“We’re not talking about Dad here,” Rory says, gulping her beer deeply now. She’s heard this before. She flicks her hand, already tired of the conversation, and heads up to find Hugh.
“Want to explain that?” Nell says after the footsteps up the stairs have subsided.
Not really, Indira thinks, then wonders which she’d rather talk about less: the house or Francis and his complications in that very house. She rises to get more tea while Nell eyes her, waiting, looking just like she used to as a toddler, always waiting for someone—usually Francis—to tell her what to do.
Indira pours the tea slowly into the mug, watching the steam rise, wishing—just like Peter had a few weeks back—that Nell would never have to remember any of it. Would it all just be so much easier if she couldn’t remember any of it?
But she knows that isn’t possible, so she puts out a morsel, hoping it will satisfy her for the time being.
“That house you remembered,” she says, turning back to her daughter. “I wasn’t there with you in it. Rory was—just for a week—you were there for the summer. You were thirteen the last time you went.”
“The last time? There were others?”
Indira exhales and nods. “A few others. I can’t recall exactly—two, three.” Four, she thinks, knowing full well how many.
“And that last one? Why was it the last?”
“That was the summer your father left us.”
Nell furrows her brow, absorbing this. “Jamie told me that he left in the fall.”
“Does it matter?” Indira says.
“Yes,” Nell answers. “Yes, of course it matters.”
Indira knows that it matters, too, but still she hedges. “It was all very complicated. That time. That time in our marriage. He left and came back, left and came back. Finally, he just left.”
Indira doesn’t tell her of that last summer, when Nell had been given the choice—stay with Indira and Rory—go to day camp and spend lazy evenings in the pool or chasing butterflies or pressing out lemonade—or join him on the farm down there. Her farm. Heather’s farm. And Nell made her choice, clear as glass.
She doesn’t share now that Nell didn’t even hesitate when Indira sat her down in June with a double scoop of ice cream and explained that Daddy would be moving out, and she longed for her to stay behind, but that he longed for her to go with him. Not even an iota of hesitation. Indira doesn’t talk about his demons, how he tried to remove himself when those combustible bouts hit, but that depression was a tricky beast—as were the beasts he fed his depression with whenever it got bad: cocaine, booze, opiates. She doesn’t say that she thought the kids were oblivious to it until everything crystallized later, as it regrettably does sometimes with parenting. That the kids, of course, weren’t oblivious at all. Nor does she speak of the strange mix of pride and shame she felt—still feels—for enduring it, for sticking with him until he opted to no longer stick with her. That the broken lamps, the shattered plates, the wineglasses against the wall—that maybe part of Indira still thinks that this was simply passion, even though a very needling part of her knows that this is among the worst of the untruths she tells herself. But Francis created his best work at his lowest moments, and the immature seed in Indira still can’t free herself from the satisfaction this knowledge brings her. That she was there for the war, and that from that war came something beautiful.
“So, anyway, with all due respect, Mom,” Nell says, snapping Indira to, “I don’t give a shit about your marriage. I want to know about the house.”
Indira tries not to look relieved at this, because there are too many things that she doesn’t want to explain, to dredge up, things that she thinks neither of the girls can possibly remember—though before her accident, yes, maybe Nell knew. Definitely Nell knew, though the two of them, mother and daughter, had both spent a decade pretending that Nell didn’t know anything at all.
Indira sips her tea as calmly as possible, hoping that her quivering fingers don’t betray her.
“Yes, the house.” That’s an easier question to answer. “The house is in Charlottesville. Virginia.” She clarifies because she can never remember just what Nell has retained: facts, states, statistics, or if that’s all gone, too.
“Why there?”
Indira clears her throat and wonders how much of a nonanswer she can provide while still providing enough of one. “That’s where your father lived. That’s where he lived the other half of his life. That’s where he lived his life without us.”
12
“Eleanor Rigby”
—The Beatles
S
o, today, we’re going to do some free association,” Liv says from the armchair in my living room.
