How We Remember

by J. M. Monaco

  After I had thrown up enough to get me to bed, Beth left me to it.

  Most of the day is a blur of repetition that includes sleep, sipping water, runs to the toilet, sips of broth, more runs to toilet, more sips, more sleep. I make sure I answer the phone so Beth and her mother Jean won’t worry. Beth was planning on taking me out with her and some friends for drinks and a meal after work. In disappointment at missing out, I drift into a dreamland where vicious dogs chase me for food scraps and the girl with the dip-dyed hair at the beach is forcing my hands over her large breasts while trying to kiss me. ‘Touch them,’ she screams. ‘Go on, touch them. They’re real.’

  Toward the end of the afternoon before Danielle returns from school – it looks like she lives in that cheerleading outfit – I gain enough appetite to eat two pieces of toast, then drink tea, followed by a quick Skype with Jon. I tell him about the slovenly state of the house, the nail clippings, the cleaning, going through all the photos, Dad cancelling, Dave, Revere Beach, the vomiting, but no mention of Uncle Ron and his dog. Afterwards when Jon pitches in, it’s as though he’s seen all my activity through a looking-glass.

  ‘Maybe you shouldn’t spend any more time sorting through your mother’s stuff. I know you only have a short time there but, maybe it’s just not good for you, you know, all at once like this. And you know what you’re like with stress, what it does to you. I don’t want you to get ill.’ He throws in a reminder of how important it is to be kind to Dave. ‘He’s hurting too. In his own way.’ Reminds me to get as much rest as possible. ‘You know your body shuts down when you’re not getting enough sleep. Stay away from greasy food and lighten up on the wine. You know what it does to you.’

  There’s a swimming pool just like the public one my brother and I used to frequent across town with our friends in the summer, and I, the middle-aged Jo, am swimming in a race. It feels like twenty-six miles instead of twenty-six laps. Two children, boy and girl, are ahead of me freestyling alongside each other towards a Buddha-like woman who waits for them at the other end, wrinkled face smiling, arms open, encouraging them. I’m working my hardest but I’m struggling and relieved to see someone else far behind me. I discover it’s Tom Cruise. Hah! Even I, with my weak leg, can beat this pretty boy. But soon he’s catching up and overtakes me. My strength ceases and I resign myself to snailing along. Smug Tom is all smiles and self-congratulatory, everyone patting him on the back. The two children are hardly visible as they huddle under the holding arms of the Buddha woman. She looks up at me coldly when I reach the end and mumbles, ‘You’re last.’

  With a night of solid sleep behind me, I make a fresh start to the day with a gentle kick of sugary tea and check my work emails. Most of them I decide to ignore. I don’t even open the ten or more from the undergrads I haven’t seen all year, the ones who haven’t signed up for any of the offered extra sessions or tutorials, the ones who have decided, near the end of their degree, that they should make their first visit to the library so they can make a pathetic attempt at writing something passable for their final-year dissertation. My outgoing message about bereavement leave is clear. In so many words, it says: Fuck off, you little shits. Serves you right for waiting this long to contact me. For now, they have my colleagues and the admin staff to deal with, then the Easter break will arrive, another way to stretch out some more time before I have to face work again.

  And then I see a message from Nina Hayes. PhD student in her late twenties. Intelligent, committed, provocative. Intense Nina. Can I see you? the subject line reads. I linger, afraid to open it.

  She started as a slow burner, an innocent intellectual flirtation.

  ‘Be careful,’ my colleague and friend, Tania, warned when I agreed to supervise Nina’s master’s dissertation a while back. ‘I hear she’s bad news. Smart one, yes, but needy. She’ll suck up all your time and more. I heard there was some kind of weird clash between her and Peter, you know, the temporary guy who covered some teaching. I don’t know any details.’

