What You Remember I Did (12 page)

"God, Nan, she was lonely. Can you blame her? And it's not perverted to have your kids in your bed. Didn't Ashley ever come into your bed, when she'd had a nightmare or something? Our kids are in bed with us all the time, when they can't sleep or to watch cartoons on Saturday morning or just to snuggle. God, Nan."

"She touched me between my legs," Nan said softly, hugging herself. "She–"

"Hold on a minute."
Becca
put the receiver down with a clatter and went off to deal with some kid crisis. Nan sat curled up, eyes closed, trying–as Tonya had taught her–neither to lose herself in the visceral sensations nor to tamp them down. She heard children's voices rise and her sister's voice rise over them. The hubbub subsided and
Becca
came back to the phone, out of breath. "Sorry. Damn kids. What were you saying?"

"Never mind." Nan consciously uncurled and relaxed her body. "I don't think I'm quite ready to talk about it. I just called you for a reality check. You don't remember anything–inappropriate happening when we were little? Sexually inappropriate?"

The pause might have been meaningful, or
Becca
might have just gotten distracted again. "Maybe you ought to call Patrick," she said finally.

"Why?"

"Call him and ask him. He might know something."

"Dammit,
Becca
, don't play games with me. Tell me what you're talking about."

"I'm not playing games. I'm not talking 'about' anything in particular. I'm just saying call Patrick."

"He's coming over to stay with Mother tonight."

"Good. You can ask him in person."

"Not exactly. Not in front of Mother."

"Oh, she wouldn't know–Shit. Gotta go. Call you later."
Becca
hung up in the middle of an exhortation to "Knock it off!"

Nan managed to get both herself and her mother dried and dressed before Patrick showed up. Catherine could more or less eat on her own, so Patrick got himself a bowl of stew from the pot on the stove and sat with their mother while Nan did what she could to make herself presentable in the twenty minutes before she had to leave to meet Matt at Le Jazz Hot. It really didn't matter how her hair looked or what she wore; after a little wine and a little sultry alto sax she'd be naked and tousled in Matt's bed anyway.

The sly, secret pleasure of this thought was not dulled by the interactions with her mother and sister, as she'd have expected it to be. If anything, it was sweeter than ever. If she'd had time, she'd have
journaled
about this; it was probably a clue, and Tonya could probably help her figure out what it meant.

But there was barely time to give her brother last-minute instructions (he didn't even pretend to be listening), kiss her mother good-night (she pulled Nan close and whispered loudly, "Don't do anything I wouldn't do!"), reposition the list of emergency phone numbers that had fallen off the bulletin board and find her keys, which Catherine had helpfully put in the refrigerator vegetable crisper. She had dashed out of the door and was getting into her car when Patrick shouted for her to stop and brought the cordless phone out to her.

"It's
Becca
. She says it's important." Ever the pesky little brother, he crossed his arms over his chest and set his jaw, completely within earshot.

"I can't talk now,
Becca
."

"I know, Pat's right there, and you've got a date. But I might have remembered something, and I thought you should know."

Nan glanced at Patrick and said carefully to her sister, "Like what?"

"I don't know exactly. Something–funny."

"Funny?"

Patrick raised his eyebrows and leaned forward, ready to be let it on the joke.

At the other end of the line,
Becca
said breathlessly, "I don't know, I don't know, I can't quite remember it, it's right on the tip of my tongue, you know? The tip of my memory." She gave a nervous laugh. "I'll keep thinking about it and maybe the whole thing will come to me, or enough to help you. I wanted to call you right away and tell you I think I remember something. Something–like you said."

Nan passed a hand over her eyes. "Right, sis. Thanks. I'll call you tomorrow."

She handed the phone back to her brother, waved off his questions, and actually squealed her tires speeding off. She was far more wound up than even an anticipated evening of great jazz, great wine, and great sex could account for. There was an edge to her excitement that scared and aroused her, a sense of danger and recklessness in the face of danger. She was eager to hear Laura Newman play. A friend in Denver, a fellow Jazz enthusiast, had told Nan that Newman, billed as "The only white woman sax player," was someone she shouldn't miss. She couldn't wait to hear her, to feel that exact moment when the Merlot's glow hit its peak. She couldn't wait to see Matt, to kiss him from head to toe, to take him deep inside her.

In a state of barely containable excitement, she ran a stop sign. The club's lot was full, so she found a spot on the street in the lot next door where a bookstore was holding a reading. On the way to the club's entrance, she found herself walking between an old couple who defined shabby chic. They both wore black, of course, but it was the way they walked that set them apart–as if they had been together for so long that they were hardly two separate people anymore.
I want to be like that,
she thought.
I want to be like that with Matt.

The door of the club stood open. The wail of Newman's horn and the complicated percussion behind it drew her inside and she pushed her way impolitely through the SRO crowd. Matt was already there. She saw him before he saw her and she stopped to stare. The blue and violet stage lights played on his profile and turned his hair satiny. He was a beautiful man, beautiful and potentially dangerous. Newman hit and held an impossibly low note as Nan let her hands fall on his shoulders and work their way slowly down his back.

The waitress came by and he told her, "Bring the lady a Merlot." She sipped it and thought again of her mother, knowing how much she would have loved being here and very glad she wasn't.

They told each other they were sorry to leave after the first set, but it would have been impossible for them to stay without making a spectacle of themselves. As it was, they stopped to kiss half a dozen times on the block-and-a-half walk to his apartment, and were already partly unbuttoned and unzipped by the time he shut his door behind them and they clutched each other in a serious embrace.

