What You Remember I Did

by Janet Berliner

  On the seat of the chair by the lamp with the brass shade were a letter and a torn envelope and Matt's reading glasses, as if he'd been reading the letter just recently and been interrupted. Nan picked up the letter and read the date. December 21. Four days ago.

  "Dear Dad,

  I'm so sorry. I realize now I was terribly wrong. All these 'memories' have been false. You never did anything to hurt me."

  Afraid she wouldn't have time to read the entire missive, Nan flipped the single page over to check the signature. As if it could be from anyone else.

  "I'm so sorry.

  "I love you.

  "Your son, Eliot."

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  Catherine struggled to sit up. "Nanny? Where are you? I had a bad dream."

  She rubbed her eyes. She was lost. She was alone.

  "Help!"

  Nan was right there, a few feet away. But she didn't move or say a word. She stood like a statue, holding a piece of paper.

  Catherine pushed herself up. Why was she wearing this red dress? She'd never seen it before. Somebody must have given it to her. How lovely. It made her want to dance.

  To the statue woman, or to anybody who would listen, she bubbled an invitation. "Oh, dance with me!" and started singing a song she couldn't name, was maybe making up on the spot, without words, just "ooooo" and "la la la."

  Nan–for it was Nan, her daughter–slid what looked like a letter into an envelope, put it on the floor under a chair, and stared down at it. Swaying a little, Catherine danced around her. You didn't have to have a partner to dance. You didn't have to have a partner to do much of anything.

  Suddenly dread overcame her and she stopped. "Nanny. What's wrong?"

  Nan looked at her, and Catherine was afraid. She tried to sing and dance again, but couldn't. "I've been double-crossed. By a man I've never met."

  "Who? Who was mean to you? I'll talk to his mother–"

  "Son-of-a-bitch," Nan said quietly, just as Matt came into the study.

  Shocked, Catherine drew herself up. "Don't talk like that. Oh dear, what am I to do with you."

  Nan stared at her, her expression deadly. Catherine felt her bottom lip quiver and was suddenly cold. Matt put something warm around her shoulders. He was such a nice man. Why didn't Nanny like him? "What's wrong, Catherine?" he asked gently.

  She looked up at him and tried to take deep breaths, but she was sobbing like a child. "There you are!" She held out her arms. "Matty! There's my Matty!"

  "We have to go home now," Nan declared. Catherine wanted to argue, but she was much too tired and sad. She barely managed to say Merry Christmas to the nice man (it was Christmas, wasn't it?) and thank him for helping her to the car.

  The following day, Nan packed away all signs of Christmas. On television, romance and resolutions replaced tinsel and Old Saint Nick. Nan made it clear that she wanted to skip New Year's Eve entirely, or at worst drink a glass of something while watching the ball drop in Times Square on television, in front of a comforting fire.

  "Alone," she said.

  Catherine had another plan: "Just the three of us, welcoming in the New Year with a nice game of Scrabble. Wouldn't that be nice? You, me, and Matt."

  Nan conceded. She played with a fierceness that scared Catherine, who won the first game, fair and square. Matt won the second by almost a hundred points. Nan started to pout like a little child. Matt made no effort to conceal his annoyance with her, put his palm over his eye, and said he felt one of his migraines coming on. Only Catherine was sorry when the ball fell in Times Square, ending the evening. In bed she cried because nobody had kissed her and wished her a happy New Year.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  With the holidays over and only the occasional coaching at the club until the spring semester, Nan found it harder and harder to make it through the day. Even the most familiar routines became fraught with dangers: What if she fell on perfectly dry and flat pavement and hit her head just right and died? What if her mother choked on a bite of her beloved corned-beef-and-Swiss sandwich?

  Whenever she anticipated a relatively stable day, something happened–a call from the attorney to set up an appointment, Liz canceling–some new problem to perturb her efforts at normalcy. She returned for several more treatments with the Balinese healer, went into the City a few times to see a foreign film or go to an exhibit. Nothing helped. She did not go back to see Tonya.