  Misunderstood, I thought. A rumour did go around about this ‘clash’, but I assumed Peter just wasn’t up to the job. She might have showed him up. I noticed Nina was a bit odd, isolated herself from other students, although in the earlier taught part of the master’s programme she never failed to impress everyone with her wider reading. She’d rattle off endless references then challenge the European academic canon’s deficit in ‘really’ original theories on taste beyond those that merely extended French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu’s. The class wasn’t sure what to make of her when she debated the futile nature of theorising about anything. What was the point of it all? she would ask. It was a game she said she wasn’t sure she wanted to play. How could I, and the similarly sceptical Bourdieu, argue with that? She was the life of the seminar, the ideal future academic. In the end her distrust of the institution didn’t stop her from graduating with distinction, or from returning a year later and asking me to support her PhD application and to supervise her. And she was more than happy to accept that attractive studentship package.

  Tania was right. Here I am now, more than half way into the first year of supervising Nina’s PhD and she certainly has ‘sucked up’ lots of my time. At first I welcomed this when faced with other students whose lack of ambition prompted sinister thoughts. Nina’s enthusiasm to set her ideas in motion has resulted in reams of pages that jump from one astute thought to another, without ever reaching closure. Her work has been a beautiful and thrilling mess.

  Her PhD project weaves together feminist theory with her own photography practice which involves taking self-portraits of her naked body. Yes, it’s been done before, but she has managed to make it her own with something new to say. Many of the images focus on her scars from the third-degree burns she suffered in a childhood accident. Some shots are close-ups of her fully made-up face and classic Hollywood looks, but the scars challenge any attempts at photographic perfection. Her body is a bas-relief of complex terrain. When we talked about the fire in our first tutorial she never revealed any details. It was just ‘an accident out of my control,’ she said. ‘This study’s like a way of regaining some kind of power again.’

  ‘Yes, that’s a positive thing, Nina, a way of telling your own story.’

  Before responding she fixed her dark eyes on mine and smiled. ‘But I have a right to be quiet about what I want to be quiet about,’ she insisted. ‘It’s about having a choice, right? Take that away and there’s nothing.’ She tilted her head to the side, then swivelled herself back and forth in her chair in a suggestive way. I had noticed her do this in our previous MA dissertation supervisions but tried to put it out of my mind.

  ‘It’s an interesting perspective,’ I said. ‘But it often feels like a fine line to me. In some cases, choosing to speak out or opting to remain silent will lead to the same result.’

  She continued staring, smiling, swivelling. She wore a maroon satin camisole under a see-through blouse. It was hard not to admire the confidence she displayed in her soft, curvy figure, tummy roll and scars for all to see.

  I saw her again that week after the Visual Culture talk I organised. The speaker couldn’t stay for drinks and most staff and students dispersed after thirty minutes. It was still early and Nina coaxed me into grabbing a bite to eat nearby, followed by more drinks. Normally I would have said I was too tired, but Jon was away on a research trip across the country again and I didn’t have to teach the next day. Along with a good appetite, I felt an unexpected rush of energy.

  That’s when it started. The power of a good tapas selection and sangria, how they take off the edge. The revelations that follow. There was a boyfriend a few months back, a girlfriend before that. Nina always knew she was bisexual.

  ‘Aren’t we all born that way? Isn’t that what Freud said? I have some problems with Freud but I know he was right about that one.’

  ‘Yes. Yes, you’re so right,’ I said, giggling, raising my glass. ‘Let’s not totally discount Freud. I’ll toast
to that!’

  As the months passed we had more meals, exhibition trips, drinks. I hadn’t considered any of this a problem at the time. My colleagues often socialised with PhD students, in particular the more mature ones. Their research overlapped with our own interests, they were sharing our undergraduate teaching hours and we treated them like colleagues. Over time Nina and I shared more friendly disclosures. Honesty about my MS, how it all started, the leftover effects.

  ‘It was actually so awful, Nina. I really didn’t know how I was going to get through it. And it was tough for Jon, too, at the beginning, but he’s stuck by me all the way.’

  ‘You’re incredible, Jo. You’re just so amazing.’

  Inquiring chats about what it was like for me when I started as an academic. How ‘inspiring’ my work was. How captivating my teaching was.

