“That house you remembered,” she says, turning back to her daughter. “I wasn’t there with you in it. Rory was—just for a week—you were there for the summer. You were thirteen the last time you went.”
“The last time? There were others?”
Indira exhales and nods. “A few others. I can’t recall exactly—two, three.” Four, she thinks, knowing full well how many.
“And that last one? Why was it the last?”
“That was the summer your father left us.”
Nell furrows her brow, absorbing this. “Jamie told me that he left in the fall.”
“Does it matter?” Indira says.
“Yes,” Nell answers. “Yes, of course it matters.”
Indira knows that it matters, too, but still she hedges. “It was all very complicated. That time. That time in our marriage. He left and came back, left and came back. Finally, he just left.”
Indira doesn’t tell her of that last summer, when Nell had been given the choice—stay with Indira and Rory—go to day camp and spend lazy evenings in the pool or chasing butterflies or pressing out lemonade—or join him on the farm down there. Her farm. Heather’s farm. And Nell made her choice, clear as glass.
She doesn’t share now that Nell didn’t even hesitate when Indira sat her down in June with a double scoop of ice cream and explained that Daddy would be moving out, and she longed for her to stay behind, but that he longed for her to go with him. Not even an iota of hesitation. Indira doesn’t talk about his demons, how he tried to remove himself when those combustible bouts hit, but that depression was a tricky beast—as were the beasts he fed his depression with whenever it got bad: cocaine, booze, opiates. She doesn’t say that she thought the kids were oblivious to it until everything crystallized later, as it regrettably does sometimes with parenting. That the kids, of course, weren’t oblivious at all. Nor does she speak of the strange mix of pride and shame she felt—still feels—for enduring it, for sticking with him until he opted to no longer stick with her. That the broken lamps, the shattered plates, the wineglasses against the wall—that maybe part of Indira still thinks that this was simply passion, even though a very needling part of her knows that this is among the worst of the untruths she tells herself. But Francis created his best work at his lowest moments, and the immature seed in Indira still can’t free herself from the satisfaction this knowledge brings her. That she was there for the war, and that from that war came something beautiful.
“So, anyway, with all due respect, Mom,” Nell says, snapping Indira to, “I don’t give a shit about your marriage. I want to know about the house.”
Indira tries not to look relieved at this, because there are too many things that she doesn’t want to explain, to dredge up, things that she thinks neither of the girls can possibly remember—though before her accident, yes, maybe Nell knew. Definitely Nell knew, though the two of them, mother and daughter, had both spent a decade pretending that Nell didn’t know anything at all.
Indira sips her tea as calmly as possible, hoping that her quivering fingers don’t betray her.
“Yes, the house.” That’s an easier question to answer. “The house is in Charlottesville. Virginia.” She clarifies because she can never remember just what Nell has retained: facts, states, statistics, or if that’s all gone, too.
“Why there?”
Indira clears her throat and wonders how much of a nonanswer she can provide while still providing enough of one. “That’s where your father lived. That’s where he lived the other half of his life. That’s where he lived his life without us.”
12
“Eleanor Rigby”
—The Beatles
So, today, we’re going to do some free association,” Liv says from the armchair in my living room.
“Okay.” I shrug.
“I don’t want you to think about anything before you speak. I want to tap directly into that emotional wall, see what comes over it—or under it—before your brain kicks in.”
“Emotional wall? Explain the metaphor, please.”
“I’m sorry.” She waves her fingers, and I notice that her light pink polish is chipped. That if you don’t look closely, she’s immaculate—sleek pants, fitted cashmere sweater—but she’s more than that, too: the chipped polish and the dog hair on her shins make her likable, human. “It’s a term I use to describe the dams we build around ourselves. Our safe havens. Though sometimes these havens do more harm than good. Sometimes, they block us from getting to the really good stuff. The real emotional core.”
“Gotcha.”
“So just…the first thing that comes to mind, just spit it out.”
“That’s generally how I work these days, anyway,” I say, and she smiles, so I smile, and I feel the knot in the crevasse of my right shoulder blade untangle ever so slightly. It’s been there, wedged in, for the forty-eight hours since we returned from my mother’s.
“In some ways, perhaps that’s gratifying—the living-in-the-moment experience,” Liv says.
“Well, I’m trying to be different, intentionally or not.”
“How so?”
“Less buttoned-up, I guess. More…open. More fabulous.”
“Fabulous?”
“I know it sounds silly. I feel this pressure to take this chance and do things differently. I…well, I have this image of myself—like…Rachel from Friends.” I immediately regret saying it, chiding my immaturity. I want the laugh track!
“Rachel from Friends.” She grins. If she’s laughing at me, she doesn’t give it away. “How so?”
“Just…carefree. Without the problems that my dysfunctional family has wrought. Well, really, without all of my problems, period.” The clothes! The apartment! The love life! I want that, I need that. I promised myself back in the hospital.
“That doesn’t seem unreasonable,” she says, “though I wonder if you find it strange—that a difficult tragedy might actually be an improvement to where you were before.” I eye her. I can see now how she might trick me into thinking she’s my friend when, really, there’s no doubt that she’s my therapist. Dr. Macht picked wisely, it seems, in assigning the two of us to each other.
