Remind Me Again What Happened

by Joanna Luloff

  When Charlie brought me back to Vermont from the hospital in Florida, Rachel unearthed some old photo albums that Charlie and I had apparently forgotten to pack when we moved away. She apologized for never having sent them to us, and explained that over time she had forgotten about them. It was only when we were leaving the hospital, and the doctor had suggested that photos might help unleash some memories, that Rachel had remembered the albums. One of them had actually belonged to my parents and was filled with images from their childhood, and seeing them, I remember the stories they told me about growing up. This is the album that Charlie has chosen to bring to Dr. Stuart’s office.

  My mother told me stories about her grandmother Viv, who was an avid fisher. Before her family left Latvia and moved to Queens, she had kept her brothers company in the early-morning hours as they fished the local lakes for pike. Viv was in charge of curing the fish once they got home, and my mother told me that Viv’s hands had been hardened with salt and cold air and had been pricked by too many fish bones and that she had taken to wearing gloves even when she was inside. I remember her touching my skin only once with her bare hands, my mother told me, and it was like being touched by granite. My mother told me that when she was a small girl, Viv would take her fishing at Howard Beach in Queens. They would stand together on the pier, her grandmother sturdy and stoic, while my mother grew bored and entertained herself by watching the planes take off from and land at Idlewild Airport, just on the other side of the beach.

  Here is a picture of my great-grandmother Viv, bundled up in her black winter coat, perpetually in mourning for her first child, a son lost on the crossing between the old country and the new. She carried a simple fishing pole and a tackle box of fresh worms and, on occasion, a shucked clam, and she planted herself on the pier, where she would stand, patiently, for hours at a time. My mother told me that she had never known anyone with the patience of her grandmother. Even on the murky, bleak days of late winter, she would tromp out to that pier, a beaten slab of concrete jutting out into the bay, and claim her favorite spot.

  She hated the local herring in the New York delis, Viv used to tell my mother. So instead she would fish for her own catch on the piers near her home. She complained that the fish weren’t the happy fish of her childhood, that the striped bass and occasional flounder she was lucky enough to catch were “sad city fish.” She would bring the fish home to my grandfather, who humored her and ate the smoked city fish without complaint. My mother was absolutely forbidden to eat the fish, though. When her mother would drop her off with Viv for the day, she would make my mother promise not to eat anything her mother had hauled out of that disgusting water. Complain that you have a stomachache or just tell them you aren’t hungry, she was advised. That water is filthy, her mother warned, and filled with pollution. You’ll spring a third eye if you eat her fish.

  My mother told me that she was ashamed whenever she had to turn down her grandmother’s fish. She would have to sit at the table, stomach churning with hunger, and pretend she didn’t want any of the fish or bagels or potato salad or pastries that her grandparents gobbled up in front of her. She felt terrible for lying to her grandmother, and as far as she could tell, her grandparents were still healthy, a bit hunched and wrinkled like all the old people she knew, but neither of them had a third eye or glowed green, and they weren’t losing their hair any more than normal. But whenever she complained to her mother, she was warned: Who knows what’s happening on the inside. You might not sprout a third eye, but perhaps your children will. That was all it took, my mother told me, adding “And you should be pleased, Claire, that I followed my mother’s advice. Your two eyes are perfectly placed in the middle of your lovely face.”

  Now, telling this story to Dr. Stuart, I can hear my mother’s voice more clearly than my own. I know her grandmother’s story with more certainty than I know what I ate for dinner two nights ago. I know that I have mourned my mother for over twenty years, but telling these stories makes the loss feel all too immediate. I try not to cry in front of Dr. Stuart or in front of Charlie. If I do, Charlie will start to get worried, thinking I’m overdoing it, and Dr. Stuart will tell me to take a break, which is exactly what I don’t want to do. When I tell these stories, I finally feel as if it’s my own voice coming out, alongside my mother’s and father’s. I take a deep breath and Dr. Stuart tells me to go on.

