How We Remember

by J. M. Monaco

  Dave stands over us with his empty cup, ready to pour another, and waves his free hand around. ’With all these other pizza places, Mexican, Chinese, Thai, Indian options, burgers, the right kind of burgers, can make a fortune here. People around here want a decent burger, a grilled one, with finesse,’ Dave says, pinching the air between his index finger and thumb. ‘And they’ve got the veggie options too, but red meat, you know, is still what everyone wants. It’s a no-fail deal. A no-brainer.’

  I watch our dad sitting still, his eyes lowered, his fingers tapping the side of his mug. Every now and then he looks up at Dave, nods, says, ‘Uh-huh. Yup,’ adds, ‘OK,’ and peers down again.

  While Dave talks and I try to take it all in, I start biting the inside of my cheek again, then my lip, and can’t seem to fight the temptation to feel for more chin hairs. Some of it is starting to sound a bit less scary, but who knows, they may not even get past the agreement fee.

  Dad only interrupts Dave once with comments on how risky business is; that he should put a deposit on an apartment and stop renting.

  ‘Well, Dad,’ says Dave. ‘Don’t you remember back in the day when you put some money into that fish business with your friend and you cashed in OK when you had enough. Remember? If the business goes alright then I can still buy my own place.’ We banter around it all, the hesitations, the possibilities.

  ‘Things were different in my day. That fish place. That was small-fry stuff,’ Dad says, and I’m thinking, yup, that’s probably because it was a cover-up for Irish mob business. Not that I would ever say it.

  ‘Come on, Dad. Put yourself in my shoes. How about giving me a break here? Just this once, will you? Can you just try to listen to everything I’m saying? How about cutting me some slack?’

  Judging by the way Dad has closed his eyes and is tightening his mouth, I imagine his blood pressure is rising. He starts to laugh, still not looking at Dave. ‘Hah,’ he says. ‘That’s funny. Yeah. That’s funny. Cut me some slack. Hah, hah.’

  ‘I’m not joking, Dad. I’m serious.’ Dave sends me a frustrated glare and I look away.

  ‘Yup. Oh, I know you’re serious alright.’ Dad looks out the window, squinting into the sunlight. ‘That’s the funny thing. And you know what? The thing that’s making me laugh is that you are serious. Yup. It all sounds great in your head and from your calculator.’ He turns to Dave with an odd grin. ‘But you know what? I’ve decided. I ain’t gonna give you a dime,’ he says slowly. ‘Not a penny.’ He shakes his head. ‘Can’t do it.’

  ‘Oh, jeez,’ I whisper, holding my head in my hands.

  Dave slams his mug on the countertop. ‘Jesus Christ, Dad. Jesus H fucking Christ.’ With shaking hands he takes a cigarette from his pack in his shirt pocket and lights up.

  ‘Yeah. Jesus Christ,’ Dad laughs. ‘Took the words right outta my mouth. Look, you can try to do whatever it is you wanna do, that’s great. Whatever. But leave me out of it.’ He raises his hands in surrender. ‘I don’t want any part of it. It’s what Ma wanted. And she was right. Nothing you say is gonna change my mind. No point in talking.’ He stands, looks at me and says, ‘I gotta finalise things with this lawyer and if your brother wants any money at all we better get going soon.’ He moves towards his bedroom.

  Dave’s cigarette smoke envelops me and I’m overwhelmed with a suffocating sensation. This is followed by an increase in body temperature that I know has nothing to do with my hormones. I could die here. Right now, this second, I could collapse and I know I can’t let myself die here in this house. I reach in my handbag to find a wrinkled tissue and dab my forehead and upper lip. I examine the damp tissue, close my eyes, and dab again.

  ‘That’s it then, Dad? You’re just gonna walk away from me? Sure you are. What the hell else is new?’ He shouts, throws the mug in the direction of the sink, but it bounces off the edge, lands on the tiled floor and breaks into several pieces.

  ‘You see? See that? There you go. Nice.’ Dad shouts back, grabbing his jacket from the bedroom. ‘I told you, it’s in the will, there’s no changing it.’ He points a finger at Dave. ‘You got plenty. I’m telling you to get a place of your own and I don’t wanna hear anymore about it. We gotta go. I’m waiting outside in the truck.’

