Memoirs of a Teenage Amnesiac (2 page)

There’s a joke about amnesiacs, which always reminds me of meeting James. It’s not exactly a joke, but more a “funny” slogan you’d wear on a T-shirt if you were a) an amnesiac, and b) extremely corny, and c) probably had issues in addition to amnesia, like low self-esteem or the need to give “too much information” or just plain bad taste in clothes. Okay, picture a really cheap, fifty-percent-polyester jersey with a white front and red sleeves. Now add the words “Hi, I’m an amnesiac. Have we met before?”

“You know something funny?” I said. “The first thing I thought about you was what an honest voice you had, and it turns out you were lying to me.”

“No. Not to you. Only to some jerk in a uniform,” he corrected. “If I’d been thinking at all, I would have said you were my sister. No one would have even questioned that.”

“Except me. I don’t have any siblings.” I tried to make a joke of it. If given the choice, I preferred being his imaginary girlfriend to being his imaginary sister. “Are we friends, at least?”

“No, Naomi,” James said with the same little smile, “can’t say that we are.”

“Why not?” He seemed like the kind of person it might be nice to be friends with.

“Maybe we ought to be” was all he replied.

It was and it wasn’t a satisfactory answer, so I tried a different question. “Before, when you were shaking your head, what were you thinking?”

“You’re really gonna ask me that?”

“You have to tell me. I might die, you know.”

“I didn’t take you for the manipulative kind.”

I closed my eyes and pretended to pass out.

“Oh, all right, but that’s awful low,” he said with a resigned laugh. “I was wondering if I could get away with letting you think I was your boyfriend. And then I decided that would definitely be the wrong thing to do. It wouldn’t be fair—you don’t even know what year it is, for God’s sake. A good relationship is not built on lies and all that crap.

“And well, I also wondered if it would be wrong to kiss you—not on the mouth, maybe on your forehead or hand—while I had the chance, while you were still thinking you were mine. And I decided that would be very, very wrong and probably uncomfortable later on. Plus, a girl like you probably does have a boyfriend—”

I interrupted. “You think?”

James nodded. “Definitely. I don’t give a damn about him, but I didn’t want to compromise you…or take advantage. I decided that if I ever kissed you, I’d want your permission. I’d want—”

At that moment, my dad came into the ER.

James had been leaning over the side of the gurney railing, but he stood up straight like a soldier to shake Dad’s hand. “Sir,” he said, “I’m James Larkin. I go to school with your daughter.” But Dad pushed right past James to get to me, and James was left with his palm in the air, and I saw the four puncture wounds my nails had made from grabbing him so tight.

The doctors returned then, followed by a nurse, a specialist, and an orderly who began wheeling me away without even bothering to tell me where, and then I really had to throw up, and I didn’t want James to have to watch that (I didn’t want him to leave either), and somehow James slipped out without my seeing, which is something I would later find out he had a talent for.

Once I was admitted into a room, Dad passed the time by asking me if I was okay. “You okay, kid?”

“Yes, Dad.”

Five seconds later, “Kiddo, are you okay?”

In an amazing display of restraint, I managed to reply
Yes, Dad
three more times even though I had no earthly idea if I was. On the fifth or sixth time, I finally just snapped, “Where’s Mom?” She was better than Dad in these types of situations.

“In the city,” he said. He kept pacing the room and looking up and down the hallway. “Christ, is anyone ever going to help us?”

“Is she working?” Mom was a photographer and she sometimes had to go into New York City for that.

“Working?” Dad repeated. His head was sticking out the door like a turtle, but he pulled it back inside so that he could look at me. “She’s…She…Naomi, are you trying to worry me?”

“Dad, are you screwing with me?” Knowing my dad, this was not an unlikely scenario.

“
Screwing
with you?”

I assumed he hadn’t liked my use of the word
screw
, though Dad was not normally the sort of parent who cared much about swearing. He always said that words were words and the only reason to ever eliminate any of them was if they were either hurtful (and you weren’t meaning to be) or inexpressive. I figured that the anxiety of the situation must be getting to him, so I rephrased. “Sorry.
Playing
with me, whatever.”

