Mary Margaret MacGowan, "Ms. Mac" to her fifth grade students, "Emmem" to her friends, was out of sorts. She felt as though she were forgetting something, something really important. She'd been feeling this way for a long time, and—
"Ms. Mac? Ms. Mac?"
It was Cheryl, probably wanting a bathroom pass. Cheryl always wanted a bathroom pass.
"Here you go, my dear."
And nothing seemed to help. She'd tried making lists, sending herself voice memos, meditation, even hypnotism. No breakthroughs. No progress. Once in a while she'd catch a glimpse of maybe the tail end of the memory. The last time that had happened—
Now she had to go break up a scuffle between Vicky and Kara and make them sit in different seats.
The last time it had happened was when her fifth graders were giggling over a meme with an elephant.
It might've been years she'd been feeling this way. Literally about 20 years. That many years ago, she would have been in fifth grade herself. Had she repressed a memory of being bullied or seeing something bad? No, the lurking memory was something good, she was sure about that. But then why would her brain be so—
"Put those away until recess, please. You know the rules. If I see it again I'm taking it."
Why would her brain block it out, if it was good? Shouldn't her brain allow her to roll around in it, bask in it, go over and over it... whatever it was?
She read books about memory, built herself a memory palace trying to find the door to the room holding the memory. She tied a string around her finger, remembering an old Bert and Ernie sketch on Sesame Street where Bert asks Ernie about a string-ring and Ernie explains it's to remind him of the next string-ring, and the next, until he shows all his fingers have strings tied around them, and the final one is to remind him he's out of string.
Looking down at the string tied around her finger, she remembered tying it, and she remembered the Bert and Ernie sketch, but she couldn't remember the thing, whatever it was, that she was trying to remember. It had something to do with—
Tracy had a question about the math. It was a complicated one.
Emmem was on recess duty the first week in October. Jumping rope was still in. Every year or two there was a new fad, and jumping rope was the current one. It had started the year before, and now the fourth, fifth, and even the sixth graders were doing it. A girl who'd transferred from another school was teaching everyone a new rhyme, something about Cinderella.
Cinderella
Dressed in yella
Went upstairs to kiss a fella
By mistake, she kissed a snake
How many doctors did it take?
1, 2, 3...
Back in class that afternoon, Emmem asked her students to think of a movie they'd seen more than once, maybe even lots of times. Lots of hands went up, and soon the students were having louder and louder conversations about The Little Mermaid, Frozen, and something called Cloudy with Meatballs, which Emmem hadn't seen. She marveled at the way her fifth graders could feel nostalgia for things that had happened quite recently. "When I was little," they'd say, as if they weren't still little. Or "Do you remember..." and it would be something that happened the month before.
The movie question was so popular, she asked them to write down a short description of their beloved movies and explain what made them so great. She collected the papers, and during reading time, she went through them quickly, giving everyone a star sticker.
When she got to Kara's essay, which was about a live-action version of Dumbo, she slowed down. There was something familiar there, something connected to the unremembered thing.
That evening, she went online and watched a trailer for the new version of the movie, and then a trailer for the old version, and then read an article about how problematic the original was, and then read a review of the new version, which said it wasn't good, and then looked at some animated gifs of elephants flying.
She started a list, writing down everything Dumbo-related, not sure what might apply to her out-of-grasp memory. Mother and child, circus, balloons, impossible flying things.
In November, she took Jersey Transit from Trenton to New York to spend Thanksgiving with her mom in Brooklyn. One of the women in her mom's book club had a Fifth Avenue apartment with a balcony, and every year the whole club was invited there to watch the Macy's parade and eat Brie and drink wine.
This year she found herself more interested in the parade than usual. She was mesmerized by the motion of the giant balloons floating down Fifth. The way they bobbed along, the slow rhythm of it, a bit like ocean waves. She tried moving that way herself, to hold onto the motion.
A big thing, flying slowly. That seemed to be the crux of it. An elephant?
Back home again, after dark, she stood in her back yard and made her arm into a trunk, waving it in the same rhythm as the parade floats. She sang "Baby Mine" to herself as she did it, quietly. "If they knew, sweet little you, they'd end up loving you too."
After break, she borrowed all the Babar books from the school library. The librarian looked at her funny, asking, "Aren't these a little young for fifth graders?"
"They're for me," Emmem replied.
She read them in order, all the ones by Jean de Brunhoff and then the continuation of the series by his son Laurent. In one of the Laurent ones, Babar Visits Another Planet, Babar and his family travel to space and meet some space elephants. The book contained a line that felt very familiar: "They look like elephants, but they're not elephants." A few pages later, another line in the book had a similar effect: "Babar found he understood what was being said, although he did not know the language."
