How We Remember

by J. M. Monaco

  ‘Well. Too late for all that. But that’s sweet. You wanting to defend me.’

  We hang out at his house, another place in the quiet suburbs, where he lives with his nice parents, sister and brother, but everyone’s out for the night. Mike is my first real love, the one who teaches me how to love back. He is the first boyfriend I trust enough to experience an orgasm. Even though he makes me feel uncomfortable when he says, ‘I love to watch you when you come,’ at the strangest moments in my day I fantasise about him saying this over and over.

  That night we agree to take our minds off things, drink a few beers and when we get through those we finish a bottle of white wine, then smoke a joint. I indulge in the gradual loss of myself and embrace the attention he gives my body when we make love on the couch. I am dying the best death I can imagine, as a tender tornado sweeps me up and takes me away to a place where I don’t have to look back.

  We are so out of it that we wake up later, half dressed, to the sound of his parents coming in at the front of the house. We are in the extension to the rear where they won’t see us. Mike escapes quietly to his bed. I fall into a deep sleep in the spare room and dream I am fifteen years old again, standing outside Auntie Peggy’s house. I am screaming, ‘Please, Auntie. Please, let me in.’ I end up in a battle with a faceless, dark, long-haired girl who is blocking the door. Both of us swing baseball bats frantically as we try to strike each other. Finally, I manage to perfect my aim. With full force, just as I hit her in the face, I see she has turned into me and I wake up.

  Six

  My eyes open in the evening to the sound of Beth’s voice in the kitchen as she speaks loudly to someone on the phone. In spite of the usual discomfort in my bad leg, I leave the cane for the moment. As soon as I open Danielle’s bedroom door I catch an inviting smell of something cooking in the oven. Beth comes to the hallway. I give her a quick wave letting her know it’s OK not to hang up just because I’m there, but she uses me as her getaway.

  ‘Ma, OK, OK. I have to go now. Jo’s up. Yeah, well, she can decide how to manage her own jetlag. I’ll see you when you get here, don’t worry about it now. OK, bye.’ Beth hangs up, sighs, rolls her eyes at me. ‘She wants me to let you know that you shouldn’t have gone to sleep so long because that’s just going to make your jetlag worse.’

  We laugh, I agree and we have a quick embrace. I want to hug for longer, but Beth is too practical a person for that. I follow her into the kitchen and soon enough she carries on wiping down the countertops, filling the dishwasher, tidying away.

  Beth looks good and always impresses me. She’s just turned fifty-four, and made a pact with herself to lose weight when she was diagnosed with type 2 diabetes. After finalising the divorce it was like she saw some kind of spiritual light that told her she could sing another song, compose an entirely new arrangement going forwards. I was envious but I wasn’t quite ready to get rid of my husband for inspiration. She soon became like one of those before and after women you read about in Weight Watchers’ success stories. She started waking up around 5.30am, walked the dog for around thirty minutes, working up to a speedy pace, then when back home would do a pilates workout DVD for another thirty minutes. Soon she progressed into a jogging routine, starting slow but worked up to full running in hour-long stretches. By this time old Bailey was finding it hard to keep up with her. Before long she was signing up for 5K, then 10K races, then half-marathons, yes, thirteen miles, each time picking up the pace. Now’s she’s a lean machine. I’ve warned her not to lose any more weight or she’ll risk having that big-head-on-a-skeletal-frame look.

  Beth’s mother Jean arrives, striding into the kitchen with a radiance to her clear, Mediterranean-blue eyes, her well-managed waistline showing only a hint of love for a cupcake or two. She’s the picture of health, the kind of attractive senior woman you might see in an American commercial with her WASP-ish husband enjoying a glass of wine on a terrace overlooking a sandy beach. She holds out a small bunch of white peonies. ‘No, they’re not for you, Beth, they’re for Jo. I’m so, so sorry, Jo, about your mother. She was something special.’ She gives me a squeeze, rubs my back, and we both clear a few tears from our eyes.

  Danielle’s right behind her. I can’t seem to take my eyes off her face, flawless in her plumped youth, that little brush of eye-liner with its simple feathered wing-tip at the ends. I thank her once again for giving up her room for me.

