I Remember

‘There’s never anything to eat here, God,’ says Chelsea. 

‘Are you kidding me?’ I say, gesturing at the four boxes at my feet that I’ve already cleared from the pantry. I’ve got what I think is flour on my cheek and grains of what I hope is some spice under my nails. It smells smoky. Cardamom maybe? I’m not good at spices.  

‘Oh, yes mum, please,’ says Chelsea, picking out the nearest jar, ‘let me eat some whole green pickles in brine from...’ she turns the jar over, ‘nineteen-ninety-seven.’ 

Horror and disgust fight for first place one her face as if she didn't realise nineteen-ninety-seven was a real year where people lived and did things like eat pickles. She settles back on the kitchen stool, tucking her feet tightly under her on the footrest lest she might “catch” old age. 

‘What the hell is brine anyway, sea water? Gross.’ 

She’s taken a picture of the “gross” jar and is now uploading it to some platform or other, I imagine Snapchat, probably with a caption complaining about how her Saturday has been ruined by a relative very rudely dying.  

I remember her tucking her feet under that very stool when she was little, they didn't reach the footrest then. My beautiful daughter, six years old, face shining with excitement, her eyes wide and sparkling, full of raw joy as I passed her an ice cream sundae. I hardly see her eyes now, I realise, just her eyelids as she looks down at her phone, long exaggerated eyelashes poking out from underneath. I miss those eyes. I hope they come back.  

Mum comes back into the room, she touches Chelsea’s hair as she passes, Chelsea shrinks away from it, her head retreating into her shoulders like a turtle. I’ve warned mum Chelsea hates having her hair messed with these days but she wont be told. ‘Nonsense,’ she says. My mums catch phrase.  

She throws down a handful of post, ‘God knows when these are from, I don’t know if she’d opened mail in a while. And look at this, Joanna.’ 

She hands me what looks like a rectangular birds nest with a picture of five-year-old me in the middle. 

‘Oh my God,’ I say. ‘I can’t believe she kept this!’ 

My mind goes back thirty-seven years, my chubby, clumsy kid-hands sticking dried pasta hap-hazardly onto a cardboard photo frame.  

I remember. 

 I’d been so proud of it, it had felt exhilarating and naughty using food as art and watching Nana’s face crinkle into bemusement as I gave it to her. Nana handled it gently like fine porcelain. 

Mum stands on tiptoe to gaze over my shoulder at it, when did she get so small? She smiles and goes misty-eyed. 

‘I remember you at that age, Jo- such a doll you were.’ 

I have a pang of sadness, I wonder if I was a big a cow to her as Chelsea is to me, I wonder if she ever looked at my awkward teen frame and missed me to her core. I put the frame carefully in a box on the counter, a small collection of treasures I want to take home. I rest it against an old teddy of mine and a thick copy of Gone with the Wind Nana always told me I should read but I never got around to. 

I open the nearest drawer for something to open the letters with and grab a fork, sliding it neatly under each envelope as I tear.  

* 

I watch my daughter, a grown woman now with her own family, opening letters with a fork. Whoever taught her to open letters with a fork? A community newsletter, a reminder from the library, an overdue bill, I was expecting one or two of those.  

Joanne skims them all and tosses them aside, something to be dealt with later. She is methodical like that, always has been. One task at a time. She takes a jar of pickles off Chelsea and puts it back into a box on the floor, things to throw I assume. So many things for the tip. A whole life packed up. 

Chelsea has muttered something rude under her breath and Joanne has lost her temper, snapping back. I didn’t hear what the comment was, I hate to admit it but my ears aren’t what they were, whatever it was, it was ‘Too far,’ Joanne is saying. I turn away to hide my smile. I can’t help it, I see so much of my Joanne in that beautiful, sulky child. She is going to grow up just fine. I only hope she opens letters with a proper letter opener.  

‘Absolutely no respect,’ Joanne says. ‘My Nana has just died, your Great Nana. Don’t you care?’ 