  One afternoon in early February, Ida hung around after her coaching session. At one time Nan would have welcomed the young woman's company, but now she just wanted her to leave. "Can I buy you a cup of coffee?"

  Nan was shaking her head before the end of the sentence. "Not today."

  Ida stood her ground "There's something I have to talk to you about."

  Nan was sure she would not be able to tolerate girl talk about Peter Sanchez or even shoptalk about tennis. "Sorry, but I can't."

  "It's important," Ida insisted. "It's something you need to know."

  Dread settled in the pit of Nan's stomach as she submitted to the girl's determination and walked with her to the Club's coffee shop. Usually a bit shy and diffident, this time Ida came straight to the point. "I came across your student evaluations."

  "'Came across'?"

  "I'm doing work study in the Dean's office. I file."

  Already furious, Nan said, "I've always had excellent evaluations."

  "Have you seen the ones from last semester?"

  "No."

  "They're not excellent."

  "Well?"

  "All kinds of complaints. I was shocked."

  The girl was enjoying this, though she put up a front of concern and shock. Nan suddenly knew that Ida was not, after all, her friend. "Stop being coy."

  Ida had actually made notes, which she consulted now. "A lot of comments about you being brusque, disinterested, even..." Ida raised her eyes, which glistened with tears Nan knew to be fake "...verbally abusive."

  Nan started to get up. "I don't have to listen to this."

  Ida put a hand over hers, and Nan would have had to use force in order to extract herself. She very nearly did so. "Wait, Nan, please, there's more. I'm your friend. I think you ought to know what students are saying about you." Nan sat down. "Too many cigarette breaks. You cut lessons short for no apparent reason. You take offense where none is meant. Good-natured banter like you used to encourage you now call people on as disrespectful." Ida put down her list. "And there's something else. Nan, what happened with Peter?"

  "Is that what this is about? Your boyfriend?"

  "No. That's not what this is about. But he was devastated and furious when you kicked him out of class."

  "You know I can't talk to you about another student."

  "He says you accused him of sexual harassment." Nan didn't answer. "He says you started it, and you went off on him."

  "That's not exactly the way it happened," Nan said grimly, but in the back of her mind was the fear that maybe it was.

  Ida looked at her for a moment, then went back to her notes. "You missed too many classes."

  This allowed Nan to be righteously indignant. "I take care of my mother. You know that. Everybody knows that." In fact, on the days in question she'd simply been unable to face another human being, and had spent hours sitting on the boards at the far end of the jetty in Nyack. At least twice she'd been significantly late getting home. Liz had been miffed, her mother oblivious. Of course, she said none of that to this impudent little traitor, who closed her notebook and leaned across the table as if they were going to have an intimate chat. Nan cut that off. "Are you finished? Is there anything else you want to say to me?"

  Ida had the nerve to look hurt. "I'm just trying to help. I care about you–"

  Nan strode out of the shop and out of the building without looking back. She thought about going to see the Department Chair, but decided he'd just stare at her legs. She tried to make an appointment to see Tonya, but was told that the therapist was taking
personal time and both group and individual sessions would begin again after the fifteenth of the month; would she care to make appointments? No, I don't want to make an appointment, I want to see her now. But there'd been no choice; Tonya wasn't available when she needed her.

  The time between then and now had seemed interminable. Nan had felt disoriented, unable to pick up social cues, misreading what people said and unsure of what anything meant. She became aware of a pattern of behavior that was straying further and further away from her own comfort zone, not to mention from healthy and normal.

  "Your holidays?" Tonya asked the group at the first session of the new year. "Were they...pleasant? Have you done anything for yourself since I've seen you?"

  With some trepidation, Nan told her that she had been to see the Balinese therapist.

  "Ah, yes, the crystal table."