  ‘You just show up all the others in the department. You’re way too good for this second-rate place,’ Nina said, looking at me with those wide, admiring eyes. ‘Why hasn’t another top uni snapped you up? You should be a professor by now.’

  I introduced her to Jon one evening in my office before he and I set off to see a film.

  ‘So Nina’s your PhD tour de force. I noticed she looked at you a certain way,’ he said, lifting his eyebrows as we left the building.

  ‘What kind of way?’ I asked, with some trepidation, but knowing exactly what he meant.

  ‘Let’s just say she likes you, that’s for sure.’

  ‘Oh, she’s young,’ I laughed. ‘It happens. Won’t last though, the idolising thing.’ In that second it felt good to think that someone might idolise me and I found myself flicking my hair in a silly gesture.

  ‘No, Jo. I mean she fancies you. A lot. I can tell.’ His expression and tone were serious.

  ‘Hah, that’s a funny one. I’m pretty much twice her age, not to mention fat, with an MS limp. Not exactly a great catch am I?’

  ‘Look, I’m just telling you what I saw. I wasn’t imagining it. And stop saying you’re fat.’ He slid his arm around me, pinched my love handle. ‘You just need to lose a bit of weight, that’s all.’ He removed his arm, sped up his walk and I struggled to keep up.

  It was the three-day conference in Manchester I attended before I flew out to see my mother at the hospice that confirmed Jon’s suspicions. After dinner with others on the second night, Nina asked me to have a look at her slides as she claimed she was worried about her talk the next morning. Another PhD student she planned to share the room with had cancelled at the last minute and Nina had the room to herself.

  With her sitting close to me on her bed, we went through her work in some detail. While I shared my comments I felt her move her arm under mine. I was surprised, although her touch felt natural and non-threatening. I smiled and continued to read. Then came the light strokes on my arm, then a kiss, just a little one, me stunned but not pulling away – her smiling, her waiting. After that, proper kissing, the eventual groping, me stopping, babbling about how wrong it all was – ‘I’m your supervisor. I’m old enough to be your mother’; Nina whispering ‘We aren’t doing anything wrong’; more insistent groping, me refusing then giving in, refusing, and giving in again.

  When I finally returned to my own room (Nina needed her sleep before her morning talk) I thought about Jon. I tried to convince myself that what happened didn’t exactly count as cheating on my husband. No, it was a special intimacy shared between two women friends, that was all it was. Yes, we had ended up in bed, our imperfect bodies surrendered, but even so, this, I told myself, was not the same as going behind Jon’s back with another man. What could be worse than that, the ultimate dagger in a husband’s back? I went to sleep reassuring myself that what I had done was my business.

  Yet when I met Nina at breakfast the next morning, something inside me had shifted. I wasn’t sure if it was just nerves, but she appeared different, less appealing. Then it hit me, that boulder-hitting-the-bottom-of-my-stomach insight. Hadn’t I joked with Tania about those male professors who abused their power and had affairs with their research assistants? Hadn’t I sneered at those men who’d left their wives and kids after falling for an attractive female grad student? ‘So typical. So slimy. They just can’t control themselves, can they?’ And there I stood, the morning after. Could I honestly claim complete innocence just because I was a woman?

  When I delivered my talk that morning I tried not to catch Nina’s eye. Her attention on me was unflinching and made me uncomfortable. She continued to stick by my side for the rest of that last day, embarrassing me by telling others how much of a ‘stellar supervisor’ I was. All at once, every word she uttered, every glance she threw my way, made me want to wince. At lunch when she asked if I could introduce her to yet another group of senior academics I noticed how quickly she moved in. I watched the way she inched closer to them as they chatted. I recognised the way she pulled back those silky blonde waves from her face and tucked them behind her ear at just the right moments. The way she tilted that head of hers, that coy smile. I remembered Tania’s warning, ‘Be careful…she’s bad news,’ as my body began to sense the gravity of the situation. And it frightened me.

  Just be straight with her, I told myself. No messing around. Strict supervisor/student meetings in my office from now on.

