What You Remember I Did (16 page)

She took out her cigarettes and offered one to Karen, who shook her head. "I've quit."

"Since when?"

Karen smiled a little sheepishly. "Since my grandson made me promise."

"I quit, too." Nan paused. "Often." It was an old joke but it worked for them. They laughed lightly.

"So what's this all about, Nan? Sounded urgent. Is it Catherine, Ashley, Gary? A new man?"

Nan stared at her friend, then looked away.

"Talk to me, Nan. You can tell me, no matter what it is. We've never judged each other."

Nan shook her head. "I thought I could talk about it, but I can't." Karen and her well-adjusted upper-middle class family, who owned a cat, a dog, and a bird, had two-and-a-half children and barbequed every Sunday. "I can't."

Karen reached across the table and placed her hand over Nan's. "I can't imagine anything short of murder or incest–" She stopped. "I'll shut up. I'm happy to see you. Glad to listen, or not."

Lightening her tone, she chatted about her children, her vacation, her grandchildren's exploits. Nan reciprocated with cute anecdotes about Jordan and Catherine. By mid-afternoon, they were talked out. Karen suggested a shopping spree.

"Another time," Nan said. "There are some things I have to do before I go home."

Karen asked no questions. Before Nan took her leave, she asked to see a phone book and did what she had told herself she wouldn't do, though she'd known she would. Torn between not wanting to find it and wanting to, she looked up Eliot's name. There it was.

She turned the phone book toward Karen and pointed. "Is that far from here?"

"Do you want it to be?"

"Smartass."

"It's five minutes from here, in a fairly recent subdivision. Why?"

"Eliot's father teaches at RCC. We were having coffee and I mentioned I was coming to New Hope today. He hasn't seen their house, so he asked me to drive past it and report back to him."

"They couldn't send photos?" Karen looked at her. "Forget I asked. You know where to find me if you need me. For anything. Promise."

Nan nodded, knowing it was a promise she'd never keep.

As soon as she was out of sight of the house, she pulled to the side of the road and took out the paper on which she'd written directions to the Foundation. She added Eliot's address and the simple instructions Karen had given her to his house.

Just in case she happened to find herself there en route to the City.

"Yeah. Right," she said aloud. She drove to the small development, circling around until she found the house, then slowing down but moving past. A young boy who looked like a miniature of Matt sat on the grass reading. Trying not to think about the theory that abuse was passed from generation to generation, she focused on three girls playing jump rope on the driveway. Two held the ends. The one in the center jumped steadily, singing out numbers. "Forty one, forty two." Her hair shone in the sunlight. Her voice was young and clear. She looked up, caught Nan's eye, waved slightly and smiled.

Nan smiled back and drove on toward the highway and the False Memory Syndrome Foundation. She knew little about Philadelphia, but as chance had it, the building was near Rittenhouse Square, across the street from an excellent sushi restaurant she had gone to with Karen a year or so before. There was no parking in the immediate area, but there was plenty within walking distance and taxis from the parking lots that serviced the Square. She decided to walk there and take a cab back.

The area reminded her a lot of certain parts of New York, mostly because of the multi-story Brownstones and because people strolled around with a sense of belonging–not just because they lived there or were passing by, but because, or so it appeared to her, they chose to be there. The Foundation itself took up the first two floors of a four-story building next door to the restaurant. The charming woman on the phone had told her the building was circa the 1800s.

A sign on the outer door read, "Ring bell to enter." Nan hesitated briefly then pressed the button. An inner door opened into a library and a series of conference rooms. Upstairs were offices with floor-to-ceiling shelves.

A woman stepped toward her. "How may I help you?"

Nan recognized the voice. All the way, she'd been going over the questions she wanted answered. Now that she was here, only one of them came to mind. "In the end," she managed to ask through rising tears, "how do you know for sure?"

The attic of the house on Long Island where Nan had grown up was cold on this Friday after Thanksgiving, and rodent feet skittered up and down inside the steeply pitched roof inches from her head. She decided to think of them as squirrels instead of mice. Squirrels were cuter, even if they were no less destructive.

She looked up from the box on her lap and smiled, remembering the squirrel who'd lived one winter between her bedroom window and the evergreen hedge, using the bits of fabric and paper she'd left out on the sill to construct a nest into which that spring four tiny babies had been born. Nan had been thrilled.
Becca
, with whom she'd been sharing a room then, had not. Muttering about chewed wires and ruined insulation, their dad had set a trap, which had been successful all five times. "You think you're so smart." Whispered in the semi-darkness after lights-out, her sister's taunts had been daggers as only siblings' can be. "Look where your 'help' got them.
Smooshed
." And she'd make a sound like a small neck breaking.

Feeling tricked by her own memory (
Well, that started out as a nice thing to remember
), and freshly mad at her sister not only for the childhood meanness but also because she now claimed not to remember squirrels or traps at all, Nan went back to digging through the box. She'd been at this all week. The boxes and plastic bags and pillow cases and suitcases she'd already searched through were stacked against the far wall in a space Jordan had helped her clear the first morning of her vacation. The stuff waiting to be gone through still filled much of the floor space and many of the dusty shelves

"I've never been up there," Ashley had confessed when Nan had spoken–lightly, casually–of her project.

"You own the place. You've lived here since before Jordan was born. It's your history, too. You've never been in your own attic?"

"Nope."

"Have you, Jordan?"

Jordan said, "Nope. Mom won't let me." But the way she hesitated and cut her eyes toward her mother were not lost on Nan. Jordan had been in the attic. Ashley might or might not know that.

"What are you looking for?" Ashley wanted to know. She was ironing, sweat streaming out from under the athletic band around her damp hair, crisp shirts and skirts and pants accumulating on hangers hooked over door jambs around the room. The air smelled moist and hot.

