We Only Know So Much (3 page)

Despite her age, Vivian is as fast on her feet as ever. If she decides she needs something in the other room, she’ll be there and back in a blink, as if she has her own little high-speed conveyer belt. She’s a little slower with other things, like cooking, but still gets it done. Keeps her part of the house tidy, neat as a pin. Has a cleaning lady come in once a week to do the sweeping. Sometimes forgets that the word “Negro” is no longer in favor (
Oh, I can’t keep up with that
). Watches her weight. Collects antique valentines and little windup toys, the kind that do things, ducks and penguins that waddle and flip over, bobble-head dolls, tops that open up and fan out when you spin them, finds them endlessly amusing. Not super interested in her great-grandkids now, hasn’t been since they were toddlers. Thinks Otis is a little off, does not approve of Priscilla’s: hairstyle, manner of dress, attitude. A little obsessed with a nephew who graduated from Princeton. Photos of him on her fridge. (Don’t get Priscilla and Jean started about this.) Is always prompt for engagements and expects promptness from others. Always sends handwritten thank-you notes. It’s just proper etiquette.

Oh, and one more thing: has never in her life driven a car. Oh, my word, no. Prefers to be driven. Her husband used to do this, then Theodore, but he hasn’t been allowed to drive for several years now. That’s fine. She’s happy to call a taxi.

Review: difficult daughter, know-it-all dad, son sweet and okay if a little weird, mom delayed potential/having affair, great-grandmother bitchy, granddad losing it. So we know where we’re starting.

three

P
riscilla heads out, takes her mom’s car without asking—a fairly regular occurrence—leaving her mother with no way to go back out and pick up anything she needs for tonight’s dinner.
Where are you going
, Jean asks, and Priscilla tells her she’ll be right back, even though she won’t. She’s on her way to meet some friends at the mall. Priscilla’s in junior college but that’s not likely to last; she’s mainly there because her parents told her she’d have to move out if she didn’t go. A weak ultimatum at best, unlikely to be followed up on, but somehow it worked. Priscilla would love to have her own place, of course, has fantasies about a modern, spacious loft in New York or somewhere, like on
Sex and the City
, but (a) spends everything she makes on clothes and (b) seriously has no idea how to go out and sign a lease and all that. Also, she’s never prepared so much as one meal involving more than cereal and milk, never done one single load of laundry ever; even Otis has done laundry. Not that she’s consciously added up the thoughts about moving out meaning cooking and doing laundry and paying bills, of course. It may sound like Priscilla isn’t all that bright, but that’s not the case. Let’s just say that she doesn’t quite know what to do with the kind of intelligence she has. Like her mother, she has potential. This is maybe the one thing they have in common.

At the food court, picking at one Cinnabon, Priscilla and her three girlfriends, Ashley, Danielle, and Taylor, her BFF, go over some recent gossip. It is agreed that a certain girl they know is fat, and also that she is homely.
Busted
. A troll.
A
severe
troll
, Taylor says. It is probably not a coincidence that this girl has also recently taken Taylor’s
sloppy seconds
in the form of her senior year boyfriend. It is not agreed that this certain girl is also a shady bitch, though Taylor adamantly insists this is so.
Well, I’d be bitchy, too, if I looked like that
, Priscilla says, and all three of her friends simultaneously think “You’re bitchy anyway,” and they glance at each other sideways, but no one says it. Taylor almost does—but then these two guys come over to them with clipboards, asking if they’d be interested in trying out for a new reality show.

