Remember this
Remember this years from now. It's about noon - you write your parents, you tell them that four job opportunities fell through, that you don't know what the fuck you're going to do, that you're depressed, discouraged, and scared. You miss her. In the e-mail, something that you write comes off as a sort of shot at your dad, who has always been good to you, you regret it as soon as it's sent. You feel terrible, but you have to hurry to make lunch now so that you can leave for work, and as you're doing that, your phone gets a message from your dad, who is calling, telling you not to be too depressed, that you have enough money to hold out for a few months, that you're going to be okay, and he sounds sad, sad for you, but he says that you're going to be okay. Halfway through the message, you start bawling, the first real cry in years. Minutes later, there you are, eating applesauce for lunch on the dusty couch in the dark room, your eyes still damp, an old man on the television watching and listening to a younger classical pianist. When the music stops, the old man speaks, and you realize that you are eating applesauce and watching Mr. Rogers alone, tear-stained and only temporarily employed. This seems like such a recognizable low point - something that you can remember years later and think look how far I've come since then, look at what I have built since then - and the ridiculous overwrought quality of this moment is so transparent that you begin to feel better. It's funny, right? Remember this years from now.

Here's another story.


Undeliverable Messages
Spring 2005
THE PERSONS INVOLVED
AN OLD MAN, who is leaving home
AN OLD WOMAN, his wife, who has died
A MIDDLE-AGED WOMAN, the old man’s neighbor, who helps him move
HER MOTHER, who has died
A YOUNG MAN, the middle-aged woman’s son, who helps his mother.
A YOUNG WOMAN, whom the young boy left months ago


YOUNG MAN to YOUNG WOMAN:
Sometimes, when I’ve been shoveling for a while, I think about girls. Since I was in middle school, I’ve been working on this guy’s sidewalk. It’s a strange sidewalk because it takes this sharp turn because he lives on a corner, but I’ve done it so many times that I can look up and see that I’ve finished one direction and started on the other without paying attention to the turn. Sometimes I’d imagine that I wasn’t doing it because my mom told me to help these old people, but was doing it for a girl instead. She’d be waiting back at the house for me, where it was warm and soft. It wasn’t sexual, just comfortable. It sounds really fucking stupid now that I’m older, but I still want a girl like that. I never thought about you as the kind of girl that I’d shovel for. You were crazy.
I don’t know why I’ve been thinking about you recently. I haven’t seen you for close to a year. The last I heard, you didn’t graduate. Did you ever really care about graduating? You’re rich, so does it matter? Normal people can’t just quit school with one semester to go, then come back to finish two years later and fucking fail. Remember all the jokes I made about how rich you were? You were a good sport, but maybe that’s one reason why I never understood you. You never had to work. My mom and I are helping this guy not just because we feel bad for him or because it’s the right thing to do, but also because he’s leaving some of the stuff to us. Furniture, plates, and rugs; my mom hands me boxes of stuff to take over to our house. I don’t feel good about it, but the guy wants us to have it.
He made me think about you once. I picked up a box that was marked as “heavy and fragile.” It was full of booze. The guy collected alcohol, so he had all this obscure stuff in weird bottles, and the only thing I recognized was a bottle of Scotch. It was Johnnie Walker Black. I heard him laugh as he came into the room.
“That’s good stuff,” he said. “Do you like Scotch?”
I laughed and started to put the bottle back, but he came closer and stopped me.
“Your mother’s upstairs,” he said quietly. “You can tell me the truth.”
“Oh,” I said. The bottle felt heavy in my hand.
The old man waited.
“It’s good,” I said. “I don’t really know a lot about that kind of thing, though. I don’t drink much.”
“At college?” He laughed again. “What the hell do you do, then? Boys still get drunk with girls, right?”
I didn’t tell him that the first and last time that I got drunk was with you.
