In her recently-released collection, Remember Me: Essays, Lee Zacharias immortalizes a developmentally-challenged neighbor, a beloved father-in-law, a dear and troubled friend, and her younger self as a mid-century bride in four poignant meditations on loss. The essays are woven together by their elegiac qualities, underscored by the conceit that appears in the third piece, “Inside the Palace.” Here, Zacharias references William Maxwell’s final novel, So Long, See You Tomorrow, reminding us of its central image: Alberto Giacometti’s 1932 sculpture The Palace at 4 a.m. She speaks of the work in reference to Tom Hillmer, the man who is both subject and audience of this second-person essay, a friend who chose to die by his own hand, and to whom Zacharias attempts to tell “what [she] remember[s]…. [As he is] the one who chose to forget everything” (42). What she tells him is a litany: a recitation of dinner dates culled from old calendars, of plants in the garden and household items in the kitchen and books in the library. Among these books is “the book [Tom’s] heart always returned to,” Maxwell’s So Long, Giacometti’s sculpture standing within it, “haunt[ing] the narrator with its suggestion that we might walk through the walls of time,” much as it haunts Zacharias (38).
Walk through the walls of time Zacharias does in these essays, returning to the neighborhood of her youth in Hammond, Indiana; the bedside of her dying father-in-law in Virginia Beach, Virginia; Tom’s spring garden in Greensboro, North Carolina; and herself as a young bride, lying folded and wrapped inside a blue box, “a cardboard coffin with a [cellophane] peephole” (53). In “The Village Idiot,” she crouches in the dirt beside Wayne Blandford, a disabled, teenaged boy with whom the children had no wish to play, as he pushes his “blind, engineless [toy] car as far as it would take him” (11). In so doing, she considers not only what, but who makes a community. In “Crossing the River,” she nurses a man who believes that “the passage [into death was] no more complicated, no more to be feared than a trip to the grocery store” (16). Of course, it is more complicated, not least for the loved ones that he leaves behind. In “Palace,” she stands in Tom’s garden, which blooms in “precise green rows of tomato plants and peppers, fringed along one side with cosmos, bright flags of pink, magenta, and white” (36). It is in the metaphorical space between his garden and hers, the ways in which they each conceived of and tended to these gardens, that Zacharias locates the meaning of his death. And in the “The Bride Beneath My Bed,” she crawls beneath the dust ruffle to meet again a bride of mid-twentieth-century America, “a ghost” whom no one recognizes because she “never balanced her own bank account or filed her own taxes” and “still thinks music comes on vinyl” (63). In a style that borders on the surreal, she speaks to the culture that shaped and silenced this bride, but also to the question of how to view, and what to do with, the youthful selves we leave behind.
In each of these deeply expressive essays, the various tensions that arise—whether a non-normative young man can bring together the seemingly homogenous members of a community; or if a past self, one that from a contemporary vantage point appears hopelessly insignificant, is worthy of honor—are underscored by a single tension: the subjects will be forgotten. Like those of us whose names are unknown outside our small circles, Wayne and Koke and Tom and the Bride Beneath the Bed are fated to one day rest in unvisited tombs. And but for the lyricism of Zacharias’s voice, the gravitas of her vision, this may have been the case; as it stands, each of them will have the breath of life for a long time coming.
Remember Me: Essays, by Lee Zacharias, was published by Unicorn Press in 2024.