Priscilla can hardly believe it. None of them can. Their eyes all widen, they all sit up a little bit straighter, try to pretend they’re not smoothing down possible flyaways on their perfectly flat-ironed hair, but Priscilla especially believes this is her moment, believes it is absolutely fate; though she’s never previously thought about fate, she knows now that she completely, wholeheartedly believes in it, and that this is hers. These two guys ask the girls a bunch of questions, nothing unusual, what are they interested in, how old are they, a little about their families. Priscilla feels sure that one of them is directing more of his attention to her than to the others, and at one point she even tries to lean forward over the table in such a way that Taylor and Ashley are behind her and thus less likely to be noticed. She asks what the show is about and one of the guys, whose name is Ted, says that they can’t really say too much about it except that they’re looking for one main person to be the focus of the show, that it would be sort of like those MTV shows about the friends, but more focused on one character instead of an ensemble.

Priscilla is doing everything she can to remain calm, but she is totally freaking out. It’s seriously like her
destiny
has come to her
right now
, right here at the food court. She tilts her head and nods in what’s meant to be a thoughtful way, a way that indicates anything but that she’s freaking out, a way that says,
I think thoughtful things
, a way that says she’s interesting. The guys leave applications with each of the girls and tell them that if they’re interested in auditioning they should show up at this time and place the following week with the completed application and a headshot.
Do we need to, like, prepare a monologue or something?
Priscilla asks, immediately sure it is the dumbest question ever asked in, like, the history of dumb questions.

Before we proceed, we should probably mention that when Priscilla uses the word “like”—and she uses it often—it is invariably merged with the word that came before it, forming a compound word of sorts:
tolike
,
inlike
,
islike
. If we didn’t know better, we might think she believed it to be a grammatical rule, and that, in her universe, the rarely used comma is reserved for sarcastic pauses only.

The guy named Ted smiles but doesn’t laugh and says
No, all you have to do is just be yourself
. Priscilla is over the moon. She is
so
good at that. She is going to spend all weekend practicing being herself.

Ted and the other guy leave and the girls agree that the time has come to go shopping, that for this auspicious occasion they will need new outfits. Priscilla gets a 50 percent discount at Express, where she works, so they head there first. It’s not Priscilla’s favorite store by a lot (her taste runs to pricier brands), so she buys and wears the minimum she can get by with to work there, but her friends all like it just fine, and she’s happy to let them buy stuff with her discount and show them how to wear it, which all agree she has a knack for.
If you take that $19.99 knit dress
, Priscilla says about an item Taylor’s looking at,
and splurge on one really badass pair of knee-high boots that you can wear with everything, it’s like practically a fashion miracle.
All the girls nod at Priscilla’s great truth.

IN THE END, ASHLEY and Danielle won’t even show up to the audition, Taylor will, but she’s really only sort of half into it. Taylor confides this to Priscilla the day of the audition, and Priscilla is for once silently outraged—silently only because they’re in the waiting room and she does not want to call attention to herself in this way.
Well then why are you even here
, Priscilla whispers, to which Taylor says
I dunno, I just thought I’d see
. Priscilla makes a loudish huff through her nose. This is, like, her life’s dream. She’s wearing a pair of designer jeans with a tank top and a long cardigan sweater she found on sale by a designer whose name she recognized from another reality show. The only part of the outfit that isn’t brand new are her boots. The tank top by itself was sixty-eight dollars. Priscilla has put the entire cost of this outfit, minus the boots, on her credit card, adding up to almost $370, or what Priscilla might make in forty-one hours, which will take her close to a month as she only works twenty hours a week, and of course, she has been charging other things, and will charge more things, and will not be paying off this credit card anytime soon. Unless she gets this TV show. Which she will, she’s so sure.

Taylor goes in first, is in there for ten of the longest minutes of Priscilla’s whole entire life. Have any of the other girls been in there for ten full minutes? Priscilla wishes now that she’d noticed. They’re scheduled ten minutes apart, but some of them have come out a minute or two earlier. Ugly ones, Priscilla thinks. Beasts. She looks at the photo she’s brought for them. Is this what they want? Is it too sexy? It’s not a professional headshot, it’s one that Ashley had taken of her right before a party. She had bangs then, doesn’t now, hopes it doesn’t matter but is thinking
Shit, shit, what if it matters?
She tries to think about something else, anything, can’t for a minute, scans the room for more ugly girls she can cross off the callback list. She’s not wrong about these girls, not about them being ugly so much as about them being not pretty or stylish enough to be called back.
A plainer girl can go a long way with a little style
, Priscilla thinks.
Why don’t they know that?

