It was the day I forgot which shoe belonged to which foot, had two breakfasts, and forgot my daughter’s name.
I came downstairs carrying my shoes, and went into the kitchen for breakfast. Caitlin was already home from uni, looking tired and thinner. Wrung out from living life, I supposed, although her habitual black outfits and black-rimmed eyes didn’t do a lot to flatter her obvious exhaustion. I asked her once why she liked dressing like a Goth so much, and she grabbed a handful of her mass of jet-black hair and said, really, what other choice did she have? School hadn’t broken up, and she was taking Esther out for the day—because the childminder was sick—which was good of her. She looked like she really just wanted to stay in bed all day, and part of me wanted to put her there—tuck her up, like I used to when she was little, brush the hair off her forehead, and bring her soup.
They were already up when I came into the kitchen. Esther had dragged her big sister out of bed and down the stairs, and was ensconced on her lap talking babble and demanding to be fed like a baby. I walked into the kitchen, still carrying my shoes, and I looked at them, my two daughters, seventeen years between them, and I felt this little bubble of happiness that even with all of the life I had lived between giving birth to each of them, they still were so close and so bonded. I’d gone to call Esther over for a cuddle when it happened. There was just this wall of gray, this dense fog between me and her name. No, no, it wasn’t even a wall: it was…a void. A vacuum where something had been before, perhaps just moments before, and now it was obliterated. I panicked, and the harder I tried to think, the thicker the fog became. And this wasn’t a meeting at work I’d forgotten to attend, or that woman from the book club I went to about three times, whom I sometimes have to avoid in supermarkets because I can’t remember her name. This wasn’t “someone off the telly, who used to be in that thing.” This was my little girl, the apple of my eye. My treasure, my delight, my sweetheart. The child I’d named.
I knew it then, in that instant, that the same thing that had come to claim my father had come for me too. I knew it, even as I tried with all my heart and head combined not to know it. You are stressed and tired, I told myself. Just relax, take a breath and it will come.
I filled a bowl with muesli, which tasted like cardboard in my mouth, and afterwards I went to brush my teeth. Keep the routine, do what you know, and it will come. I came back and filled a bowl with muesli, and Caitlin asked me if I was extra hungry, and I realized that actually I wasn’t hungry at all. Then I noticed my first empty bowl, still sitting on the table, and realized why. But still, I told her I was, and forced down a few more mouthfuls, making a joke about starting the diet tomorrow instead. Caitlin just rolled her eyes, in that way she had perfected over the years. “Oh, Mum.”
Trying to press the panic down, I looked under the table and stared and stared at my shoes. Low, black, kitten heels with a long pointed toe that I loved. I wore them because they didn’t hurt, even after a long day teaching, and they looked purposeful and just sexy enough to get away with. But that morning, the more I looked at them, the more of a mystery they became to me. I simply couldn’t decipher which shoe went on which foot. The angle of the toe; the buckle on the side—none of it made sense to me anymore.
I left the shoes under the kitchen table, and went and pulled on my boots. That day, the whole day at work, simply went by: I remembered which classes to go to, what I was teaching, characters and quotes from the books we were studying…they were all there. But not my daughter’s name. I waited and I waited for Esther’s name to come back to me. But it was gone, along with which shoe was left, and which was right. And it only returned that evening when Greg called Esther by her name. I was relieved and so frightened at the same time that I cried. I had to tell Greg: there was no hiding anymore. The next day I went to see my GP, and the testing began—test after test, all aiming to try to tell with as much certainty as possible what I already knew.
And now I live with Mum again, and increasingly my husband feels like a man I barely know; and even though Esther’s name hasn’t slipped out of my tightly clenched grip ever since, other things do, every day. I open my eyes each morning and tell myself who I am, who my children are, and what is wrong with me. And I live with my mum again, even though no one ever asked me if that was what I wanted.
And there’s something else, something important I have to say to Caitlin before she goes back to uni. But whatever it is, it’s standing just out of reach behind the fog.
“Do you want to set the table?” Mum asks me, holding a bouquet of shiny metal in her fist. She is eyeing me skeptically, as though I might somehow do her in with a blunt butter knife. What she is wondering is: am I capable of remembering which implement is which, and what it is for? And what really pisses me off is that I am wondering the same thing. At this exact second, I know precisely everything I need to know about setting the table, and I will do right up until the moment she hands me the objects that require placing in a particular order. And then…will the fog roll in, and will that piece of information be gone? Not knowing what I don’t know stops me from wanting to do anything. Everything I attempt is fraught with the possibility of failure. And yet I am still me, at the moment. My mind is still me. When will the day come that I am not me anymore?
“No,” I say, like a sullen teenager. I am decorating my memory book. I keep finding little things, little items that aren’t quite whole memories, that wouldn’t fill a page or even a line in the book, but which make up parts of a life, my life, like pieces of a mosaic. And so I decided to cover the book with the things I find. I tape on a fifty-cent piece, a remnant from my trip to New York, next to a ticket to a Queen concert that I ran away from home to watch when I was only twelve. I’m trying to think of a way to attach a hedgehog charm that my dad gave me for my birthday before he became sick; I’m wondering if I can somehow sew it onto the thick cover of the book. It’s small work, in a small world, in a place I know, and it absorbs and comforts me in the way that Diane the counselor said it would. But that’s not why I don’t set the table: I don’t set the table because I don’t want to not remember how to set the table.
“Did you show Caitlin the letter?” Mum takes a seat opposite me, reaching across the table to lay out the objects that make a frame for a plate to sit within. “Did you talk to her?”
For several long moments, I turn the small silver hedgehog over and over in the palm of my hand, rubbing it with the tip of my finger. I remember how delighted I was with it, how even when it was attached to my bracelet I played with it, making it walk over the carpet and hibernate under cushions. I lost it once for a full day, and didn’t stop crying until Mum had found it secreted at the bottom of a box of tissues: I’d forgotten where I’d put it to bed. I can remember all of that in perfect, crystal-clear detail.
“I don’t know,” I tell her, embarrassed, ashamed. “I think I said something. I’m not sure what I’ve said.”
“She’s upset,” Mum tells me. “When she came in, she’d been crying. Her face was red; her eyes were swollen. You should show her the letter.”
“I don’t know,” I say. I have always hated it when my mother has decided it’s time to force the issue, to box me into a corner and make me act. But now, instead of feeling like I’ve got my back against the wall, it’s as though I am lost in a maze, and I’m not sure of the way out. “There’s a lot she isn’t saying, and I don’t know if I can, if I should, force the issue. Not now, not after all this time.”
“Whatever else, she does deserve the truth, doesn’t she? That girl, she’s so angry a lot of the time. So unsure of herself, so…closed in. Haven’t you ever wondered whether half of it’s because she feels like she was abandoned by her father before she was ever born?”
I say nothing. This doesn’t feel fair to me, the new crusade that Mum is on, determined to get me to set my house in order. I don’t want to set my house in order; I want to glue things into my book. I raise the tiny hedgehog up to eye level,
and begin to make a loop for it out of a length of cotton.
“Ignoring me won’t make it go away,” Mum says, but a little less sternly this time. “You know how I feel about it.”
“Yes, Mother,” I say. “I know what you feel about it because you’ve been telling me more or less nonstop since the day Caitlin was born. But it wasn’t your choice to make, was it?”
“Was it yours?” she says, which is what she always says, and I realize there are some things I am quite looking forward to forgetting.
“Nothing would be any different from the way it is now,” I tell her, going back to my book.
“You can’t possibly know that,” she says. “You made assumptions, and Caitlin’s life is based on them. She’s a child that has always felt abandoned, and lost. Even if she never says it, you only have to look at her to know she doesn’t feel like she fits in.”
“This from the woman who used to always wear a full-length kaftan and flowers in her hair?” I say. “You’ve heard of personal expression, right? Why does it have to mean more when it’s Caitlin?”
“Because it does mean more because it is Caitlin.” Mum struggles to find the words, turning over a peeler in her hand as she thinks. “When she was little, she never stopped singing, always grinning like a loon. Shouting, making herself the center of attention, just like you. I just…I just feel like she’s not…reaching out enough. I mean, where are the jazz hands and the high kicks? What happened to that little girl? And don’t say she grew out of them. You never did.”
“Mum, what do I have to do for you to give me a break? I mean, if a degenerative brain disease won’t do it, what will? Would you let me off if I had breast cancer, maybe?” The words come in quick angry bursts, low and strained—because I know Caitlin is upstairs, curled in upon herself, furled around all the words she feels she cannot say; and because I know that Mum is right, and Mum being right is the hardest thing to stand. Picking at this same old wound with my mother won’t help Caitlin, so I force myself to back down, finding the imprint of the tiny hedgehog driven into the palm of my hand as I unclench my fist. “Caitlin might not have had a traditional upbringing, but she has always had me, and you, and now she has Greg and Esther. Why isn’t that enough?”
Mum turns her back on me to boil orange vegetables, probably to mushy oblivion, and I watch her: her shoulders are tense, the tilt of her head set in repressed disapproval, perhaps grief. She is very angry with me—it feels like she always has been, although I know for a fact that is not true. Now more than ever, the times when she was not angry shine like polished silver in a sunny sitting room, and those memories positively dazzle. Sometimes I try to pinpoint the exact moment things changed between us, but it always shifts. Was it the day Dad died, or the day he became ill? The day I didn’t choose the same dreams that she had always had for me? Perhaps, though, perhaps it began with this one choice, made a long time ago—this choice that somehow became a lie, and the worst kind of lie. A lie I didn’t exactly tell Caitlin, but one I let her believe.
Caitlin was six when she first actively noticed that she was the odd one out at school. Even the kids whose parents were no longer together had dads somewhere on the horizon, and even if they rarely saw them, they knew of their existence. They knew, at least approximately, where they were in the world. There was a vague connection to them, a tenuous sense of identity. Caitlin, though, had none of that, which is perhaps the reason that, one day, on our usual walk home from school, as she plucked the tulips and the daffodils that strayed between garden fences so she could make me a stolen bouquet, she asked me if she was a test-tube baby. The question, the phrase, so awkward and unnatural, so obviously implanted in her mouth by another, shocked me. I told her that she wasn’t a test-tube baby, and that she’d been made in the same way most other babies were. Hurrying on before she could ask me exactly how that was, I told her that the moment I’d known about her, I’d wanted her, and I’d known that together we could be a brilliant little family and as happy as could be, which we were. I hoped that would be enough, and that she’d run ahead like she usually did, and hop and jump in an effort to pull sprigs of blossom off the cherry trees that lined the road. But instead she remained thoughtful and quiet. And so I told her that if she wanted me to, I’d tell her all about the man who’d helped make her, and help her to meet him. She thought about it for a long time.
“But why don’t I know him already?” she asked, her hand slipping into mine, leaving a trail of fallen petals behind. “John Watson, he knows his dad, even though he lives on an oil rig and he only sees him twice a year. He always brings him loads and loads of presents.” Her tone was wistful, and I wasn’t sure if it was because of the visits or the presents.
“Well…” No words came. I was ill-prepared for this moment, although I should have seen it coming; I should have practiced and rehearsed and been ready. And so I told the truth that somehow became a lie. “When I found out that you were in my tummy, I was very young. And so was your father. He just wasn’t ready to be a dad.”
“But you were ready to be my mummy?” Caitlin had looked puzzled. “It’s not very hard, is it?”
“No,” I said, squeezing her warm sticky fingers gently. “No, being your mummy is the easiest thing in the world.”
“I don’t want to know about him, then,” Caitlin had said, quite determinedly. “I’m going to tell everyone at school that I am a test-tube baby.”
Then, with an unexpected bound, she did run ahead, leaping up at a low-hanging branch laden with blossoms, creating a fall of pink confetti all around us as I walked under the tree. We laughed, tipping our faces up as the petals floated down, all thoughts of dads forgotten. I had thought that the time would come again when she’d want to talk more, and next time she’d be older and I’d be better prepared, but it never did.
That was the only conversation in which he was ever mentioned to her, and it was all she ever asked. And yet I had the uneasy feeling that Mum had always been right about this, and that the quietness, the uncertainty in Caitlin, the shyness she hides so well behind the black eyeliner and hair, and the always-black clothes that she wears like a shield…it might all have come from that one ill-thought-out conversation. It might all be my fault. And that idea, the thought that the one thing I always thought I could be proud of—being her mother—might be untrue, fills me with horror. I’m going soon; I’m going and I need to make things right.
So this afternoon I pulled out a dust-filmed shoebox and found this letter, which I pasted into the book. It was folded around a photo of him holding my hand. Taken on a sunny day, we were both laughing, sitting on swings in the park, our fingers outstretched to claim the other’s, leaning toward each other in a concerted effort to remain connected, no matter how gravity and kinetic energy might try to pull us apart. I must have been just pregnant with Caitlin by then, not that I’d known it. Strange how quickly that determination to touch dissolved so absolutely, so quickly, into nothing. I tucked the letter and photo into the back of the book, and I waited for Caitlin to come down to dinner. That would be the right time, I decided. With everyone here who cares about her: Esther to make her smile, and Greg to offer her support. That would be the best time to set things right.
“Well, she can’t just turn up on his doorstep and find out that way, if that’s what you are thinking. Imagine it!” Mum raises a brow as she sets out a trio of objects around my memory book. I slide it off the table and hold it to my chest, feeling the chill of the fifty-cent coin against my skin.
“Of course I don’t think that,” I say softly, suddenly exhausted.
Mum stirs something, a sauce she’s made to go with the meat that’s in the oven. “I mean, think about her,” Mum says. “Think about what she is facing now. A dad might come in handy.”
This time, I don’t answer. Instead, I find myself resting my head against the book, laying my cheek on its uneven surface. I’ve run out of effort.
The front door opens, and I am grateful
to see Esther running in, clutching a bright-pink teddy bear, which must be a present from her other granny. Greg has been to his mother’s. She rarely comes here. She did not approve of her son’s aged wife even before I officially became a burden, and now she is distraught at his predicament. The sight of me does actually move her to tears. Greg did offer to take me along as well, and for a while it was a close thing: an afternoon with my mother, or his…. But in the end I chose my own. Better the devil you know.
“Look!” Esther shows me her bear, proudly. “I’m going to call him Pink Bear from Granny Pat.”
“How lovely,” I say, smiling over her head at Greg, and for a second we share a familiar joke. Esther’s literal soft–toy animal names are legendary. Lined up on her bed right now are, among others, Ginger-Colored Dog with One Eye, and Blue Rabbit That Smells a Bit Funny.
“I don’t know why it has to be a pink bear,” Mum says, regarding the creature scathingly as if it were Granny Pat herself. “Why is it that just because she is a little girl, she must have pink foisted upon her?”
“Pink is my favorite color!” Esther tells my mum, eyeing the food that Mum is putting into serving dishes. “It’s much nicer than blue or green, or yellow or purple, or something. Actually, I do like purple, and that really bright green, like grass. I like Granny Pat, but I don’t like broccoli or meat.”
The Day We Met Page 6