She Forgot

Rick Moody

She forgot and sometimes it was a good thing.

She forgot what I brought her and what I fed her for dinner from the tray by her bed.

She forgot the sound of rubber wheels wobbling down a corridor.

She forgot that a certain nurse often carried in the tray, a nurse with a mother of her own, and she forgot that the food was the same every Sunday when I visited. Salisbury steak, peas, mashed potatoes, plastic container of apple juice.

She forgot the fruit cup with the pineapple slices, the green grapes, the cling peaches, and because she forgot the menu she never tired of it.

She forgot dinner as soon as it was removed, if not before, and as soon as I was gone she forgot that I’d visited, which was not a good thing, because then she forgot that I’d made the effort. Though she’d forgotten I was related to her, she did recognize that I was not a party to be feared.

She forgot that there was no view out the window but parked cars. She forgot that she might have had a view that was otherwise.

She forgot that nothing in the room belonged to her but dusty framed photos, including a picture of me in a tweed suit, from back when I still had hair.

She forgot her hip fracture, which was only a few months ago, she forgot the pain of it. She forgot physical therapy and the nurse who presided there. A large Nordic woman, Claire, whom she disliked.

She forgot that they strapped her in at night, and therefore she was condemned each night to experience anew the straps fitted around her.

She forgot that she wandered, and that this was why she was strapped in, and she forgot that forgetting itself implied wandering, the forgetting of her room, the forgetting of the wing she lived in, the forgetting of the layout of the corridor, the forgetting of the institution. She forgot the terror associated with this forgetting, which was probably greater than the terror of being strapped in.

She forgot weeping in front of the nurses’ console after wandering, without any idea about where she was. What room, what place, what state, what period of her life.

She forgot how to protest about being strapped in.

She forgot the whole debate on free will and determinism, and so she didn’t mind giving up her will, in all but a very few cases involving things like the television remote control, which she’d forgotten how to operate, but to which she clung desperately.

She forgot about her opposition to the gun lobby, to the last couple of wars, to the Eisenhower administration, the McCarthy hearings, she forgot all these things, and she forgot that she and I disagreed on these things. She forgot Lyndon Baines Johnson. She forgot Richard Milhous Nixon, and other men whose middle names are always included.

She forgot that she was dubious on racial issues, and as a result she forgot to be suspicious of nurses who were a different color from her. She forgot that she was afraid of them, and so she often loved them, even when they were admonishing her.

When she woke in the night, she forgot that it was night, and she forgot what straps were, and that straps were affixed, and so in the middle of the night, when she was often awake, she experienced the straps and the night and the insomnia and the loneliness, and these must have been hard for her, but she also forgot her anxiety, and so she slept.

She forgot about the dawn. Each morning was the first. The sun rising over the cherry trees at the far end of the parking lot. The sparrows in the trees. The sanitation collection engineer, banging around some cans, hydraulically lifting a dumpster so that its refuse tumbled into his truck. How beautiful it must have been, this first dawn of hers, dew on the lawn, a retriever racing up the sidewalk in the distance, the baroque cursing of the sanitation engineers.

She forgot everything that was mundane and everything that was humdrum, and so there was no mundanity. The taste of toothpaste. A cup full of water, light refracted in it.

She forgot that I’d lost my job. I kept telling her. One day, I experimented and told her three times that I’d lost my job. The news became routine. Telling her again and again that I had lost my job diminished the catastrophe for me, if not for her. I changed the specifics of my job the third time, just slightly. She was unable to hear differences in this story, and so each time she worried afresh. If only for an instant.

She forgot the circumstances of all stories before they reached their conclusions, no matter what the stories were. As a result, what she liked about stories was the details. I could use the word chenille in a story any time and it would delight her. Cobwebs were also good, though somewhat frightening. Chrome, lilies, maple sugar, blueberries, wood smoke, flannel, baby oil, hot water bottles, whiskey, cigarettes. These pleased her.

She’d forgotten how to respond to good news, though she tried. When I told her I was dating again, she had trouble understanding my meaning. She’d forgotten that I’d once been married. I tried making up good news. I told her I had a daughter, though I did not. She was happy for a minute or two.