  Tonya's obvious disapproval made Nan ashamed of herself–for having thought the table could do anything to help, for having accepted several sessions without first checking it out with Tonya, for bringing it up here in the support group. She started to say she wouldn't do it again, but Tonya went on.

  "I think there's probably something to it." Relief brought tears to Nan's eyes and for the first time in weeks, she felt herself relax a little. "I think it probably does work to call up unpleasant memories and dispel them. You felt better after your sessions, right, Nan?"

  "A little, I guess."

  "And the memories of what your mother did to you receded a bit?"

  Nan hung her head and nodded as if confessing to something dirty. The woman next to her patted her knee.

  "That's my concern," Tonya declared. "We don't want the memories to recede. We don't want to banish them. We want to reclaim them."

  An assenting murmur traveled around the circle, and Nan joined in. Of course, this made perfect sense. Everything Tonya Bishop said made perfect sense when Nan was with her, and the world was not quite so bewildering. It was when she tried to find her way through this morass on her own that she lost her way.

  "It's so hard, though," a husky-voiced woman was saying. Another support group member was blocking her from Nan's view, which was more disconcerting than it probably should have been. "People don't understand what you're going through, and you can't really tell them."

  When Tonya asked for examples, the woman told of an experience at a New Year's Eve party when she'd walked in on a slightly drunken conversation about a movie where the murderer had insisted he couldn't remember doing any of it, and the party-goers were greatly amused by the patent absurdity of such a claim. "I wanted to tell them I blacked out when my grandfather was molesting me." The woman's deep voice quavered, "And that I think he did, too. But I couldn't. I'd have embarrassed my partner. I'd have embarrassed myself. It was New Year's Eve, for God's sake."

  Tonya was nodding. "Dissociation is common for both the victim and the perpetrator. So when we say we 'don't remember,' we really don't."

  Nan's head shot up. Was Tonya using the word "we" in the therapeutic way, to suggest an alliance with the patient? Or was she implying that she herself was a victim? Or–surely not–a perpetrator? For a fleeting moment the therapist seemed to meet her gaze across the circle, but she skillfully looked at the next person and then the next, inviting and encouraging each one to speak. Several did, but Nan was having trouble following. Her thoughts strayed to someplace murky and agitated.

  "Has anyone else experienced that?" Tonya was regarding her again, pulling her back into the conversation. "The feeling of not being understood, and of not being able to make yourself understood? Nan?"

  Nan's heart pounded. What if she said the wrong thing? For the first time, she didn't feel entirely safe in this group. She swallowed. "My granddaughter refuses to come and stay with me anymore."

  There was a chorus of "Why?" and "Oh, dear!" Nan caught some of them looking at her as if she might be the embodiment of the principle that those who were abused become abusers. Someone said, "She's how old? Maybe she's just of an age where kids have their own lives and better things to do than stay with Grandma." Several people laughed appreciatively. Nan was not among them.

  "She told her mother I'm mean."

  "Are you?" That was the woman with the husky voice, who now leaned forward–belligerently, it seemed to Nan–and fixed her with a steely glare.

  "Sometimes I get impatient," Nan admitted. "Sometimes I yell at her when I shouldn't. I'm on edge these days."

  "That often happens at this stage in the therapy." Tonya passed a hand over her eyes, as if suddenly tired.

  Another group member started to speak, but Nan wasn't finished. She went on in a rush. "She says I'm weird. My daughter didn't want to tell me, but I insisted, and she told me Jordan says I'm weird, I stare off into space, I talk to myself, I get up in the middle of the night and wander around the house and it scares her. She's right, I do all of those things. She says I'm mean to my mother. My daughter wants to put her in a home because it's getting too much for me to take care of her. What would I do with myself if I didn't have my mother to take care of?" Abruptly, she found herself staring straight at Tonya and demanding, "Tonya, is your mother still alive?"

  People murmured and stirred and watched to see what would happen. There was a slight but undeniable pause while Tonya, presumably, considered her options. "Yes, she is."

