Tanking

My friend and mentor, the great writer Laurie Stone, has taught me and scores of others that memoir is always two time periods, the time you’re writing about and the time you’re writing from. With distance comes fresh insight and sometimes more meaning to make from memory.

When you take a look at an older essay, and layer in a new context, sometimes the essay deepens and sometimes it doesn’t work anymore and has to be broken open in new ways.

Here’s a story I reworked this week from a year ago. The past didn’t change. What I made from it has. As Laurie says, memoir isn’t what happened to you; it’s what you make of what happened to you.

Enjoy!

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Turtles are small, shy and slow if you’re only casually involved with them but if you let one into your life, eventually they demand their own bathroom and live for seventy years. This, broadly, was the consensus I gathered as I shared that I was getting my daughters a turtle - that as animals go, they are not so much low maintenance pets as they are slow-moving life partners with boundary issues.

Everybody seemed to know of a turtle who had destabilized a household. One apparently started out the size of a quarter and now was as wide as a paella pan. My mom knew about a family who let their turtle free range around the house because its circumference approached that of a beach ball. “And these are smart people,” she said. “I don’t know how they let themselves get in to this mess.”

I’ll tell you how: Smart people think a turtle is how you outsmart kids who are begging for a dog. From a distance, they seem like the perfect commitment: quiet, contained, portable. They don’t shed, they don’t bark, and they don’t need to be walked at 6 a.m. in February while you’re wearing pajamas.

It was going to be a guilt turtle. My kids didn’t know it yet but their parents were divorcing. In a few weeks, I’d be letting them know. In a few months, I’d be moving out and setting up a new home for us. Where? When? How? I didn’t know. It was a grueling anticipatory headspace and it was, for the time being, a secret I kept from them.

Divorce was more complicated, involved, enduring and expensive than I thought it would be. And other things that appeared to require a three step process turned out to require three hundred and twenty-two step processes as well. Difficultly wasn’t just in the atmosphere - it was the atmosphere. Even the kind of turtle I was about to acquire, a red eared slider, needed - at least - a twenty gallon tank, with a bridge because turtles must bask, and a heat lamp, a UVB lamp, a water filter and turtle food.

For help, I reached out to Erin, my kids’ former nanny, like a diamond thief reaching out to an old accomplice for one more heist. The gear retailed for $275 at the fancy PetCo in Union Square, but Erin found it second hand for $40 from a guy who lived in a part of New Jersey that is apparently called West New York. If anyone else had suggested picking up animal gear from a stranger in a place that sounds like a clerical error, I would’ve said no. But Erin is fun, smart and energetic, she’s nimble with Facebook Marketplace, and she’s excellent in an emergency or a fiasco, the kind of person in whose presence you wouldn’t really mind getting a flat tire. So this guy she found in West New York, New Jersey, he could have been a serial killer or merely the seller of a defective turtle tank, but if Erin was coming it would be a day well spent.

West New York, at least the part I saw, looks like someone smooshed malls into brand new dorm buildings, lined them up in a row in front of the Hudson River, and smacked on a bunch of signs that say “luxury.” This is aesthetically not my cup of tea but I was in such a good mood from being with my daughters and Erin together in a turtle adventure that I thought it was great and talked about how I could see myself living there. “Look at these views! There’s really so much parking.”

Di Zao, the seller, was not a serial killer, though admittedly the bar for reassurance is low when you’re getting a good deal. He wheeled the turtle equipment from his building to my car on a luggage cart, politely asking where we lived. When I told him, he said he often comes in to the city to see his girlfriend, a trek which used to be so easy, but now has an extra $6 tacked on to the cost because of congestion pricing.

“Is she worth it?” I asked him, and he laughed. “Yeah,” he said.

The things we do for love.

Erin and I didn’t probe him about why he was unburdening himself of a turtle set up because I have found that when a deal is about to close it’s good to not ask extraneous questions. We had a turtle tank in the back seat and that’s what mattered most.

Soon we were standing in my vestibule with the cumbersome gear, gazing up at the mount, a third floor walkup. “I’ve got this,” Erin said, picking up the gigantic glass tank and bounding up the stairs like the Incredible Hulk, if the Incredible Hunk was a leggy young woman.

My seven year old considered a long list of names for her new pet before settling on Ashley Alice. Once Ashley Alice was home, eating, swimming, basking, absorbing nutrients and blinking, I fretted about how she was doing. Turtles need the water to be between 75-85 degrees and I wasn’t convinced her water was warm enough. I put a space heater near the tank and ordered a submerged turtle tank warmer.

Was she worth it? Yeah. It was nice knowing we did a bang-up job setting up a life for her. Sure there was equipment, and action steps, but Ashley Alice was getting absolutely everything she needed. The very notion of this was relaxing.

The turtle tank with its tinkling filter became a familiar object. In those last months that I lived in that home, the tank glowed in the dining room as the late afternoon climbed into night, and Ashley Alice was the first thing I fixed my eyes on when I left my bedroom in the morning. Sometimes my daughters and I, we sat and watched her. She didn’t do much but everything she did was adorable, climbing onto her turtle bridge, swimming from one side of the tank to the other, blinking. We admired her pretty shell, her amazing feet.

I didn’t know this then: that with the grace of a benevolent universe and support from friends and family, I’d be capable of making a beautiful new home for us, too. We, too, would end up with absolutely everything we needed.

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Paintings by Richard Tinkler on view at Elliott Templeton.

Want to write this summer? There’s still room to join my seven week Zoom memoir and personal essay writing class. For more info and to register, go to my website.

I will leave you with this gem.

xo Lizzie