The Memory Sessions

I.

THE BRIDGE

i. TELEVISION

The evening our father died—the night before my entire childhood memory evaporated—my sisters and I did something we were not normally allowed to do: watch television. My mother preferred that we crochet and play school before bed. Debbie remembers red flannel jammies with white plastic feet that made her toes sweaty. I like to think of our feminine foursome in matching nighties, soft and pale pink with flowers.

I wonder if I felt excited to be shuttled into that February night, along the brick path and through the pachysandra patch to the neighbor’s house, where we ate SpaghettiOs, according to Tammy, and watched television, according to all. I remember that part. The show was Knight Rider: a shadowy flight into the dangerous world of a man who does not exist. In February 1983, the show was over halfway through its inaugural season. It was a Monday, and new Knight Rider episodes aired on Friday nights, so perhaps NBC was showing a rerun of the latest installment, The Topaz Connection.

I’ve since rewatched the episode. The publisher of a men’s magazine is murdered. Michael Knight and his sleek supercar, KITT, head to Vegas to investigate. Miss November plays a role—topaz is November’s birthstone, something my father and I shared. The dead man’s daughter, the standard love interest, sums up the episode: Glamour and sex. Fashion and sex. Cars and sex!

On the screen: a supposedly dead ex-cop and an indestructible supercar on a grisly but glitzy investigation. Watching: four little girls, in jammies or nighties, perched on a neighbor’s couch while their mother is told by a cop and a priest details of their father’s death. KITT could sustain impact at top speeds, destroying the other guy without receiving a scratch. My dad’s small gold Honda stood no chance against the drunk driver’s oncoming car.

My sisters and I remember the red lights on the mouth of the talking car. We differ in how we recall my mother’s phrasing of the terrible news. But after thirty years, none of us has forgotten those lights. To us, watching the show, watching television at all, had been as strange as the strangers at the door.

I tell my eldest sister, Beth, I am trying to remember the night our father died. Mom knew the minute she opened the door, she says. But I thought, it’s a mistake. He’s just hurt or asleep, not dead. I thought that until I saw him in the casket.

You saw him?

We all did. We drew pictures for him. We gave him flowers, too. Don’t you remember? We wore matching cranberry-colored velvet jumpers with ruffles along the straps. I remember placing my picture next to him.

My sisters say I’m lucky that I don’t remember. His skin looked like Silly Putty, they tell me. His knucklebones, pronounced.

After the funeral our mother put us to bed and lay down on the porch, where she would sleep for many years, her only company the blaring television.

ii. TIME OF DEATH

My mother, because it’s November, is gearing up for the holiday blues. Several names on the card list will be scratched out. Funeral cards wait to be filed. She has a number of Catholic masses to dedicate. One cousin died suddenly from a blood clot, so she must send flowers and a donation. She clipped his obituary with vigor; we bought her a small copy machine, so she can spread word of the newly deceased without having to reproduce the notices in longhand. Managing death has long been a priority, while other tasks—rearing children, cleaning out the empty nest, shoring up against deterioration, baby-proofing all over again for grandchildren—have cycled.

This November day is also the end of daylight saving time, an otherwise ordinary day, both dreadful and delightful to her, as she must set the clocks back. All forty-two of them. Wall clocks, table clocks, alarm clocks. An antique mantel clock, a Waterford crystal piece, a sandstone sundial in the overgrown garden. A longcase marking the lunar phase. A terra-cotta circle on the shed. My mother is proud of her clock collection, amassed since my father’s death. He was forty, my mother forty-one. Time moved on. At least to forty-two. Each hour, a wild jangling awakens the critters in the walls. Horologists would delight in my mother’s midnight.

She’s making her way to the family room and its four clocks when the phone rings. She jumps. My mother fears life. She worries that happiness will sneak in, and she’ll accidentally let out a lighthearted laugh. Nothing is life threatening, but everything in life threatens. She wears protective gear against such life. She finds the worst and weaves it into a mourning cloak wrapped tightly around her shoulders.

In the past, my mother would screen calls; now, with ailing joints, she can’t get to the phone in time. She listens to my voice filter through the wheezy answering machine. Mom, it’s me. Just wanted you to know I’m thinking of you today. I miss him too. I love you. It takes my mother a few seconds to identify which me has left the message. By day’s end, she will have received four such communications. We daughters call when something happens. We call on holidays. And we call on her anniversaries: the anniversary of her father’s death; of her mother’s death; of her best friend’s death; of her second daughter’s stillbirth; of her wedding; of her husband’s birth; of her husband’s death; and so on. The annual sum of these messages is likely five or ten minutes.

Today, we call because it’s my father’s birthday. He was born nine months after the start of War Time, President Franklin Roosevelt’s energy-conserving measure that moved clocks ahead and left them that way for over three years. His birthday often coincides with the end of daylight saving. When he lived, he got one more hour to celebrate. When he died, she got one more hour to mourn.

My mother keeps moving, her thick sandy-brown hair pulled into a mass atop her head and barely contained by a scarf. Shuffling across the beige kitchen linoleum, she’s unsteady. But she knows how to get around the house. Whenever her disease-eaten knees refuse to support her weight, my mother’s knowing hands find purchase on a counter, an end table, a chair’s straight back. She passes the dining-room window. Out back, beyond the brick patio that she installed where a pool used to be, stands the Memorial Garden. Spookee 1982–1995. Twinkle 1985–2000. Charcoal 1987–1996. In the graves rest brittle cat bones, wearing dolls’ clothing and arranged in baskets.

