Memories Are An Old Man's Toys

by Elayne Tulliani

  with his hands but he sure could beat them with his brains.

  Mr. Collins was also feeling a bit of satisfaction in handing out those failing grades. He knew what kids like Tony put some of the other children through but generally unless they caught them in the act there was very little the teachers could do.

  As a devout science lover, Mr. Collins also knew that a woman by the name Lillian Moller Gilbreth had invented the foot pedal trash can along with her many other contributions to modern day domestic designs. She’s credited with many of the things we now take for granted such as the shelves on the inside of refrigerator doors as well as the butter and egg compartments. She was a well-respected Psychologist and an Industrial Engineer. However, her title of wife and mother of twelve is how she’s often remembered. Two of her children wrote a book about their upbringing titled “Cheaper by the Dozen.” Their novel was eventually made into a movie. Mr. Collins was quite comfortable overlooking all of this because he was thrilled to watch one of his students immersed in the joy of learning. He also figured that Billy would eventually learn more about Lillian Moller Gilbreth in higher grades and he had no intention of being another pin in Bil-

  ly’s bubble.

  The remainder of his elementary years continued like this for Billy, but he managed to minimize the after school fights by joining as many activities as possible. That way he got out of school about an hour after the other boys had already left. He spent his summers tinkering around in his dad’s garage and trying to build things from the scraps he found lying around.

  He was skeptically optimistic about entering into Junior High the following September. He was indisputably a creature of habit, and the unknown as to what awaited him on the other side of the Junior High School doors left him nervous and anxious. That, coupled with the horror stories he had heard about the school buses caused him many sleepless nights that summer.

  On several occasions, he and Sherry met at Revere Beach that summer. Neither of them had any idea that the bond that was developing on those warm summer days would morph into the most significant relationship that either one of them would ever experience.

  Sherry was a poet at heart, and during those visits, she shared many of her writings with Billy. She was always very careful to remove certain pages from her journal to prevent Billy from accidentally reading any of her thoughts about her mother’s husband or the torment she was experiencing. As much as she vowed to never tell a soul about the abuse she was suffering she never gave up on the hope that one day someone would look into her eyes and hear her silent screams of pain. Each time someone asked her where a bruise came from Sherry prayed that they would ignore her words which merely parroted the lies she had been instructed to say. She was desperate for someone to see the terror on her frozen little face and rescue her. Her prayers went unanswered.

  2

  INTRODUCTION TO LOSS

  As if the fear of changing schools wasn’t stressful enough, the summer before he was to enter Junior High, Billy’s dad suddenly took ill. Billy wasn’t quite sure what was wrong with him but he wasn’t a stupid kid, he knew something was wrong. His aunts came over a lot more often and brought dinners with them. His uncles came over on weekends to mow the lawn and fixed things around the house, and his mom cried a lot.

  She did her best to hide her heartbreak, but Billy could hear her from his room at night. She would sit at the kitchen table with the lights out, drinking coffee and crying. One night he decided to go downstairs and ask her what was wrong but she quickly ushered him back upstairs without an answer. She simply said, “This is nothing for you to bother yourself with, now back to bed with you.” He never went down to ask again.

  That September his father passed away, and a dark sadness loomed over the house from that point on. His mother cried a lot more now, and suddenly the house went from being a place of laughter to a place of silence. Marguerite tried to keep Billy’s life as normal as possible but there was a silent sadness in her eyes and Billy did his best to leave her alone.

  All of Junior High seemed like a blur to Billy. Although still plagued with the label of ‘wimp,’ it seemed that with the change to Junior High there were a few more kids like him and in an odd way, that spread the abuse out over several kids and he found it a little easier to fade into the background.

  By the time High School had rolled around, he had taken a part-time job at one of those big office box stores. He worked as a stocker, and he rather enjoyed the anonymous aspect of his work. His interaction with customers was limited, and he didn’t have to interact much with his co-workers either. He was very observant though, and he began to study how the managers and district managers did their jobs. He would often think, “Man if I were in charge I would do things differently.” But, he wasn’t in charge, so he did his job as it was asked of him and collected his paycheck.

  Since his father’s passing, he always tried to contribute something to the family. His mother felt ashamed accepting any money from him, but she did need the help. To the best of Billy’s knowledge, his dad had left enough life insurance to pay off the house and leave Billy and his mother a small amount of cash, but that didn’t cover all the day to day expenses, so Billy tried to fill that void. He worked tirelessly both in and out of school. He saved as much money as he could and spent every spare moment studying. He knew a scholarship was going to be his only hope of ever getting into college. His family just couldn’t afford that luxury, and he knew he couldn’t afford not to go, not if he ever wanted to get out of this town. Being the gifted student he was, he managed to secure a full college scholarship to MIT in Boston.

  Sherry also found relief in junior high, but she still feared that she would spend the rest of her life just trying to blend in. High School for Sherry, however, was quite a different story. Her situation at home had taken a drastic turn. Her mother and step-father had divorced, and it was now just Sherry, her mother, her little sister Lisa.