Do you remember that? I’d never really kissed anybody or been very drunk before, and when you came to my room, holding a bottle of Scotch and promising that you’d teach me, I was scared, but I went because I was twenty and it was long past time. I remember sitting on your bed and watching you light candles as if we’d known each other for more than a week and as if this was somehow romantic. I’d never really been in that situation before, but your voice was low and you moved slowly. I remember not moving my lips against yours at first. I remember gulping Scotch from the bottle. You were warm and soft. I was drunk. I remember leaving my socks on. I remember puking in your trashcan as you rubbed my back. I slid down to the floor to lie there for a second. I remember not being able to get back up, but you followed me down there. I remember waking up on the floor. You were next to me, but it was still the middle of the night. I couldn’t move much, but I saw that we still had underwear. You were still passed out. I was still a virgin. I dragged myself up to sit and see how you looked. In the light from the sagging candles, I saw that you were fat. You were fat, old, and crazy, but I wanted to learn on somebody that I didn’t care about, so I kissed your fat warm soft lips again and tried to shake your shoulders. I remember the bellowing moan that you made as you woke up drunk because I collapsed again at the sound. I stayed on my back for a few moments, lying there and trying not to listen, but I didn’t want anybody to think anything bad was happening, so I got back up and held you, and you stopped.
“Bed,” I told you.
“Yeah,” you said.
I dragged us back up to your bed, and when we both could move again, I asked if you still wanted to, and you said yes, and we did. In the morning, I cleaned up the trashcan for you, but I said that I couldn’t go to breakfast with you.
I don’t know if you still remember any of that. I hadn’t thought about it until I found the old man’s Scotch. I’m not proud of what I did, but I’m glad that I didn’t have to learn with the girl that I got after you. She isn’t anything like you. She’s thin, she’s blonde, and she isn’t crazy. She’s a great girl; she won’t sleep with me yet. I’m not ashamed of anything. You talked me into it. Everything was consensual. I don’t think it ended badly. Clearly, we both moved on.
Recently, I’ve wanted to tell you things that you never knew, but I’m not ever going to contact you again, and I don’t know where you are. You’ve probably forgotten about me, but if you haven’t, you might remember the night that we spent together right before spring break. Maybe you don’t remember all of it, because you came to me drunk, and you were still drunk the next morning. I know that you’d remember what happened afterwards.
When it was done, I didn’t get up to throw away the condom. We looked and saw that there was no condom, and I tensed up and became very quiet. You held me. I could still smell the Scotch on your breath when you held me and told me not to worry. You told me that you’d get your period over break.
I remember how you looked at me with big brown eyes on a soft face.
“I’ll take care of things if I don’t,” you said.
I didn’t say anything.
“Don’t worry,” you said. You kissed me again and rested your head on my chest.
Don’t think that I didn’t appreciate that. You were crazy, but you had these moments when you were absolutely clear. After break, you did remember, and you did tell me that everything went okay. That was really nice of you, and that’s why you deserve to know. When you looked at me, could you see that I hadn’t had anything to drink at all? Did you know that I knew what I was doing the whole fucking time?
I’m not proud of it, but it wasn’t completely irresponsible. I knew that you were on the pill. You told me that you were clean. There wasn’t much risk of anything. You’d take care of it.
You have to remember the context. This was weeks after the first time, long after I told you that I couldn’t be your boyfriend and you’d agreed, but you were crazy, and it was falling apart. You said that you were fine with it, and that it was all that you expected, but then you’d pull out the passive-aggressive stuff, and if I wanted that kind of crazy, I could have stayed home with Mom. We’d said that we were getting tired of kissing each other. But despite that, you kept on answering your door when you knew that it was me. You taught me a lot, and I should thank you. I learned that sex didn’t mean much without love or some other kind of respect. And on that morning I was beginning to see that that was true. Do you understand? I was just trying to learn more. I wanted to know what it felt like, and you could teach me.
Don’t think that I didn’t feel terrible afterwards. I felt awful during that whole break. I wondered if I’d done something that I couldn’t ever take back, and if my life had switched directions without me even knowing. Did you know that that was why I couldn’t put up with the craziness any longer? I don’t know how you had taken it away before, but I got my guilt back, and I couldn’t keep on seeing you. Even after you told me that everything was fine, I had to put an end to it. A couple weeks later, an hour after I sent that e-mail inviting you over, I sent you another one about how we had to stop, and after that one for the road, that’s why I stopped. That’s why that had to be the last time that we talked.
It’s months later now. I’m back from school. When I shovel this sidewalk, I wonder if you’d understand me. I didn’t think about you, even though I was applying what I learned to the new girl that I found. She’s not like you. There’s something about you that brought out the worst in me, as if your fat and your craziness made me lazy and mean when I was with you. I can go out with her and feel comfortable when people see us. My friends like her. We haven’t had sex yet, but I don’t think that it’ll be like it was with you. I respect her. This could be love.