On to the family room, where every square inch of wall space is adorned with an archaic farm tool, a tarnished trinket, or a musical instrument long silent. Antique glove stretchers, a broken dairy scale, the Massachusetts license plate from her parents’ light-blue Ford Gran Torino, my father’s orange Keds. Close to the flag that draped his coffin hangs a wedding photo in an antique brass frame. Across the top is a red ribbon, retrieved from the casket arrangement, bearing the nickname Hon. If she plucked the picture from its tomb, she would read on the back in her own perfect cursive: No two people loved each other more. She would nod in agreement with herself, replace the photograph, straighten the frame, dust off the glass.

Before she was bent by her condition—a collection of infections and diseases she’s either hiding or denying—my mother would drive to the town cemetery and pick leaves off the family headstone. Her own name—Dolores, from the Latin word dolor, meaning grief or sorrow—is already etched there, next to my father’s, marking the plot of earth where her body will finally rest.

After my father died, I believe, my mother asked Death to take her, too. And Death, in a manner, did. Came to her with an offer of marriage. She would live on, would provide a space for Death to flourish, with all the trappings and tokens of human life to play with, all the nooks and crannies of her house and her mind to inhabit. In return, Death would provide the income, payouts from the life insurance policy, and remain her unfailing companion until the time had come to return my mother to her husband. She accepted Death’s proposal, whispering that now she would never be alone.

By the time three more messages beep on her machine, my mother makes the final turn of the final clock. Forty-two hours are added, but the day is shortened.

Her own birthday most often falls on the winter solstice. Around the world each year, celebrations of the coming sunlight unfold, while my mother watches murder mysteries by the glow of a heater switch and one digital clock.

iii. BLAZE OF GLORIA

A rotting log, or snag, provides food and shelter for many animals and plants, reads Colin, deliberately. I’m Colin’s after-school homework helper, one of the several part-time jobs with the elementary set I’ve taken since leaving my full-time teaching position to attend graduate school. Some plants and animals eat the decaying materials and dead organisms in snags. He circles the information needed to answer question one: What do rotting logs provide that plants and animals can eat? b. decaying materials and dead organisms. Colin and I both excel at multiple-choice questions.

I know snags pretty well, having spent many hours in my mother’s yard cutting them down. Dead from fire, lightning strikes, disease, or age, these rotted-out trees beg to be severed from their roots and stacked elsewhere. They’re wormy. Unbecoming. Sometimes they’re so rotten you can tug lightly and the whole tree comes loose. A snag makes you feel stronger than usual, while the tree acts weaker than it looks. My mother often asks me to drag the branches and trunks into the woods behind the house, piling them by the stream, where their musky odor mingles with the wet dirt and the skunk cabbage growing along the banks. I used to believe that most trees were transferred to such a setting after they died, that even when burned or killed by drought, trees ultimately met a wet end.

But standing snags, according to Colin’s science book, provide a home and a food source to a great number of living things in the ecosystem. Woodpeckers, chickadees, bats, beetles, frogs, moss, fungi—they all love a good, dead tree. Better to leave the trees to their afterlife, sticking up among the dense pachysandra. At least the dead trees in my mother’s yard have never been sentenced to the chipper. Piles of branches become complexes of soft, secret little houses. The wood decays and nourishes the dirt, which in turn nourishes the pungent bouquets of skunk cabbage, one of the greenest plants I’ve ever seen.

Colin finishes for the day. I ride the bus home, straight down Second Avenue but still a long, halting trip due to rush hour, and think about trees. I’ve been in New York for years, but I still miss my New England home. Connecticut, hilly and woodsy, always draws leaf-peeping crowds in autumn. Some years, when the nights turn cold early enough, the leaves reveal their fiery hearts of orange, yellow, and red in September. Other years, even in late September, green lingers.

When my three older sisters and I were kids, a typical Thursday afternoon, they tell me, included record-breaking swing-set marathons or roller-skating down the driveway that must have seemed like a precipitous slope given my fear of speed and heights. But one Thursday afternoon in late September, when I was eight years old, we spent our time calculating how close to the house certain trees were leaning, triple-checking battery-operated lamps, crisscrossing the windows with masking tape, and taking inventory of the canned food stored in the basement. My mother stockpiled hundreds of cans, jars of pickles from my grandmother’s recipe, and scores of bottles—mostly ketchup, soda, and salad dressing. The basement was a playground for us, especially when we gave in to troublemaking impulses. Someone unscrewed soda caps and took just a sip from each bottle, letting them leak out their gas. (I’m told that I was the culprit.) Someone cracked the basement fridge and stole one of the hard-boiled eggs intended for potato salad or Easter coloring. (No one has yet confessed to that crime.) Our basement antics infuriated my mother, and saddened her too, since her basement was her own haven, not for tricks, but for her beloved things. Fabric, mostly. And the piano, a significant purchase she and my father made after I as their youngest was out of diapers, officially making us a family of four lesson-ready kids. The basement held my father’s effects, too—his workbenches laden with tools and his model trains. My mother’s basement hideaway, shelter from the bomb-bright world, hadn’t changed a bit since my father was alive.

That Thursday in late September, our basement trips were restricted to fetching supplies. Hurricane Gloria was rushing up the East Coast, and as the radio blared the song by the same name, the sky darkened, the wind picked up, the electricity flickered, then failed. We lit