  When my mother and her parents moved away from the city to Massachusetts, she was given a pig to raise. Her family had relocated to a small town outside Springfield, where her father found work at Hasbro and would often bring home sample board games for his family to try out. Even though their evenings were filled with games and the buzz of a new job, my mother missed the city and was having trouble making friends, so her mother signed her up for 4-H. My mother told me that the day she knew she was going to be okay was the day she was introduced to Sunshine, her very own pig.

  Sunshine had to be fed twice a day. I think my mother thought of Sunshine more as a pet dog than a pig. She had been told that pigs need to exercise to produce lean muscle, so my mother had made a special leash for her new ward and, much to the farmer’s amusement, took Sunshine on walks through the fields and even sometimes along the dirt road that wound toward town. My mother used to hide her head in her hands when she told me these stories about Sunshine and the walks the two of them would take. “I don’t know what I was thinking,” she told me. “I’m sure I hadn’t really let it sink in that, at some point, Sunshine was heading to a fate of bacon and pork loin. And I sure don’t know what my parents were thinking,” she added. “They had given me my first new friend in Springfield, and one day in the not too distant future I was going to have to murder him. If I ever do something so dumb to you,” she would say to me midstory, “you have to tell me. And then give me a quick, swift kick in the backside.”

  The pig had done the trick: my mom had started to make friends through the 4-H club; she was less sullen and mopey around the house; she took more interest in the games her father brought home for the family to play. But when my mom learned that Sunshine was scheduled to be slaughtered about six months after they had met, she ran away from home. To be more precise, she kidnapped her pig, and the two of them set off on the road to who knows where. My mom confessed to me that she had no idea what she was doing—she was only ten years old—but she knew she had to protect her best friend. She had packed a backpack and filled it with apples and bread and cereal and carrots, an extra sweatshirt, her pajamas, a toothbrush, and a Nancy Drew book. She broke into a shed, tied Sunshine up in one corner, fed him some apples, and settled in for the night. It was the flashlight she was using to read her book that revealed her location the following night. “The policeman was quite nice to me,” my mother said. “He put Sunshine and me in the backseat of his patrol car and dropped us both off at my parents’ house. My mother wouldn’t speak to me for about two weeks, but my dad bought Sunshine from the farmer and helped me build an enclosure for him in our backyard. The pig died during my first week of college.”

  I tell this story to Charlie and Dr. Stuart and explain that my mother used to bring out the Sunshine narrative whenever I was feeling low or lonely. As I explain all of this, Charlie looks at me like I’m crazy. “Did all of this really happen, Claire?” he asks. I know it’s impossible for him to understand how I can’t remember our honeymoon but I can remember the intricacies of my mother’s childhood stories. I don’t know how to explain it to him or to myself. When I look at these photographs, I can hear my mother’s voice. Her memories are clearer than my own. Even if I couldn’t find most of my own memories in my misfiring brain, my parents’ stories seemed perpetually available.

  Dr. Stuart jumps in. “This is one of the mysteries of brain damage and memory loss,” he explains. “Certain moments can be recalled as clearly as if you were watching a movie, but another year might be irretrievable.” He smiles and Charlie frowns. I choose to ignore them both and continue with the next photographs. I
feel in control when I look at my old photo albums. Charlie can’t tell me I’m wrong; he never knew my parents. I don’t even know if he’s ever heard these stories before. I think that, maybe, being forced to listen to me will do us both good. And so I turn to my father.

  My father’s parents pursued their courtship in Atlantic City. Rose and Harry, and Harry’s cousin Lenny and his wife, Mildred, would leave the city once every couple of months for a journey to New Jersey, to the boardwalks and the fancy restaurants. Lenny and Mildred had a lot more money than my grandfather ever did, but they saw themselves as not only the young couple’s chaperones but also their cultural guides to all things cosmopolitan and snazzy. Even after Rose and Harry were married, the two couples made a habit of traveling to Atlantic City a few times every year. In these photos, Rose and Mildred pose in front of their favorite restaurant, Captain Starn’s.

