How to Forget

by Kate Mulgrew

  My mother hesitated, clutched the handle of her purse, looked away.

  “Jenny,” she whispered.

  “Oh, Mummy, Jenny won’t be here for hours,” I explained, as gently as I could. My sister was living in Kensington with her husband, whose bank had temporarily transferred him to London, and Mother and I had decided to make this visit our last stop before returning home. After almost ten days in Turkey, on the Seabourn cruise up the coast of the Aegean Sea, followed by nearly a week in Israel, we had, at last, arrived in London.

  The moment snagged, hung suspended.

  “Why don’t we take off your coat?” I urged, reaching for her hand.

  My mother looked at me expectantly, then withdrew her hand.

  “No,” she answered. “No. I’m waiting for Jenny.”

  When, three hours later, Jenny finally waddled into the suite at the Royal Garden Hotel, her advanced pregnancy announcing itself loudly as she came through the door, my mother stood up, smiling.

  “There you are!” she said. “Let’s go!”

  The three of us set forth, out the door and onto the streets of London, whose denizens walked hurriedly in no particular pattern, so that I continually found myself bumping into people. My sister took my arm and said, “The Brits have no sense of personal space. Let’s get Mother off the street.”

  Jenny was bubbling with ideas as to how we should spend the day.

  “Later we’ll have high tea at the Milestone, which is supposed to be fabulous, but first, a stroll through Kensington Park!”

  My mother paused, looked at Jenny curiously, and said, “Why would I want to walk in a park? I live in a park!”

  Jenny and I laughed and continued walking, but when we turned back we saw that our mother was no longer behind us. She had wandered off the sidewalk into the park after all, and appeared to be fascinated by something she saw on the ground. As we approached, our mother leaned down and plucked an object from the gravel.

  As the three of us resumed walking down Kensington High Street, our mother slightly in the lead, my sister nudged me and whispered, “Look at her left sleeve.” Peering closely, I saw two long, gray feathers protruding from the sleeve of our mother’s silver knit sweater. Jenny and I exchanged a look that felt a little like a betrayal but was, in fact, a confidence—a confidence we both understood we would not be sharing with our mother.

  Chapter Thirty

  Kitten?”

  A Saturday morning in Brentwood, the breakfast room flooded with Southern California light. The year was 2000, we were nearing the end of the sixth season of Star Trek: Voyager, and I had filmed very late the night before. Irritably, I scraped strands of tangled hair from my eyes and lowered my head, pressing the receiver to my ear.

  “Mother, is that you?”

  A long pause, then the voice returned, each word strained as if through a fine sieve.

  “I think something’s wrong,” she said. Again, she lapsed into silence.

  “Mother, listen to me,” I commanded, intuitively using a voice both firm and gentle. “You need to tell me what has happened. Take your time. I’m here.”

  There was a moment on the other end of the line that opened like a void, dropping my mother into a confusion so palpable that I wondered if I had lost her.

  “I think I may have had a series of small strokes,” the voice at last responded, small and hesitant.

  “What do you mean? Tell me exactly what happened, Mother, as clearly as you can.”

  “I fell out of bed and my glasses broke.”

  “Why do you think you had a series of small strokes?”

  “It felt like electricity zapped my brain six or seven times, and then I fell out of bed.”

  “What do you mean, electricity zapped your brain?”

  “I was reading and then currents—like bolts of lightning, or strobes—flashed in my brain. Very powerful, very quick. So strong it knocked my glasses off, and now they’re broken.”

  Another long pause, during which I processed this information and my mother attempted to compose herself. But she was distant, her voice tremulous, and even as we spoke, I felt her slipping away from me.

  “How are you feeling now?” I asked. “Mother?”

  “I think something came out of the wallpaper.”

  My pulse quickened.

  I lowered my voice, steadied it.

  “What came out of the wallpaper, Mother? Can you tell me?”

  Then a groan, stifled as it rose in her throat.

  “What was it, Mother? What came out of the wallpaper?”

  “Spiders,” she whispered. “Black spiders.”