“Are you screwing with
me
?” Dad asked.

“So you can use
screw
and I can’t? That doesn’t seem fair,” I protested.

“I don’t give a damn if you use the word
screw
, Naomi. But is that what you’re doing?”

“I’m not screwing with you! Just tell me where Mom is.”

“In N.Y.C.” It sounded like slow motion. EHNNNNN. WHYYYYY. SEEEEE. “New York—”

“City. Yes, I know what N.Y.C. stands for. But why?”

“She lives there. Since the divorce. You can’t have forgotten that.”

I’m sure you’ve already figured out that I had.

Everyone always says how much I look like her—my mom, I mean—which is ridiculous because she is half-Scottish and half-Japanese. We both have light blue eyes though, so I guess this accounts for the misunderstanding. No one ever says I look like Dad, which is ironic because he is actually part Russian. The rest of him is French, and all of him is Jewish, though he’s not observant. All this makes everyone sound much more interesting than they are—my mom’s really just a California girl, and my dad was born in D.C., and they met in college in New York City, where we used to live until I was eleven. If you’re a wine-drinking type, you might have heard of them. They wrote a series of travel memoirs/coffee table books called
The Wandering Porters Do
…and then fill in the blank with the exotic locale of your choice, somewhere like Morocco or Tuscany. My mom took the pictures, and my dad wrote the text, except for the occasional footnote by Mom. Her footnotes were usually something mortifying, like “2. At an Edam cheese factory, Naomi vomited in an enormous wooden clog.” Or “7. Naomi was particularly fond of the schnitzel.” As for my contribution, I made a series of increasingly awkward appearances in their author photo on the back jacket flap above the caption “When not wandering, Cassandra Miles-Porter and Grant Porter live in New York with their daughter, Naomi.”

That’s what popped into my head when Dad said they were divorced—all those Wandering Porter books and me as a kid on the back flap. In a strange way, I didn’t feel like their divorce was happening to me, certainly not the “me” in that moment, the person lying in the hospital bed. It was happening to that little girl on the book jackets. I felt sad for her, but nothing yet for myself.

“Did it just happen?” I asked.

“Did
what
just happen?”

“The divorce.”

“It’s been two years, eleven months, but we’ve been separated close to four years now,” Dad said. Something in his tone told me he probably knew the precise number of days, too. Maybe even minutes and seconds. Dad was like that. “The doctors, they said you weren’t sure of the year before, but…Well, do you think this is part of the same thing?”

I didn’t answer him. For the first time, I allowed for the possibility that I had forgotten
everything
from the last four years.

I tried to remember the last thing I could remember. This turns out to be an incredibly difficult task because your brain is constantly making new memories. What came to mind was uselessly recent: my blood on James’s collar.

I decided to make a more specific request of my brain. I tried to remember the last thing I could about my mother. What came to me was her “Sign of the Times” show, which was an exhibition of her photographs at a Brooklyn gallery. She picked me up on the last day of sixth grade, so that she could give me a private showing before anyone else got there. The show had consisted of her pictures of signs from around the country and the world: street, traffic, restaurant, township, movie theater, bathroom, signs that were painted over but you could still make them out, signs handmade by homeless people or hitchhikers, etc. Mom had this theory that you could tell everything about people (and civilization in general) from the kinds of signs they put up. For example, one of her favorite pictures was of a mostly rusted sign in front of a house somewhere in the backwoods. The sign read
NO DOGS NEGROS MEXICANS
. She said that, regardless of the rust, it had communicated to her clear as anything “to take the picture quick and get the hell out of town.” Most of her exhibit was more boring than that, though. As we were leaving, I told her I was proud of her because that’s what my parents always said to me whenever they came to see a dance recital or attended a school open house. Mom replied that she was “proud of herself, too.” I could remember her smiling just before she started to cry.

“So is Mom on her way, then?” I asked Dad.

“I didn’t think you’d want her here.”

I told him that she was my mother, so of course I wanted her.

“The thing is”—Dad cleared his throat before continuing—“I
have
called her, but since you haven’t really spoken to each other for a while, it didn’t seem right that she come.” Dad furrowed his brow. I noticed that he had less hair on his head than my brain was telling me he ought to have. “Do you want me to call her back?”