Now that I’ve told you what you didn’t know, tell me why I’ve been thinking about you. Why don’t I think about my girlfriend instead? At night, when I’m alone, why have I remembered the sex without remembering any of the million things that made us dysfunctional? If I stopped visiting you because it was corrupting me, and I understand why you made me crazy, why can’t I leave the memories behind? Teach me how to live with knowing that you were never crazy.

MIDDLE-AGED WOMAN TO HER MOTHER:
You’ve been dead for a hundred and seven days, but you had been gone for much longer. I think about that frequently. I think about you frequently. It’s hard for me on Sunday afternoons because I can’t call you. It’s hard to work on the garden because I know that yours is overgrown. It’s hard at night. It’s hard to walk by the clock that you gave me for Christmas seven years ago. It’s hard to hear organ music. It’s hard in the early morning. It’s hard to hear my own sister on the phone, sometimes, because she sounds like you. It’s hard in the middle of the day. It can be hard at any time, anywhere, out of nowhere for no reason. It’s still too hard. It should be easier now, after a hundred days, but the aching in the back of my mind for the past week reminds me that I still feel it like it’s raw. I shouldn’t worry too much about why this past week has been hard. I know why. I’ve been helping an old man who lives down the street.
I don’t think that you ever met him. I never spent much time over there. We’d go there for cocktail parties sometimes, we let him hire our son to shovel his walk, but we were still never really very social with him and his wife. We knew that he’d been having health problems recently, and that she’d been taking extra care of him, but nobody thought that there was anything wrong with her. It was a real shock when she died in her sleep a month ago. She was only sixty-two, more than a decade younger than him. She looked fine. It was the first funeral that I’d been to since yours, and I knew that it would be hard, but there was no reason not to go. His daughter came from Portland with her little girl, who I hadn’t seen before. They had kids late in that family, but can you imagine what it would feel like to do that and then to die young, while they’re still so young? I never asked about it later, but I know that they’d been married for a while before they had their daughter, and she turned out the same way. I wonder how heavily that weighs upon him.
I’m helping him now. I’m helping him because I saw him pick up his mail a week after the funeral. His daughter had left. He was alone. I saw him bend over to pick up his newspaper. He looked tired. He looked like you did when you were getting sick. That morning was eighty-five days since you had died.
I forced myself to say hello to him and to ask him how he was.
“I’m fine,” he said.
“I need to do some things now, but can I come over to visit later on? This afternoon?” It was Sunday morning and I missed you.
“Yes,” he said. “Sure. Come over later. We’ll sit.”
Was it wrong? Was it wrong to visit this man if I did it not because he was my friend, but because I missed you? You’d been dead for months, but you’d been gone for much longer. Do you really remember what you were like then? How can I know when you were really gone?
He told me that he wants to leave his house for Portland. He knew a place close to his daughter. He said that he’d been researching it, and that he’d sent his daughter to look it over. Judging by the way that she spoke about it and from the pictures that he saw, the place was warm and soft. As I sat there, I knew that he couldn’t clean out his house alone.
“I don’t need to be there to know how the place will be,” he said.
“You’re right,” I told him. “The smallest signs can be enough.”
I’m sorry, Mom. Mom, I’m sorry. Do you understand me? I couldn’t do the same thing for you. I couldn’t be there then. I couldn’t really think about what was happening to you. I wasn’t ready. I had to go through a hundred days of regret first. Even now, it’s hard, but I’m doing it. It’s the right thing to do, shouldn’t I do that?
I told him that I’d help him with the house and everything in it, and I don’t regret it. He has a bad knee. He’s recovering from laser surgery. He needs the help. You know what the job is like, don’t you? It’s hours of taking a home apart room by room, helping him decide on the few things that he wants to take and finding a place for the rest. He’s been giving lots of things to me and my family, which is nice, but I know that it’s more stuff that will make me remember him later. He’s strong. He’s sharp. He isn’t crazy yet, but I know that he shouldn’t do it alone. You know what it’s like to get rid of your spouse’s clothes, but he shouldn’t have to take apart his whole house at the same time. Still, he’s been strong. He’s only keeping a few boxes. He doesn’t tremble when my son takes the rest away.