His shirt came off in the foyer. His spine was long, his shoulder blades smooth. She forced herself to wait a second or two before plunging her hands into the light fur at the small of his back. Keeping as much of their bodies pressed together as they could, they stumbled into the living room, where she bent her head and one by one took his nipples between her teeth. It was all she could do not to bite down, and he did wince, gasp, laugh in surprise.

He started to pull off her shirt but she stopped him with a sharp, "No!" Instead she unbuckled his belt, pushing his hand away when he made as if to help her, working at the snap on his jeans until it came loose.

"Let's go in the bedroom," he whispered, tongue playing in the whorls of her ear.

But she pulled him down with her onto the oval braided rug and they made love there, hard and fast, both coming at once and crying out together. Before the spasms of pleasure had completely subsided she was sobbing against his chest and thinking how she would tell Tonya about this.

Maids-R-Us advertised the fact that they were fully bonded, therefore all employees were fully investigated. The truth was demand exceeded supply and the employee turnover was enormous. So what if a few of the men and women who worked for them slipped through the cracks and back under the rocks for which the county had been named.

Sometimes they only stayed for a day, like the one who came to work in scrubs, a nurse in need of extra funds.
 
A lot of their elderly clients requested nurses who could help them out for a day with their meds and meals and showers and were willing to pay extra for those services. By good fortune, they had one on their list that day–the only day the nurse showed up.

Although Nan arrived at the support group meeting fifteen minutes early, the two seats on either side of Tonya were already taken. She was annoyed at herself because she could've been here earlier and equally irritated by the fact that she was annoyed at all. Like a teenager going to a party where she knew only the hostess, she'd sat in her car in the parking lot listening to the radio and counting down the minutes, not wanting to appear too eager, but not wanting to be late. She didn't like not knowing how to behave and was nervous about what Tonya and the others would think of her, let alone about what she'd be expected to do or say in a support group for people with repressed memories of parental sexual abuse, especially since she wasn't at all convinced she was one.

Most of all, now that she was in the room, she hated how distressed she was by not being able to sit beside Tonya.

Tonya came across the room to greet her. Her hug was gentle and professional, and Nan was aware of feeling a little abandoned when the therapist stepped back.

"Welcome," Tonya said softly. "I'm glad you came."

Nan stiffened. "Why?" Being suspicious of Tonya's motives made her feel guilty, and smart and strong.

Tonya met her gaze so calmly and directly that Nan had to stop herself from looking down. "Because I care about you," she said, and turned to talk to someone else.

Nan got herself a cup of weak coffee and a store-bought cookie, neither of which she wanted, and took a seat on the other side of the circle of chairs from where Tonya was sitting. There were ten people in the room, counting herself and Tonya. Two were men. All were white; she wondered what, if anything, that meant. Of the rest, most fit the demographics as demonstrated in her research–young women, around Ashley's age, in their mid-thirties to early forties. A couple looked older and one in particular had to be at least seventy.
Good Lord
, Nan thought miserably,
if you haven't resolved your "issues" by that age, what's the point?

What surprised her most about this group was its mood. The chatter was about the weather, jobs, kids, diets, movies, and there was frequent laughter. Could these people really have gone through the kinds of things Tonya had suggested to her? Wouldn't they be crying and gnashing their teeth?

The crying, if not quite teeth-gnashing, started soon after Tonya called the group to order, as it were.
 
There were introductions–"just your first name," Tonya admonished, "and how long you've been coming to group"–and Nan was flustered just to have to say out loud, "My name is Nancy, and this is my first time." "Nancy" felt suitably like an alias.

"Any questions before we get started?"

"Where's Joy?" someone asked. "Shouldn't we wait for her?"

"Joy won't be with us today."

"Is she sick?" one of the younger women asked.

"She's fine," Tonya said. "Her mother died and she has to take care of things."

Someone applauded softly. A second person joined in, then a third.

"Probably a heart attack," someone said. "Or a Joy attack." Everyone laughed. "Bet she offed her. Serve the old bitch right, after what she did."

"She slipped in the shower," Tonya said quietly. "Now settle down and let's start with a few moments of meditation. Carl, could you dim the lights, please?"

Nan's heart was racing. She felt uncomfortable and out of place. Carl, an almost certainly gay man in his thirties–or his forties or fifties, with a lot of youth-maintaining work–lowered the lights and returned to his chair looking somber. People settled themselves. Instinctively Nan closed her eyes and took a deep breath. Someone had begun to weep. From under almost closed lids she saw that it was the elderly woman.

"Shut your eyes and take a few deep slow breaths," Tonya intoned, and Nan felt like the teacher's pet for having done so already. Around the circle, everyone audibly inhaled and exhaled. "Now, starting at the top of your head, I invite you to imagine warmth and light spreading like a ray of sunlight through your entire body."

Someone moaned softly. Another person began to breathe raggedly. Nan didn't look this time.

"Across your skull, in the roots of your hair, down the back of your head, across your forehead and your cheekbones and softly across your eyes. Pay attention to any tension that may be held in any of these places, to any places that might seem especially tender or tight or frightened."

Frightened
? This last caused Nan to open her eyes in order to see the therapist. At first she thought Tonya was looking straight at her, but her gaze was unfocused, or focused on something far outside this circle, this room.

Tonya's soft, deliberate voice sent the visualization over and through all parts of the body, and Nan did, indeed, seem to find places where tension could be relaxed, places where the imagined touch of the warmth and light caused pain. And, yes, places–her left shoulder blade, her navel, her buttocks, the sole of her right foot, her (oh, god) clitoris–that seemed frightened. Afraid to be noticed. Afraid to be touched. Longing for both. Terrified of the longing. She was having trouble breathing. Carl was rocking and hugging himself.