I did. I longed for Mom in the most primitive way, but I didn’t want to seem like a baby or not like myself, whatever that meant. And Mom and I not speaking? It seemed so unbelievable to me and like more than I could even begin to figure out in my current state. I needed time to think.

I told Dad that he didn’t need to call Mom, and his brow unfurrowed a wrinkle or two. “Well, that’s what I thought,” he said.

About a minute later, Dad clapped his hands together before taking his pad and pencil out of his back pocket. He always carried them in case he should be inspired. “You should make a list of everything you don’t remember,” he said, holding the pencil out to me.

Although my dad writes mainly books for a living, what he loves writing most are lists. Groceries, books he’s read, people he’s angry at, the list goes on. If he could write lists for money instead of books, I think he’d be a happier person overall. I once said that to him, and he laughed before replying, “What do you think a table of contents is, kid? A book is just a very detailed and elaborate list.”

My father is one of those people who believe that anything can be accomplished, the ills of the world cured, so long as it’s written down and assigned a number. Maybe it’s genetic, because I am most definitely not one of those people.

“So how about it?” Dad was still holding the pencil out to me.

“If I can’t remember it in the first place, how’ll I remember to put it on the list?” I asked. It was the most absurd thing in a day of absurd things, as ridiculous as asking a person who has lost her keys where she had last seen them.

“Oh. Good point.” Dad tapped on his head with his pencil. “Brain’s still working better than your old man’s, I see. How about, as you hear things you don’t remember, you tell me, and I’ll write them down for you?”

I shrugged. At least it would keep Dad occupied.

“Things Naomi has forgotten,” he said as he wrote. “Number one, Cass’s and my divorce.” He held up the paper to show me. “Just seeing it written down, doesn’t that make it all so much less frightening?”

It didn’t.

“Number two,” he continued. “Everything after Cass’s and my divorce. So that would be 2001, right?”

“I don’t know.” I knew Dad was trying to be helpful, but he was really starting to annoy the crap out of me.

“Number ten. Your boyfriend, I’m assuming?”

“I have a boyfriend?” I thought of what James had said.

Dad looked at me. “Ace. He’s still away at tennis camp.” He made a note.

My dad was up to nineteen (“Driver’s Ed? No. Driving? Maybe.”) when a nurse came into the room to wheel me away for my first of many tests. I remember feeling relieved that I didn’t have to hear twenty.

I was in the hospital for three more nights. A rotating coven of evil nurses would wake me up every three hours or so by shining a flash-light in my eyes. This is what they do when you’ve had a head trauma: all you want to do is sleep, and no one will let you. Besides not sleeping, the rest of my time was occupied with taking boring tests, ignoring my father’s incessant list-making, and wondering if James Larkin might take it upon himself to visit.

He didn’t.

My first visitor was William Landsman. Visiting hours began at eleven o’clock on Fridays, and Will showed up at 10:54. My dad had gone outside to make a few phone calls, so there was no one around to even tell me who this teenage boy in the maroon smoking jacket was. “Nice save, Chief!” Will said as he entered the room.

I asked him what he meant, and he explained about my rescue of the yearbook camera. “Not a scratch on it. Really going above and beyond the call of duty there,” he added.

Despite his questionable clothing choices, Will was not the least bit fussy or wimpy. When I asked him about the jacket, he claimed to wear it ironically, “as a way to entertain myself in the face of the daily monotony of school uniforms.” He was compactly built, about my height (five feet seven inches), but solid-looking. He had wavy chestnut hair and dark blue eyes, sapphire or cerulean, a deeper shade than either mine or my mother’s. His eyelashes were very long and looked as if they had been coated with mascara even though they hadn’t been. On that day he had light dark circles under his eyes, and his cheeks were flushed. If he seemed loud or cavalier about my condition, I suspect now that it was a way of masking his concern for me. In any case, I liked him immediately. He felt comfortable and broken-in like favorite jeans. It probably goes without saying that James had had the opposite effect on me in the brief time that I had known him.