My son is helping. He’s really grown since you last saw him. I can see him shoveling from where I’m working now, and when I can’t see his face, he looks like a man. He’s quieter now, but when he speaks, he sounds like a man. Sometimes, when he’s home from school, he’s like a man that I don’t know, but from the right angle, I can still see that little boy. You loved that little boy so much, maybe more than I sometimes did. You asked about him every time that you called until you didn’t call anymore. I think he’s fine. I’ve got him taking the old man’s things away now. Do you think that he understands what he’s doing? It’s so easy for him.
Cleaning this house should be easier for me because I never lived here. It should be easier without the memories of what took place in each room that I destroy, without knowing the history of each thing that ends up in the trash. It should be easy, but it isn’t. Mary got your voice, but I got your active memory. I’m usually good, but I can’t go for too long without asking him where he got something, and after he’s told me, I can’t help but think about it. With those histories, my memory twists itself and fills in gaps that I couldn’t go through. The most painful times are when I’m going through his wife’s things, because they’re not too far away from your things. You would have liked her books. You would have liked her dresses. You would have lingered over the photos of her daughter, too. Do you understand me? Did you do it for your mother, or did you leave it for someone else too?
You always joked that you were mad at Daddy for dying without clearing out the attic like he’d promised, but you didn’t do it either. Would you have done it even if you hadn’t gotten sick? For the past hundred days, I’ve thought about what the last years of your life would have been like if the drugs worked. Would anything have worked? Could anything pull your mind out of what it fell into once your body started to fail? It used to bring me a kind of solace that you probably never noticed that Mary and I had to eventually stop bringing our kids to visit you because you couldn’t smile for them, because you didn’t notice that they were there at all. It used to give me a kind of comfort that you probably never heard us crying on the phone when you couldn’t string good days together in a row or when you asked us why we weren’t doing enough. I cried hardest for Mary, because she was the sister who never moved too far away from you. Because she loved you too much to leave you, she was the one who had to take you from your house, who had to check you out of psych wards when you’d been good and then who had to talk to the doctors when you fell back into them. Do you understand what we’ve left to Mary? I left her to take your house apart alone.
Tell Mary I’m sorry. Please try to understand why I had to leave, and then tell her for me, because I’m too ashamed to tell her myself, even when we’re on the phone on Sunday afternoons. Do you remember the last time that we were together? We knew that you couldn’t stay in the house much longer. You were having too many bad days. They were coming too close together. You weren’t safe alone, but neither of us could imagine bringing you to live with our kids. You needed too much. Mary had called me to come see that clearly, so she could get you out of there. She needed to be sure that it was the right thing to do. She needed help.
Do you remember that? Do you remember the last time that I fed you? The only way that I could do it was to imagine that you weren’t my mother. Mary and I tried to imagine that it was another woman who we held down, not the woman who we would remember being a nurse and force-feeding patients herself, not our mother who carried us when we were sick in the night.
“No,” you said, “no, take it away, let me go, let me go, let me go. Let me die.”
I held you tighter.
Mary forced the applesauce into your mouth. “It’s not her,” she said; “remember, it isn’t her.’
“I know,” I said, and I believed it completely.
As I held her, a bellowing moan erupted from the woman’s emaciated body. The sound was alien and unknowable to me, but I began to shake nonetheless at the animal pain within my grasp.
“It isn’t her,” I said to my sister. “She’s gone, it isn’t her.” I couldn’t look at the woman.
“It isn’t her,” Mary said. The sound continued.
I held the woman tighter.
The sound stopped.
My grip loosened.
The woman breathed softly.
Mary put the applesauce down.
I breathed softly.
“Girls,” the woman said, in your warm soft voice, “say, what’s for dessert?”
Mary and I froze. You looked at us again with eyes that I recognized. You must have seen your daughters fortified against you. We must have looked like we’d seen a ghost.
You smiled, and you started to laugh so hard that your body shook between my fingers, and I shook with you, laughing as hard as I could until we all ran out of breath together, and then you fell silent. You breathed slowly through lips spattered with applesauce. You fell asleep.
Do you understand why I had to leave? Mary must have understood eventually. I don’t know if she’s ever really forgiven me for it. I told her that I couldn’t do it anymore, and when she reminded me that it was time, that it was time to take care of our mother and her house, I hugged her and drove away. She still talks to me, but we’ve never talked about that night. We talk about everything that isn’t that night.
