Klaudia's Bracelet

First Person Memoir Contest

by Susannah Mandel

Susannah Mandel was born in San Francisco but now makes her home in Philadelphia. She has a piece of creative nonfiction in the recent anthology Evocative Objects: Things We Think With, edited by Sherry Turkle, which appeared in September 2007 from the MIT Press. This essay, "Klaudia's Bracelet," was the winner of the 2007 First Person Memoir Writing Competition in the short-short category. The competition is held annually in conjunction with the First Person Festival of Memoir and Documentary Art, running through Nov. 11 at 2111 Sansom St. Read other winning memoirs at citypaper.net.

June, and hot, and we're in the water. At the horizon, where it opens into Lake Pontchartrain, the surface is a murky green like jasper; the sky's a hazy blue. Behind us rises the levee, and behind the levee is the university. We're not supposed to be here, but Klaudia loves to swim, and she fears nothing, she says.

She surfaces beside me. "You're stuck to the rocks! Come further out."

"I lost my elastic," I explain. "My hair's getting everywhere."

She laughs. "So take mine."

What she gives me is really more like a bracelet. A red filament, like a vein, runs through beads the color of amber. The light shifts inside them, changing from pale honey to burnt caramel, like shadows under water.

"It's plastic," says Klaudia. "You can lose it." She grins.

In the sunlight, she's so many shades of gold that I can't look away.

"Shh," I say, leaning to press her down against the warm water-damp stone. Her eyes are bright and calm. I can see the sun swimming in their dark currents.

Then she shifts, pushing me away. "No," she says. "We can't. Someone might come."

I try to laugh, but it chokes. "Who could possibly see us here?"

"Doesn't matter," she says, sitting up. "If it got back to the other girls from my school, everyone would find out back at home. Not just in my university, but my mother ... my grandmother."

"But —" I say. She's already sliding back into the water.

"I told you last year," she says. "It's a different culture where I come from. Maybe you weren't listening."

I yell after her: "And will you spend your whole life trying to make sure your mother doesn't find out?"

There's no answer. I am alone on the rock, watching her move away, left with my choice: to stay, or follow.

The rest of our visit seems to be the same conversation, over and over. She won't kiss me goodbye.

At home, unpacking, I find her bracelet in my duffel. It's too tight on my wrist, like an insistent grip. In the beads I seem to find again something of Klaudia: the dark water, the light moving in her eyes.

There is no lesson here, only a moment full of constantly shifting light. It's lodged in my memory, like the ambiguous luminescence moving between the lake and the sky: these beads with their red vein. This gift that was not a gift of love; this story that did not open out into a love story; this souvenir, cool and self-contained, that presses against my skin, pretending to be what it is not.