“It’s not the change that is the most difficult,” I say. “The change is actually the best part about it. It’s the constant surprises. Like these paintings I found of mine. Or the playlist—The Best of Nell Slattery.”
“The Best of Nell Slattery?”
“My sister made a playlist, filled with all the bands of my old life. I guess I took music pretty seriously for a while there.” I reach for the iPod on the coffee table, scrolling through its files. “Did you know that I was named for a Beatles song?” I flick my chin toward her notes. “Is that in there? That my father insisted on naming me for a Beatles song that’s about the loneliest woman in the world?”
“No, that’s not in my file.” Her eyes are kind when she says this.
I answer her by pressing play, the living room echoing with Paul McCartney.
“Eleanor Rigby died in a church and was buried along with her name. Nobody came.”
I hit stop. Enough to make my point.
“My sister put the song on there, on the playlist. And I listen to it, and I just think, What sort of parent would do this to a child? Like, what’s the weight of that inheritance?” I smile, despite myself. “My mom swears that this isn’t entirely true—that yes, he loved the song, but mostly, he loved the name, but still. Even the idea, even the instinct to maybe pay an homage to this woman—Eleanor Rigby—well, no wonder I didn’t love my life.”
“So you didn’t love your life?”
I set the iPod back down. “No, that’s probably too strong a statement. I don’t even know if I loved my life. But all signs are pointing toward no. Toward the fact that I was moving through it, not”—I pause, considering—“not embracing it, I guess.”
“And, to bring this back to the state of constant surprise, this discovery has unsettled you?”
&
nbsp; “The discovery about the song that named me or the discovery about my sad-sack life?”
“Whichever.” She flips up the palm of her hand.
“Well, mostly it makes me wonder what else he’s done. What other surprises there are, that’s all. Like, if I can’t understand where I came from, how can I anticipate what else there is?”
“The weight of your inheritance,” she says, writing something down. “The famous father, the expectations of you.”
“All of that,” I say, watching her scribble.
“And how does this make you feel? Angry, resentful, sad?”
I suck on the inside of my cheek and stare out the living room window. There’s a siren whirling from somewhere down below that I only just now notice. The sky is overcast, ominous-looking, a warning that summer won’t last forever, and a helicopter cuts through the clouds, there for a moment, then out of sight.
“I guess mostly it makes me feel lost. Though that’s not particularly revelatory. Take someone’s memory away and really, what’s left? I’m sure there is space for anger or sadness or whatever, but who knows what I really feel?” I inhale. “You know, it’s strange for me to be talking to you. Because we’re really more or less strangers, although you’ve read my file. You know a lot about me.”
“I know about as much about you as you know about you,” she says. “Which is to say, what can be written down in a file.”
“Not the important stuff,” I offer.
“No, not the important stuff.” She agrees.
“I would maybe feel a little bit more at ease if I knew something about you, too.”
She smiles. “That’s not really how this works, Nell.”
“One thing,” I say. “One thing so it won’t feel so obvious that I’m sitting here talking to a shrink. That I might be talking to an old friend, someone who has known me forever.” I gesture to her pants. “You have a dog.”
She hesitates for a moment. “I do. A yellow Lab.”
“Tell me one thing you like to do with your dog. That’s it. One thing so I can picture it and think of you as a person, and that will be that.”
She inhales, debating it. “Fine, fair enough. On the weekends, I like to take him early to the dog run, the one over here by the museum. I sit and read the paper, and we don’t leave until I’ve read every last section. We both love it.”
I envision it: her in a dog run in my neighborhood that I can’t remember but is there all the same. I can see her in a tank top and shorts, folding over her crinkling paper, her dog at her feet. Like any friend of mine might do, not a hospital-issued therapist who is here to help me prove that the wires of my mind haven’t permanently misfired.
“Thank you,” I offer.
She nods. “So…do you want to talk more about your weekend or just go ahead with the free association?”
“How about if I start with a combination of them both, if I throw some free association words out to you about the weekend. For starters: awkward—that one was from when I opened the door on Peter, naked, just getting out of the shower; infuriating—that one was from when I realized that my mom knew about the house I remembered and didn’t admit it; reverential—that one was from when I sat in the dining room and stared at my father’s portrait of my mother that still hangs over the buffet and realized just how goddamn good he was. And that part was also heartbreaking—that I can’t remember him, and…well also, there was creepy—that my mom has her own portrait, drawn by her ex-husband, in her dining room.”
Liv smiles sympathetically. “And maybe a little indulgent.”
“My mother is nothing if not indulgent. Not at all like me.”
“Not at all like you?”
“What’s the opposite of indulgent?” I ask, searching for the word, my eyes floating up to the ceiling.
“Austere?” she suggests.
I let it sink in, see if it sticks, resonates.
“You think I was austere?” I say, really more to myself than to her.
“I didn’t know you then. I only know what you’ve told me. You’ve mentioned this in one of our early sessions—how different you and your mother are.”