Emmem read Babar Visits Another Planet 12 times. She photocopied some of the illustrations and hung them around her house. The memory was so close. She just had to unlock it. Thinking again of Bert and Ernie, she tied a string around her finger to remind herself to think about the space elephants during the school day.
A couple of days later, writing on the whiteboard, her back to the students for a moment, the string caught Emmem's eye. Something burst. The memory was within reach, she could almost taste it—
"Ms. Mac, your dress is on backwards!" Jacquie called out from the third row.
"Oh, no, how embarrassing..." Emmem said, walking to Jacquie's desk, showing how the line of shiny gray circles down her spine were part of the fabric of the dress, not actual buttons. "...for YOU, that is." Emmem had a lot of black dresses, including one with white buttons in the front, so it made sense that Jacquie thought she'd somehow put it on the wrong way around.
Jacquie laughed, as she was meant to, and directed her attention back to her worksheet. Emmem continued down the aisle, confiscating a fidget spinner, a paper airplane, a paper football, and two paper fortune-tellers. Fortune-tellers were a fad that just wouldn't die, it seemed. "You can get these back at the end of the day," she said, "IF I like my fortune."
Back at her desk she foretold her future with the fortune-tellers. One said she would marry Harry Styles, and the other said she would have 200 babies. "Not really a fan of either of these," she said to the class, "but I'll try again later."
During science, while the girls dissected pretend frogs using an iPad app, she made her way through all the possible fortunes and found one she liked. "Thank you, Keisha," she said, "I look forward to being the winner of Top Chef Mars. Everybody can have their stuff back at 3:00."
That night, she watched the cartoon version of Dumbo again while she ate dinner. It was really sappy and old-fashioned, but she watched it twice, looking for clues. Then crawled around on all fours with a scarf dangling down from her forehead, like an elephant's trunk. She made her way to the bathtub and dipped her head a few times, pretending to drink from a river.
"I am losing my mind," she said aloud. She resolved to stop trying to turn herself into a space elephant and instead take up a hobby. Maybe macrame. Macrame was having a comeback. Or art! She tied another string around another finger. "Time to buy more string, I guess."
A few days later, Emmem brought home a baggie of bad crayons from school. (Crayons were designated bad if they broke in half, which happened regularly. Some of them were barely an inch long, but nobody could bear to throw them out.) She picked up a coloring book at the grocery store, opened the book to a random page, and colored a flower gray, adding dark wrinkles to some of the petals.
In the spring, she phoned her mother to ask if anything strange had happened when Emmem was a kid. Her mother immediately jumped to the wrong conclusion and asked if that creepy neighbor had messed with her. "No," she said, "no, don't worry, it's nothing like that, though I agree that guy was definitely a perv. No, I just mean, do you remember anything odd, anything out of the ordinary. Nothing bad."
"Well, lots of strange things happened in Brooklyn all the time. Do you remember that cat that used to come around and tried to eat your deodorant? That was strange. Or how about that time at the laundromat when all our clothes moved from one dryer to a different dryer even though we were sitting there the whole time?"
"No," said Emmem, "I mean, yes, those were strange, but I'm thinking about something more, like, mystical? I know that sounds stupid. Maybe something with a circus? Or maybe a zoo? Or, like, a balloon?"
Her mother laughed. "Okay," she said, "that's pretty specific, but also pretty vague. Let me think about it. I'll go look at my old planners from when you were little. Can you pin it down a little more?"
"I think it's before I was twelve," said Emmem. "I think it's outdoors, and there's something gray."
Her mother started singing the song from Close Encounters of the Third Kind. "Do you think you were abducted?"
"No, no no," said Emmem, "no." But in her head, something blasted out, YES. "Did I ever run away from home?" she asked, "or, like, disappear for a while? Look for something like that in your old calendars, would you?"
She got off the phone with her mom and ordered a puffy down comforter in "slate" from Bed, Bath, and Beyond. Then sent messages to a dozen gmail addresses that seemed promising: spaceelephant@gmail.com, floatingpachyderm@gmail.com, elephantballoon@gmail.com, antigravitybabar... She wrote the same message each time: "Hello, are you who I think you are?" Mostly she got bouncebacks. She did get a response from massivetrunk@gmail.com but it wasn't what she'd hoped for.
She borrowed a bunch of books from her local public library: The White Bone, Water for Elephants, Topsy, Leaving Time. The White Bone by Barbara Gowdy, was the best one. It was written from the elephants' point of view.
