All the Fishes Come Home to Roost by Rachel Manija Brown

[meganbmoore]

I should mention that it's a very good thing this is what I took to read in the car. Because, quite honestly, when your conservative christian mother asks what you're reading, "the memoir of a woman who spent several years of her childhood in a compound of Meher Baba worshippers" is a much better answer than a description of most of the manga I was thinking about taking.

Before I start, I should preface this with the fact rachelmanija has been an LJ friend for at least a year, and unlike other authors I've friended for stalking purposes I didn't even realize she'd written a book until several months after I met her. (Yes, it's in her profile. Shush!) I have since met her exactly once (and in theory will again) and so I cannot claim to be completely unbiased, especially since I tend to think commenting on a person's accounting on their own life is a little different from commenting on their fictional work.

The brief description of the book from her profile most likely explains it far better than I ever could:

It's the true story of how my post-hippie parents raised me on a bizarre ashram in India devoted to Meher Baba, who is best known for having been Pete Townsend's guru, taking a vow of silence for most of his life, and for coining the insipid motto "Don't worry, be happy." I was the only foreign child within 100 miles of anywhere. Despite being Jewish by birth and a Baba-lover by parental decree, there was only one school in town, and so I spent my formative years attending Holy Wounds of Jesus Christ the Savior Convent School.

Had I read this at A-Kon when I met Rachel earlier this year (which I almost did) she probably would have confiscated it from me before long, between the looks of abject horror and impromptu hugs. And I am not a huggy person. More a "no touching unless you are elderly, a small child, or a close relative" person. If even half of what she recounts is true, I'm amazed she made it through her childhood. And there's no reason to believe that anything in the book isn't true, in some fashion.

At the beginning of the book, she sets herself up as an unreliable narrator by recounting a story from when she was eleven, and her family paid for passage in a jeep. Both Rachel and her parents agree that their driver was very short, but they remember the why of the driver's shortness differently. Rachel remembers that he was a dwarf, her mother that he was just a short man, and her father that he was only twelve. (This passage also stands out to me for two other reasons. The first is that it was my first moment of horror as a man welded the jeep's fueled engine while Rachel, her parents, and another family sat in the jeep. The second is that Rachel and i were reading the same book when we were eleven. If a few years apart, under totally different circumstances, and on different continents.) Throughout the book, it's mentioned several times that her mother doesn't remember the horrible things that happened to her, or her telling her parents about those things, and that she remembers Rachel being a happy child. At the end of the book, Rachel indicates this may be somewhat true, but points out that "one extreme experience is more memorable than many normal ones." This is very true.

I hesitate to include the following as it's about me and not about Rachel or her book, but I think it's a good illustration of one bad memory clouding out the rest.

 

I grew up in a small housing development halfway between San Angelo, the average-sized Texas town where I live now and Wall, a tiny Texas about "town" about twenty miles away that consisted of the 13-year (K-12th grades) school I spent my childhood at, a few houses, a post office, a convenience store that closed down before I reached high school, and two churches. Our home was on a mile long road about half a mile off the main highway, that began on and circled to an access road. I know my parents and neighbors used walking, jogging and riding a bicycle around the block regularly as their daily exercise. I know I did too. I don't remember that. I have exactly one clear memory of before I entered junior high. I'm 12, my brother is 9, and school starts up about 2 weeks later. It's 8-9 in the evening and a neighbor came over earlier, saying our father asked her to. We don't think this is strange, as neighbors normally watched each other's kids on short notice. Our parents went for a walk, and we think they've stopped to talk to someone. We don't even notice that she says "father," instead of "parents." sIn my head, sometimes she's only there a few minutes, sometimes for almost an hour, and it's not always the same neighbor, but one of three. That isn't the memory.

The memory is when my father gets home. I don't notice at first that there are several other neighbors with him, including a girl who was in my class and her older sister. I don't even notice that my mother isn't there. The reason I don't notice is because my father's clothes are splattered with blood, and his hands and lower arms covered in it. My first thought is that, since the blood is on him, he'd hurt himself. He tells us to come into my parents' room with him and he sits on the edge of the bed. Then he tells us that our mother was hit by a car and is on the way to the hospital. Other things are blurrier. I don't remember if he told us then that she wasn't expected to live through the night, or if I overheard Angela (our regular babysitter who spent that night with us) telling her boyfriend that when my father called to check on us later that night. She lived through the night, but the doctors didn't know if she'd suffered brain damage, or how much, because she was in a coma. Nor did they know if she'd ever walk again. She did suffer brain damage, but you won't notice unless you share the minutae of your life with her. She could walk with assistance by the end of the year. She doesn't realize (or if she does, she doesn't mention it) that the reason I walk slightly behind and to the right of her isn't because her longer legs make her walk faster, but because it's the perfect position to grab her arm and steady her if she loses her balance, because she's never fully regained a proper balance (one leg is now shorter than the other) and up until I was almost out of high school, any uneven walking surface was a threat to her.

Everyone in my family knows that my fear of hitting someone with a car is why I didn't get my driver's license until I entered college and had to have one. I'm not sure anyone but me realizes that my brother's near-rabid eagerness to get a license, and his reckless driving the first few years he had it (including two single-car rollovers that he walked away from) was most likely his trying to prove that he wasn't afraid of cars. I remember other details about life in general for the first twelve years of my life, but that's the earliest specific moment. When people ask me about my worst memory, my strongest memory from my childhood, or my most vivid memory, or any such thing, I will usually say "my father telling me my mother was hit by a car." While this is close to the truth, it isn't quite. The truth is "my father covered in my mother's blood." The why of that comes after.

To end this on a lighter note, Angela's boyfriend also spent the night. I don't know if my father was asked about this, but I doubt he cares, then or now. I told her boyfriend that I guessed that was ok, and maybe he could sleep on the couch, since Angela was going to use my parents' room. Please remember that I was twelve.

 

I don't relate any of that to gain sympathy, or to distract to from Rachel or her own childhood experiences, which I'd say are far, far worse, but just to point out how one bad memory can crowd out many good ones, and how one traumatic event (much less many) can influence your life.

I might not remember that night exactly as it was. Rachel might not recall the events exactly as they were. I don't think, however, that there is any context imaginable where it isn't horrifying to have an old man asking a seven year old girl to tell him how she is his "mummy" (mommy). And then have this conversation apparently be a normal thing over the next several years.

At school, Rachel is bullied by all the other students, and the teachers rap the students' hands over the slightest thing-and even nothing-and forced the students to stand in the sweltering heat until they passed out from sunstroke. When she stepped foot off the compound without an adult to protect her, people threw rocks at her. At home, she is expected to praise and adore a man she doesn't, and to worship him, and every facet of her home life revolves around that.

All of this is told in a very wry voice, sometimes even at her own expense, as Rachel tries to avoid ever painting herself in a virtuous light just because she's the narrator. The "characters" tend to be either absurd on the whole, or "normal" with an absurd bent. If it were fiction, it would be an amazing farce where, even as you laughed, you'd be grateful that it wasn't real. Except, even if somethings weren't exactly as Rachel remembers them, or there were more normal things in between, the fact that there's truth behind it all makes it horrifying.