  Nan had no idea what she was doing, but she pressed on. "Where does she live?"

  "She lives in California." Tonya was positively grim. "What about the rest of you? Does anyone else have ambivalent feelings toward his or her abuser? It's natural–"

  "Do you see her?"

  Tonya had had enough. "Excuse me? Nan? Why is my relationship with my mother of such interest to you?"

  Nan knew only that it seemed vital to have an answer to her question. "Do you see her?"

  Several people tried to call her off, but Tonya locked gazes with her and said, very evenly, "I do not."

  This would have been the moment for a long, dramatic pause, but one of the other group members, the biker-type with tattoos of naked women on his biceps, launched into the same tales he told every time–or as often as Tonya would let him–about what his father used to do to him. It seemed to Nan that he got something other than therapeutic release out of his recitation, and this always irritated her; tonight, she hated him for it.

  His monologue did, however, break the tension between her and Tonya, and the support group meeting began to wind down. The therapist had to be direct with the biker to get him to shut up. The husky-voiced woman paused on her way out to touch Nan's shoulder and quietly wish her good luck. The others were leaving with alarming rapidity. Tonya was in intimate conversation with a woman younger than Ashley who looked as if she hadn't smiled or cried in a hundred years.

  Nan did not want to be alone with Tonya just now; the therapist was too skilled and too determined not to confront her about the little pissing contest they'd just had. At the same time, it seemed almost unthinkable, even frightening, to leave without saying good-bye. Not knowing what to do, she stood up and made her way slowly toward the door.

  The young woman rushed past her, and Tonya hailed her. "Nan. Wait a minute, could you?"

  "I've got to get home. My mother–"

  Tonya stopped trying to catch up with her and called across the room, which, now that it was almost empty, echoed a little. Nan had the absurd desire to hear what the echo was saying, but it only made Tonya's voice sound hollow. "I can't make our appointment tomorrow. Something's come up. Call my office to re-schedule."

  Blood rushed to Nan's head. Thinking she might faint, she clutched the doorframe for support as Tonya gathered up her things and left by another door, leaving Nan standing there alone.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  "Any dreams to report since we last saw each other?" Tonya consulted her notes. "Three weeks ago, I guess."

  I should be seeing her every week. She's disappointed in me. She thinks I don't really want to g
et to the bottom of this. I'm a bad client. She'll give up on me. With effort, Nan stopped the rush of frightened and self-critical thoughts and confessed, "I haven't had a dream since you told me that my mother abused me." How odd to be able to say such a thing aloud and with only a slight visceral reaction.

  "Probably abused you," Tonya said. "And you do dream. Everyone does. It sounds as if you're not remembering your dreams. Interesting."

  No matter how much she'd have liked to please Tonya, she was not dreaming. No matter how many books she read about dreaming, no matter how many times she flipped through Freud's Interpretation of Dreams or picked up some New Age book about teaching yourself how to repeat your dreams or induce certain kinds of dreaming, there was nothing for her to remember. She had just plain stopped dreaming.

  Tonya leaned forward. "You are dreaming, Nan. You simply don't want to remember. I went through something similar a few years ago."

  She began to talk about some of her own dream experiences, a personal turn that made Nan uncomfortable–partly because it pleased her too much to be taken into the therapist's confidence. Later she realized, though it didn't seem to matter much, that the self-disclosure was probably a therapeutic technique.

  That night, she had a dream. Nothing mysterious or frightening, except in the unfamiliarity of the experience itself. It was actually kind of fun, like going to the movies without any knowledge ahead of time about which film she would be seeing. When she tried to write it down, as Tonya instructed, all but a few sunny images had evaporated. She resisted the temptation to make something up.

  Every night after that, she dreamed, and her recall got better and better. Recording in her dream journal, thinking how glad Tonya would be, she started to hope she would dream something that would open a door into her childhood. But invariably her dreams related to what was presently happening to her–to Catherine and Matt, to Tonya and the people in her support group meetings.