A Stitch of Time

by Lauren Marks

  6

  Usually, my grandmother spent her afternoons at the library. But this afternoon in May, she broke her routine to take a trip to the grocery store. It was of the highest priority because my cousin Spencer was coming into town.

  Gram fussed about getting the right groceries. She wanted to pick up Spencer’s favorite cereals and get the ingredients for his favorite meals, so I drove her to the market.

  I don’t want any bickering between you two, she warned me.

  Why would we bicker? I asked.

  She chuckled. Then she reminded me that while I had always been something of an aunt to my youngest cousins, Spencer and I were much closer in age, more like brother and sister. And she added that we had more sibling rivalry than Michael and I ever did. Maybe you’ve grown out of it, but you two could be holy terrors when you were kids, she said. You were each perfect on your own, but you’d develop this competitive streak around each other.

  Grandma hung her cane on the wheeling cart, and leaned into the bar for support. When you were baking with me in the kitchen, lo and behold, suddenly Spencer wanted to learn to bake too. If Spencer was riding on the toy tractor in the yard, you wanted to get on it right away, even though you had ignored it all summer. And he would tell these harmless little stories about being in the CIA or FBI, which were ridiculous, since he was only seven years old. But Spencer’s tall tales would just make you furious.

  Really? I asked her, curious. This wasn’t ringing any bells in my memory. Are you saying that I’d get angry with him?

  That’s putting it nicely. You’d both tattle on each other, and make me the referee. And in your ongoing attempt for competing for my attention as adults, you raised the stakes to dueling neurosurgeries! My grandmother gave me a tight pinch on my arm. Only teasing about that, punkin. It wasn’t your fault this time, of course. But you little stinkers did give me the fright of my life last summer!

  •  •  •

  It had been years since I had seen Spencer in person, and when he arrived at Gram’s door, I was amazed by how much he looked like my uncle, his father. His hair was more blond than brown, and tended toward corkscrew curls around his ears. Later that evening, we were sitting on the patio chairs in the backyard. Spencer was reluctant to go in, even in the waning light. In the part of Montana where our family had grown up, there weren’t many days of the year one could sit comfortably outside. Winter was too long and too cold, and summer was plagued by swarms of mosquitos.

  Spencer was bragging to me how his smooth talking had recently gotten him a used boat. This old drunk was asking five thousand dollars for it, Spencer said, but I bargained him down to one thousand and a bottle of Maker’s Mark!

  I had a twinge of envy listening to my cousin’s story. Not about the boat—I couldn’t care less about that—but his silvered-tongued power of persuasion. This was a trait Spencer and I used to have in common that was now almost entirely lost in me.

  Spencer was leaving soon and I asked him if he was willing to show me his surgical scars, wanting to compare battle wounds.

  His bare arms stiffened. All right, he said, though clearly uncomfortable. But only for you, Cuz.

  He hiked up his T-shirt to the base of his neck. The incisions were fleshy white, hardened into a shape and color he would carry for the rest of his life. It was not just one scar, but dozens of them, like a bird’s nest that had been pulled apart and then laid out over the length of his back. Then I showed him my scar, too, its pink and white tracks, from earlobe to forehead.

  I’ll be damned, he said, coming closer for inspection. It’s almost exactly the size and shape of a horseshoe. It’s like you are walking luck!

  My cousin and I were still young, our faces mainly unlined. But peel off a shirt or remove a curtain of hair, and our scars could rival the worst of them. Looking so closely at each other was a bit like encountering a fun-house mirror. We were seeing very similar aspects of ourselves reflected between us, but we were also seeing aspects of the reality we only narrowly avoided. Watching how Spencer moved, it was clear he was still in pain; even sitting for him was difficult sometimes. And when he saw me, he understood a bit about my battle with my language and my memories. Our mutual admiration was infused with a guilty sense of gratitude. Though we had been spared a particular type of unpleasantness, someone we knew would have to bear it instead. And I think Spencer picked up on my slight jealousy, about how he was able to return to everything so much more quickly than me. So he compensated with a compliment.

  Been meaning to tell you something, he said. I didn’t see you right when the injury happened, but listening to you talk now, I have to say that your vocabulary is better than most people I know. Hell, he said, I think it’s better than mine!

  He was exaggerating again, this time for my benefit. And I appreciated it. There was such a thing as a helpful deception.

  7

  Jonah and I were chatting over the phone, and by the end of the call, he was trying to convince me to come back to New York earlier than I had initially planned. I was thinking about July, after my post-surgical angiogram. But he didn’t want me to wait that long. Why not May? he asked. After some deliberation with my mother, we agreed on June.

  Finally! Jonah said. Your triumphant return!

  It was a funny bit of phrasing. Return. Was I visiting New York, or returning to it? Conversely, had I returned to LA? Or was that the place I had been visiting?