Her new comforter arrived. Emmem sliced open the package and wrapped herself up in it. She tried moving around the house in her cocoon, but it was pretty awkward, so she belted it around the middle and attached plastic chip clips at her wrists and ankles. Now she could walk or crawl in it more easily.
She started seeing elephants everywhere. At the grocery store, an organic soymilk had an elephant on the label. A little girl in the park wore a sundress with rainbow-colored elephants on it. A pop-up ad for a documentary about elephants continually showed up in her feeds. Each day when she got home from teaching, she put on the slate comforter outfit. Sometimes she slept in it.
Her mom called. "I think I might've found something," she said. "When you were about ten, you asked me for some money to go see something called a jumping elephant."
Emmem went very still. Jumping could be like flying.
"You went with Jody and slept over at her house, and the next day, according to my planner, you walked around in a daze, and I told you no more sleepovers because clearly you didn't sleep. I asked you about the jumping elephant and—here, let me read it—asked about the elephant and her face went blank, made me wonder if she'd used the money for something else, called Jody's mom who said the girls had gotten in very late, talking about an outdoor magic show and giggling a lot. Are you still in touch with Jody? Maybe she can fill in the rest of the story."
Emmem was friends with Jody on Facebook, of course, but hadn't actually talked to her in a decade. She instant-messaged as soon as she got off the phone.
"Jody! It's Emmem! How are you? Do you remember when we went to see some kind of magic jumping or flying elephant in Brooklyn?"
Jody didn't remember anything like that. Until a few days later, when she said maybe she did remember a little bit. She still lived in Brooklyn.
"I'm still trying to remember about the magic elephants. I've been walking around the old neighborhood."
Emmem sent a YouTube clip of the scene in the live action Dumbo where Dumbo sneezes and flies up into the air. "I know it's weird, but try but try watching this and see if it helps."
Jody didn't respond right away. When she finally did, her response was peculiar. "Do you remember how we used to put plastic combs in our back pockets? Mine was orange, and yours was hot pink. Yours got stuck in your hair one time, and we had to break it. But first we tried adding vegetable oil, which just made it worse."
"I remember that! Um, is this related to my question about the magic show thing?"
"I think it happened the same day, but I can't remember anything else. I keep trying, because I feel like I can almost remember, but then I can't.
"See, that's why I asked, I've been trying to remember it for years and I think I'm closing in, but every time I almost remember, I forget again."
"I found a little park with a fence around it. I think that's where it was. Near the old corner store by the school."
Emmem put vegetable oil on her comb and combed her hair with it. It was disgusting. She did it over the bathtub, and then took a shower and washed her hair four times. On the fourth wash, she got a flash of the little park in her mind.
She looked it up on Google Maps and couldn't see it, so she tried Google Street View, and it wasn't there, either, but there was a little glitch in the video where she thought it should be.
Summer came. She kept her air conditioning turned up high so she didn't get too hot in her comforter. Her coloring book was completely colored, and all the gray half-crayons were used up. Emmem asked her mom if she could come to the city for the Fourth of July weekend. Her mother was going upstate with Mitzi but said Emmem was welcome to stay in the Brooklyn apartment.
Emmem took the train to Penn Station and the subway to Brooklyn, arriving around dinnertime on July 3. She ordered Chinese and looked out her mother's windows at the Manhattan city skyline. Was it her imagination, or did the buildings kind of look like elephants? It was probably just her imagination.
The next morning she had a bagel and lox, packed some supplies into a duffel bag, and started walking toward where she thought the little park was, the one that didn't show up on Google Street View. On her way to it, she saw a home-made flyer taped to a lamppost:
MAGIC ELEPHANT -> -> ->
Suggested donation $4
The arrows were pointing the same way she was going. She walked faster.
But when she got to the little park, there was nothing there. And it was all fenced in. She walked all the way around it and found another one of the signs. She stood in front of it for a while. What the hell, she decided, and pulled up VenMo on her phone. She sent $4 to MagicElephant.
"Payment declined," said the pop-up on her screen.
But there was an opening in the fence she hadn't noticed before. How did she miss that? The whole park was only about the size of a parking space. Or an elephant, she supposed. About the size of an elephant. She unzipped the duffel bag and put on her comforter suit. She stepped through the little opening and onto the grass.
It felt like when she was in a car singing with her friends. It felt like the first time she had noodle kugel and wondered where it had been all her life. It felt like that time she took her students on a field trip to Niagara Falls. It felt like when she was a kid and she and her mom climbed up to the top of the lifeguard chair at the beach in the off season.