Finally Taylor comes out and she’s making a face like
That was weird but kind of fun
, and Priscilla is dying to grill her about it, but her name is called, so she has to go in.
Don’t leave
, Priscilla whispers on her way in. She smoothes her hair down one last time, shakes hands with Ted. The other guy from the food court isn’t there. Instead there’s a panel of four people: Ted; a guy Ted introduces as the casting director; and another man and woman he says are producers. Priscilla catches a weird vibe from the casting director, which may or may not be there, and smiles at all of them like she’s never smiled before. All it is is, they just ask her a few questions about herself, what she’s interested in, what she’d be willing to talk about or do on TV.
Oh, anything
, she says, a little too quickly. She didn’t really mean
anything
like she’d take her top off or eat spiders anything, she meant more like flirt-with-cute-guys-and-drink anything. But she doesn’t explain. That could have been a mistake. Probably not. But it could have been. But probably not. Probably not. Hopefully not.

four

A
t work this morning, first thing, Gordon’s secretary presents him with a small plant, a bonsai she’s picked up for Boss’s Day. Support staff is encouraged not to spend more than five dollars on their bosses on Boss’s Day, as their salaries are obviously much smaller. It’s just supposed to be a gesture. Gordon’s secretary, Doris, is a few years older than he is, and she’s been doing this for thirty-five years. So she gives him this sweet little bonsai to thank him; the fact is, he’s a decent boss, he doesn’t make her stay late, has her birthday on his calendar, knows the names of her kids, and is generally friendly toward her. But, but, he’s the same with her as he is with everyone, and so when she gives him the bonsai, he responds with the following:
Oh! A bonsai! Did you know that the bonsai dates back as far as the early times of Egyptian culture? Of course they’re most closely associated with Japan, and the concept of wabi-sabi. You surely know about wabi-sabi
—
how best to explain that? Well, it’s a sort of appreciation of the transience of things. On that account, it’s almost surprising that the bonsai has gained any popularity in America, since we’re well known for our throwaway culture. Do you know that there’s a bonsai at the Tokyo Imperial Palace that dates back to the seventeenth century? Think about that! Often, copper wiring is used as a technique for directing the tree into a desired shape. And there are many different shapes.
Gordon holds it up and examines it from all sides.
I’m not quite sure whether this one is upright or informal upright, but it’s clearly not multitrunk. I’ll have to find a nice sunny place for this.

Gordon means to include a thank-you in here somewhere, but by the time he’s done, he’s forgotten. Doris nods and smiles, but about halfway through the bonsai talk she’s begun to go through the morning mail, tossing out junk and handing her employer the letters he needs to see.

Now Gordon’s day is about to take a weird turn.

At the deli counter at one of his stores, he’s considering a tabouli salad for lunch, providing some information on tabouli for the chef who prepared it.
Did you know tabouli was originally a Lebanese mountain dish, but that there are Turkish and Armenian variations of the dish as well, in which there is more parsley than bulgur? Also, interestingly, there’s a common misconception that bulgur is the same thing as cracked wheat, but in fact it’s usually just parboiled.
The chef is just listening for any part of Gordon’s talk that includes the word “pound.” Gordon is still talking about bulgur when a woman on line behind him recognizes his voice and peers around him to get a better look at his face.
Gordon!
she says, smiling.
I thought that was you.

Gordon would swear he has never seen this woman before. Gordon often claims he never forgets a face, which is usually true, although once in a rare while he’ll forget a name, but this face and its name are entirely unfamiliar to him.
I’m sorry, do we know each other?
He figures they must have met at a party, maybe a corporate training event, that she’s someone he knows casually. Gordon may be priggish, but he’s a polite man, and is hoping that they did not date, that would be awkward. But, of course, that’s exactly the deal. The woman introduces herself as Trudy.