  ‘But I can still do that,’ Dave calls to Dad as the old man makes his way towards the front door, and there’s a clear shift in tone. ‘Jo, you can see how it works, right? I’m not crazy here.’ He touches the top of his head. He begins pacing around the kitchen. ‘I can make this thing work. I know I can. I just need someone to have faith in me. Please. Look at what you got. You worked hard. I’m no idiot, Jo. You had dreams, right? I got dreams too.’

  ‘OK, OK. Just slow down, Dave. I need more time on this. I need to think about all this,’ I say, feeling breathless. I don’t know what’s worse, Dave shouting or Dave ingratiating. I move to the sink to splash water on my neck and chest and start picking up the broken mug pieces. ‘You can’t expect me to make such a big decision all at once here. I need to see something like a business plan, that sort of thing. Actually, you know what, Dave? I can’t even think about this now with Ma’s memorial coming up. That’s what we should be talking about right now. Not money. It’s not right. It’s Ma we should be thinking about. So don’t push me.’

  The three of us head over to the lawyer’s office in Dad’s pick-up truck in complete silence. You could cut the atmosphere in the cab with a knife. Outside the lawyer’s office hangs yet another American flag. What’s the relationship, I wonder, between respecting the flag and all this God-speak that everyone clings to around here?

  ‘George’s a good Irish lawyer, looks out for his own,’ says Dad, as we open the doors.

  Dave doesn’t respond.

  As we walk in, Walsh looks at the clock. He’s near retirement age, is hacking away with a bad cough and we’re twenty minutes late at the end of the day. We apologise. He apologises for not shaking our hands because he’s concerned about passing on his germs.

  I ask what we should do if I decide to lend Dave some of my share of the money.

  ‘I can’t change the staggered payments to Dave that your mother wants, but hey, whatever way you want to distribute the money between you and your brother is your decision. For a charge we can write up a legal agreement for the repayments you’re talking about,’ he says, wiping his nose with an old-fashioned cloth handkerchief with embroidered trim. ‘Or you can go on family trust and be done with it.’

  ‘Well, we’re not doing anything just yet,’ I say, avoiding Dave’s eye, ‘with everything going on, but we’ll keep that in mind.’ Soon we are signing everything and pass on our bank details.

  ‘Your mother really struck it great with this investment. She wouldn’t tell me anything about the stocks but when she came in that day about adding it to the will, specifying the three-way split and the conditions, I asked her why she didn’t cash in earlier. Why didn’t you set up a nice cruise for you and Jimmy? I asked her. She says to me, “George, by the time it started doing real good we didn’t really need the money. We had everything. Yeah, we could’ve done a cruise but Jimmy would’ve got bored and hated it.”’ He laughs.

  ‘Hah, yeah. She got that right,’ says Dad.

  ‘Then Terry said, “I just want to do right by my family now. They deserve it.” So, you guys are lucky. It doesn’t always work out this way.’ George takes a break to cough and sniffle. ‘If I were her I would’ve lived it up right to the end.’

  Twenty Three

  On the day of Ma’s memorial, I get to the house just after 10am with plenty of time spare to collect the photo album I’ve put together and the rest of the framed photos then load the car. They’ll look good in the restaurant where family and friends will be gathering for her send-off after the service.

  Dave stands in the kitchen with Dad and my father’s brother, Uncle Joe, the gambler who lost all his money. I haven’t seen the guy for at least ten years. They’re all finishing a round of shots wit
h their coffee before setting off. After my uncle’s laugh about my walking cane – ‘How’d you hurt yourself? Oh, right, yeah, I forgot’ – and some jokes about the sorry state of socialised medicine and British hospitals, I endure all the small talk. It’s good the weather held out for us. What a beautiful sunny day, just what Terry would want, probably a lot nicer than in rainy London, right? I couldn’t live there with all that damp. The joints feel it as soon as it gets too wet. You sure sound like one of them now. I guess that’s what happens after all these years, huh? But I remember you sounded like that a long time ago too when you first got over there.

  ‘Yes,’ my brother pitches in, taking a stab at sounding like a royal. ‘Just call her Princess Joanna.’

  Wouldn’t it be nice for once, just once, to be treated like a princess around here.

