The reminders, p.11
The Reminders, page 11
But Joan convinced me to join her and her mother. She said if I had any hope of writing good lyrics, I had to keep having new experiences. Smart kid. Once again, she’s coaxed me into doing something I didn’t expect to be doing. First I’m facing Sydney head-on, welcoming his memory when I had sworn to outrun it. Now I’m writing song lyrics, something I haven’t done in almost twenty years, and, what’s more, writing about the very things I’ve been trying not to dwell on.
I pass by vendors of all types, surveying their wares from a distance, careful not to make eye contact with the artists. I feel too guilty not buying their stuff.
One artist’s tent finally intrigues me. I’m particularly drawn to a painting of a woman surfing a wave. The ocean is achieved with haphazard strokes. In contrast, the woman and her surfboard are ultra-precise, even down to the thin strands of hair. I can’t tell if it’s the artist’s style that’s familiar or the feeling it evokes. Either way, I think it would make a nice gift for my sister.
On a table below the surfer painting is a box of prints containing smaller versions of the larger works hanging around the tent. Now I’m wondering if a bulky painting is too ambitious. I decide to look for an eight-by-ten instead. I leaf through the cards until I find a copy of the surfer painting.
“Those are twenty-five each,” says a voice. “The postcards are five.”
It’s a girl. A young woman, rather. Probably my sister’s age, in her twenties. But there’s something old-soul about her eyes, like she knows more than her years might suggest.
“Gavin?”
I’ve been recognized. Ever since my video aired on the news and gossip shows, I swear people have been looking at me funny.
“Sorry,” she says. “You don’t know me. I knew Sydney.”
I remove my shades, turn again to the surfer painting. The loose ends start to connect. “We had one of your paintings in our house,” I say. “The one with the forest.”
The trees were a smattering of messy green jutting up against a starry night. The moon, meanwhile, was rendered with photorealism. It was a dramatic piece. The key word: was. I set it on fire.
“Mara,” she says, reaching out her hand. “Nice to meet you.”
“You too.”
There were artists of all types at Syd’s funeral, many of whom I’d never met before. Syd had championed their work, nurtured their creativity, and they all came to show their gratitude.
I hold up the eight-by-ten print of the surfer. “I’d like to buy this one for my sister.”
“Awesome,” Mara says. “Does she surf?”
“I don’t think so. But she loves the beach.”
She smiles. “It’s a nice gesture.”
I look again at the box of prints. “And do you have any postcards of the forest painting?”
Syd loved that painting, hung it in a prominent spot in our home. It took him several years to find something worthy of placing on that central wall.
Mara leafs through the box, keeps shuffling, seemingly without luck. Then, toward the back, she spots something. She reaches in and removes a card sheathed in plastic.
“On the house,” she says, hesitating before adding, “I’m sorry about what happened. I didn’t know him that well, but he meant a lot to me. In a weird way, he sort of made me realize how much I’m capable of.”
I know the feeling. How unlikely to share it with a stranger on this day, in this random place. And I almost didn’t come. Syd would say it was meant to be.
I tell Paige and Joan I’ll meet them back at the house. I walk east until I’m up against the Hudson River, one hand gripping the railing. Below, the dark water sloshes against a concrete foundation.
In my other hand, I hold the two prints: the one for my sister and the copy of the painting Syd and I once owned. I torched the painting and somehow it returned to me. At first it seemed like a stroke of cosmic luck. But soon after, about the time Paige and Joan returned with their enormous bag of kettle corn, I was hit with an overwhelming despair. The forest painting that hung in our house hadn’t been restored. I just had a smaller, cheaper duplicate of the real thing. The same can be said of Joan’s memories of Syd. They might bring me closer to him, but they never truly bring him back.
