Remember Me

She walks into the room but can’t remember why she has. She turns around and walks back over the threshold. The same refrain plays again and again in her mind: What am I doing here? She can’t remember where she left her keys; but that’s normal, she tells herself for the thousandth time. (When an out-of-the-ordinary thing occurs a thousand times is it not now normal?) She didn’t need her keys, now, anyway, since the last time she had driven her car she had forgotten where she was headed before she had even managed to reach the end of the driveway. Put it in reverse, put the keys on the sideboard. Where were they again? Oh yes, that was a week ago. She didn’t need the keys now. What was she looking for?

           She turns around and walks back into the family room, where her daughter, Ruth, watches anxiously from the sofa. She feels confused and tries not to show it, but can’t remember why she should keep it hidden. Hidden; yes, that’s it. What she was looking for (whatever it was) must have been hidden by one of her playful grandchildren. She has three—no, four—of them: Anna, Jack, Samuel, and… and? The frustration and fear mounts as she stands just inside in the doorway, unsure where to go from here.

           “Joey,” says her daughter—Joey! That was the last one’s name, she sighs with relief. Of course, how could I forget?—“Go help your grandmother to a chair.”

           “No, no,” she says, shuffling over to one of the upholstered chairs almost as old as herself, “I don’t need help.” She sits and watches the children play, trying to tell Jack and Joey apart, even though they don’t look alike. She feels uneasy about why she had left the room, or come into it, in the first place. She must have wanted something, but what? The concern on her daughter’s face only makes the feeling worse. She could never mistake that face, the dark brown eyes and freckles of her own flesh and blood, but also, she thinks, not for the first time, of the resemblance to Aunt Cathy, her own dearly departed sister. When Ruth comes over to take her hand, she pats the hand entwined in hers and says, “Thank you, Cathy.”

                                                       ***

           Try to remember, she thinks, leaning on the sideboard, and unwilling to go back into the garden and face the children and Ruth empty-handed and helpless. She had heard the children whisper to their mother: Grandma’s acting strange, again; or, she keeps calling me by the wrong name; why doesn’t she recognize us? “Grandma’s having a little trouble remembering things,” had been Ruth’s diplomatic answer, but, her mind is still sound enough to register the implication, she thinks bitterly, and she decides she isn’t ready to surrender yet. Remember. She shuts her eyes. Please remember.

           Her daughter is standing there when she opens her eyes, and for a moment she thinks she’s at home again with Cathy, getting ready to bake cookies in the kitchen with their mother. Ah, that’s right—she must have forgotten to grab the flour. That must be why Cathy looks so upset.

           “Mother?” Cathy asks, and she looks around, expecting to see their mother walking in at any moment. But she doesn’t come. And Cathy is dead. And her daughter is crying. “Don’t you know me?”

***

           The episodes are longer now; she lapses in and out of the present, as if, after so many years of living, linear time has lost its meaning one and for all. Ruth and her Ruth’s children swim to the surface for a split second before sinking again and giving way to beloved figures that she’d thought she lost forever many years since. Then in an instant, her mother and sister sit by her side again, and she is young, and nothing aches, and no one is worried, and she can run and dance and sing to her heart’s content. Vividly she sees the gingham pattern of her mother’s apron, and the sunlight shining on her sister’s hair; she can count every freckle and it’s as if she never left those halcyon days behind.

           In her more lucid moments, which occur with less and less frequency and remain for shorter periods of time, which minutes seem to her like hours, she wonders why yesteryear looms before her so clearly these days, while her own grandchildren, not more than a decade to her own eight years, seem to grow farther away. Their presence flits in and out of her mind, until she is unsure if those faces belong to her or not. Once, when she calls her daughter Clara, after her sister, she realizes her mistake, and it occurs to her that Clara is dead and Ruth is alive, and that it is the latter to whom she chatters and replays her memories of girlhood. She sees that it hurts Ruth to be mistaken for her Aunt Clara. If only they didn’t look so alike. Then she wouldn’t get so confused.

           Surely she wouldn’t forget, though. Not her own daughter. Never. On the contrary, her memory was strong; she still remembered with complete clarity those faces from so long ago.

***

“Mom? Can you hear me?” Mom? I’m not your mother silly, she thinks, smiling at Clara’s antics. Mother’s inside baking shortbread, which we will eat warm off the pan. Why are you crying, my sister? It is a beautiful day, and we are young and gay and waiting for our lives to begin. I believe we will always be so. I believe that, one day, when we are old, and have children of our own, and perhaps even grandchildren, we will sit together, as we are now, Clara my dear, on the stoop of our natal home, in the village of our youth, wearing our jumpers and eating ice cream in cones from the shop down the street. We will look back and smile and say to each other Remember when? I can’t imagine why you are fretting, dear, when I know that, someday, we will look back on this moment and smile, and it will not seem so long ago, after all.