The Memory Book

by Lara Avery

  “Hey,” I said, and took his hand. I made my grip strong. “Are you okay?”

  “No,” he said.

  “No?”

  “I don’t want to talk about it right now.” Stuart forced out a smile.

  “Okay,” I said. “I know this month hasn’t been easy. It can’t be easy, like when I kind of lost it in front of you.” I forced myself to make eye contact. “I know it must be weird.”

  “It’s not about you,” Stuart said.

  I blurted, “Then what is it about?” and hoped it wasn’t as biting as the truth behind it.

  “What do you mean?”

  I said slowly, “We spend all our time together. I can’t help thinking that if you’re agitated, it might at least be in part to how much stress my… situation has caused you.”

  “No, no…” he began. Always, no, no.

  “Yeah, but if you need to, you know, take some space, I understand.”

  “Sammie,” he said, stern. He repeated, “It’s not about you,” and the sharpness in his voice took me by surprise.

  “Well,” I said. “I was trying—”

  “I’m sorry,” he said quickly.

  “I don’t like to be interrupted,” I said. I took a deep breath. “I was trying to find out. But I’m glad I can eliminate our situation as a possibility.”

  “Yes,” he said, his voice softer. “It’s just going to be a big reality check. Parents and agent and everyone all in one week.” He lifted his hand to my cheek.

  I took his hand and kissed it. “Have a milk shake for me,” I said.

  “I will,” he said, and we kissed.

  “Tell everyone at NYU I won’t be able to make it.”

  “Oh, Sammie.”

  “I’m sure they’ll be heartbroken. All the people I’ve invented over the four years I’ve pretended to live there.” My voice cracked. It appeared my brain was cracking, too. Insane to think that if I got on the bus, in eight hours I could be there with him, with everything I’d wanted. What if I just got a job waiting tables? What if I just showed up?

  “Hey,” he said gently. “We should go sometime.”

  “But not now,” I said, watching the second-to-last passenger board, a college student going home after summer school had ended.

  “Soon,” he said, and stepped onto the bus without me.

  COOP’S GCHAT ATTEMPT TO MAKE ME THINK LOSING MY MEMORY IS NOT SO BAD

  Cooper: hey!

  Me: Hey

  Cooper: hey i was just thinking about you

  Cooper: about your npc task force thing

  Cooper: and how you wanted to meet someone with npc

  Me: Yeah?

  Cooper: do you remember my grandma?

  Me: I remember she was very nice.

  Cooper: yes, she is very nice, but she has dementia, unfortunately, and i was thinking if you wanted we could go talk to her. it’s not npc but it is similar and i thought it might be nice for you to see that she hasn’t lost herself completely

  Cooper: she’s still happy, i mean

  Me: Yeah, I think that would be good!

  Cooper: cool

  Cooper: well let me know when you want to go

  Cooper: i know how you like to pencil things in :)

  Me: Yeah, I do, haha

  Me: But

  Me: You know what?

  Me: How about now?

  Cooper: okay!

  FRIEDA LIND, 87, AUDIO TRANSCRIPTION FROM A VOICE MEMO I RECORDED ON MY PHONE:

  Frieda: The McCoys? Oh yes, of course I know the McCoys. They’ve been here for about as long as the Linds have. They came around the same time, migrated from Boston to set up farmland. Our families have lived around the mountain from each other for almost one hundred years. The best story is their shared, well, stewardship of an albino goat named Francis.

  Sammie (snorts, to Cooper): Is that how you got your middle name?

  Cooper: My mom says no but the coincidence is unsettling.

  Frieda: I believe this was around the turn of the century. The story goes that… let me think. Francis was an albino goat, and he was such an oddity that people came from all around town to look at him, and I believe it was one of the McCoys who had the idea to charge people to see him.

  Cooper: Of course it was the McCoys.

  Sammie: Hey!