And it only frustrates me more not to have full command over my experience of the past, the way Joan does. She asked me to share my favorite memory of Syd and I couldn’t do it. Of course, I’ve got memories that stand out. The time he put way too much chili sauce in his pho and started dripping sweat and I couldn’t stop laughing. Or the time we took a road trip out to the Salton Sea and checked into a dank motel where we discovered a suspicious hole in our window the size of a bullet; we held each other extra-tight that night. Or both of us shedding tears at the exact same moment while watching Sigur Rós perform at Hollywood Forever Cemetery. Or the time I had the flu and Syd took the day off from work and sat with me in bed with his laptop while I watched a ten-hour marathon of House Hunters.
I know there are a hundred better memories that I’m forgetting. I wasn’t paying close enough attention when they were happening. I was too busy living, just enjoying our time together, completely unaware that it could all suddenly end. Now it feels like a distant dream.
And on top of that, to suddenly have doubts about Sydney when I never had them before. He lied to me, fine, but why? What was he doing out here? What was he hiding? Or is it still possible that this is all a misunderstanding? I might never know the answers.
I lean over the railing and stare down into the dark water. So tranquil. Sometimes I wonder if total blackness would be easier. When we were newly in love and totally inseparable, we hypothesized about what we’d do if one of us suddenly died.
The other will kill himself, I said.
Deal, he said. Unless, of course, we have a child.
I turn away from the water and start walking. Just moving my body helps to unblock my mind. It’s been so long since I’ve done any kind of exercise.
I pick up my pace, the rhythm of my steps against the pavement creating its own kind of music. A skeleton of some larger composition. I flesh it out with the chords and melody that are foremost in my mind: Joan’s. All that’s missing now are some verse lyrics to go on top.
I think you’ve already sealed my fate.
I sing the brand-new line to myself as I walk along. It feels true, worth keeping. I repeat it over and over like a mantra.
Pretty soon another one comes:
I can’t let you go, can never escape.
I’ve got two lines now. It’s a start.
“Get your guitar,” I say.
Joan hops off the studio couch.
“I guess you were right about me coming to the fair today,” I say, holding a scrap of paper in my hand. “I have some lyrics for the verse.”
She starts playing. I read-sing my handwriting:
Life began when you arrived
What came before was a waste of time
Now I’m wondering where to go
Some answers I’ll never know
I could get up and flee this place
But no one leaves without a trace
I think you’ve already sealed my fate
Can’t let you go, can never escape
I had forgotten how satisfying writing can be. Matching language to cadence. Flipping through the mental thesaurus. Seizing the perfect word, the one that packs meaning and feeling. I forgot how each vowel sings differently, alters tonality and emotion. I forgot how much music can help.
“That’s all I have,” I say.
“I love it,” Joan says.
“That one line is weak. I could get up and flee this place. It’s clunky.”
“Are you saying you don’t want to be here anymore?”
“I’m trying to say that wherever you go, you’re never really gone. It’s kind of like how you see people in your memories. They’re still here somehow. Anyway, I’ll keep working on it.”
“Okay,” Joan says. “For the chorus, you know how you say Keep dwelling on what went wrong, keep reaching for what is gone? What if one time you changed the second line to Keep singing the saddest song? Dad loves it when one chorus is different.”
“Okay. I can do that.”
“Also, I’ve been thinking a lot about a bridge. Wouldn’t it be great to have a song that makes people dance and cry at the same time? One of Dad’s all-time favorite songs is ‘A Day in the Life.’ It starts off really sad and slow and then the bridge gets fast and John sings about waking up and getting ready for the bus and then you totally want to dance.”
“That’s not John. That’s Paul.”
“What do you mean?” Joan says. “It’s John’s song. He read a story in the newspaper and he wrote the song.”
“True, but that’s Paul in the bridge. He wrote the middle part and he’s the one singing. You know, your style is more like Paul’s than John’s. Paul was a master of melody and he was the one coming up with the grand schemes, like Sgt. Pepper’s and all that. That’s you.”
Her eyes narrow, ready to pounce. “Do you know how to talk with a British accent?”