‘Of course I care, I’m not a psychopath.’ 

‘You could have fooled me,’ says Joanne. She has been gesturing wildly with her hands, ever the dramatic, finally realises she has a fork in one and throws it into a box on the counter, I imagine to rid herself of the impulse to throw it at Chelsea’s head. I peer down into the box and began rearranging things in an attempt to keep myself well and truly out of this argument. A book, a teddy, the pasta frame. I hold the fork in my hand, still warm, and my mind jumps back forty-three years.  

I remember.  

I was staring down at my plate, food untouched, clutching a fork just like this. Could it have been this exact one? I was trying to avoid my mother’s gaze, not wanting to see the look on her face. Instead I focused on the fork as the silence settled around us like a dangerous, chilly fog. I took in each prong, every dent, every scratch on its surface. 

‘You are what?’ Mother had said. 

The fork glinted a little as I tried to control a tremble, catching the dim light from the overhead lamp. 

‘Pregnant,’ I said. ‘I think.’ 

‘You think? You think, Marion? You had better do better than that.’ 

I cleared my throat with a small ‘Hm-hm,’ willing the strength to have that conversation. ‘Ok, then, I’m quite certain.’ 

Martin and I had married, of course, mother had seen to that, and while the marriage wasn’t entirely happy (‘Happy?!’ Mother had said when I confided in her a few years later, ‘Happiness is not what marriage is for, Marion’), I had got my Joanne out of it so I shan't complain. 

I think about my dear mother now. She was disappointed in my discrepancy but she wanted the best for me, I know that now. I watched her fade over the last year, shrink into the background like she knew what was coming. I t hurt to see her go. It hurts now to see her life reduced to boxes, reduced to memories, the only tactile proof that she was here in inanimate objects like this fork. I wonder where she is now. 

* 

I watch my daughter, from far away now. For some reason I’m shocked to see her in her sixties, although I was present for every one of her birthdays. I just don't know how it happened so fast. One moment she was a beautiful bouncing baby being bathed in that sink behind me, the next she’s standing at my kitchen bench staring at a fork, for heaven’s sake, while her own daughter and granddaughter are in a passionate exchange of words right in front of her.  

It’s about pickles from what I can make out, I don't understand young people. The things they say to each other! If I had spoken to my mother that way, I would have been out the door without a pickle to my name. 

I wasn’t even twenty when my mother died.  

I remember. 

I felt the loss like a chasm, like a gaping sink hole opened up in the street, interrupting lives, causing chaos and fear. I wasn’t ready to be on my own without a guardian, to be a grown up. But there we are. Things happen and we must get on with it, and my mother left me a ready-made adult life to step right into- this house and everything in it. Even the fork in Marion’s hand. Harold and I moved in and took over a life my dear mother had begun, and this house and I have been together ever since. 

Things were different back then, things were precious, not disposable. I imagine my mother being gifted that set of cutlery by her own mother as a wedding gift, a momentous occasion full of achievement and promise. I imagine my mother’s face as she undid the clasp and opened the wooden lid, the cutlery lined up in perfect rows, each piece set into its own bed of velvet, glinting, unblemished. I imagine her selecting a fork, turning it this way and that, appreciating every curve, thinking about this fork feeding her and her new husband, feeding a daughter of her own one day. Perhaps the fork she held up to the light is the one Marion has in her hand right now. Dented now, a little blemished. As are we all.  

I watch Marion tuck the fork safely back into the box and get back to her life, finally stepping in to be the referee. It makes me smile. Life goes on, the fork goes on to feed a new generation of mouths. 

It’s time for me to go. 

I look around my old kitchen fondly. So many memories here, so many meals, so many conversations, so many big moments, but also so many mundane ones. The moments we overlook, the packed lunches, the over-cooked roasts, the spilled milk, the burnt toast. The moaning child unhappy about leftover casserole again. I remember them all, the god times and the bad. 

I remember.