“Okay.” I shrug.
“I don’t want you to think about anything before you speak. I want to tap directly into that emotional wall, see what comes over it—or under it—before your brain kicks in.”
“Emotional wall? Explain the metaphor, please.”
“I’m sorry.” She waves her fingers, and I notice that her light pink polish is chipped. That if you don’t look closely, she’s immaculate—sleek pants, fitted cashmere sweater—but she’s more than that, too: the chipped polish and the dog hair on her shins make her likable, human. “It’s a term I use to describe the dams we build around ourselves. Our safe havens. Though sometimes these havens do more harm than good. Sometimes, they block us from getting to the really good stuff. The real emotional core.”
“Gotcha.”
“So just…the first thing that comes to mind, just spit it out.”
“That’s generally how I work these days, anyway,” I say, and she smiles, so I smile, and I feel the knot in the crevasse of my right shoulder blade untangle ever so slightly. It’s been there, wedged in, for the forty-eight hours since we returned from my mother’s.
“In some ways, perhaps that’s gratifying—the living-in-the-moment experience,” Liv says.
“Well, I’m trying to be different, intentionally or not.”
“How so?”
“Less buttoned-up, I guess. More…open. More fabulous.”
“Fabulous?”
“I know it sounds silly. I feel this pressure to take this chance and do things differently. I…well, I have this image of myself—like…Rachel from
Friends
.” I immediately regret saying it, chiding my immaturity.
I want the laugh track!
“Rachel from
Friends
.” She grins. If she’s laughing at me, she doesn’t give it away. “How so?”
“Just…carefree. Without the problems that my dysfunctional family has wrought. Well, really, without all of my problems, period.”
The clothes! The apartment! The love life!
I want that, I need that. I promised myself back in the hospital.
“That doesn’t seem unreasonable,” she says, “though I wonder if you find it strange—that a difficult tragedy might actually be an improvement to where you were before.” I eye her. I can see now how she might trick me into thinking she’s my friend when, really, there’s no doubt that she’s my therapist. Dr. Macht picked wisely, it seems, in assigning the two of us to each other.
“It’s not the change that is the most difficult,” I say. “The change is actually the best part about it. It’s the constant surprises. Like these paintings I found of mine. Or the playlist—
The Best of Nell Slattery
.”
“
The Best of Nell Slattery
?”
“My sister made a playlist, filled with all the bands of my old life. I guess I took music pretty seriously for a while there.” I reach for the iPod on the coffee table, scrolling through its files. “Did you know that I was named for a Beatles song?” I flick my chin toward her notes. “Is that in there? That my father insisted on naming me for a Beatles song that’s about the loneliest woman in the world?”
“No, that’s not in my file.” Her eyes are kind when she says this.
I answer her by pressing play, the living room echoing with Paul McCartney.
“Eleanor Rigby died in a church and was buried along with her name. Nobody came.”
I hit stop. Enough to make my point.
“My sister put the song on there, on the playlist. And I listen to it, and I just think, What sort of parent would do this to a child? Like, what’s the weight of that inheritance?” I smile, despite myself. “My mom swears that this isn’t entirely true—that yes, he loved the song, but mostly, he loved the name, but still. Even the idea, even the instinct to maybe pay an homage to this woman—Eleanor Rigby—well, no wonder I didn’t love my life.”
“So you didn’t love your life?”
I set the iPod back down. “No, that’s probably too strong a statement. I don’t even know if I loved my life. But all signs are pointing toward no. Toward the fact that I was moving through it, not”—I pause, considering—“not embracing it, I guess.”
“And, to bring this back to the state of constant surprise, this discovery has unsettled you?”
“The discovery about the song that named me or the discovery about my sad-sack life?”
“Whichever.” She flips up the palm of her hand.
“Well, mostly it makes me wonder what else he’s done. What
other surprises there are, that’s all. Like, if I can’t understand where I came from, how can I anticipate what else there is?”
“The weight of your inheritance,” she says, writing something down. “The famous father, the expectations of you.”
“All of that,” I say, watching her scribble.
“And how does this make you feel? Angry, resentful, sad?”
I suck on the inside of my cheek and stare out the living room window. There’s a siren whirling from somewhere down below that I only just now notice. The sky is overcast, ominous-looking, a warning that summer won’t last forever, and a helicopter cuts through the clouds, there for a moment, then out of sight.
“I guess mostly it makes me feel lost. Though that’s not particularly revelatory. Take someone’s memory away and really, what’s left? I’m sure there is space for anger or sadness or whatever, but who knows what I really feel?” I inhale. “You know, it’s strange for me to be talking to you. Because we’re really more or less strangers, although you’ve read my file. You know a lot about me.”
“I know about as much about you as you know about you,” she says. “Which is to say, what can be written down in a file.”
“Not the important stuff,” I offer.
“No, not the important stuff.” She agrees.
“I would maybe feel a little bit more at ease if I knew something about you, too.”
She smiles. “That’s not really how this works, Nell.”
“One thing,” I say. “One thing so it won’t feel so obvious that I’m sitting here talking to a shrink. That I might be talking to an old friend, someone who has known me forever.” I gesture to her pants. “You have a dog.”
She hesitates for a moment. “I do. A yellow Lab.”
“Tell me one thing you like to do with your dog. That’s it. One
thing so I can picture it and think of you as a person, and that will be that.”
She inhales, debating it. “Fine, fair enough. On the weekends, I like to take him early to the dog run, the one over here by the museum. I sit and read the paper, and we don’t leave until I’ve read every last section. We both love it.”
I envision it: her in a dog run in my neighborhood that I can’t remember but is there all the same. I can see her in a tank top and shorts, folding over her crinkling paper, her dog at her feet. Like any friend of mine might do, not a hospital-issued therapist who is here to help me prove that the wires of my mind haven’t permanently misfired.
“Thank you,” I offer.
She nods. “So…do you want to talk more about your weekend or just go ahead with the free association?”
“How about if I start with a combination of them both, if I throw some free association words out to
you
about the weekend. For starters:
awkward
—that one was from when I opened the door on Peter, naked, just getting out of the shower;
infuriating
—that one was from when I realized that my mom knew about the house I remembered and didn’t admit it;
reverential
—that one was from when I sat in the dining room and stared at my father’s portrait of my mother that still hangs over the buffet and realized just how goddamn good he was. And that part was also
heartbreaking
—that I can’t remember him, and…well also, there was
creepy
—that my mom has her own portrait, drawn by her ex-husband, in her dining room.”
Liv smiles sympathetically. “And maybe a little indulgent.”
“My mother is nothing if not indulgent. Not at all like me.”
“Not at all like you?”
“What’s the opposite of
indulgent
?” I ask, searching for the word, my eyes floating up to the ceiling.
“
Austere
?” she suggests.
I let it sink in, see if it sticks, resonates.
“You think I was austere?” I say, really more to myself than to her.
“I didn’t know you then. I only know what you’ve told me. You’ve mentioned this in one of our early sessions—how different you and your mother are.”
I shake my head. I don’t remember saying this, though I may very well have.
“It’s a strange thing to focus on, don’t you think?” I ask. “That of the many things I could gravitate toward—of my failing marriage, of my miscarriage, of how lost I feel because of the amnesia—that I told you about my mom?”
“I won’t quote Freud here, but a lot of who we are is defined by our families,” Liv says. “Until we choose it not to be.
If
we can choose it not to be.”
“So you think it’s a choice, their influence, the way I intuitively react to my mom?”
“I think that everything that’s within our control is a choice,” she says.
“And what of the things that aren’t?” I don’t need to add in:
like my brain, like my memory
. “How do we choose when we can’t control them?” I sulk for a moment and stare at the clock on the cable box.