  I get ready to leave for the church before them. ‘It’s a good idea to get there early, you know, to greet people,’ I say. They look at me as though I’m speaking Mandarin. ‘OK. So I’ll go now and see you there. Don’t be late.’

  ‘Yeah. You go. Good idea,’ Dad says and swigs the last bit of his shot.

  Soon after I arrive, I see my niece, Amy, driving into a space with one of those newer Honda SUVs, her mother, Nicole, in the passenger side. (I think about the shitty little second-hand, fifteen-year-old two-door French thing that Jon and I share in London. And we’re supposed to be respectable types.) It’s been years since I’ve seen Nicole or Amy. The longer I’ve lived in London, the less effort I’ve made to stay in touch when I’ve returned for visits. Each later trip seemed to miss young Amy’s visits to see Dave and my parents. Another year passes, everything else takes over; got to see my old friend Beth, off to New York for a couple of days with Jon, to the mountains up north to see that old college friend, anything but hang around here. The distance between Jo and the O’Brien family grows wider until the O’Briens are little specks on the horizon.

  Amy is close to thirty years old, a mother herself now, so OK, maybe old enough to warrant her own SUV. Still pretty and slim, a fresh face and shy smile that works to good effect. She doesn’t say too much, never did as she was always on the quiet side, although I knew all those years ago there must have been more going on in that head of hers. But her eyes offer genuine feeling, for a moment at least. The thing is, when I look down I notice she’s wearing jeans, of all things. They’re the dark-blue, nice-looking kind but shouldn’t she know better? Hey, this is your grandmother’s memorial. I try not to let these thoughts take over, such things shouldn’t matter, all these outdated stuffy traditions; she’s flashing those big, sad powder-blue babies, just like her father does.

  Her expression takes me back to one summer afternoon at the beach in Cape Cod when Jon and I agreed to look after little Miss Amy who, for a kid who grew up near the coast, freaked out and screamed at the thought of going in the water. After several attempts, games and tricks, we gave up and suffered the humiliation of letting her bury us under the hot sand, slowly, one at a time, in the baking heatwave, as Amy quietly planned her next move. I can’t stop myself coming back to the jeans when I glance in her direction. I blame it on the mother.

  Nicole’s hair strikes me first. Somehow she’s perfected the dirty-blonde look with just the right amount of highlights, and her fine hair exudes a silky-soft sheen. I make a point to touch it and remark how gorgeous it is. She is much rounder than when I last saw her, but then so am I. We silently acknowledge this fact by saying how good the other one looks.

  ‘How’s your health, Jo?’ she asks with a look of concern, touching my right arm. Sweet, how she wants me to know she’s sincere.

  ‘Could be better, could be worse.’

  This routine repeats itself with others as I try to make my way to the front entrance and bump into more people I haven’t seen in years. I catch sight of some friends of my mother’s I saw during their visits to the hospice. Her best friend Rosie drives in, my second cousins arrive, those on my father’s side of the family, the children of my grandmother’s Italian sisters and brother. Al, the barber cousin who was well-known for his Elvis impersonator gigs in New Jersey, shows up, still sporting the side-burns and the harsh black dye job, but his balding scalp can’t keep up with his performance intentions.

  ‘Oh, I’m done with the show life,’ he says, ‘but I enjoy the karaoke down the road here. Like doing the early Elvis tunes.’

  Another cousin, Marilena, is around my father’s age. She’s guided a bit by her daughter and when she gets closer I see she’s got thin tubes coming out of her nostrils because she’s hooked up to a portable oxygen tank that sits in her shoulder bag. Then I remember her lengthy chain-smoking habit and her characteristic hoarse voice which I thought sounded sexy when I was young.

  ‘It’s been around five years now,’ she explains slowly, taking a breath, ‘since they took the lung out. I’m part of a new treatment study now but after this round, that’s it. No other chances. Your mother was a wonderful person. We had good times,’ she says, and cries when we hug.

  My first cousins, the two children of Auntie Josie, appear at different times. The oldest one, Steve, helps his old father, Phil, shuffle out of the car. While I still recognise Steve who is a bit older than Dave, his puffy face, marked with tired eyes and unsightly rosacea, gives the appearance of carrying a heavy burden, as if life’s bullies have throttled him a few too many times. His sister Angela appears soon after with her teenage daughter, Kristen. Angela has a last drag of her cigarette, checks her lipstick in the rear-view mirror, exchanges a few words with Kristen, and they’re off.