  Regardless, Jonah’s request had brought up the long-neglected issue of my New York home. I wasn’t paying for school now that I wasn’t attending it, but my apartment was another issue entirely. Before the aneurysm’s rupture, I had shared my place in Greenpoint with an Australian journalist who was finishing his master’s at NYU. But he had graduated and moved out while I was in California, and several of my friends had pitched in to help me find subletters. It was a sunny place, with a garden and a view of the Empire State Building, not to mention subway access on the corner—this profile itself made it somewhat easy to fill. But the tenancy was all short-term. In the course of nine months after the aneurysm’s rupture, seven people had inhabited the two-bedroom flat, a few of them strangers; and two recent tenants had broken their agreement the month I was having the craniotomy. A generous acquaintance was staying in one of the rooms now, covering the majority of the rent, and my family was paying the remainder. My mother reminded me that she preferred that the situation be attended to sooner rather than later.

  I’d leave after the first week in June and stay for three weeks. Though, try as I might, it was nearly impossible to cut and paste a version of myself in New York.

  I planned to e-mail the current subletter, to ask if she minded if I stayed in the empty bedroom occasionally while I was there. But Jonah said there was no need.

  That’s silly, he said. You’ll be living here in my place anyway.

  Living here. It sounded so permanent. Perhaps he hadn’t meant it that way, but months earlier, Jonah had said Stay here. His language had tweaked since then. Now he was saying: Live here.

  talking with Jonah last night. twice he has more than hinted that he would want me to move in with him. but something feels misplaced. why would he want me to me to move in now—in my absence, and after years of ambiguity (I know I am changed and perhaps him too over the last year). I tell him I have difficulty reconcile myself to myself. My stories, my thoughts, my life, before the aneurysm.

  It occurred to me then that in the years Jonah and I had spent as a couple in New York, we had never discussed living together. Jonah talking about it directly probably would have felt like progress to The Girl I Used to Be, proof that the relationship was taking a step forward. But with no clear sense of my own direction, the prospect of the three-week experiment was just a bit confusing for me.

  Jo? I asked him. I know it might sound weird. But can you tell me a little more about our relationship? Can you tell me “the story of us?”

  Though I remembered the big things, I
wanted desperately to hear about little things. I remembered a lot of Paris. I remembered some of Scotland. I remembered plenty of Los Angeles, especially after the rupture. But there was so much still missing, especially from my time in New York, and a lot of that had been when Jonah and I had been together. After the second surgery, I felt a more urgent need to contextualize, to understand more about the life I used to inhabit. I had asked him versions of this question before, but this time I could tell he knew I needed him to take the request seriously.

  Well. He hesitated. What do you want to know?

  Everything, I said. I want to hear about everything.

  Lauren, there is no easy way to answer this question, he said. And even if I could . . . well . . . there are some bits I don’t want to relive. You know? There is a lot I’m not proud of.

  I don’t want you to feel bad, I said. Or embarrassed or whatever. The whole thing is so distant for me, so there is no way I can get upset. But I’m under the impression that our relationship was somehow . . . fraught? Like Michael and Amber.

  First of all, we weren’t anything like your brother and his hot mess, Jonah said definitively. But we did fall in love when we were really young. We were both smart and opinionated, so we challenged each other in good and bad ways. There was flexibility in our relationship, and I think I took advantage of that more than I should have. He sighed. But you were never a pushover. You could be tough as nails—it was one of the things I most liked about you. It was like you were the only person who could really take me to task. So, I think “the story of us” was a constant balancing act of intimacy and independence. Does that answer your question?

  It started to, but I wanted hours and hours of more details. Like, if we were so opinionated, what had been the content of our opinions? What did we agree and disagree upon? I pressed him: What sort of things did we use to say to each other during our fights? I need some reminders from you. The more language I get, the more memories come back to me. . . .

  Okay, Lauren. Jonah didn’t seem angry or defensive at all, but his tone was a little worn down. I get what you are saying, and hear how important this is to you. So I want to help you out on this, I do.

  But . . . He stopped himself. And after another moment of consideration, he continued, I just can’t help but feel that rehashing this ancient history is a little counterproductive in a way. We’ve got an opportunity for a new beginning here? There are so many couples who really just want to reset the clock on their relationship, and you and I actually get that chance. And slowly, I think I am finally becoming the sort of person I should always have been for you. I understand that you want to talk about how we were, but I like how we are. Right now.

  I do too, I said, and I meant it. But there was still so much I wanted to know, and since the ideas still lingered in my imagination, I continued to write about it.

  I said, “What about are our story? How did it begin? How did it changed. What happened?” I tell him not to leave anything out.

  He is retiscent. He doesn’t want to talk about it, but is not angry either.

  The question that hums

  Or we better mates in absence then in presence?

  When I had asked Jonah to remind me of the sorts of language we used in the last incarnation of our relationship, it was somewhat revisiting the topic of “linguistic relativity” that Jonah and I had started talking about soon after the rupture. Jonah had made clear his position on the matter: words didn’t have a lot of bearing on perception, and language represented problems that exist, with or without words. But I still felt that language had a lot more agency.

  In its “strongest” form, the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis suggests that human beings are hugely constrained by language, both in thought and action. Its weaker form is more malleable, simply suggesting that language can have unexpected influences on behavior and thought.

