Emily Brodrick
The day of my seventh birthday party is seared into my memory. It was a warm day in mid-May, 1999, on eastern Long Island. My parents got me pink, purple, and white balloons. Katydids hummed in the trees and puffy clouds floated slowly across the deep blue sky. The pool at our new Watermill House was full of excited, screaming children in innertubes my dad had purchased for the party. My parents got me two cakes—one vanilla, one chocolate, both with candles shaped like the number seven on top. The day was nearly perfect. There was just one thing missing: towards the end of the party, when I opened all my presents, none of them contained a Tamagotchi—the toy that had captivated me for months.
The era of Pokemon had come and gone, but it left its mark. Girls my age were obsessed with adorable, Japanese-designed, creatures. Y2K fashion, with its neon, iridescent, and digital aesthetic, had crept into our sticker-covered dressers. Tamagotchi–a two-inch tall, three-buttoned video game that looked like a cracking easter egg birthing a screen–was our perfect accessory. The eight-bit, black-and-white game entailed raising an imaginary animal from an egg, through its various life stages, to adulthood. Tamagotchis ruled my world. I had dreams about them and stared longingly at them when we visited the toy store.
My mom once told me–when I informed my grandma’s friend that the Beanie Baby she was gifting me was already in my collection–to never appear ungrateful when receiving a gift. I kept my composure and said nothing. Guests departed. I said goodbye with a smile. Inwardly, I was devastated. I thought my parents had gotten the Tamagotchi memo. It was a lesson in humility. That year was to be full of lessons.
***
Late in 1998, my parents bought a house in Watermill, NY. We’d been living 10 miles away, in East Hampton, but my older brother Geoffrey and I went to a private school closer to Watermill and my mom hoped to shorten our commute. We planned to move in the summer, before the start of the 1999-2000 school year. But in May, since many of my classmates lived closer to the Watermill House, my parents decided to host my birthday party at our soon-to-be home.
In East Hampton, my bedroom walls were white, and I shared a bathroom with my two brothers. The shingles were dark and old-looking. We had a pool, but it was vinyl-lined, ugly, and always freezing. My room at the Watermill House was painted light blue and had a private bathroom. The shingles were a warm gold that glowed with newness. In the backyard, there was a modern-looking, heated, cement pool. The East Hampton House was the only home I’d ever known and yet I didn’t have any strong feelings about it. I remember once standing in the driveway and looking up at that house with my mom.
“Do you think you’ll miss living here?” she asked.
I considered the question as my eyes panned across the dark shingles.
“No,” I said.
The Watermill House was an upgrade and I was excited to move. My birthday party would be the beginning of many happy memories there.
***
The day after my birthday party, we were back at Watermill House cleaning up the previous day’s festivities when my parents surprised me.
“Go down to the garage,” my mom said. “There’s something for you.”
I ran down and peered into the open garage door where my dad was standing, holding one last present.
“We didn’t want the other kids to be jealous,” my mom said, coming down the stairs behind me.
I knew what was inside. The present was shaped like the Tamagotchi packaging I’d seen at the toy store. I tore the wrapping paper off like a rabid animal. Then I went out to the front of the house, removed the Tamagotchi from its plastic prison, took a seat in the grass, and powered it on. For five minutes I stared at the itty bitty egg on the square-inch screen until out it popped—a bouncing, smiling blob. The “babychi.”
Over the next couple of weeks I would mother my Tamagotchi to adulthood—feeding it hamburgers and slices of cake, playing games with it, disciplining it, and cleaning up its fly-encircling poops. Every chance I got, I turned on the game to take care of my little pet, impatiently waiting for the day that it would become full-grown. There were six possible outcomes for adult Tamagotchis, whose appearance and personality were determined by how well you raised them. The day it finally became an adult I was a bit disappointed. I tried as hard as a seven-year-old could to raise a digital pet, but my Tamagotchi still grew up to be “below average.” What I didn’t know was that my inept parenting had also affected my Tamagotchi’s life span.
After around the 12th day of my Tamagotchi’s adult life, I powered on the game. What I found was a pixelated image of a winged cherub flying amongst the stars. My Tamagotchi had died. The finality of it, after all the emotional energy I’d put into the idea of the game, and the time I’d spent taking care of my Tamagotchi, was more than I could bear. Perhaps another child would have rebooted the game and started again, but not me. My friend was dead forever and my little heart was broken. I cried and howled. I pleaded with my mom to bring my Tamagotchi back to life. But that wasn’t how it worked. Eventually, my mom took the game away, hiding it somewhere and then claiming she had forgotten where. I didn’t know it at the time, but Tamagotchis were supposed to die. It was part of their life cycle. Like all living things. It was a lesson in loss, and there was to be another before the summer’s end.
***
My parents decided we weren’t going to move to Watermill. At the time, my mom told me that my dad had a nightmare about a tsunami engulfing the Watermill House.
“When he woke up, he said ‘We’re staying’” she said.
I asked her about the dream recently. “I’m sorry. I don’t remember saying that,” she admitted
I was confused. “So why didn’t we move to Watermill?”
“Dad changed his mind.” She added that a charter school for special needs students was being built in East Hampton in 2000. My younger brother Robert has autism and my parents wanted to send him there. She also brought up that my grandmother, her mom, died in early 2001. “I fell apart,” she said. Then she revealed an even bigger issue. One I didn’t remember ever knowing about. “There was a flood and the house got ruined. Dad may remember this differently.”
I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. “I don’t remember the flood,” I said.
“It was after your birthday party,” she said. “The air conditioning in the attic sprang a leak. It may have been going on for weeks. No one noticed. The leak expanded and ran for a few days and filled up the attic, which ran down the stairs and ruined Geoffrey’s room, the upper hall, the upper bath, the dining room on the first floor, and part of the kitchen. It was very bad and I could not handle it.”
The flood was bad enough that it made the house uninhabitable and my parents were too upset and mortified that it had happened to fix it for a long time.
How do I not remember this?
Memory is as unstable as water. Did my dad predict the flood or did the flood preclude the move? Was the Tsunami story something my mom made up to ease a child’s confusion or a phantasm of my own recollection? Maybe my dad knows. Maybe he doesn’t remember either. I remember not being that sad about not moving, but then again, the vivid memory of my dead Tamagotchi leads me to wonder if I’m not conflating the pain of lives lost.