  Frieda: A penny a peek or something like that. The difficult part of this was, ’scuse me. (coughs) The difficult part about this was that the goats roamed the backyard freely between the two pieces of property. One of the Linds, I think it was Geoffrey Lind, claimed that the McCoys had no right to make money off Francis because Francis was born of their goats. Then Patrick McCoy, of course, said no, absolutely not, Francis was his goat Freddie’s kid. What was funny was that Francis wasn’t even a kid anymore. He was a fully grown goat! So the whole life of this goat they didn’t even care whose he was, but now that they found out they could make money off him, they both claimed him. They were still fighting even when there was a line of people outside to see Francis, and finally Colleen McCoy, who was a religious woman…

  Sammie: No surprise there.

  Cooper: Ha!

  Frieda: Colleen McCoy had this high-and-mighty idea in her head that was just like the story in the Bible with the wise King Solomon. You remember that, Jerry?

  Cooper: It’s Cooper, Grandma.

  Frieda: Oh, you look just like Jerry.

  Cooper: Jerry’s my dad.

  Frieda: Of course he is!

  Sammie: So you were saying about the wise King Solomon…

  Frieda: What was I saying, sweetheart?

  Cooper: Francis the goat. Colleen McCoy.

  Frieda: So Colleen got it in her head that only if she threatened to cut Francis in half, Francis’s true owner would reveal himself. She was quite dramatic.

  Cooper: No surprise there.

  Frieda: Colleen lifted the knife above her head… (feigns lifting knife)… and slowly brought it down, down, down, toward poor Francis the goat, and no one said a word!

  Sammie: What?

  Cooper: Wait, it gets better.

  Frieda: So neither Geoffrey Lind nor Patrick McCoy was the true owner of Francis. For all they knew, Francis could have just wandered down the mountain from someone else. Or most likely they had just forgotten.

  Sammie: But did Francis die?

  Frieda: Yes, he did.

  Sammie: Aw! How?

  Cooper: They had a goat roast, because all the town was there anyway!

  Sammie: They made Francis into a roast???

  Frieda: Yes, and legend has it he was delicious.

  KIDS WILL BE KIDS (THAT WAS A GOAT PUN)

  Frieda told Coop and me the “Francis the goat” story two more times, and four or five times, she told a story about how her husband took her out in his car for their first date.

  The stories changed each time she told them—not the details, just which details she decided to include. In one version of Francis the goat, it was revealed that they tied a little blue ribbon around his neck. In the other, she told us that after the town ate Francis, Patrick McCoy said no, really, Francis was his goat, and the argument started all over again.

  Coop’s grandma has dyed brown hair and this soft baby-powder skin and lots of veins you can see, like a map of rivers and tributaries. She and Coop have the same navy blue, dish-plate eyes, though hers are a little cloudier.

  “Jerry, I don’t mean to fuss, but I recommend you get a haircut,” she kept telling Coop, and it was funny to see Coop’s cheeks turn pink about his hair, because of the way he’s always running his hands through it around girls. I guess his grandma was the only girl who didn’t like it.

  “I’m not Jerry, I’m Cooper,” Coop kept saying. “And this is Sammie.”

  “Hello,” I would say, for the seventh time.

  “Is she your girlfriend?” she would ask, smiling at me.

  “I’m not his girlfriend,” I kept saying. “I’m just his friend.”

 
; Every time we’d say it, Coop would mouth sorry, but by the fifth time, he was hiding a smile.

  When Coop dropped me off, I thanked him for letting me meet her. “Was it good?” he asked, turning toward me in the driver’s seat.

  “Yes,” I said, getting out. “She’s a wonderful lady.”

  Coop looked out over the yard. “She really is. And think of how good she is at telling that story! It’s because she tells it over and over. That’s not so bad, right?”

  As Coop spoke, I noticed for the first time that he had dressed up. He had his now sun-tinted hair pulled back, and he was wearing a polo shirt with a belt and jeans, and he was wearing loafers. I decided not to tease him for dressing up for his grandma. I lingered at the door of the Blazer, resting my elbows on the front seat.

  “No, I guess not,” I said. I thought about when Coop had seen me forget where I was, or the other day, when I had forgotten the chickens. “But how does she stay so sweet, you know? When I… have an episode… all I can do is panic.”

