Memoirs of a Teenage Amnesiac

by Gabrielle Zevin

  “Please, say it.”

  “Sasha lived eighteen years on this earth, and all that time didn’t add up to a damn thing. What that time is to me now, is a hole. I…I wish he’d never been born or that I’d never been born. I can’t talk about this.”

  He kissed me then and I suppose I was glad for the distraction.

  By the time we had gotten on the Metro North Railroad back to Tarrytown, it was pretty late. Having gotten a ride from Alice that morning, we had to call James’s mom, Raina, to pick us up at the train station.

  Raina smelled like cigarettes and perfume, and she had this way of looking like she hadn’t seen James in years. “Is everything okay? What happened to the friend who drove you? I didn’t know you were going to be so late,” she said. “I thought the play was a matinee.” Even though she looked on the young side, she was all mom when it came to James.

  “It’s fine, Ma. It’s…nothing,” James said. “Ma, this is my friend, Naomi. You remember her? She was in that play I worked on.”

  She appraised me, and then we shook hands.

  “Raina,” she said.

  “Nice to meet you.”

  She nodded. “I like your hair.”

  Raina dropped me off at my house first. James walked me to my door.

  “Sorry about my mom,” he said. “She’s really protective.”

  I said something about that just being the way parents were.

  “No, it’s not like that,” James said. “Raina’s protective because I’ve given her reason to be. I’ve spent most of my teen years a complete and utter disaster. She’s already lost so much. I guess she’s always on the lookout for signs that I might turn bad again.” His voice made a strange tremor over the word bad, and it made me want to kiss him, so I did.

  I loved kissing him. I loved the way his mouth felt on mine. His lips were supple, but always a little chapped. The cigarettes (and the peppermints he ate to cover them up) made him taste bittersweet. But I wondered if all this kissing was a bad habit with him and me. The thing we did with our mouths instead of talking.

  The time between Thanksgiving and Christmas always passes in about a minute. Before I knew it, James was leaving for Los Angeles to visit his father again, and Dad and I went to Pleasantville to spend the holidays with Rosa Rivera and her twin daughters, Frida and Georgia (aka Freddie and George), who she referred to as “the girls.”

  Although they were identical twins, Freddie and George did not look at all alike. George competed on her university’s bodybuilding team, and she was packed with muscles. Freddie was petite, like Rosa. Neither was shy about asking a lot of questions, as I would find out seated between them at dinner.

  “Mom said you lost your memory?” George began.

  I nodded.

  “Our dad had Alzheimer’s, did Mom say?” Freddie asked.

  “I heard,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

  “It sucked,” George said. “It turned him into a total asshole.”

  “George!” Rosa Rivera yelled across the table.

  “What? It did.”

  “But that’s not what she has,” Freddie said. “Mom said she only forgot the last four years?”

  “Well, those years suck anyway,” Freddie said. “Do you remember, George?”

  “Man, we had those, like, mullets in seventh grade. What was Mom thinking?”

  Freddie shook her head. “Do you have any idea what it’s like to be known as the mullet twins?”

  “I wish I could forget it,” George said.

  I laughed. “By the way, have we met before?” I asked.

  “Yeah, we didn’t really like you.”

  “We pretty much thought you were a typical snotty teenager.”

  “Kind of a jerk.”

  “Georgia and Frida Rivera!” Rosa Rivera yelled across the table. “That is not polite.”

  “What? We did. She’s not offended.”

  I wasn’t. I appreciated their honesty.

  “You seem okay now, though.”

  For Christmas, Rosa Rivera gave me a pair of fur-lined gloves, and my dad gave me a memoir about climbing Everest. My mother sent me things to help with my photography class: monographs by Cindy Sherman, Rineke Dijkstra, and Diane Arbus, and a new camera, which I left in the box. It was lucky my project with James had already turned into a bust, otherwise that shiny new camera might have found itself taking a trip down the stairs. James bought me two goldfish in a heart-shaped glass bowl with a castle in it. We named them Sid and Nancy. They both died before break was over.

  8

  I WAS IN JAMES’S ROOM, LYING NEXT TO HIM IN bed. At Tom Purdue, there’s a one-week reading period during January before exams where classes don’t meet and you just review. I was studying physics; James was studying me. “I don’t like to feel so crazy about someone,” he said. “I don’t like to feel like my happiness is so tied up in another person.”

  I said not to worry.

  James sat up in bed and said, “No, I’m serious. Today, I almost forgot to take my pill. The way I feel about you…sometimes it scares me.”

  I started kissing him all over. Not just on the mouth—in my opinion, the mouth gets too much attention. There are a million equally interesting and lovely spaces to put lips to. I kissed him on the crease behind his knee. I kissed him on the small of his back, which was narrow but surprisingly muscular. I kissed him on the round bone that stuck out from the ankle; I don’t know what that’s called. I kissed him on his eyebrows, which were dark and well forested and just a hair or two shy of a unibrow. I kissed him on his wrist, right on top of that two-inch horizontal scar.

  He pulled his wrist away from me.

  “Don’t,” I said.

  He laughed. “God, I was so stupid back then.”