Of the books she loved, not a line remained. Herman Wouk. Will and Ariel Durant. James Gould Cozzens. John P. Marquand. She could read sorrow in a face, though. To forget sorrow exists in the face of another person you have to forget what faces mean. The day was not so far off.

She forgot her name, even if the nurses repeated it to her, as one nurse unfailingly did. It was just a courtesy, the employment of her name.

If she remembered something, if some clogged neurotransmitter fired briefly, and the flood of events came back, as sometimes happened, and if she then spoke a complete sentence, Darling, could you please drive me back to the house, she nonetheless soon forgot.

She forgot the time they complained to me about lateness of payments. She forgot that I snuck in the service entrance sometimes, just to avoid walking past Accounts Payable. She forgot when we pauperized her so that the state would make the payments instead. She forgot when I asked her to sign things. She forgot her signature, and so she forgot how to be a signatory.

She forgot anything about my appearance that she disliked.

She forgot darning socks, she forgot mending curtains, she forgot about when I first grew out the crew cuts of my childhood and how upset she was. She forgot the tweed suit she made me wear, she forgot how she so disliked denim, which she called low class and unflattering.

She forgot the pomegranate. She forgot the persimmon. She forgot the after-dinner mint. She forgot bubblegum, she forgot that she thought women who chewed gum were tramps. She forgot marzipan. She forgot bittersweet chocolate, which she preferred to milk chocolate. She forgot white chocolate, which she preferred to bittersweet chocolate.

The cedar mulch always looked fresh, on the grounds, and the hedges looked newly clipped, and one afternoon I took her out to look, but it was difficult and she was afraid of open spaces, since she had forgotten how to negotiate them.

She forgot the chandelier in the dining room in our house, which she’d bought at an antique store in Vermont in the fifties. She was so proud of that chandelier, which is still in my house, now my wife’s house.

She forgot the varieties of light cascading through an old dusty crystal chandelier.

She forgot that she had granddaughters, the children of my brother, who didn’t often visit. First she forgot the birthdays of her grandchildren, because they were barely out of diapers, then she forgot how many of them there were, then she believed she had one grandchild who stood in for all grandchildren, then she conflated me with her grandchildren, then she conflated me with her husband, my father, long since dead, and then she began to forget me.

She had cousins and children of cousins. Which was which? No more gift buying or feeling guilty about forgetting to buy gifts. No more worrying about whether the kids got gifts of equal value and size. She forgot who was a blonde and who was a redhead, which eyes were hazel and which blue.

Along came a day when it was unavoidable, the conclusion that what she’d really forgotten was time itself. No moment was before or after any other moment. She lived in a sequence of present instances, sundered from origins and destinies, and please note that in many precincts this is considered a wise and brave way to live.

Once, we happened to watch on television a montage sequence in black and white where the pages flew from a desk calendar. She paid no attention.

What she had not forgotten was how to see and hear and taste, as these apparently required little or no memory. So she was a seeing and hearing and tasting entity. Also a waste producer.

She forgot every day that she was a waste producer, and I think she was always shocked when she needed to be helped with this, but she never got over her sense of decorum, which, it would seem, is not part of character, but is housed somewhere lower down.

Since she forgot her children and grandchildren, it follows that she forgot reproduction. What a relief. She forgot the rhythm method, she forgot condoms, she forgot the advent of the birth control pill. She forgot the foams and sponges, she forgot the Morning After Pill, which she’d denounced as an abomination before God only five or six years ago. She forgot abstinence and birth control, she forgot that there was fornication, lovemaking, copulation, human sexuality. She forgot the missionary position, she forgot there was anything else besides.

She forgot whatever lovemaking she might have done; she forgot, no doubt, kissing some boy in a waving field of wheat back in the teens or twenties, before she was courtingmy father. She was blameless and immaculate.

She seemed to remember pleasure when a hand was pressed against her forehead. Was she capable of a delight in being touched? Or had she forgotten that too? I always took her hand in mine, and in this way I tested the remembering or forgetting of hands. I warmed her hands. I looked closely. Her hands seemed like marble now, as if forgetting had rigidification as a physical by-product.