I had to leave because I understood that it was you all along. I couldn’t see you fall apart while you were awake. I couldn’t be there anymore, not if you never left me, not if you knew that your house was coming down around you, not if you recognized us as your body took your mind apart and kept only what it needed for its trip to the grave.
It’s been a hundred and seven days since I left home, since the day that you were no longer able to forgive me. Can you hear me? Can you forgive me? What should I learn from the things in this man’s house?

OLD MAN TO OLD WOMAN:
I’m leaving. I’m leaving our town. I’m leaving our possessions. I’m leaving our house. I’m leaving our home. My sweet love, I’m leaving you in the ground. I know that this isn’t what you wanted me to do. You were clear about that. You took care of me when I needed it. I needed it when my knee failed, I needed it when my eye went, and I needed you every moment that you were here.
Now, my love, you’re gone, and I don’t need you anymore.
Please don’t misunderstand me. You have been so good to me, and I tried to be my best for you. You know that. That’s why I can tell you that you were wrong before. You knew what I wanted. I want to go out west. I want to live near our daughter. I want to die while I see her child grow. All that was left for us here is the warm soft feeling of decay. The rot that takes everything we have came to me first. It challenged my ability to stand and see, and you were good to me when you helped me through it, but you treated me like I was already dead. I told you that I wanted to leave when I could see again, but you held me tighter in my bed.
“No,” you said. “No, you don’t understand, but it’s too much to give to her, we’re too much of a burden for our daughter and her little girl. I love her, I love my daughter, and that’s why I’m telling you that she deserves to live with lively people. Let our granddaughter be a child. Let her live without seeing us fall apart and worrying about when we’ll finally die. If we go, they won’t be protected from our bad days. If we love them, we can’t be selfish. I’ll take care of it. I’ll take care of you. I’ll take care of everything.”
Was that when I betrayed you? Was that when I told you that I agreed with you as I left you in my mind? I was too angry with you to bring it up again. I sent our daughter to look the place over and didn’t tell you. I didn’t tell you that she liked it. I didn’t tell you that she missed me.
After I could move my knee enough to walk slowly, I waited for you to leave the house. I knew that you and the doctor said that it wasn’t ready for much, but I didn’t care. When I knew that you’d be gone for a while, I’d take walks. I walked down the street, up the hill, and towards the woods, where I could see rotting trees shed their dying leaves. In the West, where she is, they have trees that are higher and older than any around here. They still stand strong. Our daughter and our granddaughter want to show them to me. I never told you about the trees. I’d be home from those walks before you ever knew that I was gone. I had already left you, and I was still too angry to tell you how much you hurt me. I lied to you like I was a little boy. That’s how you treated me, but I should have done better.
I gave you silences, empty gestures, and a seething gap. Is that what killed you? I betrayed you, and I’ll carry that with me.
Forgive me because I’m still leaving. I betrayed our love, and I’m sorry, but I’m still leaving.
A woman and her son are packing up our house. I’m giving almost all of our things to them. They’re helping me leave you. They’ve been good to me. They’re quick to make it easier on me, so fast and so thorough that I can tell that they’re not just doing it for me. Nobody works that hard for the man down the street and his thing, not unless they revel in it somehow. Nobody’s so good to anybody these days, and certainly not for small rewards.
I need to leave home. I need to see the West. I need to see the children grow before I die. I can’t stand knowing that memories that I could have made with these new people have wasted away. And Love, they should see my decay. I believe that when we lie to ourselves about our failings, when we relive our memories in hopes that we will somehow travel back to take a different path, we fundamentally betray the young learning minds within us that must live with their real decisions. I’ll carry my sins with me, but I will not re-enact them for the warm soft pleasure of their familiarity.
I’m leaving home for the West. I’m going to die there, but I will first drive alone across the country in my rotting body. It might wear me down by the time that I get to the girls, but they too should learn that every moment is their last chance. I’ll hug this woman that’s helped me leave our possessions behind, and shake the boy’s hand, and maybe, by then, they’ll have poured their guilt out into their labors. As I drive, I will listen for the sound of my tires against the road. I believe that it will sound like a bellowing moan.