“You takin’ the piss?” I say.
“What?”
“That’s my accent.”
“Oh. Okay. Say ‘John Lennon’ with the same voice.”
“John Lennon.”
“Did you hear it?” Joan says. “When you say it with a British accent, it sounds like you’re saying Joan Lennon.”
“So?”
“I’m just like John! Dad named me Joan Lennon, not Joan McCartney. I’m the walrus!”
I wait for her to sit down. “You know my last name is Winters, right? But my real name is Deifendorf.”
“I saw that on your license. What’s Winters, then?”
“I made it up.”
Plenty of actors invent new monikers. For me, it wasn’t just the fact that my birth name is clumsy and difficult to spell. I discovered I was only able to truly disappear into acting roles once I’d made my past disappear. Of course, it was just an illusion.
“Listen, you can call yourself whatever you want,” I say, “but at the end of the day you’re still you. There’s no way around that.”
She pulls out a loose thread from her pants and ties it around her finger. “What if that’s not true?”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, my friend Wyatt told me I might lose my memory if I fell on my head again in Home Depot. And if I lost my memory, then I wouldn’t be like me anymore. I’d be like everyone else.”
I want to laugh, but it’s clear she’s not joking. “Look, kids tell each other a lot of crazy stuff. I once told my little sister there was a half-bird, half-man creature who lived on our roof, and she was too scared to open her window for weeks.”
She peeks up, cracks a smile. “I wish I had a sister or brother.”
“Do your parents ever talk about having another child?”
“Yeah, all the time,” Joan says. “But it’s never going to happen.”
I feel the need to offer an answer, though I’m not sure she’s asking for one. “Having a kid is a really big decision. It’s not something you just step into lightly. Maybe one person is ready and the other needs more time. And then, for whatever reason, it just doesn’t work out like you planned.”
I look up. Joan is doing her best to follow, but the thing is, she’s not really the one I’m trying to explain something to.
17
The Hollybrook Cognitive Research Center in Summit, New Jersey, is nothing like the college where Dr. M works in Arizona. The college in Arizona is covered in trees and the sun is shining and happy students are sitting on the green grass.
But today in New Jersey it’s all rain and clouds. The research center is just one brick building and it’s got a parking lot around it with no trees, just telephone poles and wires stretching everywhere.
Inside the research center, it’s even gloomier. Dr. M’s office had interesting things to look at, like a model of a brain and a silver ball that never stopped swinging, but this room is just a table and chairs with nothing on the walls. Mom is allowed to stay with me, but she has to keep quiet during the tests.
We’re waiting for the doctor to arrive and I’m playing my Nintendo DS, but I’m too nervous to pay attention. It’s my own fault that we’re here today. After Mom caught me answering the phone and I told her I wanted to help old people remember, she scheduled this appointment.
I reach my hand back to her. She takes it. “It’ll be fine, honey. I’m here.”
Dr. Robert Brickenmeyer is a skinny man with his hair combed like a dork. He puts a recorder on the table between us, but the recorder is nothing fancy, nothing like Dad’s stuff. I guess doctors don’t care how good things sound.
Dr. Robert reminds Mom not to say anything and he shows me a picture:
Then he covers the picture and he asks me questions:
What time was it on the clock?
—3:25
—2:35
—1:45
What was directly above the ruler?
—chair
—cat
—football
Which hand was the teacher waving?
—right
—left
—neither
It’s a really hard test because I was too busy looking at the cute little cat, but I try to ace it anyway. Then Dr. Robert reads me eight pairs of words:
car—puddle
fox—melon
computer—snake
diamond—chocolate
skateboard—gorilla
umbrella—corn
butterfly—plastic
teacher—buckle
Dr. Robert says computer, and I’m supposed to remember that it goes with snake. These tests are just like the ones Dr. M gave me until he realized that my memory doesn’t work this way.