  Then I spot Auntie Peggy’s oldest son, Billy, from a distance, stepping out of a car with his father, Uncle Ron. He looks about as old and worn as he did the other day. A quick wrench passes through me and I feel a sudden desire to open my bowels. Why is he here? Why has he gone out of the way to pay last respects to my mother, a woman he hated and who despised him back, her jaw clenched when she talked about him, teeth worn down to the bone? He’s just such an asshole…Bastard.

  Beth and her mother Jean arrive, to my relief, and I try to forget that he’s breathing the same air as me. My father, his brother and Dave show up about five minutes before the service commences and we all take seats in the front row. The smell of booze from the three of them is strong and I notice their glassy-eyed expressions show no clue as to any thoughts or emotions when my suspicious eyes meet theirs, except to say, What the fuck, Jo? What’d you expect? I guess if the situation was turned and Ma was at Dad’s memorial she’d be knocking them back too. My father, every now and then, I notice, closes his glazed eyes, opening them again to reveal the same void each time. There are worse things than this numbing of the soul. The problem is the inevitability of the next day when you’re right back in the same place again at square one. I avoid looking over my shoulder at the people filling up the pews just in case I find Uncle Ron and his son Billy sitting behind me.

  It’s good my mother isn’t alive to witness the service. The old priest is on his last leg and he was probably offered the gig out of pity. Or maybe they just couldn’t find anyone else. His voice never rises above a whisper, which accompanied by the fast speed of his speech makes him incomprehensible. We can just about hear that he might have an Irish accent, but it’s hard to tell.

  The mass moves through the usual, plodding motions to which I remember being subjected in my youth, although none of us immediate family members, being reluctant and bitter Catholics now, have volunteered to read any of the Bible passages to help spruce things up a bit. After communion, the mass approaches its closing and Beth and I are looking at each other waiting for the priest to announce that I will deliver the eulogy. As he begins to head out of the church I step forward and halt him in the nicest way I can.

  ‘I think someone must have forgotten that I was going to give the eulogy, Father. Can we do it now, please?’ I say quietly.

  There are some oohs and ahhs, oh my dears, wide-eyed looks of dismay from
him and the two women church staff members. Finally he returns to the lectern, and after an introduction in which he refers to me as ‘Jane’, I’m up for the show.

  I’ve got my written script, filled with red-pen edits and side notes in front of me. I slide into my usual lecturer’s mode, hearing myself practically shouting in my efforts to wake up the crowd. I realise I do this to students to ensure all eyes are on me, so they’ll take me and my subject seriously, as though it’s the only thing that should matter to them in their sad, pitiful lives. It’s my gift of knowledge to you, and hard-earned it was, thank you, for which you should hold the upmost respect. That’s why you are here, there is no other reason why you should spend your parents’ money, if you are in doubt there’s the door, right there, goodbye.

  A few minutes into my speech I hear myself rambling in a way I’ve done in the past when I’m teaching, but then I always managed to get back on track. Now I’m off-script babbling about my husband’s Jewish family, how Jews wouldn’t dream of firing themselves up in a cremation for obvious reasons, or are they obvious to this crowd? And then it’s a thank you to so and so for visiting Ma when she was dying, and how nice it was to see so and so when I was at the hospice, how nice the place was. Then a surge of tears follows and I can feel my mouth quivering uncontrollably, turning me into a stuttering mess.

  ‘She never wanted to hurt a soul,’ I drivel on. ‘Always thought about others. She was a good mother,’ I tell them.

  Then I look up and lock eyes with Ron who is positioned mid-church, and momentarily stutter to a halt. His eyes are focused on me. It’s impossible to read him. Is he sympathetic? Hateful? Willing me to fail? I’ll show him what I’m made of, the bastard.

  ‘Ma offered nothing less than unconditional, unselfish motherly love to my brother and me. Her sisters, her brothers, they were everything to her.’ No mention of the cheating husband. My voice is shaking but I’m on a roll, in full emotional swing, believing every word of my melodramatic nonsense. Yes! Now you will all listen to me, won’t you?