The Last Conversation

024

“Your mother stayed at home with you until you went to kindergarten.”

“Is that me with her on the screen now?”

“Yes.”

“I remember her.”

“What do you remember?”

“I—I remember her. I remember her laugh, and how she would purposely embarrass me in front of my friends by calling me ‘honey’ or ‘sweetie.’ Is that correct? Didn’t you tell me she did that?”

“When you went to school, she resumed her career as a real estate lawyer. She often worked long hours.”

“Aren’t all hours the same length, sixty minutes? Oh, wait, you are using figurative language. You mean that she worked many hours, more than usual or the expected.”

“Your father worked for the Wakefield Gas Company, mainly as a field technician responsible for residential delivery and maintenance.”

“Tell me: Do I look more like my mom or my dad?”

“I think you’re an equal combination of both.”

You believe she wants you to ask her again what you look like. It’s a humiliating question. For all the talk of her helping you regain your memory and identity, of who you are, but for a collection of photos of you as a child she has yet to allow you to see yourself as you are now. There is no mirror in your room. No mirror in your bathroom. You have only the flat screen and the fleeting seconds when it goes dark. You are there adrift in the inky pool of the black glass, but you are only a shape, an outline, a blurred face, and then the screen disappears behind the sliding wall panel.

“I’d like you to tell me about trips to the beach with your parents.”

“Why? We already did this yesterday, twice, and the same thing the day before.”

“Because repeating it will help you remember, and remember more.”

You say, “Almost every Sunday we’d drive down from our beat-up two-family house in Pawtucket to Narragansett Town Beach.”

You pause, your frustration and mistrust melt away as you lose yourself in the undeniable pleasure of remembering. It is a pleasure because you have images now associated with these memories. The disjointed way in which the images appear in your head feels natural, authentic. While you can’t know if these images are actual memories or embellishments, or a little of both, it doesn’t matter. They are yours. They belong to you and they branch away into an infinite network of new ones. These memories are proof of you, and someday soon you won’t need or rely on Anne to define you.

You say, “We’d get up early so we could arrive at the beach before eight a.m., find free street parking, and not have to buy beach passes. Going that early was definitely about saving money, but my parents made it sound like a game, like we were doing it for the fun of beating the system. Mom always talked about beating the system, and I used to imagine the system was made up by people wearing black suits and sunglasses and they watched you and wrote out tickets that would cost a lot of money so that parents would have to work overtime and not be home enough with their kids.

“The night before I’d go to bed early, already dressed in my bathing suit even though there were changing rooms at the beach. The changing rooms were dark, like bunkers in those war movies you showed, and their floors were covered in a nasty sludge of water and sand.

“On the ride to the beach Mom usually slept, using a beach towel as a blanket. Dad would still play the radio and sing along with all these oldies, he called them oldies, and he made up lyrics to make me laugh.

“You lose yourself in the undeniable pleasure of remembering.”

“I loved that drive down to the beach. It was my favorite part. Driving through the city and then to this big wide-open beach always made me feel like we had magically transported somewhere else.

“On the walk over from the car, Dad and I would make bets about whether or not the waves would be big. Mom was the wave-height judge. The loser of the wave bet would have to be the first to dunk underwater, which was always cold. The kind of cold that would make you involuntarily gasp for air when you resurfaced. Dad would cheat sometimes when he lost and scoop me up in his arms and force me under the water with him.

“After an early lunch, Mom and I would go for a long walk, and if it was low tide, we’d walk way out to the sandbars a few hundred feet out from the beach. On the way back to our blanket, Mom would race me, waiting until I broke into a sprint to start her own sprint. She always overtook me, letting me know she was faster, but then would slow down, pretending to be exhausted, and let me win.”