  With the loss of Bob’s income from the household Sherry and her family had no other choice but to move out of their home. Diane had some family in Chelsea, so she and the girls moved in with her cousin for several months and eventually managed to rent an apartment in the same complex as her cousin.

  Her mother was still abusing alcohol and pain medication which left Sherry pretty much the only one taking care of her sister Lisa. Regardless, Sherry didn’t care; she would take raising her sister and taking care of her mom any day over fending off her mother’s disgusting husband.

  This new environment coupled with her emerging beauty allowed her to begin to spread her wings and make friends. However, her confidence was not yet strong enough to risk being ostracized by her new high school friends by empathizing with the nerds. Sherry was still a nerd at heart, and a very bright girl but her social standing was more important to her right now, after all, high school is all about self-preservation.

  Sherry found a sense of relief from moving out of Revere. She grasped the opportunity to reinvent herself around people who did not know her as a child. Other than Billy, there was nothing about Revere that she was going to miss. She was afraid that she would lose contact with him now that they were attending separate high schools, and she was right. On rare occasions, they would run into one another, and these times became even more limited when they each went to college.

  Billy worked several mediocre jobs during his college years which allowed him to hone his skills and perfect his craft. College also afforded Billy the opportunity to re-invent himself as well. He had grown from an awkward little boy into quite a handsome young man. His transformation also opened a door that he feared would remain closed to him. There were quite a few young women he attended college with that were very eager to “study” with him. He justified his new found popularity by convincing himself that he deserved it after all of the Friday nights he sat home alone. Despite all of his new extracurricular activities, he maintained his focus on his studies.

  He majored in computer prog
ramming and graduated top of his class. Major companies were tripping over each other to get their hands on him, and he was offered several high paying positions after graduation. After serious consideration and many sleepless nights, Billy decided to join a large company in New York that seemed to meet all of his criteria. The primary consideration was its proximity to Massachusetts. This job would afford him the opportunity to fly into Logan Airport on weekends which was only a short commute to Revere. He also knew that with his mom getting up there in years, being able to get home quickly was imperative.

  The other benefits included an extremely lucrative salary with full medical benefits. The clincher for Billy was the type of work he'd be performing. While countless companies were working to develop software and devices that would allow people from all over the world to communicate in real time via voice, writing and video, Billy’s work made all of that look like kindergarten busy work. The agency that he chose to sign on with was supported one hundred percent by government contracts. Now I can’t tell you everything he worked on because quite honestly, he never disclosed all the details to me. He took his confidentiality contract with the agency quite seriously.

  Billy lived in New York for many years, and during that time he had established a reputation for being the go-to man for all things computer program related. He had dug himself quite the lucrative little niche. From the surface, it appeared he had moved forward and successfully shed all of the insecurities he carried as a child.

  Despite his high-pressure job, Billy religiously boarded a flight from New York to Boston every Friday evening and arrived promptly at his mothers’ house in Beachmont at six o’clock in time for dinner. He always told his co-workers that these weekend visits were very important to his mother.

  Truthfully though, they were equally as important to him. He cherished his weekly visits with his mom. These weekend excursions carried on for years. When the weatherman predicted cold or rain for the upcoming weekend, Marguerite would make it a point to food shop on Thursdays. She would buy all Billy’s favorite foods and spend Thursday evening and Friday morning preparing meals for them. They would spend those weekends talking for hours at the kitchen table. They often pulled out the old photo albums and listened to the big band albums. Many times he offered to buy her a CD player, “Mom you don’t understand how the music sounds when it’s played on a CD, it’s so much crisper than when played on the record player.”

  Time after time she declined his offers. It wasn’t until years into these visits that she explained to him why she didn’t want to replace her old record player.

  “Honey, I know that there isn’t a thing in the world that you wouldn’t do for me to make my life more comfortable. I also know that you think I turn down your offer because I simply don’t want you wasting your money and although that is true to a point it’s not completely honest. The real reason I don’t want to replace my albums is I love the scratch of the old records, the white noise. They take me back to a place in life when things seemed so much simpler. I can sit here at night with the lights off and my eyes closed and listen to all the big bands, and for those brief moments it’s like your dad is right here with me, I cherish those moments.”

  After that explanation, Billy never offered to update her music again; it didn’t need updating, it was exactly as it was meant to be.

  Getting this glimpse into his parents past gave him a deeper understanding of their love. It also gave him a deeper understanding of himself. People in his life had often questioned why he enjoyed Big Band and Classical music as much as he did. After all, it certainly wasn’t the music of his peers. The music of his time spanned from John Denver and Tom Rush all the way to KISS with a brief interruption of the whole Disco craze. Billy did enjoy John Denver, Tom Rush, and other such performers but he never really got into the heavy rock bands or disco.