  “Do you mean for trying to kill yourself?”

  He laughed a little longer, and a little more sadly somehow. “No. I just meant that if you’re slitting your wrists, you’re supposed to do it vertically, not horizontally. If you cut horizontally, you don’t bleed enough. The wound begins to heal on its own.”

  My worst subject, aside from photography, was French. I had to study like a fiend just to pass, and even then I didn’t know as many vocabulary words as required for the most elementary conversations.

  As luck would have it, James was a whiz at French. The private school he had gone to in California started teaching the subject nearly simultaneously with English. He would sometimes help me study by having conversations with me en français where he would introduce new words that I hadn’t yet covered.

  We were in his car when he asked me, in French, “Do you blame Will Landsman or the stairs for your accident?”

  I had to ask him to translate, because stairs was outside of my limited vocabulary. Accident, however, was not.

  Once he’d translated, I replied without really thinking, “Ni l’un ni l’autre. L’appareil-photo,” meaning “Neither, I blame the camera.”

  James laughed. “Hey, that was good.”

  The strange thing was I hadn’t known I knew the words for “neither” or “camera” until I said them.

  We were driving to his job at the community college (he was doing American Cinema that semester), and I remember looking at the trees and knowing that they were arbres.

  That the road was route.

  And the sky, ciel.

  And marble.

  And coin toss.

  And coffee cup.

  And the French words for everything under the sun.

  I was about to tell James that my French had, unexpectedly, seemed to return, when I realized that it was not alone.

  I remembered everything.

  Everything everything.

  Starting with that day.

  Will and I had been arguing about who should have to go back to the office to get the camera.

  Will removed a quarter from his pocket, and without even asking he announced that I would be tails and he, heads.

  So I joked, “
Who made you God?”

  “Naomi,” he asked, “are you saying you’d prefer to be heads?”

  I wasn’t necessarily saying that—I didn’t really care either way—but my friend (and co-editor) could be efficient to the point of dictatorial, and as his co-editor (and friend), I thought that this was something he needed to work on. “People appreciate being asked,” I said. “As a courtesy, you know?”

  Will sighed. “Heads or tails?”

  I called heads just as he threw the coin. It was, in some respects, a decent throw—high enough that I momentarily lost track of it, though this might have been an illusion caused by the silver against the twilight. High enough that I wondered if Will, who was not known for his athletic prowess, would actually manage to catch it. He didn’t. The coin landed with an undignified plop in a puddle seven feet over, on the border between the student and faculty parking lots. We raced over to verify the results. I was fast from tennis and I got there first. Through the murky water I could make out the hazy outline of an eagle.

  “Should have stuck with tails, Chief,” he said, fishing George Washington out of the puddle.

  “Yeah, yeah.”

  We parted by shaking hands, which was how my colleague and I always said goodbye.

  I trudged across the faculty parking lot and across the school’s two athletic fields—our paltry marching band (twenty-three members) was practicing on one, and our paltry football team (average height: five feet eight inches) on the other.

  I trudged up the hill that began at the lower-school (grades 7–9) buildings and peaked at the upper school (10–12) in an impressive display of topographical symbolism.

  I trudged up the twenty-five marble steps that led to the entrance of the main building; the brick, banklike structure people thought of when they thought of Tom Purdue, largely because it was on the cover of all the brochures. At this point, it was nearly seven o’clock and the halls were empty, the way you’d expect them to be at nearly seven o’clock. I unlocked the door to The Phoenix—no one was there since school hadn’t even started—and retrieved the camera, which was new enough that we hadn’t even had time to buy a carrying case or a strap yet.

  In the time all this took, it had officially become dark, and I was ready to be home. I jogged out of the building and down the marble stairs.

  People said I had tripped—as in Did-you-hear-what-happened-to-Naomi-Porter-she-tripped-going-down-the-stairs-and-her-brain-exploded—but that wasn’t what happened.

  Think about it. I was not an eighty-year-old woman with a creaky hip, and at that point I had been climbing those Tom Purdue steps for almost four years: seventh, eighth, ninth, and tenth grades. I knew how they felt when they were slick with rain. I knew how they felt when wearing heels and a formal dress. I knew how they felt in the middle of winter, coated with salt.

  Those steps could not have been more familiar to me, so that’s why it was impossible that I could have tripped.

  What really happened was that someone had left a Styrofoam coffee cup on the steps. In the darkness I didn’t see it, so I kicked the cup and whatever was inside spilled out. I remember slipping a bit on the liquid and that’s when I lost my grip on the camera. In that split second before diving down the stairs, my only thoughts were for the camera, and how it had cost The Phoenix a heck of a lot of money, and how much I wanted to catch it before it hit the stairs.

  I didn’t trip or fall—tripping and falling are accidents.

  I dove—diving is intentional. Idiotic, yes, but also intentional.

  Diving is a leap of faith plus gravity.

  I had been throwing myself toward something.

  Maybe away from something else.

  I had kissed Will the night before.

  Actually, he had kissed me, but I hadn’t stopped it.