  My father loved these photos of his mother. He told me that it had driven his father crazy, the fact that Rose was exposing so much of her leg for all the world to see. My grandmother was always very proud of her legs, my father told me, and Harry was a very jealous man. After my father was born, his parents used to take him to Captain Starn’s. “Sometimes I thought their greatest pleasure was watching me eat,” he told me. “And this place was all about abundance. The restaurant was a very grand place with a raw bar that extended the length of an enormous banquet hall. My mother would fill my plate with clams and mussels and shrimp and oysters, and then, once we were seated, in would come the lobsters. The waiter would pop the cork of some expensive champagne and Lenny would toast the table and claim my father as a shared son. Lenny and Mildred never had any children of their own.

  “I think my mother hated the way Lenny and Mildred would ply me with gifts that she and my father couldn’t afford. She worried that they were claiming me, that I was somehow owed to them since Lenny and Mildred had facilitated my parents’ courtship. They had paid for their wedding, or most of it, I think,” my father continued. “My father’s father had been dead for years, and he was the youngest of five siblings. Lenny had taken him under his wing. It took me a long time to realize that my mother hated them. I was more preoccupied by the lazy sea lions that glided along in their pens outside the restaurant. While my parents and cousins finished their champagne, I was allowed to walk the boardwalk and visit the sea lions and porpoises or gawk at the seaplanes that would come in for a landing right outside the restaurant.”

  My father was also a dislocated New Yorker when he met my mother in Springfield. They met in ninth grade, four years after my mother had run away with her pet pig, and one year after my father left Brooklyn. Their fathers worked together and liked to sing the praises of a nice, robust lawn, quiet streets where the kids could play, and space, lots of space. But there were grandparents to visit, and after my father and mother’s parents became friends, they decided it would be safer for their children to travel to New York on the bus together, when their parents couldn’t join them for the journey, and so my parents fell in love on the Greyhound buses between Springfield and New York City. They were only fourteen years old. This still seems impossible to me.

  My father loved to take me to the aquarium. Perhaps it was all those days spent out on the boardwalk of Atlantic City, the playful porpoises and sea lions of his youth. Every now and then, he would pack me up in the car, we’d wave to my mother, who hated zoos of any kind, and head off to Boston, where we’d stare at the harbor seals, swimming in the entrance-area tanks, for so long that sometimes we’d forget to buy our tickets into the main part of the aquarium. “The only thing I wish we had out in Springfield, Claire, is the ocean. You should always try to live near the ocean, if you can,” my father said.

  As I look at these images, I think about our house here in Vermont. I know it is beautiful here. From the little shards of memory I have, I know I love the lushness of the forests that surround our home, and I love the gentle landscape that rolls and meanders as you travel south from Burlington. But the sea isn’t close by, and I wonder if my father would be disappointed to find me living here. I wonder what he’d make of Charlie, who admits to being frightened of the ocean and prefers to keep his feet on solid, earthly ground.

  I look now at Charlie, who is fidgeting in his chair. I know he doubts all of what I’m saying, which gives me all the more reason to keep turning these pages. If he would only listen closely, he might learn a little something more about me too. When I encounter these pictures, it’s not only my parents’ stories I’m remembering; it’s how they told me to live my life.

  This is my father and his best friend, Robbie. Their mothers took them one summer to the Adirondacks, where they visited a historic site that reenacted scenes of life in the French settlements of colonial Canada and northern New York and Vermont. It was one of those places where you might duck into a shed and meet a blacksmith, who, dressed in colonial garb, would lecture you on the art of crafting horseshoes in the early eighteenth century. Or perhaps a milkmaid might greet you at the stable and lead you in an awkward demonstration where she would milk a cow and then churn the milk into butter and cream. Or perhaps, if you were really lucky, you’d show up on a day when there was a reenactment of one of the battles of the French and Indian War. I often look at this picture and wonder who the man standing to the right of Robbie is. What sort of colonial was he? I feel sorry for my father because I can’t imagine this visit coincided with any sort of exciting battle reenactments. I think he must have stood and listened to this costumed man ramble on and on about the fur trade or fishing in nearby Lake Champlain.