Then Dr. Robert takes out an iPad and plays a video. It looks like a TV show. There’s a man and a lady sitting on a couch and then someone knocks on the front door and the man gets up and answers the door and it’s another man. The first man lets the second man into the house and they all sit on the couch and then the lady goes into the kitchen and she comes back and the video is over.
“Okay,” Dr. Robert says. He brushes his hair to the side, even though his hair is already as far over as it can go. “The first question: What magazine was resting on the coffee table in front of the couch?”
Magazine? What magazine? “I didn’t see a magazine.”
The doctor nods and then he asks more questions, like how many cups the woman was holding when she came back from the kitchen.
I answer each one and then Dr. Robert plays the video again and I see that I got every question wrong. The magazine that I didn’t even notice was People and although I guessed that the lady was holding two cups, she actually wasn’t holding any. She was holding a plate.
“That’s not fair,” I say. “It was a trick.”
“It’s part of the test.”
I turn back to Mom and she smiles and it helps but I feel stupid because that’s not how my memory works.
“Please face forward, Joan.”
“I don’t remember stuff like that.”
“Well, that’s just it,” Dr. Robert says. “We’re not sure how your mind operates. We’re hoping to figure that out.”
“But I already did these tests with Dr. M. I don’t want to do them again.”
“You’re doing great,” he says, but he says it like a robot and I don’t like robots.
“I want to go home.” I turn around. “Mom.”
She stares at me until she sees something and then she stands and slides her purse onto her shoulder.
“Excuse me,” Dr. Robert says.
“I’m sorry,” Mom says. “She’s changed her mind.”
I rush to her and Dr. Robert stands and he walks around the table and gets down on one knee. “If you come back another day, we’ll have to start from the beginning. You don’t want that, do you? You’re doing a terrific job. Later you get to climb into a big machine.”
“I’m not coming back.”
Mom takes me by the hand and we find our way out.
I stare out the rainy window as Mom drives us away from Hollybrook and talks on the phone. It must be Dad she’s talking to because he told Mom last night that he wanted to hear how it went.
“Not great,” Mom tells him. “Yeah, she’s okay.”
I tried to tell Dr. Robert that it has to happen to me and in my life and I have to pay attention to it or else I won’t remember it. Ask me what Grandpa got me for my fourth birthday (indoor trampoline). Ask me what day it was when I learned my first B minor chord on guitar (Monday, November 7, 2011). Ask me the color of the building where they sent Grandma Joan after she got sick (red brick). Ask me what Sydney was wearing when he arrived on October 27, 2008, but don’t ask me what time it was when he came because I don’t wear a watch and I never look at clocks.
The car isn’t moving anymore. We’re parked in a shopping center and Mom says, “How about a smoothie?”
Mom gets Berry Bananza and I get Nectar Nirvana and we sit near the front of the store and suck on our straws. The window is foggy so you can’t see what’s going on outside, but inside it’s dry and cozy.
I like this smoothie shop because they have plastic cups, and plastic cups are better than paper cups because you can see how much smoothie you have left. Mom says plastic is bad for fish in the ocean but I know paper is bad for trees, so I guess that’s why Mom says you can’t win, which means there’s no right answer.
After two giant slurps, I ask, “Are you mad?”
“No, honey, not at all,” she says, shaking her head a zillion times. “It’s my fault. I was afraid that would happen. That’s why I was always against you doing this.”
She’s only ever let me talk about my HSAM to Dr. M. “So why did you let me do it this time?”
“Because you wanted to help people like Grandma and I thought I should at least let you try.” I can tell she wants to say something else but isn’t sure if she should. “Look, you’ve got a special thing and it’s yours and I know that. When you’re eighteen you can do whatever you want, but right now it’s my job to protect you. People call me up with all kinds of requests and some of them offer us money and it just doesn’t feel appropriate. You just have to trust that I’m trying to do what’s best for you and your future. I don’t always make the right decisions. But I’m trying.”
