A list circled, crossed out, revisited and considered. Names for my future children who may never exist but in memories and late night musings of what could have beens (what could be), regrets that dissipate with the sunrise. Roberta, for the longest time. That was your name. My Bobbie Brook. My one true love, with copper coins of shining eyes and a dollop of honey hair. Roberta, named for the memory of a great aunt, long ago, who treated me as a granddaughter in place of her late sister—the very sister whose name I took—Catherine. To be connected over generations to a woman I’d never known, followed by her memory and legacy by the few who still carried the torch of her 22 years.
“She’d be so proud of you. Keep playing piano. She’d love to listen.”
Roberta. Fond memories, hand-written cards, and tarnished jewelry handed down led me to visit again—after all, I am of the age that a family could be in the cards, the same age my mother was when she had me, two years older now than Catherine was when she died. My Bobbie Brook may be more than just fickle ideas, but a warm feeling in my womb.
I visit, and the woman I have idolized and wished to immortalize does not remember me. A blue flag (MAGA) and comments of covert fear of black men and transgender women make my stomach churn. The copper coins oxidize with a filth of grey; the honey attracts gnats. Bobbie Brook grows into a teenager, a woman who hates me. I sit with it, and I wish Roberta would have died when I was young, while the memory was still wrapped in crinkling paper, warmed by the fire, and lit with Christmas lights.
I wonder what Catherine was really like. I have prayed my life to her like a saint. I stock her shrine in a manila envelope of blurry photos, pendants, and yellowed sheet music, annotated by her hand. The only photo of her in any definition frames my father’s eyes in charcoal, a hip pixie of red, and the mischievous smile of a 17-year-old forced into a photo studio. Each photo after marriage and motherhood is blurry—she wears a white suit to her wedding, a final, daring independence, my grandfather nowhere to be seen. Her hair grows long, her makeup dulls. A porcelain doll sits in my childhood bedroom, proclaimed her twin by my great grandmother. Marlboro-smoke lines the words of the drunkard who missed her—you look just like her. Was she like her sister Roberta? Or still a girl, thrust into motherhood at 20 and her windshield at 22? Did my father, who could not even recall the face of his own mother, wonder at her legacy before giving it to me? Or did he know her only as I did— the bold young woman of photos and anecdotes?
The other family names on my list lose their luster—Rowe, for my drunken grandfather. Sylvester, for my soft-spoken, naval-veteran great grandfather. Casimir, dug dusty from French family records. Catherine’s legacy remains lovely on my birth certificate, because that is how she was remembered—lovely. I cross Roberta off my list, knowing that, had I not visited again, it would have remained as it always was: sepia-tinted and nostalgic.
Goodbye, Bobbie Brook. Mommy loved you.
