My mother remembers the glory days on the Eastern Shore when she could consume all the cheese she wanted. She spread chévre liberally over crackers, consumed stacks of Swiss on rye, sprinkled parmesan in drifts over spaghetti marina.
These days ended, she implies, when she left the coastal plain of the Chesapeake Bay for the precipitous hills of San Francisco. She doesn’t immediately recall that her dairy issues started when she still lived on the East Coast, years before her move out west. Remember when we visited Italy? I ask, a trip we took before her move. You were so careful (well, mainly) to avoid cheese and milk products. And then she does remember because she recalls an unkind waiter who sneered at her request for pasta sans cheese.
Negative experiences stick. Imagined and potential risks stick. Childhood experiences and yearnings are close to the surface. Other things, some things, feel like they are eroding.
Do you remember? Don’t you remember? Remember?
A reverie about a roller rink, the one on Route 40 which surely was closed years ago or maybe it wasn’t closed or she thinks it eventually closed. Did you go roller skating as a kid? she asks in a moment of interest, perhaps in a bid to draw me out, draw me in. It is an attempt at connection that only highlights what we’ve lost. I was an unadventurous, nervous kid unlikely to roller skate down my grandparents’ driveway, let alone wheel around a rink. Think about what you remember about me as a child, I state, unkindly. Do you think I would have enjoyed going to a roller rink?
I am laser-focused on her lapses. Meanwhile, she operates independently in the world. Time is more malleable, YouTube with its deceptive AI slop a constant presence, but she still writes poetry and pays her bills. Still, I have seen her slumped over on her couch asleep, neck crooked, head dangling, as the videos endlessly scroll on her laptop. She looks vulnerable. Different. Describing it feels like a betrayal.
It makes no sense to focus on her spotty memory, to scold her for her watching habits, to expect attentiveness, to expect her to remember aspects of who I am. It is also difficult to just let go, to allow sadness to exist before fear and frustration cover it over. All of it will only get worse, and I need my humanity intact.
When I was a child, not yet ten, she asked me to keep watch in her dotage. If she started to slip, if her mind began to go, I was to kill her and bury her under the tomato plants, to make good fertilizer out of a deteriorating brain. I’ve reminded her of this, too, again not kindly. Why do I do such things? She currently elides the initial instruction, remembering only the post-murder plan, me with a shovel out in the garden, her shrouded form indistinct and impersonal. The essential matricide is left out of the equation.
Perhaps I am making something out of nothing, my overly attentive eyes scanning the horizon in preparation for loss. We have a history, the two of us, me the practical one, her the gauzy poet. I slot into my role like a coin into a payphone, clumsy fingers trapped as I try to dial a line out. But the line was cut years ago. My breath steams the walls of the booth. Nothing is solid beyond the glass and the box itself is a shimmer on barren horizon. We’re in trouble, and I have no one else to call.