Oh
, Gordon says,
of course, of course
, except it’s not
of course
. Gordon and Trudy had been in the same graduating class and had dated for the entire nine months of their senior year, and he does not remember her. It’s hard to believe, near impossible to believe, and yet we can see from his face that it’s one hundred percent true. And we can see from Trudy’s face that she’s having trouble believing it, too.

You’re kidding, right?

Gordon, rarely at a loss for words, does not know what to say. He is not kidding. He thinks his mouth may even be hanging open, but he’s not altogether sure.

Senior year? ___ Hall? Pitchers of beer and darts at the Rat? Frisbee on the quad?

Gordon certainly remembers these things, but not in conjunction with Trudy. She’s an attractive woman, to be sure, he thinks, taking in her large brown eyes, the chestnut waves of hair resting on the tops of her shoulders, her slender waist, delicate ankles atop a pair of heels. She looks like someone he
would
have dated, without a doubt. But any memory of this woman is utterly unavailable to him in this moment.

For Valentine’s Day you gave me a pair of red footed pajamas? I gave you a copy of ‘Leaves of Grass’? We went to that little French place and then on the way back it rained and we ducked into that big cement pipe until it stopped?
Trudy leaves out the part about how they kissed in the pipe, can’t imagine just the pipe won’t trigger his memory, but it doesn’t.
You used to joke that our song was “Why Don’t We Do It in the Road?” I lived on the second floor, you used to go down the fire ladder, you fell that one time, I had a roommate named Sheila?

Sheila, Gordon remembers—curvy, sexy Sheila who was taking a belly-dancing class one semester. Sheila, he spent a lot of time fantasizing about.
Belly-dancing Sheila?
His face brightens a bit when he says it, which appears to displease Trudy. For a moment, they’re both silent.
Okay
, she says.
Well, then. Take care.

You, too, Trudy
, he says, taking care to enunciate her name precisely, so much so that it’s not only obvious, but weird-sounding.
Tru-dee. Truu-deee.
He hears this on a loop in his head for a moment, and then wishes he’d invited her to coffee, just to be polite, not as a date, of course, he’s married. Maybe over coffee he’d remember.

Gordon will spend no small amount of time concerned about not remembering this. Back in his office following this encounter, he scribbles down a list of pre-Jean relationships to try to spark his memory:

• 5th grade kissing game disaster—Debbie Olsop

• 10th grade girlfriend Tammy Micklin, prom

• awful blind date w/ ferret lady

• regrettable personal ad date

• Ellen, visible thong above skirt, unrequited

But there’s a noticeable and troubling hole between tenth grade and adulthood. He has not, until now, connected the fact of his father’s memory loss with the possibility of his own fate, but now that he has, the corner he’s turned is not one he’ll easily turn back around. He will not talk to his wife about this, because they do not talk about previous (or current) lovers. He will begin, repeatedly, to pose a hypothetical scenario to coworkers, friends, anyone, really:
Say you were approached by a person who claimed they had a history with you, the details of which were specific and believable, and yet even when told these specific and believable details, you still have no recollection of that person and those things as being connected, due to the fact that you have no recollection of that person?
Gordon gets a number of different answers to this question, none of which he feels are especially useful.
Happens to me all the time. That’s just CRS is what that is
, Doris tells him.
Can’t remember shit.
(Doris loves that phrase, CRS, thinks it’s the funniest thing ever.)
Nothing to worry about
. Priscilla doesn’t understand the question. She looks up from her cell phone long enough to say
What are you even talking about, Dad?
but not long enough to wait for an answer. He becomes worried that his memory may be failing him in other ways he’s unaware of, that his knowledge, which is pretty much the most important thing to him, could be slipping away in small bits and pieces, that what if one day he wakes up with complete amnesia, what then?