I took her hand in mine and she remembered, in her skin, that there was something nice about having one’s hand held. She remembered that whenever her hand was held, whether the holder was man, woman, adult, or child, there was some glorious feeling attendant thereupon, and she remembered this, or perhaps she just felt that it was glorious, in her skin. She forgot where she had learned this novelty of hand-holding, but her hands remembered.

She forgot labor, she forgot the breaking of water, she forgot the agony of labor before anesthesia. She forgot the anxiety of giving birth to a boy during the Depression. She forgot the doctor who came round to the house with his bag of opiates and his unsterilized tools.

She forgot blood everywhere, she forgot the slime and horror of delivery, she forgot her husband, out back, smoking incessantly. She forgot the placenta, which was a blue like few blues she had seen.

She forgot the smell of childbirth, she forgot the child wailing at the smack on its behind. She forgot pregnancy and how much she hated her husband during pregnancy.

She forgot that she outlived him by thirty years.

She forgot the Jazz Age, she forgot the origins of jazz, if she had ever known them, she forgot the big band period, she forgot the smooth jazz favorites that they played in the hall by the nurses’ console. The residents didn’t like the loud stuff, though they had forgotten why.

She forgot thorns. She forgot weeds. She forgot poison ivy and poison oak. She forgot gardening. She forgot that she had often knelt in fresh soil and tried to help rosebushes in bad shape. She forgot transplanting.

She forgot all storms and all threatening weather, and this I know because two weeks ago I was there when a thunderstorm passed through the neighborhood. A look of stunned incomprehension swept across her face.

She forgot the playground near my house. She forgot the stone arch on the way to the playground. She forgot the path that led to the stone arch that led to the playground, she forgot that way a swing arcs out when you put a kid in it.

She forgot that she was not a child herself.

She forgot space. Did I mention this already? She forgot the ability to understand a space beyond what was immediately visible. She forgot that there was a hall outside her room, and when she was in the hall, she forgot that she had a room. And if she had forgotten both space and time, what exactly could she have remembered?

She forgot that I asked her to tell me what was beyond the door into the hall, and she forgot that she couldn’t answer. She forgot all that lay beyond what she could see: a television set, a number of framed photographs of me, my father, my brother, and his children. A spider plant. A stuffed bear that I brought one day since she was not allowed to have any pets.

She forgot that a window was not an easel painting. She forgot that the door was not some kind of ornament, and that beyond the hospital was a road, and that along the road was a mall and a country club and post office.

She forgot that she had once intended to leave. She forgot that this was home and no other home had existed, nor had ever existed, as far as she knew.

She forgot the seasons. She forgot the delicious part of spring that cries out that summer is coming. She forgot lilacs and Scottish broom, magnolia season. She forgot the smell of fresh popcorn. She forgot all varieties of pie. At one time, she lectured me about how mince pie had to contain venison, and now she had forgotten all pies.

She ate apple cobbler without complaint, or perhaps she simply forgot to complain.

She forgot that she was a forgetter. She forgot that I was coming in the door again, and that I had brought a jar of honey that I had bought in a foreign land.

She forgot that I needed to leave soon, so that I could come back again. If I went out to talk to the nurses when I returned it was an entirely new visit.

She forgot that this was to be another evening spent with an almost entirely forgotten person, dimly recognized but mostly forgotten, a person in the process of being forgotten, who walked through the door from somewhere, though from where was forgotten. Again there would be the language of his recounting. There would be this person, speaking these words, and his questions were entirely new or incompletely forgotten.

She forgot that I too lived in a dread of forgetting, because of her forgetting. And so I tested myself, with these stories. Did I forget parts of the stories I told her when I came to visit? Or did I tell the stories the same way? Did I forget and begin to invent, and did I do these things out of compassion, because forgetting begs to be forgotten?

Would I too forget? I asked. Could I simply be, as she was, a forgetter, rather than an anguished rememberer, in the beginning of growing old? And then I asked other such questions, going into the steamer trunk of memory. Remembering and forgetting, in the stories I told her, her life and mine.

She forgot, and sometimes it was a good thing. And sometimes not.