  But if language can actually change thought, how can that idea be tested?

  This is something that transnational scholar Lera Boroditsky explores in her work. Boroditsky came of age during a period of flux in the field of linguistics, and though the discipline is still influenced by theory, it now also includes rigorously controlled experiments whenever possible. She firmly believes that understanding linguistic relativity can give “fascinating insights into the origins of knowledge and the construction of reality.”

  Personally, I find Boroditsky’s research most convincing when it is seeking out the effects of language in “seemingly nonlinguistic tasks.” Like color tests.

  Russian was Boroditsky’s first language, but she is also an academic who operates fluently in English, which gives her a unique perspective on the differences between the two tongues. Boroditsky explains that Russian has no single word for the color blue. She writes, “Unlike English, Russian makes an obligatory distinction between lighter blues (‘goluboy’) and darker blues (‘siniy’). We investigated whether this linguistic difference leads to differences in color discrimination.”

  The results of these tests were stunning. Boroditsky found that native Russian speakers were faster in color discrimination tasks, specifically “when they fell into different linguistic categories in Russian.” Native English speakers could identify the subtle differences in color as well, but they were much slower. The Russian speakers had instinctual, habitual reactions. Their language training was “on-line” even when it seemingly should have been “off-line,” and when they didn’t need to think about language at all.

  And Boroditsky and her colleagues have amassed dozens of tests like these, and they don’t just deal with color and space, but sense of direction, too. They also explore the ways people perceive culpability and intentionality, from politics to the courtroom. Time and again, Boroditsky sees how language influences areas of our lives that are generally assumed to be nonlinguistic. Plenty of linguists disagree with this baseline, but even Steven Pinker, an outspoken critic of linguistic relativity in general, has written about Boroditsky as a persuasive figure. “She will be a force to be reckoned with,” he writes, “even if I don’t agree with everything she says.”

  I had not read Boroditsky this soon after the aneurysm’s rupture, so I didn’t have her research to cite when in discussion with Jonah, but she investigated a lot of issues I felt intimately connected with at the time. In my own limited way, though, I continued to tell Jonah that language hones many types of perception. I said that these perceptions affect the way we think about the world, and the way we are able to engage with it. It was unlikely that Jonah would ever fully agree with me on this point. But as Pinker had addressed the potency in Boroditsky’s approach to linguistic relativity, Jonah was willing to cede some ground, too. He had come to realize the role language seemed to play for me, in activating some of my memories at least. So much so that he was reluctant to revisit the sorts of words we used with each other before the rupture, unwilling to disturb the spirits of our past selves.

  And as a general principle, I saw that language required a focused attention from its speakers, which created an invisible skill set inside of them. We could never know the extent of those effects. The words we use, and don’t use, could potentially permeate everything we do.

  8

  I picked Rachel up at LAX just before Memorial Day and brought her back to our house, where she would be staying for the California leg of her book tour. My bleary-eyed brother welcomed her at the door, and started to make her a breakfast of leftover pasta and scrambled eggs. Rachel had known Mike since he was a preteen, and they shared a sardonic and unflinching sense of humor that had only grown over the years. They started firing off movie and TV quotes in quick succession, mocking each other with inside jokes, inadvertently excluding me from the conversation entirely. I wanted to keep up and felt that I should have been able to—I was the person who had introduced them and had been in on all of those jokes once. But it took me ages to pinpoint what they were referencing, and when I did, they had already jumped to their next topic. So I hardly
said anything at all.

  Early in our friendship, Rachel and I were involved in a production of The Bacchae 2.1, Charles Mee’s modern adaption of Euripides’s Greek tragedy. We played the followers of Dionysus, known as the Bacchae. Rachel was the Lavender Woman, and I was the Orange Woman. Our characters were lovers, so we had to become physically and emotionally comfortable with each other pretty quickly during this production, and this show was mainly when she cemented her role as a permanent fixture in my group of closest friends. But neither of us was performing anymore. Rachel had mainly stopped acting by choice, and obviously I had stopped because of circumstance. And my aphasia made me doubt that I could ever be in a play again. Now that Rachel was on her first book tour, I was seeing how she had transformed herself from being an actor’s actor, to a writer’s writer. She had literally written herself into a new existence. The frenzy of her book tour brought out her most dazzling and manic energy. Her phone kept ringing—her managers, agents, editors, and publicity team. She barked at some of the people who called, squealed with glee with others. I was frustrated by the constant noise coming from her room. But ultimately, the speed and efficiency with which she managed these activities only illustrated how well she had taken to her new profession. My reactions to seeing Rachel in her element ran the gamut from admiration to jealousy. I sometimes thought of her like I did Casanova, changing all the aspects of her professional life, like she was just putting on a new skirt. She was a living testament that it was still possible to do that. But other times, I was stung by the nettles of desperation, because that sort of future seemed so out of reach for me.

  If only I could remember my Orange Woman then, it might have given me some voice to my current sense of displacement. This woman stood bare-breasted before her audience every night agonizing over this sometimes mystifying, sometimes afflicting, quest for self: