Remembrance of Things I Forgot: A Novel

by Bob Smith

  “Good idea,” Junior said.

  We stopped at the next pay phone we saw, outside of a bar called the Dram-Buoy. After dialing a zillion numbers to pay with a credit card, the desk clerk at the motel picked up. When I asked for room 342, she said, “They just checked out an hour ago.” I asked her who had checked out. She described a middle-aged man wearing eyeglasses. I asked how his mood was. Without any hesitation, she replied, “Nasty as piss.”

  I felt sick. It had to be Young Dick. Cheney should have been tied up in Elena’s room for another five hours. I became concerned for our friends and hoped no one had been hurt. I wished again that we hadn’t tried to prevent Bush from becoming president, especially since it seemed we were directly responsible for putting him in office. If any of my friends back in 2006 discover my culpability in making him our commander-in-chief, I will rightfully be shunned, I thought. And New Yorkers are always willing to put their cold shoulders to the wheel to let an idiot know that no one can stand him.

  I hung up the phone. Junior glanced at my face. “What’s wrong?”

  “No one’s there.”

  “Did they leave?”

  “I’m not sure. Cheney dropped off the room key.”

  Junior started to chew a thumbnail, and I tried to think of what to do next. Taylor knew where we were headed, and I had no doubt Young Dick would now be as amenable to getting information by “enhanced interrogation” as he would be as vice president. We didn’t have much time. He could be in Crescent City in a few hours. I looked around to see if we were being watched as we got back in the car.

  Carol and her husband, Ed, lived on the northern edge of town in a small development filled with three-bedroom ranch-style saltboxes. I immediately recognized Carol’s old ’50s Chevy pickup parked in her driveway and felt that I was dreaming. I was going to see Carol again and was overcome with sensations of happiness, anxiety, and physical exhaustion, but the mix made me feel strangely numb. She’d bought her truck after high school, repainted it copper, recovered the bench-style front seat, then learned from our father how to maintain the engine. She used to pick up our eighty-year-old grandmother, who had to climb up to hop in the cab, and run errands with her. Carol was the one who informed me that our grandmother, who never learned to drive a car, did know how to drive a tractor, since she grew up on a farm in Canada.

  I knew Ed was at work. He was an auto mechanic who started at seven, and his vocation had immediately endeared him to our father. We heard a dog barking from inside the house as we walked to the front door. I’d forgotten about her plump, hors d’oeuvre–sized mutt, Casey, who was part Chihuahua and part chorizo. He looked like a pig in a blanket skewered on four toothpicks.

  We rang the doorbell and heard Carol saying, “Casey, who’s that? Who’s that?” inciting him to bark more furiously. She opened the screen door, and Casey shot out, racing down the sidewalk and then circling back to wag his tail, bark incessantly, and scoot between Junior’s and my legs. Then he spotted Ravi and raced around him, occasionally leaping up to lick his face. Ravi stood still, patiently enduring the commotion.

  “Casey, calm down,” she said while following him out the door. She was back from the dead and this miracle left me in a state of incredulous gratitude. I felt remorseful that I’d almost forgotten she had once been a lovely young woman—tall, slim, and happy. She wore her long, straight brown hair parted in the middle, and her ever-present smile seemed as indelible as a birthmark. In her right hand were her truck keys, and she wore our father’s black satin bowling jacket. “Tom” was embroidered on the front, with “Niagara Lanes” on the back. My memories of her were of a time when she was forty pounds heavier and her smile was always a feint, an attempt to momentarily distract you from suspecting the depth of her misery.

  I waited on the sidewalk and watched Junior and Carol’s reunion. He hugged and kissed her on the cheek and then looked back and waved me forward. “Carol, this is Kurt.” She smiled warmly and shook my hand as she watched Casey go berserk.

  “If I let him,” she said, “he’ll run in circles until he literally gets dizzy.”

  “Nice to meet you,” I said, feeling unsure how to behave. Having foreknowledge of Carol’s death made me feel deceitful. Suddenly I understood why God’s not much of a talker; if you’re concealing that you know when someone’s going to die, most likely you’ll come off as a total phony.

  They immediately started conversing with the natural ease of two people who love each other, where every sentence feels as unremarkable as breathing. Carol asked, “How’s Mom?” and Junior told her about how she had suspected the brown unbleached coffee filters looked liked the white ones after they’re used. She laughed appreciatively and beamed at him. “How was the drive?” she asked before bending down to scoop Casey into her arms. Junior launched into how he loved the West, and Carol listened attentively. Until that moment, I never fully appreciated how glad Carol always was to see me. I was fond of telling a recent anecdote about my daughter Isabella. On my last visit to Santa Fe, when we went to pick her up at her preschool, she had been sitting on the steps. When she saw me, she became wide-eyed, stood up, and yelled, “John!” and then ran over and hugged my leg and wouldn’t let go. I said until then I’d never truly been welcomed before. I was wrong. Carol’s welcomes were the same—she didn’t cling to my thigh, but she did hang on to my every word.

  “And Dad?” she asked.

  “The same. Still disappointed he’s never been abducted by aliens.”

  “I can see Dad with little green men,” she said. “Within an hour, he’d be looking under the hood of the flying saucer and asking to fire their ray guns.”

  “Yeah,” Junior agreed, “and Mom would tolerate his friendship with them, but occasionally reveal her distaste by remarking, ‘Who wears clothes made out of aluminum foil? They look like baked potatoes.’”

  “Dad told me he’s trying to see if he can postpone his retirement,” Carol said. “He’s even talked to the police commissioner in Albany about it.”

  A spasm of concern crossed Junior’s face, but Carol was trying to get the squirming dog to settle down in her arms and she missed it.

  They discussed his chances of succeeding, which Carol admitted were small. “The rule’s the same for everyone. Out at fifty-seven.” She added jokingly, “I think he’s worried about being with Mom full time. I’m not sure I could handle that.”

  Observing Junior’s natural delight in talking to Carol—the matterof-fact familiarity, shared jokes, sudden tangents into a serious subject, discussed and then glossed over by an acerbic remark—made me conscious of how different I was from him. The disparity wasn’t our ages. Taylor had changed after 9/11, and now I could see that I had also changed after Carol’s death. Junior lacked my overall sense of hopelessness. There was no sign in him of the deep, mournful, unappeasable rage that consciously and probably unconsciously suffused every thought I had after her death, an anger taken out on the universe, Taylor, myself, and probably even on George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. Grief had turned my heart into an urn filled with ashes.

  Carol pointed out several recent improvements she’d made to her front yard. We followed her tour, and Junior appreciatively approved her paint color choices of a mossy gray for the house and forest green for the shutters. “It’s so damp up here,” Carol said, “that I decided everything should match the mildew.” The last thing she showed us was a small redwood tree she’d planted in the middle of the lawn. Junior looked skeptically at the evergreen stick stuck in a circle of dirt. “That’s impressive,” he commented. “That’s the tallest twig I’ve ever seen.”

  Carol smiled at his sarcasm. “After I’m gone,” she said, “I want to leave something behind that the new owners will resent. For the next thousand years.”

  The sun was trying to burn off the morning fog, but her comment made our smiles as misty as the air.

  “I’ve got to run to the supermarket,” she said. “I should’ve done it last night
after work, but I was too tired. You can go in the house and wait; it won’t take long.”

  “We’ll come with you,” I said. Junior yawned, making him look as exhausted as I felt, but I couldn’t wait for her in her house. We’d been given an unprecedented chance to spend time with someone whose death would shatter us; it was inconceivable that we would leave her side. I thought Junior might resent my volunteering him to tag along, but I recalled he hadn’t seen her for over a year. He chatted nonstop about how awesome the redwoods were as we piled into the front seat of her pickup. Pulling out of the driveway, she stopped and looked at me closely and then looked again at Junior. “If I didn’t know better, I’d swear you two were related.”

  Junior blushed and seemed at a loss for words. “We get that a lot,” I said.

  “I told him he’s welcome to try to join our family,” Junior said, “but our standards are high.”

  “That’s true,” Carol said as we headed down her street. “Do you drink too much and never turn down a bong hit?”

  “I’m a recovering alcoholic, although I almost fell off the wagon yesterday.”

  “That’s not good,” she said. “Long-term recovery automatically gets you blackballed. And you’re in too good of shape for a middle-aged man in our family.”

  “Yeah, but I’m gay. Shouldn’t that count as a separate category?”

  “We treat the gays just like everyone else,” she replied. “We expect you to be just as fucked up, although we do also expect you to be photogenic when you’re busted for DUIs.”

  “That’s a double standard.”

  Carol stared at me as if I were a simpleton.

  “Ask a woman with a big chin if life’s fair.”

  She assumed an air of grave solemnity. “This answer will decide it. So consider your response carefully.” She paused dramatically. “Are you mental?”

  “Completely.”

  “You’re in.”

  Junior commented on how foggy and cold it was for June in California. “It’ll burn off later,” Carol responded, shifting gears.

  He asked her how she liked living in Crescent City.

  “I love the summers,” she said while pulling into the parking lot of a Safeway. “But it’s hard to think every cloud has a silver lining when the sky’s gray for six months of the year.”

  Junior nodded sympathetically. “New Yorkers complain about their winters, but their winters are sunny and mild compared to Buffalo’s frost-bite-you-in-the-ass winters.”

  Carol grabbed her purse and before opening the door said, “For the first time in my life I understand that the best barometer for my mood is actually a barometer.”

  She’d said it flippantly, but I found her remark chilling. I’d always thought the perpetually overcast winter climate of coastal northern California contributed to the onset of her depression. Then she moved to New Jersey and she was doomed.

  Once inside the supermarket, Carol quickly filled a shopping cart and then got in line at a register with two carts ahead of us, instead of the register where there was only one customer waiting. “It’s shorter over here,” Junior said, pointing toward the other checkout lane. Carol shook her head vigorously and put a finger to her lips to shush him. “I know what I’m doing,” she whispered. She removed a thick stack of shopping coupons bound by a yellow rubber band from her handbag. I noticed a six-dollar diaper coupon topped the bundle, which was strange. Carol didn’t have any children.

  The cashier was a sullen, lanky, teenage boy with a greasy mop of dark hair. His wispy, unattractive mustache made it hard to believe he had deliberately cultivated facial hair, although it was equally hard to suppose he’d missed shaving the same spot three days in a row. Carol handed him the stack of coupons. “Do you go by Josh or Joshua?” she asked cheerfully. His nametag said “Joshua.”

  “Josh,” he replied as he rang up the coupons.

  “How long have you worked for Safeway?”

  “Not long.”

  “Are you still in high school?”

  “No.”

  “Were you on the football team?”

  “No.”

  He didn’t have the build to play badminton, let alone football, I thought.

  “Do you have a girlfriend?”

  “No.”

  Each of her questions received a curt response, and I wondered why she persisted in trying to converse with someone who clearly didn’t want to talk to anyone.

  “Nineteen eighty-seven,” he said after ringing up her order and subtracting the value of the coupons. We had eight bags of groceries and a case of beer to carry out to the truck. I tried to figure out if spending twenty dollars for that amount of groceries was a good deal back in 1986.

  Once we were out the door of the supermarket, Carol was ecstatic. “I’m glad you didn’t say anything. We got over a hundred dollars of groceries for less than twenty! You see, Safeway gives double coupons, and I use every coupon I find in the paper. I always shop either very early in the day or late at night, and I always have my order rung up by a male cashier. They hate their jobs. No man can take pride in being a cashier, and early in the morning or late at night they’re tired and they just ring up every coupon because they don’t give a shit. And I always ask them questions. The last thing they want to do is talk about themselves; they want to just disappear rather than bring any attention to their lives. So they ring me up fast because they want to get rid of me.”

  “That’s brilliant,” Junior said. “I saw the diaper coupon and thought, Why the hell did she cut that out?”

  “It’s worth twelve dollars with double coupons,” Carol said as we loaded up the truck.

  “What was your scam with Lane Bryant?” Junior asked.

  I had no memory of what he was talking about and was curious to hear how she ripped off the women’s plus-size fashion store. One of the benefits of time travel is that it makes you appreciate that if Proust’s In Search of Lost Time is seven volumes, that means our entire life must be a seventy-volume opus because we only remember a tenth of what happens. In ten years, you won’t remember the day the ink ran out on your pen when you were paying the electric bill. You won’t remember when exactly you left your keys in the apartment and had to buzz your neighbor to let you in. You won’t remember that on March 7, 1994, you ordered a tuna sandwich at a deli and they gave you toasted wheat even though you’d ordered rye. You won’t remember that on August 9, 2005, you saw a woman on the street with a large port-wine birthmark on her face and quickly averted your eyes to avoid embarrassing her. You won’t remember the shirt or socks you wore on April 9, 1998, and whether you had sex of any sort on February 22, 1977. By the time each of us dies, our lives have already been mostly forgotten, but each of us still authors a story we believe is nonfiction.

  Of course, Carol was different from me and remembered everything. She grinned nostalgically. “I used to carry a big bag and wear lots of baggy sweatshirts. I’d never smile and always try to look sad and ashamed when I asked the salesperson if they had this blouse in a size sixteen.” Carol whispered “sixteen” to indicate her show of mortification. “I’d try on several blouses and sweaters and wear them out of the store and return them for cash later. At Lane Bryant, no one would ever question a customer leaving a dressing room looking heavier than when she entered. It’s the best place to shoplift, because the sales people are so sympathetic.”

  Junior appeared to be thoroughly amused by her tale of larceny. I used to think Carol’s white-collar crimes were fun and games, a symptom of her restless intelligence, grifting suckers for a bit of fun. But after her death, Carol’s scheming seemed more troubling; the material gains from her swindles were never large enough to change the circumstances of her life, and they appeared to be desperate exercises to try to find a focus for a mind that was too intelligent for any job she ever worked. She almost seemed to be trying to outwit her own life.

  At Carol’s house, we carried in the groceries, and she asked if we wanted breakfast.
I was hungry, and so was Junior, and she offered to make us pancakes. Junior and I sat down on the large powder blue sofa while Carol made a pot of coffee and brought Junior a tall glass of orange juice. I looked around the immaculate room. There was a big TV along one wall with a recliner and sofa facing it. At the other end of the room were a small dining room table and six chairs. A framed poster from an Albright-Knox retrospective of Milton Avery hung in the dining area. Carol purchased it only after I encouraged her to buy it. One wall was covered with family photographs. I noticed both of our grandmothers were prominently featured. On a side table was the small hammered-copper picture frame I’d bought Carol for her eighteenth birthday. I’d found it at an antiques shop in Buffalo. The small round easel-style frame was an intricate arts and crafts design, more Wiener Werkstatte than Roycroft, made by Karl Kipp for his Tookay Shop in East Aurora in either 1914 or 1915. I thought it was the perfect gift for Carol. It was beautiful and had also been made in western New York. It had cost fifty dollars, which was a lot of money for me back then. Carol had placed a photograph of Buddy, our last family dog, in the frame. Buddy was wearing a pair of our father’s eyeglasses perched on his nose. When Carol died, her husband, Ed, had given it back to me.

  We needed to get on with trying to save Carol, but now that the moment had arrived, I didn’t know where to begin.

  “Carol, we need to talk to you.” I used that ponderous tone of voice that sounds the alarm that something unpleasant is sure to follow. Junior appeared to be confused and irritated.

  “Shouldn’t we wait a little?”

  “We might not have time. Either Cheney could show up.”

  Junior acquiesced but began to nervously rub the back of his neck. “This will sound unbelievable,” I warned before commencing the whole Junior = Me time-traveling story. It was a sign of how exhausted I was that I honestly couldn’t tell if my tale sounded more or less believable each time I told it. I skipped over explaining who Dick Cheney and George W. Bush were, since I knew Carol would refuse to believe that two men she wouldn’t have hired at any of her jobs would someday lead our country. Carol listened attentively without betraying either credence or skepticism. When I finished, she raised her eyebrows and smirked. “I hope my other relatives don’t start doubling up. I can’t handle two moms.”