  ‘It has to be this way, Nina. I’m sorry if I led you on,’ I said when we met in my office that week following the conference. It was a couple of days before my brother called and told me about my mother checking into the hospice. ‘I shouldn’t have let it go that far. I’m the one at fault here. I’m sorry.’ I concentrated my eyes on a pile of papers that I was shuffling in front of me.

  ‘Huh,’ Nina said, and paused. ‘Well, I don’t think you’re sorry at all. No, Jo, I’m pretty sure you’re not sorry about what happened.’

  When I shut down the conversation with, ‘This has to be the end of it, Nina. Right here. Right now. Let’s focus on the work. How far have you got now?’ – well, let’s just say Nina didn’t take it very well.

  I haven’t seen her since she stomped out of the office that day.

  Since then I’ve had plenty of time to worry about Nina and what might happen if she chose to complain to Richard smug-ass Appleton, the research committee chair, about me. How it would impact on Jon, on us. So I don’t think about it. It does make me wonder, though, whether there is something lacking in my relationship; something that has been lost over the years.

  I return to thinking about the pressure I’m under at work because of my lack of research output over the past year or so.

  ‘OK, Jo. Your turn,’ Richard Appleton said when the committee last met. ‘How are things going with that article? Any progress? You know there comes a time when you just need to know that good enough is good enough. And we do need to submit our stats soon for the research assessment exercise.’

  He wouldn’t let me leave before I agreed to send him a timeline for the journal piece I should have finished a couple of months ago, the one about expressions of feminist politics in contemporary Western art practice, and the methodologies that academic prats like me use to analyse them.

  For a few minutes I contemplate changing the entire premise of the journal piece so I can work in an argument that uses Michel Foucault’s views on power. But I realise I don’t have the strength and see I’m procrastinating again.

  Instead, I look over the draft I’ve written for my mother’s eulogy. It’s all stiff and teacherly, although comforting in its orderly structure, a list of all the things that made her a perfect nurse, mother, and wife. She tried her best with what she had, I can’t fault her for that. I fuss with grammar again, practise out loud adjusting my accent so I can sound more American, maybe even more like a Bostonian, like I did in the old days before fancy pants university sucked every last trace of street-talking townie out of me. I make the awful mistake of experimenting with my phone recorder so I can hear what I sound like, and cringe.

  Later I get in the Mondeo a
nd drive over to the house to meet Dave, before the old man arrives to talk about money.

  Twenty Two

  Dave’s rushed over from a job and somehow looks right in his work clothes that show residues of dirt and dust. His eyes are a little tired, enough to reveal a reasonable level of work ethic respectability, a hard-working, middle-aged guy fitting in with what the world expects of him. But it’s not too much; it looks like he’s found the balance. I ask him again if he wants to add anything to the eulogy and he declines, insisting I’m the expert.

  ‘Just don’t overdo it,’ he warns, smiling in a way that is intended to convey kindness but doesn’t manage it.

  ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

  ‘No offense Jo, but, you know, just keep it short and sweet.’

  After Dad arrives, Dave doesn’t waste any time in sitting us around the kitchen table, freshly brewed coffee ready. His business ideas have progressed a lot since the evening we met at the grill place, I discover with some surprise, as he kept quiet about it last night at the beach. He and Karen have been looking into a franchise restaurant opportunity, a safer bet than building up from something new, we are told, and they’ve found out you don’t need much investment cash to purchase the franchise agreement fee, although he’s evasive about exactly how much. You also have to apply for a business loan for all the other costs.

  ‘But you see Dad, that’s the easier part because the banks want to help businesses around here and a franchise is so much less risky because the company offers training, gets people started, hooks them up with suppliers and all the rest. And of course, the less I have to ask for in terms of the business loan, the better,’ Dave says with a surprising level of professionalism and confidence.

  They’ve already located a space in the centre of town that looks good, just down the road from Dad’s, and they’re looking at applying for the BGR Burger Joint franchise. He’s done some research and starts quoting a list of BGR success stories.