  My turn to be silent. She meant every word, I knew this. The phone call must have demanded extraordinary effort. She was terrified, and worse, she was disoriented.

  “Where are you now, Mother?” I asked, scribbling the words spiders and hallucination on a scratch pad.

  “Upstairs,” she replied, and I envisioned her in her blue cotton pajamas, standing next to the small oak table in the upstairs hallway where the phone sat, clutching her damaged glasses in one hand, staring back through the open door of her bedroom.

  “Mother, have you told Dad?”

  A whimper, one of anxiety.

  “Mother? Are you there?”

  I sensed that she was giving up, failing, that the conversation would soon overwhelm her, so I pressed on.

  “Mother, I think you should tell Dad.”

  Again, that sound caught in her throat, unable to escape. A long pause.

  “Oh, no, dear. No,” she said at last, and then I knew that it was only a matter of seconds before I lost her.

  “I’ll come, darling, so don’t worry, all right? I’ll come as soon as I can.”

  There was a dropping off, a fumbling, and then the line went dead.

  * * *

  SPIDERS WERE HER friends, something she had made clear one day years earlier when I sat down beside her at the kitchen table and found her once again lost in thought, staring out the window.

  “Mother, do you think we might have a conversation?” I demanded, reaching across her for the small pitcher of cream.

  “Shhhhhh! Don’t be rude, be quiet,” my mother ordered, peering intently at the window.

  “What are you looking at that’s so mesmerizing?” I asked, fully expecting a diatribe against blue jays. My mother was continually outraged by the behavior of blue jays and could not understand their open mendacity and cruelty to other birds. She considered them wanton murderers.

  “Look, Kitten,” my mother whispered, wonderingly. “Nature’s most exquisite artist.”

  I circled around to her side of the table and stood behind her chair, eager to find out what the source of this enchantment was.

  “It’s marvelous, and absolutely incredible what they are able to accomplish! Just look at what she did overnight! From one end of the window to the other, she not only wove an intricate and exquisite web, but see what she’s caught! Two flies, another spider, and a box-elder bug. It’s dazzling, don’t you think?”

  What I found marvelous and absolutely incredible was not only my mother’s fascination with these insects, but that she was referring to a web the spider had woven across the pane of glass facing into the kitchen. In other words, the spider was creating her masterpiece inside the kitchen, and she was not, under any circumstances, to be disturbed. I wondered how my mother hoped to protect such a vulnerable installation from the swiping hands of frightened kids.

  “I’ll cordon it off,” she announced, jumping up to collect masking tape and a permanent marker from the kitchen drawer. Very carefully, she pulled and then affixed tape to the entire length of one side of the window, then the other, after which she wrote on it in bold letters, DO NOT DISTURB.

  “Children are to keep their mitts off! The spider is the da Vinci of insects,” she proclaimed, triumphantly.

  “How’s that, Mums?” I asked.

  “There’s nothing they can’t do! They are s
culptors, scientists, and architects. Every silken strand has been spun to her exact specifications. First, she builds, then she hunts, then she eats, and finally . . . she waits,” my mother whispered, with dramatic intensity.

  “For what?” I asked, picking up my cue.

  “For him. Her mate. He will be smaller than she is, and he will be helplessly drawn to her scent, so that before he knows it he’ll be unwittingly caught in her web, fighting his way through the maze in his eagerness to claim her. Once he does, and the queen has what she needs”—my mother paused momentarily for effect, then continued—“she will devour him.”

  “Are you going to sit here all day and all night, waiting for this little moment of insect erotica?”

  “Oh, Kitten, don’t be average. Can you think of anything better I could be doing?”

  Standing behind her, my eyes riveted to the female spider hanging motionless in the center of her web, I realized that there was very little, in fact, that could surpass this natural tableau in either beauty or virtuosity.

  I pulled my chair closer to the drama, sipping quietly from my cup of coffee. Minutes passed, during which both my mother and I watched intently as the female spider continued to weave her web.

  “Never kill a spider, Kitten,” my mother warned. “Spiders are our friends.”

  Chapter Thirty-One

  We sat in the waiting room, trying to jolly her along. She was calm enough, nestled between her oldest daughter and her youngest son, with her old friend Tim Hagan sitting across the way. Her old friend and my second husband. My father, in rigid denial, had stayed at home. We were a strange and alert little band, pretending to make jokes but only half listening to one another. Our eyes and ears were bent toward the nurse behind the desk, the one calling the numbers, as it were. The mission was a terrible one, and we knew it, but there was nothing to be done about it. Spiders crawling out of wallpaper and strobes blasting through consciousness, glasses broken from an unexplained fall. All of this needed to be attended to, and so here we were, as vigilant as soldiers in a foxhole. No getting out of this, now. I had requested it, my brother Sam had found the neurologist, Tim had flown in from Cleveland, and so it was meant to be. Had to be.

  My mother’s eyes were like the eyes of birds, watchful and quick. Her expression revealed confusion more than anything else, though she tried gamely to laugh at Sam’s silliness. The laughter would escape her, but then it would stop too suddenly, as if shot still. She, too, sat upright like a nun during Mass, her hands clasped in her lap, her face uncertain of its attitude. My husband smiled at her kindly. He would save her, if he could, if he knew how, but we were in the land of the unknowing and had to wait our turn, just like everybody else. While we waited, we dreamed our own private daydreams, and each one of them had a happy ending, or at least a reasonably happy ending. Tim daydreamed that his friend Joan would be rightfully accused of extreme eccentricity; Sam flirted with the option of a mild stroke, but only a mild one, one that would leave her with her mobility and her sense of humor; and I, I wanted the dread that had pooled in the pit of my stomach to disappear, and in its place a feeling of purposefulness to be restored as I was handed a diet and exercise regimen and told to see to it that my mother followed doctor’s orders. My mother did not daydream, but was focused intently on her right hand, which she had balled into a tight fist.

  “Mrs. Mulgrew?” the nurse called out, looking in our direction. Our little band rose as one.

  “Dr. Fortson will see you now. Are you ready?”

  My mother looked from me to Sam, from Sam to me. She nodded, and then shrugged.

  The nurse, an amiable woman endowed with patience, smiled and came around the nurses’ station to deal with us directly.

  “The examining room is sort of small, so it’s probably best if you only have one or two people go in with you, is that all right?” she asked, quickly appraising the situation.

  “I’ll stay out here,” Tim said, “and you two go in with your mother.”

  Sensible, thoughtful Tim, who understood how things were.

  The examining room was indeed compact, and we were momentarily at a loss as to how to situate ourselves. This occasioned a bout of giggles, as Sam made an exaggerated show of being uncomfortable in the chair, on the exam table, on the surface of the work counter, and finally sat on his haunches in a corner of the room, pretending to pout.

  When the door opened, Sam jumped to his feet. Dr. Fortson was a tall, lean, dark-complected man, whose gentle manner immediately put us at our ease.

  “Mrs. Mulgrew, I’m Mark Fortson,” he said, taking my mother’s hand. “And I presume these are your children?”

  “I think so,” Mother replied, which elicited a small smile from the doctor.

  Relief and gratitude washed over me as I watched Dr. Fortson arrange two chairs facing each other. One of these chairs had a small table attached to it, a chair designed for students. My mother was asked to sit in this chair, and Dr. Fortson occupied the other. Sam and I stood behind Dr. Fortson’s chair, providing us with an unobstructed view of our mother. Dr. Fortson was at once self-assured and modest, his professionalism innate. He had learned from experience to present himself as calm, unhurried. He had all the time in the world for my mother, and I said to myself, You are wise, Dr. Fortson, because this is a woman who deserves all the time in the world.

  “How are you doing, Mrs. Mulgrew?” he asked, leaning forward ever so slightly.

  My mother had decided to perform for the doctor, and this concerned me. I had seen her do this only when she was tipsy, happy, or agitated. In this room, sitting across from a man she’d never seen before, she was clearly agitated, but had made up her mind to take the high road. From my mother’s point of view, this meant assuming a confidence she didn’t have. I was hoping she would not try to be witty.

  “What do you think?” she answered, wittily.

  “I think you’re concerned about what happened to you a few weeks ago. You fell out of bed and broke your glasses. Can you tell me about that?”

  My mother tensed, twisted her hands in her lap.

  “It wasn’t good,” she said.

  “I’m sure it was upsetting. Do you remember how your glasses broke?”

  “Something zapped my brain.”

  My mother looked over at me, and I nodded encouragingly.

  “And did you see something else that may have frightened you?” Dr. Fortson inquired. He was, of course, referring to the spiders coming out of the wallpaper.

  My mother paused, shrugged lightly.

  “Just, you know—I don’t know,” she uttered.

  Dr. Fortson studied my mother for a minute and then said, “Mrs. Mulgrew, can you walk across the room for me?”

  This had the effect of brightening my mother’s mood, and she immediately jumped up from her chair and walked briskly across the room.

  “Can you put one foot directly in front of the other and walk quickly?”

  Dr. Fortson was smiling, but we all understood this to be a challenge, and for a moment my mother hesitated. Then, nonchalantly, she put one foot in front of the other and took a step. She wobbled but tried to maintain her equilibrium, and then attempted to sabotage the effort by skipping across the room. She was in high performance mode, and I could feel my shoulders rising.

  “Well, you certainly can skip,” Dr. Fortson said. “Now, let’s do something different. I’d like you to take a short quiz, all right?”

  My mother assented, sat down in her chair, and accepted the pencil and paper that Dr. Fortson offered her.

  “Mrs. Mulgrew, will you draw the face of a clock and show the time to be one P.M.?”

  I tensed, my brother crossed his arms.

  After some hesitation, my mother drew something that could, perhaps, have resembled a clock if she were being creative, but this drawing looked more like a ghost, onto whose face she applied two dots.

  “Ah,” said Dr. Fortson, carefully searching my mother’s face.
r />   “Mrs. Mulgrew, may I call you Joan?”

  “Yes, of course,” my mother said, visibly relaxing. She had misinterpreted Dr. Fortson’s response to her drawing and thought he had found it unusually clever.

  “Joan, what is the date?”

  “The day I am here,” she answered, smiling.

  “And what is the day of the week?”

  “Friday,” she replied, correctly.

  “Can you tell me what year it is?”

  This gave my mother pause, but she forged ahead, as if such a question was unaccountably silly.

  “Nineteen . . . Nineteen, oh what? Nineteen you-know-what,” she teased.

  “And who is the president of the United States?”

  Our mother most certainly knew who the president was, he was a Democrat and a good one, and we had often debated his politics versus his morals.

  “Who cares?” my mother countered flippantly, something of her old playfulness asserting itself.

  “Well, I’m curious to know if you can tell me who the president is.”

  It was then that my mother looked down and covertly unfolded her right hand, on which she had clearly scribbled certain names and numbers in ink. Dr. Fortson pretended to be astounded.

  “Joan, are those crib notes? Are you cheating on your MMSE?”

  Sam and I spontaneously burst out laughing, we couldn’t help ourselves. Some part of us delighted in the sheer absurdity of this stratagem, in the very cheekiness of it. How like our mother to think that she could outsmart a neurologist, but how distinctly unlike her to want to. The laughter quickly subsided and was replaced by silence as Dr. Fortson sat back in his chair, appraising our mother.

  He liked her, I could feel it, and what’s more, he respected her. Beneath the masquerade, he saw her for who she was. An exceptional woman, full of life, a woman whose children clearly adored her. He would go on questioning her until he was completely satisfied.

  My mother straightforwardly told him that her daughter Tess had died of a brain tumor, but that it had happened years ago and now she painted in her studio, and cooked, and played the piano. She told him she lived in a park, which seemed to amuse him. When he asked her if she liked to read, my mother crossed one leg over the other and responded, “Are you kidding? Have you met my husband?”