What I Want to Know by Alizabeth Worley
Recollection is a funny thing; for memoirists, it is the primary thing, but its nonlinear and often hazy level of detail complicate our jobs as storytellers. Alizabeth Worley’s flash-length essay, “What I Want to Know,” delves into the question of why we remember what we remember. She revisits a moment in which her younger self stood in peril, having “trespassed the aluminum gate” into a cow pen to retrieve a lost toy. Worley slows down and interrogates the situation from various perspectives. Looking back, decades later, she questions not only her own actions, but, in a larger sense, whether the narrative she had told herself was even true.
Worley’s adult narrator tells us, “That’s how I’ve always remembered it—even though I don’t actually remember any of that,” and follows that observation with, “if you know what I mean?” Here she is speaking to anyone who has ever tried to write about the past. Without the aid of contemporaneous notes or filmed footage, we are at the mercy of our memories, which, in turn, are a byproduct of our age, maturity, and world experience. How would a child feel, facing a “fidgeting bovine giant…barreling, mercilessly” at them, and more specifically, how did she feel? As her life moved on and filled with other experiences, what might remain of the moments before and after Worley “had brought danger upon” herself? She revisits this moment with her mother, but also with herself, interrogating not only her memory but the way in which she let herself off the hook. She is deliberate in her examination not of what happened, but the why.
In her craft essay, “The Fault Lines of Memory,” Brenda Miller writes, “For me it is important…to maintain what we call the ‘pact with the reader’: I let them in on my thought process. I’m not doing it behind the scenes.” And Worley does this brilliantly; her essay not only examines a harrowing incident from childhood, but relates it to us as if we, as readers, are participating in the conversation. “I want to know,” she repeats. “Maybe I figured.” “Now I’m wondering.” As readers, we walk through the memory in this essay as if it were our own. Because when Worley writes “if you know what I mean,” we actually do. —CRAFT
One day when I was little, I trespassed the aluminum gate that was next to our little orchard in search of a Frisbee or Nerf ball or some such thing that we had sent flying, accidentally, over the barbed wire fencing towards the broad, heavy-headed cattle. There I was in the neighbor’s half-acre cow pen next to my backyard, searching the grass, when the fidgeting bovine giant looked up from the other side of the yard before barreling, mercilessly, right at me.
I was facing the cow and I froze, flush with the roar of hooves pulsing toward me, my own pulse almost tricking me into thinking that I could win the race. Then, one splitting of my breath later, the cow was feet in front of me, pivoting and rocking on its hind legs, snorting while Mr. Bullock, our quiet neighbor, shouted Git or Scram or Damn you, to me or to the cow, it’s hard to say, but the cow scrammed to the other side of the yard where another cow stood, placid. I walked backwards, slowly, my bare feet hugging the weeds and clumps of dirt one step at a time until, at last, I reached the aluminum gate and pulled myself up and over to the other side.
What I want to know, though, is why any of us thought it was worth getting that Frisbee or Nerf ball or whatever it was from the cow pen, a place we so carefully avoided. I want to know why I said, “I was the designated retriever,” as I told my mom all this the other day for the first time, and why that’s how I’ve always remembered it—even though I don’t actually remember any of that, if you know what I mean? For all I know, it could have been my idea in the first place.
I want to know, how did I, or did I, get back out of the yard, rife with milkweed, without stepping on one of its husky bulbs, cracking the air, spilling the milk and silky lint as I had done so many times in the neighboring fields before? And how did Mr. Bullock (which, by the way, was his real name) with his curdled cheeks and wet nose appear, miraculously, right when the cow and I needed him?
All this is to say that last week, when I told my mom for the first time about trespassing the cow pen, her cheeks went pink, appalled that I, or anyone else, would enter a cow pen—and now I’m wondering, why have I refused myself the gravel of this memory until now, when I can remember so little of it all?
Maybe I figured it was my fault in the first place, or that most people I knew had been kicked by a horse or burned while canning peaches or scraped down a ladder after trying to reach the fruit from the highest branches. I didn’t live in the country, not in any proper sense, but most of my neighbors along our dead-end street had some livestock or an orchard, and if you can walk away from an event unharmed, then that’s the happy end of it.
For a moment, though, when I was telling my mom and her face flushed, I forgot that so many I once knew had almost died or been maimed one way or another, and I forgot that I had brought danger upon myself, and now what I want to know, most of all, is what it felt like, finally, to turn my back on the cattle, glinting in the sun like obsidian, to feel the gate’s aluminum planks on my hard arches, to drop into my escaping heart and the weave of weeds over dry dirt and a prayer that hangs by the root tangles.
ALIZABETH WORLEY lives in Utah with her husband, Michael, and their two children. Her essays, poetry, and illustrated works have been published in MQR Online, Post Road, Guernica, Tar River Poetry, HAD, Sweet, and elsewhere. As a visual artist, she also sometimes illustrates children’s books and draws portraits, which, alongside writing, she has enjoyed doing for as long as she can remember. You can find her on Bluesky at @alizabethworley.bsky.social.
Featured Image by Eric Brehm, courtesy of Unsplash.