I shake my head. I don’t remember saying this, though I may very well have.
“It’s a strange thing to focus on, don’t you think?” I ask. “That of the many things I could gravitate toward—of my failing marriage, of my miscarriage, of how lost I feel because of the amnesia—that I told you about my mom?”
“I won’t quote Freud here, but a lot of who we are is defined by our families,” Liv says. “Until we choose it not to be. If we can choose it not to be.”
“So you think it’s a choice, their influence, the way I intuitively react to my mom?”
“I think that everything that’s within our control is a choice,” she says.
“And what of the things that aren’t?” I don’t need to add in: like my brain, like my memory. “How do we choose when we can’t control them?” I sulk for a moment and stare at the clock on the cable box.
“That’s not my question to answer,” she says after a beat. “That’s yours.”
The last word that Liv had asked me to explore in our free association exercise, to throw whatever thoughts against the wall, was love, and for reasons that I still can’t explain several hours later when Peter has come through the door, I answered, “Beige.” And then I started laughing—cackling really, because “beige,” in the context of love, makes absolutely no sense. Until Liv let the air hover between us, silence clinging to the walls in the living room, and suddenly it made too much sense, and then gobsmacked me like a tsunami of depression that “beige” is how I would describe love.
Once I started to cry, really, really purging my guts out bawling, Liv interjected, offering me a tissue and asking what about my answer had made me so very sad.
I couldn’t finger it exactly, what it was. The Beatles were still stuck in my head, and I couldn’t shake those lyrics, the melody running through me like my own blood. So I told her that I had a sense of emotional memory, as silly as that sounded. She assured me that it didn’t sound silly at all, but all the same, I felt self-conscious about how pretentious I sounded until she urged me to continue. That she wouldn’t judge me. I thought of her in the dog run and that maybe we would have been friends in another life, so I told her.
I told her about how when I think of Peter, and then, when I really focused and thought about my dad, what struck me most was the general ambivalence that rises up within me. That I can’t remember a single anecdote about my father, and yet still, in my core, there is this beigeness. For lack of a better word, I said, and she nodded because she got it. Like something has been cut out, like I’m not allowed to feel anything, so I choose to feel indifference.
“I’d like to feel red,” I said, and her forehead wrinkled. “What I mean is, I’d like for my first association with love—whether with my husband or with my father—to be passionate, fulfilled. That should be part of my promise to be this new self.”
“Love ebbs and flows,” she said. “There can’t be hot without being cold.”
“I know that. Of course, I mean, I know that.”
“But marriages do survive affairs,” she counseled. “It’s a question of forgiveness from one party and repentance from the other.”
“But that’s just it,” I said. “The forgiveness part is both easy and hard—I can’t remember what he did, other than what he’s told me. And yet, I also have no history on which to rely to give me the faith to keep going.”
“So how about you stop analyzing it?” She shifted in the armchair.
“Stop analyzing it? I’m an analyzer: that’s what everyone says. I can’t stop. That’s what I do.”
“But you’ve admitted you want to be different, so why not try a different tactic?”
“Like…just…what? Living it?”
“Well, why not?” She shrugged, though I knew this wasn’t a casual suggestion. “Why not—for one w
eek—just try to live day to day and see how you feel about that, see if it jars anything for you, and see if, for lack of a better word, as you said, it helps distill this beigeness.”
“It seems too easy.”
“It won’t be the cure,” she promised. “But for this particular aspect of your recovery, it may be helpful to tap into your emotional well, to see if we can get past the wall of ambivalence.”
“Like that might then trigger something else?”
“Like, in the spirit of living in the moment, that might at least give you a different answer when I ask you about love next week.”
“Small steps,” I said.
“Small steps,” she said. “Let’s learn to walk before we can run.”
13
By Friday, I have lived in enough moments that my brain has almost stopped its endless flurry of splintering feedback. Liv prescribed a sleeping pill that has helped smooth those sharp edges, and for four nights I have fallen deeply into slumber, unable to remember my dreams the next morning. I’m well rested in a way that I haven’t been since the accident. I press back my irritation when my mother sends me a yoga mat and homemade gluten-free cookies via FedEx, manage a mostly cheery response when Samantha hesitantly shares the news of a friend’s impending baby shower, abort a malignant thought when Peter’s text-message alert goes off while he’s standing in the kitchen—the idea of Ginger fleeing as quickly as it comes. By Labor Day weekend—nearly a month since I’ve been back home—I’m surprised at how easily I have taken to it: shoving it all aside and simply being, how it might actually be a choice: to embrace a different color in the spectrum of the rainbow.
Liv and my doctors at Mount Sinai Hospital have given me the go-ahead for sex.
“Anatomically,” Dr. Hewitt, head of my new team tells me, “you’re A-OK.” Like she’s a pediatrician, and I’ve beaten a case of the sniffles. “If you’d like to engage with your husband, you won’t do yourself any harm.”
“Psychologically,” Liv said before she left on Tuesday, “it might be a positive step in the right direction for you guys to reconnect—though only if that feels right. There’s no rush.”
The Song Remains the Same Page 11