She was in a huge meadow, looking up at gray wrinkled underbellies of... things? They blocked out the sunlight, and yet there was a brightness.
It felt like the first and last time she went skiing, without taking a lesson, and she'd gone straight down the bunny hill much too fast and ended up crashing into a soft snowdrift. They looked like elephants, but they weren't elephants. It felt like a time in the future when she was very old and her body hurt and then it didn't any more. It felt like going up on a Ferris wheel with a cool breeze.
It felt like a time in the future when her students surprised her with balloons, all of them hiding a helium balloon in a backpack until the planned moment. It felt like the time when she told her friend Freddy she knew she could be a bit much, and Freddy said, "I wouldn't mind if you were twice as much! I would like twice as much of you!" It felt like the first time she read a book by Daniel Pinkwater. It felt like at the movies when you push the button and the seat goes back. It felt like—
"What ARE you," she asked the elephant creatures.
"What are we?"
"Yes, what?" She could understand what they were saying, even though she didn't know the language.
"What are we?"
She wasn't looking up at their gray wrinkly bellies any more. She was with them, bobbing around over Brooklyn.
"Okay," she said, "what are we?"
"We don't even know! Well, some of us know. Where's Gwen? Somebody find Gwen. Or Naomi. Naomi might know."
"We are the Foon," said Naomi, once she was found. "Does that help?"
"No, but I guess I don't need to know," said Emmem. She felt like she was rolling down a gentle hill of soft green moss and then up the next hill and down the next and so on. "I'm so happy to see you all again," she said. "I've been trying to remember you for so long. But there's something I don't understand," she said. "Why me? Why did you choose me?"
The elephant creatures vibrated and made sniffling noises. Emmem was pretty sure they were laughing. "Um, we... didn't?" said one of them. Another said, overlapping, "We visit everyone. Most people forget. It's weird you didn't."
"But I did forget!" said Emmem. "I forgot for so long! It hurt so much! Please don't make me forget again." She showed them the strings tied around her fingers. "Maybe this could be a reminder," she said. The creatures all started vibrating again. "We're out of string," said two or three of them. "Buy more string!" said others. Then they started going "ch-ch-ch," copying the sound of Ernie's laughter on Sesame Street. Then they started talking about Snuffleupagus among themselves, and it was hard to get their attention again.
"Seriously," Emmem said. "Please, can you let me remember?" Still wrapped up in her puffy gray comforter, shapeless, she reached into the duffel bag and showed them the coloring book, every single picture in it colored gray. "Beautiful," said the creatures, "we love it!"
"It seems like you allowed at least one person to remember," said Emmem. "Laurent de Brunhoff. He remembered. He put you in a book."
"Lolo! Oh, we love Lolo!" said the creatures. "Are you friends with Lolo?"
"No," said Emmem. "He died. And anyway, he was French. I never met him. If he could remember, maybe I could too? I forgot! That's why I have the strings on my fingers. Why do you think I'm walking around in this gray comforter and acting like such an oddball? It's because I forgot, and I can't stand the idea of forgetting again. I really want to remember you this time."
The creatures seemed to be consulting with each other, or possibly they were hugging. She wasn't sure what they were doing, but when they finished, they said they might be able to help her remember, though it was an experiment.
"If I remember, can I tell Jody, too?"
"Sure," they said, "but she'll most likely forget again."
"Thank you," said Emmem. Whether it works or not, thank you."
She stayed with the Foon all day. When it got dark, they watched the Coney Island fireworks from above. The finale went on for a long time. The Foon watched from above, and then from within, which was quite exciting, and then Emmem watched the last bit of the finale from the little park, and then went back to her mom's apartment, in a daze, still wearing her comforter outfit, and fell asleep.
That fall, jump rope was out, and hand-clapping games were in. Emmem asked the girls who had written the one about Ms. Mary Mac, and the girls said no one wrote it, that it was old, probably 100 years old. And indeed, Emmem looked it up in a book of folk rhymes and there it was, dating back to the 19th century. Which made no sense. If it was that old, why did it seem new to her? She would’ve remembered a rhyme with her own name in it.
Ms. Mary Mac, Mac, Mac
All dressed in black, black, black
A row of buttons, buttons, buttons
All down her back, back, back
She asked her mother, mother, mother
For fifty cents, cents, cents
To see the elephant, elephant, elephant
Jump the fence, fence, fence
It jumped so high, high, high
It touched the sky, sky, sky
And it didn't come down, down, down
Till the Fourth of July, ly, ly
She and Jody used to play hand-clapping games in elementary school. Maybe Jody would know.