Catherine used to iron. Nan's father's job had required him to wear a starched white shirt every day, and he'd worked six days a week; each shirt had taken Catherine half an hour to iron, so the shirts alone accounted for three hours every week, not to mention all of her own dresses and Nan's school clothes and the
sheets
, for God's sake. This had become for Nan the symbol of female servitude. She'd vowed never to iron a thing in her life, and she never had. Ashley didn't iron sheets, as far as Nan knew, though those on her bed in the guest room were suspiciously crisp. But she did iron jeans. Go figure.

Recently Nan had mentioned ironing at a family gathering. Some of her siblings had said they remembered the white shirts, but most had claimed not to. Catherine had sworn it had been only five shirts a week, and they hadn't taken that long to iron. Nan, however, clung stubbornly to her version.

Preoccupied by the reverie and frustration, she didn't answer Ashley's question. Ashley sprayed a collar. "Are you looking for something in particular?"

Suspecting that
Becca
or Pat had told Ashley about the sexual abuse, Nan was either touched or infuriated, depending on whether they'd said they believed her or not. She didn't want to ask. "I don't know," she answered truthfully. "I guess I'll know it if I find it."

Evidently Ashley ironed one of those annoying sharp wrinkles into the point of the collar, for she sighed heavily and doused the offending spot with water. The iron hissed when she set it down and a cloud of steam rose. "Want some help?"

"I don't think so."

"Can I help, Grams?"

"Jordan, what part of 'I don't think so' do you not understand?" Ashley snapped.

"She was talking to you," Jordan pointed out sullenly.

"Thanks, hon." Nan touched the little girl's sleek hair. "This is something I have to do myself."

"How come?"

Nan thought for a minute. "I guess I am looking for something. I'm looking for the truth about my childhood. Nobody can really help me with that."

So she'd spent hours up here before Thanksgiving and would do as much as she could until she left on Sunday without being rude. Below her she could hear the everyday sounds of family life, but they had little to do with her.

Old school records. She stared in amazement at the "F" in English on her eighth-grade report card. She'd always bragged to Ashley and anybody else who would listen that she'd never failed a subject in her life. How could she have forgotten?

Newspaper clippings about big and little achievements of various children: Stuart's national spelling bee championship;
Becca's
Prom Queen triumph, particularly sweet, as Nan remembered it, because
Becca's
"enemy" had also been in contention. She could have sworn that girl had been a sulky member of the Queen's Court, but she wasn't in the picture.

Clothes she couldn't believe anybody in this house had ever worn. A collection of her father's old baseball caps that she didn't recognize by sight but that smelled like him and made her cry.

Albums with no room for more photos so fistfuls of them had been stuck loose inside the covers and tumbled out if she wasn't careful. Snapshots of the single family vacation they'd all gone on together the year before Dad died–to Yellowstone, she'd always believed, but the signs caught on film read Yosemite. The commercial shots her parents had paid good money for of herself and
Becca
double-dating to the Prom with those twin brothers, Larry and Barry or Randy and Andy or something like that.

Forgetting the forgettable twins' names or not recognizing the clothes didn't bother her. She might indeed have repressed the F in English. But she was deeply discomfited by having vivid, definite memories of things that had, according to this incontrovertible evidence, happened quite differently.

"Trust yourself," Tonya was always telling her. "Everything that has happened to us is stored in our memory, just waiting for us to look at it in the light." And, most emphatically, "If you remember it, it happened. Honor that. Don't second-guess yourself." But if she could be absolutely certain her entire life that it was Yellowstone, when in fact it had been Yosemite, was it not possible to be absolutely certain of other things that had not happened?

Photos of herself and her mother of course caught her attention. Most of the time, the two of them were in larger groupings; you couldn't grow up in a family the size of hers and have much alone time with a parent, especially a single parent. She remembered resenting that, yearning for time with her mother without other people around needing something from her.

"It's not uncommon," Tonya had told her, "for a parent, especially one without a partner, to become attached in an unhealthy way to one child, even if there are many children. And sexual abuse doesn't have to take a lot of time. A child brought into the parental bed on the pretext of sickness or nightmares. Bath time. Corporal punishment–were you spanked, Nan?" She didn't think so.

But she'd come across three photos of herself with her mother. In the unlabeled one, she couldn't be a hundred per cent certain the baby was herself, but she thought so. Her mother–young, beautiful, dramatic–was holding her, and her mother's left hand was under the skirt of her frilly yellow dress. Was there anything wrong with that? How many times had she held Ashley and then Jordan just like that, hand supporting the round little bottom, fingertips stroking the soft thigh? Wasn't that how everyone held babies?

Anger toward Tonya began to stir, and Nan didn't like how frightening it was. This was sick. The photo was happy. The baby was laughing. The mother was gazing at her daughter with a look of unadulterated adoration.

Nonetheless, could that be a lascivious cast to the mother's–
her
mother's–expression? And could the baby–she herself–be laughing because whatever was being done to her under that innocent little skirt felt good and she couldn't possibly know it was wrong?

The second photo was of herself and her mother in matching lilac-colored dresses with full skirts, puff sleeves, and a long double row of white pearl buttons from collar to
hem
. This was the dress under which she'd worn that scratchy petticoat she'd remembered and written down for Tonya. She was sure
Becca
had had a dress and petticoat like that, too, so why had someone taken her picture alone with her mother? Both mother and daughter, about eight years old in this picture, had their hands folded demurely at their waists. There was no indication whatsoever of anything untoward between them. But the memory of that petticoat made Nan squirm, and there was something about her mother.