  It had happened quickly; we were covering the Science Club’s back-to-school trip to the planetarium. I had always teased Will about his obsessive coverage of academia. Will’s “Nerd Inclusion Campaign” I called it, even though that was probably mean, and let’s face facts, we were both kind of nerds ourselves. In any case, we decided to stay for the star show.

  So we kissed. I think we had both been tricked by the air-conditioning and the darkness and all those treacherous fake stars.

  That kiss had probably been more about my ambivalence toward Ace than any romantic notions I had had about Will. Besides, I hadn’t met James yet.

  In all these months, Will had never mentioned it, though. I suppose it didn’t matter anyhow. I was with James now, and Will and I weren’t even friends.

  Sitting in James’s car, I took off my sunglasses even though we were in the midst of a brilliant, white January sunset.

  We were stopped at a traffic light when James said to me, “You’re awfully quiet.”

  I nodded blankly and tried to smile. I felt like if I spoke, I might have an aneurysm.

  “You aren’t wearing your sunglasses,” he said.

  “Oh…” I put them back on. Then I kissed James on the mouth, probably too hard.

  I decided that I wouldn’t tell him or anyone else about my remembering. In a way, none of it mattered. None of it changed anything.

  This was what I told myself.

  I looked at James. I looked at him and felt grateful again that he’d been the one at the bottom of the stairs. It could have been anyone.

  For obvious reasons, my exams went much better than expected, my French exam particularly. I did so well that Mrs. Greenberg decided to base my grade solely on the final. She was a tough teacher, but always, always fair. “You have had much to deal with, Naomi,” she said in French, “but you have studied hard and come out beautifully.”

  I understood her perfectly and expressed my gratitude in French.

  At his request, I went to see Mr. Weir on the last day of finals. “Congratulations. You have eighteen more weeks to dazzle me,” he said. Instead of failing me, he was giving me an incomplete. Incidentally, if I’d had my memory back in September, I definitely would have dropped that class. His was the worst kind of elective—the kind with the potential to bring down your GPA.

  When I got back home that night, Dad was in his study working.

  I quietly took the car keys off the hook by the kitchen door and went for a drive.

  It felt good to be behind the wheel again.

  I didn’t drive anywhere in particular. I stayed in my neighborhood, making enough right turns so that I ended up back where I started.

  When I was about seven years old, I got lost in a museum. My parents had been researching their third or fourth Wandering Porters book, the one in the South of France. I had thought I was with my mother, but I hadn’t been. I had been mistakenly following a woman with a camera bag that looked like hers. When the woman turned, I realized my error and began to cry.

  The woman looked at me and although she did not speak English (I don’t think she was French either), I managed to detect the question “…Maman…?”

  I nodded miserably and pointed to the camera.

  “L’appareil-photo?”

  I nodded even more miserably. As it happened, my mother entered the gallery then, and I was found.

  For many years, l’appareil-photo was the only French word I had.

  I don’t know why my memory came back that day in James’s car—maybe there was some medical explanation having to do with synapses and neurons—just as I don’t know for certain why it left in the first place.

  All I knew was that I missed my mother.

  9

  I DIDN’T WANT TO TELL ANYONE ABOUT THE END OF my amnesia, and the effort of keeping track of what I was and wasn’t supposed to remember was exhausting me to where I began to forget insignificant things. Like my history book. The first day of the new semester, I lost mine. I thought it might have been in James’s car—we had passed many enjoyable hours in there. I walked over to James’s house to see if I could look around.

  James was at work, so the car wasn�
��t even there. I asked Raina if I could go look in his room, and she said to “be her guest.” Raina had not been particularly warm, but James said it wasn’t about me and I shouldn’t take offense.

  I looked under James’s bed. Improbable as it may seem, my book was there: the mythic first place I had looked. As I was taking it out, my eyes alighted on something else.

  It was a still-sealed envelope from the University of Southern California, where James had applied early. It was postmarked December 13. James had left it unopened for seven weeks. It seemed a little, for lack of a better word, crazy. I mean, I knew that he had really wanted to go to the film program there, but was he so afraid of not being accepted that he wouldn’t even open the envelope?

  The right thing would have been to leave it there, but I didn’t do that. I picked it up and put it in my pocket. I wasn’t sure what I was going to do with it, but I couldn’t bear the thought of it lying there under his bed.

  He called me after work that night. He said that Raina had mentioned my visit and that he was sorry he’d missed me.

  I told him that I’d been looking for my book when I’d accidentally stumbled upon the letter.

  James grew deathly quiet.

  “I could open it if you want,” I said.

  He didn’t say anything.

  “Are you that afraid of not getting in?”

  He told me to mind my own goddamn business, and then he hung up on me. You could say that that was our first fight. He had never even raised his voice to me before. I suppose he was right to yell at me.

  At school the next day, I didn’t see him until lunch. I handed him the still-unopened letter and apologized if I had violated his privacy.

  James took the letter. Without a word, he opened it. It was an acceptance. He set it on the ground, as if he couldn’t care less. It started to blow away, so I put my boot heel on it.

  “It’s great news,” I said. “It’s what you wanted.” I hugged him, but his posture was rigid. “What is it, Jims?”—that was my nickname for him—“Why aren’t you happier?”