  Coop pushed a strand back that had fallen out behind his ear. “You were nice whenever I reminded you who I was,” he said, and looked at me, his brow furrowed.

  “Good,” I said.

  “Maybe it’s that your brain relaxes when it’s someone familiar.”

  “I can be mean, though, too,” I said, picking at the threads in the seat. “I was kind of a brat to my family.”

  “Sometimes Grandma can be kind of a brat, too,” he responded. “If she’s tired, or if she isn’t comfortable.”

  I laughed a little. “I should start wearing a caftan, to guarantee maximum comfort at all times.”

  Coop nodded in fake seriousness. “It’d be a good look for you.”

  We were quiet for a bit. “The rain stopped,” I noticed.

  “Oh, yeah,” he said, glancing up through the windshield.

  “Do you have to go home now?” I asked.

  Coop shrugged, glancing at me, then at the clock on his dash. “Nope.”

  I looked back at the house. Mom and Dad would be home soon, with all the kids. But I didn’t really want him to go, for some reason. I suppose for the same reason I was glad to see him on the roof on the Fourth of July. “Want to stay for dinner?”

  Coop unbuckled his seat belt immediately. “Will there be hot dogs?”

  “Probably.”

  “I’ll take my chances.”

  We shut our doors and Coop came around the Blazer.

  “I wonder what stories I’ll tell over and over,” I said.

  “Who knows,” Coop said, and grinned as we walked toward the house. “But, more importantly, I think we should get a goat.”

  Me: How’d the meetings go?

  Stuart: good

  Stuart: how’s life back there?

  Me: strange and good

  Stuart: strange and good?

  Me: I’ll explain when you get home.

  Davy asked me why I wanted to get my teeth so clean. She watched me brush my teeth three times in the span of one hour before bed. I guess I forgot that I had brushed them. So I created a system—I leave my toothbrush on the sink if I brushed them, then Mom and Dad can put the toothbrush away at night after the kids get ready for bed, and then I put a note up that says: “If the toothbrush is on the sink, you brushed your teeth. If it is put away in the cabinet, you need to brush them.”

  WHEW!

  New day. Another cloudy one but the sun poked through by ten a.m. or so and Coop came over with tennis rackets because what else, we were going to try fucking tennis. I don’t know why I chose tennis on my NPC Task Force but unfortunately Coop saw it and remembered it, so dear Serena Williams, I ruined your sport.

  But you know the studies say people with memory stuff have to learn new things, it’s good for them, but I don’t know why I chose tennis. Sorry I’m not writing too good my pain medication kicked in but honestly it’s kinda like roses writing on the pain medication because I’m not so worried about making it pretty you know?

  But I will tell you everything that I remember as always.

  But I am a little loopy.

  So Coop came up the mountain and I swear I almost lost it because he was wearing these red short-shorts and socks up to his knees and of course the THAT GOOD GOOD tank top and he had his hair in a pony with a sweatband and these aviator sunglasses. When I let him in he saw Harrison was playing Minecraft with headphones on so he snuck up behind him and stood right next to him at the computer until Harrison noticed he was there and jumped a little and took off his headphones and said, “What the hell?”

  And then Coop said, “I’m Pete Sampras,” in this really low voice.

  We found a flat enough spot in the yard and Coop tied a rope he found in the shed between two trees and draped a bunch of mine and Dad’s old shirts on it.

  “Tennis!” he said.

  “I’m not going to last five minutes,” I said.

  “It’s not about how long you last, it’s how you do it,” he said, or some other joke alluding to sex. “Ready?” He threw up the ball and hit it over to me.

  I missed it by a few inches. “I am too distracted by your pale thighs,” I said.

  “Focus on the tennis ball,” Coop said, and I laughed. I was already winded. I kicked it back with a clumsy jerk.

  He tried again. I missed again. Coop ran up to the T-shirt net. “C’mere,” he said. He smiled at me between one of Dad’s gray CITY OF LEBANON T-shirts and my DAN & WHIT’S sweatshirt. He handed me the ball so I could hit first. I smacked it over his head and for the first time that day, I liked tennis.