  ‘You’ve all gone beyond the call of duty,’ I say, feeling the releasing effect of that second glass of wine, which prompts more tears and then more offers of kindness from them.

  For a moment I sit quietly with my glass, catch a waft of the peonies now and then, watch, smile, listen to the Connelly women some more, and think to myself, Oh, this is what a nice family life is like.

  Beth’s way of forgetting about work and relaxing before bed is to watch TV. It’s all fast-moving, this channel-hopping – will it be The Good Wife or Modern Family? – along with those long commercial breaks promoting the profit-seeking potential of the pharmaceutical industry. All you need is a friendly chat with your healthcare provider, not to mention a damn good insurance package, and the choices are endless, along with the long list of side-effects, including death.

  ‘Ooh, this looks like a good one. Tom Cruise. We like Tom Cruise, don’t we, Jo?’ says Beth, eyes steady on the screen. ‘Yes we do,’ she confirms for me.

  It’s the more recent version of the actor, playing the role of a bandana-wearing rock star. We catch it from the middle of a scene in which he’s in a room with a pool table. He’s moving with serious intent towards an attractive woman who wears her long blonde hair in a big 1980’s style. Suddenly Cruise breaks into the classic Foreigner anthem ‘I Want to Know What Love Is’ that we recognise straightaway from our younger days.

  ‘What? What the hell’s going on?’ Beth shouts.

  ‘Oh my God, is that really Tom Cruise singing?’

  Soon enough, they’re tearing their clothes off in high comic fashion while serenading each other.

  Beth jumps from her cosy spot on the couch, grabs the remote and sings into it, stroking her hair, moving her hands down along her hips and to the top of her leg suggestively. I sing back and try to mimic the sexy actress’s moves and carry on until the end of the number when the blonde falls off the table and there’s a commercial break.

  We look at each other and start laughing. We laugh so much I’m left with a stiffness around my jaw and the realisation I’ve actually lost some bladder control. I race to the bathroom, returning as Danielle enters the room wondering what’s going on. We calm down, enough to convince her to watch the scene with us on playback.

  ‘It’s this amazing scene with Tom Cruise who looks like he’s really singing,’ says Beth.

  ‘But he is really singing!’

  We fall about. Danielle just stares at us.

  ‘Anyway it’s one of the most amazing things you’ll ever witness in your whole entire life!’ squawks Beth.

  Danielle joins us with some willing curiosity and sits quietly through the scene, witnessing more of our wonder and hysterics. When it’s over she offers her verdict. ‘This is crap. I’m going to bed,’ she says, and leaves the room.

  As the night continues we drink more wine than Beth has allowed herself in a long time.

  ‘I’d like to say I’ll hate you in the morning for doing this to me, Jo, but I could never hate you for anything. I’ll just hate myself instead.’

  We laugh more, we laugh harder. My mouth aches. It’s a welcome release after all the built-up sadness I’ve been holding. ‘This is like old times, Beth. Remember all those nights we dreamed about our future? Did you ever think it would end up like this?’

  ‘Married, a kid, divorced, over-worked, constantly counting calories. You leaving me to live in England. No, I didn’t imagine this. But it could be worse, I can’t complain. And going to London…that was the best thing you could have done for yourself. How was I going to try and st
op you? And by that time I got myself married. Hah, look where that got me.’

  As teenagers Beth and I were inseparable. That was before she met Gary, her first serious boyfriend in high school. I was still in the picture, often as the best friend who had to get fixed up with one of his friends so we could go out on double-dates. But in truth I was always jealous. Not because Beth had a boyfriend and I didn’t, but because I wanted her all to myself. We use to fantasise about the future when we had good jobs and could afford to get a nice place together. Sometimes we’d joke about living together as lesbians, adopting kids to make our family, spending our old age together. I’ll never know how Beth really felt about the lesbian thing, beyond it being a shared joke, but at the time I pondered it secretly. I knew for sure that when Beth became serious about boyfriends, my emotions would take over; bursts of anger at my mother, sudden nasty turns at someone else in class, snide remarks to Beth about Gary, urges to find ways to break them up.

  During one of the many nights I stayed overnight at Beth’s, I remember waking from an intense dream. It felt as though the dream’s events had just happened in real time. In it I was lying with Beth in her bed, just as we were that night after we came home from a party. We were both drunk and silly, nudging up to each other closer until we interlocked our legs and swung a free arm around each other. Through laughter and tears we said how much we loved each other as best friends and we began to kiss, slowly and carefully. I took the lead and covered her body with kisses and more touching. I didn’t remember anything else except that I woke up in the early hours when it was still dark and felt wet in my groin, Beth asleep next to me, still wearing the nightie she wore to bed, the same one I remember lifting in the dream.

  I never mentioned what I thought must have been a dream to her and it never happened again. I assumed it was my unconscious taking me to a place I wasn’t brave enough to visit in my waking world.

  I’ve often asked myself what kinds of struggles we would have been up against if we did decide to try this out for real, declaring our love to our families, our friends. Or maybe we could have escaped somewhere else, some happy-hippy town out in California and done things our way. That was where people could be free, wasn’t it? But making realities out of fantasies is not so simple.

  Our excessive wine-drinking and retro-music extravaganza send me to sleep fast. At around 2am I wake up from a dream where I’m roaming around in my old high school’s quiet, grey hallways in search of a classroom. I’m scheduled to teach an art lesson, but I’m late and know I’ll get into trouble with the principal, the same horrible man who had the job years ago when I was a student there. I start running as fast as I can, conscious I have no cane to slow me down, but my new speed frightens me. After I make my way to the top of a steep staircase I begin to fall, pinging sensation at the chest.

  I wake up gasping for breath with my usual nagging leg pain. Sleep doesn’t return fast enough. I take a pill for the pain, take another 10mg of the melatonin Beth offered me earlier to help with the jetlag. Still an hour and a half later, I lie in bed staring at the ceiling, ruminating.

  High school. In my last two years there vivid dreams, mostly nightmares, took over many nights, waking me frequently and leading to long periods of insomnia. For some time I feared the idea of sleep altogether. The fright around what might be waiting for me when I lost conscious control was overwhelming. Could someone break into the house? Did I remember to lock the door? Was my mother coming home that night? Was I alone again?

  Dozing in class was a common occurrence. I could get away with it sometimes with sympathetic or otherwise uncaring teachers, but on other occasions I had to pay for my inattention when I was made to stand for the rest of the lesson, given detentions or extra work. Never once did any teacher question my tired eyes, the persistent under-eye bags or why I suffered somnolence at such a young age.

  My nightmares showed a clear pattern. I sometimes suffered from sleep paralysis in which I was frozen in a vulnerable position, unable to cry out. In my dreams I was often at risk of physical attack by some faceless man. Variations of scenes would play like the conventions of a thriller or horror film. In the dream I would be lying in my own bed. I’d be woken by the sound of an intruder entering the house or coming up the stairs to my room. In the dream I would sometimes sit up and struggle to focus my eyes on something but couldn’t because the room was completely black. The sound of footsteps and heavy breathing would close in. I’d try my hardest to scream but no sound would emerge, until the shadow of an overwhelming male figure with no facial features hovered over me, ready to pounce.

  Nightmares continued in the years after high school when I was working full-time, going out with Mike and sharing an apartment with two other young working women, one a lonely cat lover and the other a cool, wise one in her late twenties who worked at a bank in Boston. Unfortunately for him, Mike was frequent witness to my night terrors.

  ‘This shit’s a bit weird, Jo. Maybe you should see someone about it.’

  When my nights and days became too difficult to manage I agreed with Mike that it was time I took some control, so I did the only thing I thought was right at the time; I joined the growing number of Americans in therapy. I searched the telephone books for a local shrink that my health insurance would cover and hoped to get some pills to help me sleep.

  Location and convenience were my main priorities. Man, woman, it didn’t matter. I pretty much picked the first name that fitted the bill. My first session with the suited, pasty-complexioned, white-haired man, who appeared to be in his sixties and whose name I don’t remember, started with a summary of why I was there.