  In this photo, my father wouldn’t have known that in another few years’ time he’d be moving away from the city, that he’d have to say good-bye to Robbie and his other friends. His new home would resemble the woodsy landscape of the Adirondacks, and perhaps his new neighborhood would feel just as removed from his previous life as the colonial reenactments had seemed during his visits to Fort Ticonderoga.

  I used to wonder why my parents never wanted to move back to the city. It’s possible that they settled into the peaceful life and slower pace of our little town, that they wanted me to feel safe and protected and have woods to explore and nature trails to wander and apples to pick during the autumn. But I remember the excitement that would gather in the house when my father was taking me to the aquarium or my mother was taking me into Boston for a shopping adventure. At those times, I always sensed a longing in them to be someplace else. Somewhere bigger and filled with surprises.

  My father loved walking through the city. He would grab my hand when we left the aquarium, and we would spend the rest of the day wandering. Through the North End into Chinatown, across the Common and the Public Garden, down Commonwealth Avenue, across the bridge into Cambridge. He would point out MIT and then Harvard, where we might finally sit and eat some ice cream at Brigham’s. Coffee ice cream for my dad, strawberry for me. My mother liked the subway. She loved studying a map, figuring out where we would have to exit a trolley and enter a new train car, heading off in a different direction. “I know it’s strange and a little, well, gross,” she said to me once, “but I love the smell of the subway. I like that warm air that puffs out of the grates and reminds you that you’re in the city.”

  After my mother died, my father stopped traveling. He never wanted to be far from our house because I think he still sensed my mother’s presence there. We had boxed up most of her belongings, donating the clothes that I wasn’t keeping to the Salvation Army, but my father insisted on keeping a few of her things on the bathroom counter (her perfume, her contact lens case), on the nightstand (the book she hadn’t finished reading—Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale), in the garage (a pair of hiking boots). When I left for college, my father promised to come visit, but it was always me returning to him. And I returned to a diminished version of my father. He was shrinking by the month as I found myself wanting to take up more and more space.

  As I’m telling the stories
behind the photos, I’m also trying to remember my own. I think I moved to the city to get closer to my parents’ memories and stories, and I couldn’t get enough of the busy streets, the honking traffic, and the anonymity of the bustle around me. I remember fragments—taking long walks from Brookline to Chinatown and hunting for bargains in the overflowing bins of Filene’s Basement. I imagine that I worked hard at school and got good at listening to other people’s stories. I wrote for the student paper, I went to football games, I drank beer with arrogant boys, and I must have wished I could tell my mother and father about all these things. Eventually I would have Rachel, and later Charlie, to share my stories with. There are so many memories in my addled brain; they’re just not the ones that Charlie is particularly interested in hearing anymore.

  When I look up, Dr. Stuart is scribbling notes into my chart and Charlie is staring down at his hands. He won’t look at me. Apparently I have made him angry, and again, I have no idea why. Did I speak out my thoughts in the midst of my narrations? I suddenly can’t remember.

  Dr. Stuart glances at Charlie, then at me, and must sense that something is wrong. “Charlie,” he says, “why don’t you get some air? Maybe a coffee? It’s hot in here, isn’t it? I’ll crack a window and have a little chat with Claire.”

  Charlie follows Dr. Stuart’s orders (and for a moment, I’m pleased to see him having to do what I do every day) and leaves us.

  “He is angry with me because I can remember all these things from my childhood, but I don’t remember the things that are important to him,” I tell Dr. Stuart.

  “Perhaps not angry, Claire. Maybe frustrated or sad. It’s understandable, don’t you think?”