  His distaste for rock music had more to do with him never really feeling comfortable with himself than an actual dislike for the music. It seemed to him that the rock bands and disco were meant to be enjoyed by large groups of people. That never was his style. The Big Bands and Classical, however, always took him to an enjoyable place. It wasn’t until his mom explained why she enjoyed it that it began to make sense to him.

  This music brought him back to before his dad passed away and his mom was always smiling. It breathed life into his subconscious memories of the music playing in the background while his mom busied herself planting flowers in the window boxes and his dad walking past her and stealing a kiss.

  Parents never think their kids notice things like this, but they do, and for Billy, it was the cement in his foundation. He was glad she had chosen to open up and share what her music meant to her. It was also one of the reasons he looked forward to the weekends when the weather kept them housebound.

  On the weekends when the sun was shining they would take walks along Revere Beach, and she would recite the same stories about the rides and the Dancing Pavilion that used to draw thousands of people there every week. She would describe the Pavilion as though it appeared to float on water and talk of all the performers who frequented the stage.

  Billy had fond memories of going to Revere Beach as a child, but by the time he was old enough to go there on his own, many of the attractions were gone, and the rides were minimal at best.

  It was on these walks that Billy noticed for the first time that his mother’s memory was beginning to slip. She still told the same stories, but as of recent it seemed that just as with the music, she wasn’t merely reminiscing, she was actually going back there in her mind.

  It started with small hints like calling him Bill instead of Billy; she never called him Bill. It seemed like an easy enough mistake to make, so he dismissed it. Then it progressed to her saying things like, “Bill, do you remember when we went to the Pier Dancing Pavilion, and we danc-

  ed up until the time the band played its last note?”

  Billy would always try to nudge her back to the present with a gentle, “Yes mom, I remember you telling me stories about you and dad going there to dance.”

  She would always try to dismiss it with a simple, “Oh my goodness, would you just listen to me getting all caught up in the moment, I meant when your dad and I went there.”

  Both Billy and his mom knew what was happening, but neither chose to make any more of it than it was, simply an old woman who found more pleasure in the past

  then she did in the present.

  As the weeks crept on and turned into months and the seasons came and went, the inevitable was no longer anything that Billy could ignore. He tried for a while to have caretakers visit during the weekdays to handle shopping and yard work but Marguerite never was one for letting other people carry her weight. Up to this point, Marguerite had remained physically healthy despite the mental decline, but that was all changing now. Her health was now failing, and he felt it was his duty to return home and care for her. He wanted to help her maintain her dignity.

  Marguerite felt incredibly guilty because she knew he

  was passing up opportunities in order to be with her although he never made mention of it.

  Billy had a very keen business mind and had secured ample resources to open a small computer programming and repair business back home in Beachmont.

  Billy was always intrigued by the fact that Beachmont somehow unofficially separated itself from Revere despite just being a section of the city. If you asked people from the area where they were from, they always responded “I’m from Beachmont,” no one ever said they were from Revere.

  Several months had passed since Billy returned from New York and he split his time between getting his business up and running and caring for his ailing mother. He spent Sundays cooking meals for the week so he could just heat them up for her and spend his time at the house fixing things and visiting rather than cooking. Winter came early that year, and although it was only the first week of November, the ocean air carried with it a bitter reminder of how har
sh New England winters could be in the seacoast town.

  Billy went to his moms’ one weekend to put some plastic on the old windows and make sure the furnace was

  in good repair for the upcoming season. Upon entering the house, he felt an eerie feeling sweep through his body. He immediately hurried to his mother’s room.

  She wasn’t looking well, “Billy, it’s been a pretty rough night. I feel the kind of cold that is deep down in my bones; I just can’t get warm.”

  “Mom, you need to go to the hospital. I’m going to go call an ambulance, and I’ll be right back.” As soon as he returned to her room, he began collecting some of her items so she would feel comfortable at the hospital. He sat on the edge of her bed and began to put her robe on her.

  His mind drifted back to the days when she would try and thread his little spindly legs and arms into snowsuits. She used to call him jello arms because no matter which way she maneuvered the snowsuit his arms and legs went the opposite direction. It seemed so surreal to be sitting here now trying to do the same thing for her.

  He softly said with a playful intention that rang of sadness, “Hold still jello arms.” Their eyes locked for a moment with a sobering reality. He leaned forward and held her, “Mom, I love you so much, and I want you to know, you are the best mother a guy could ever ask for.”

  Cradled in her son’s arms, Marguerite slowly slipped

  away before the ambulance arrived.

  Billy gently kissed her on the forehead and whispered, “You go to dad now, he’s waiting for you. Hug him for me. I love you, Mom.”

  After robotically tending to the formalities with the paramedics Billy spent the rest of the day and the remainder of the weekend privately trying to process his feelings. His state of mind ran the full gamut from heartbreak through panic and rage finally settling into a place of acceptance. The reality hung heavy in his heart.