  “Okay!” Coop said. “There she goes,” he said, jogging after it.

  By the time he got back I was sitting on the ground. My heart was beating pretty fast. “I have a different idea,” I told Coop.

  “What’s that?” Coop said, sitting across from me on the grass.

  “It’s called femi-tennis. It’s where you roll a tennis ball back and forth and quiz each other about accomplished women in history.”

  I didn’t expect Coop to go for it but pretty soon we had made a diamond with our legs and would shoot the tennis ball across the diamond, and the rule was, shins were post-1970, thighs were pre-1950, and knees were wild card. I beat him pretty badly but he held his own, especially about the life of Harriet Tubman, and, surprisingly, he totally stumped me with this radical Japanese artist named Yayoi Kusama. I made him write her name down, turns out she also had problems with her mind and began to hallucinate dots later in life. I told Coop I had not seen dots but I had seen giants, and he also remembered that game we used to play where we built houses out of rocks and sticks and pretended we were giants and stomped on them.

  So when the little kids got home from camp we taught Bette and Davy that game, and they built elaborate little houses out of Popsicle sticks, and before they were about to stomp, Davy said, “Wait!” She asked us what the game was called, and Coop and I looked at each other, trying to remember the name, but we both agreed that we were pretty sure we just called it “the giant game.” Bette and Davy love it. I mean Bette really, really loves it. Davy I think just likes putting jewel stickers all over the houses.

  Then it was Cooper’s turn to pick a game but we were both pretty tired so we just lay down out in the yard away from the trees and looked at the clouds.

  “That was a good day of tennis,” I said.

  “Yes, tennis is a great game,” he said.

  And then god I don’t know our shoulders were like inches from each other’s and I just needed to tell Coop thank you in some way for coming over and obviously we’re just friends but it was a deeper thank-you than just like “thank you for the ride” or “thank you for the food” so I moved my hand until it was on top of his hand, and I held it for a second, and Coop shifted his hand to be underneath my hand and held mine for a second, too, and then we let go.

  “You should show them Captain Stickman,” I said after a while, watching a cloud shaped like a fish.


  “Right now?” he said.

  “No, doesn’t have to be right now,” I told him.

  Then Coop said, “How about tomorrow?”

  “Yeah,” I said and closed my eyes to the sun on my skin. “Tomorrow.”

  TOMORROW

  The days are like this: sometimes I wake up and think, What’s due? What do I have to do today? What must I write? What’s next? Who’s in my way? I have to let the stillness of the morning hit me in slow waves. I’m in bed, I think, and I am breathing and some things hurt, some things don’t.

  First I put one leg out of the bed, then the other leg, and put my feet on the floor. Mom arrives with her basil and air, and Dad with his mint and kiss, and today as I stand in front of the mirror, eating my yogurt and pills, I wonder why there is such pleasure in waking. I wonder how I could have wanted to know so much about everything out there and why, now, everything close to me is so fascinating. I wonder how the brain can work just as well when it moves slowly as it does when it moves fast. A million things happen at once just to make up a house and a yard and a mountain.

  Did I ever mention that there is a nest of warblers outside my window?

  Did I ever mention that my dad sometimes plays guitar in his room when he thinks everyone else is asleep?

  How can one body hold so many different people? I wonder how someone can want such different things in such a short time. I wonder why everyone is so good to me.

  Stuart would be home tomorrow. I was trying not to think about it because I didn’t want things to go back to the way they were. Not that Stuart had done anything wrong, Stuart was fine, it was just that I didn’t know yet where he fit into this magic combination I’d found of Coop and games and all the people around who had helped find this version of me, a person who never existed but might have always existed. I didn’t know how much he’d like playing fake tennis or building tiny stick houses. Stuart’s girlfriend was Future Sam and Sammie trying to be Future Sam and I didn’t know how well he’d like regular Sammie, as I was right now. I was just learning to like me this way. Anyway.