  ‘Can sleeping pills help maybe to stop the nightmares?’ I asked. ‘They’re getting a bit out of hand.’

  Without making any small talk, he took out his notepad. ‘Tell me about your family,’ he said, not looking at me while making notes already. ‘Tell me everything.’

  When I started the sessions I had already been enrolled in night classes at community college. Sociology 101 was the course that introduced me to what families like ours must have looked like to an outsider, those professors and writers of all those books on our reading list. I discovered quickly that we were a typical working-class case study. We owned our own unique differences, yes, but basically I began to understand everything that had happened in my life for what it was. I learned also that not all families were like mine, in spite of similar loony-bin cases in the neighbourhood where I grew up. The exclusive mental-health hospital where my brother was lucky enough to stay as a frequent guest on Ma’s health insurance, after one of his depressive lows, showed me how different many lives were beyond the confines of our social demographic.

  ‘You wouldn’t believe who his father is,’ Dave whispered excitedly one day about a fellow patient. When he earned daytime leaving privileges he was invited to their homes on weekends, those patients who became his friends. ‘His mother made this wacky dish with chicken and peanut sauce. Can you imagine that? Chicken with fucking peanut sauce.’

  With a confidence that surprised me, I listed my life events to the shrink. I started with my parents, my mother’s teenage pregnancy, their work in factories, my mother’s later start in nursing. I assumed I would get around to telling him about the trouble with Auntie Peggy and Uncle Ron.

  I said, ‘My parents got married too young, obviously. They’re kind of split up at the moment. They don’t live together, but seem to end up in bed every now and then, when it suits my father, that is. But he doesn’t hang around much. He’s proud of that, too. “Everybody knows I ain’t much of a family man,” he says, like it’s something to be proud of.’

  ‘Do you want them to stay together?’

  ‘No. There’s no point. But it doesn’t really matter what I want. Never has. So.’

  Then I gave him the lowdown about my brother. ‘OK, so Dave was a juvenile delinquent when he was young, not too surprising, I guess, considering. He was a high-school dropout, has ha
d lots of problems with drugs. Now they say he has manic depression too. Looks like one of his overdoses was more like an attempted suicide.’

  He interrupted me to ask, ‘How old was he when this first happened, the overdose suicide attempt?’

  ‘Fifteen maybe. I can’t remember. Around that time.’

  ‘And you were?’

  ‘Thirteen, I guess.’

  He continued taking notes. ‘Go on. Continue.’ he said, eyes on his notepad.

  ‘The hospital said at the time he had a personality disorder and depression, obviously. But he’s off drugs now and on meds for the manic depression, and managed to pass his high-school equivalency. And now he’s doing a course in air conditioning, heating and refrigeration. There’s supposed to be good money in that.’

  ‘He’s spent a long time in the hospital then. I suppose there was a lot of attention on him. Is that right?’

  ‘I guess.’ This irritated me. ‘That’s why I’m here. So I can have my own therapy. Not for him, or them. So I can get rid of these nightmares.’

  ‘The faceless men. Yes, we’ll get to that. What about grandparents?’

  I offered the shrink a short story about my father’s parents. I cried when I told him about my father’s mother, Nonna, and the time I saw bruises on her arms that my grandfather had put there.

  ‘You’re close to this grandmother then,’ the shrink said.

  ‘Yes. She’s like a mother to me.’

  ‘In a way that your mother isn’t?’

  I sat on that one for a quiet moment. ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I’m not sure what you mean.’

  During the third session I got the feeling the shrink had heard it all before. This insight surfaced after I recalled one of my latest nightmares and then I noticed he had fallen asleep. At first I thought I had it wrong. Of course, he must have been hanging on to every gripping word I uttered about my tragic life. I stopped talking and waited. His head had begun to droop forward, so I could see the thinning circle of hair revealing the shiny-skin scalp. The bifocals resting near his hairline began to slide down. Once they dropped beyond his nose and onto his mouth he woke with a sudden jerk. I waited for him to say something, like, Oh dear, I’m so sorry, how rude of me. But he just looked at me as he adjusted his glasses and rubbed his eyes.