Read We Only Know So Much Online
Authors: Elizabeth Crane
T
welve unanswered social network messages later, Trudy finally answers one in the hopes of getting Gordon off her back.
Meet me at Uncommon Grounds Monday at noon and do not be fucking crazy.
Monday comes and Gordon arrives at Uncommon Grounds at 11:30 a.m., doesn’t want to miss her, downs two espressos and a latte before she gets there. Just in case he wasn’t janked enough without it.
Trudy walks in, sits down at Gordon’s table. He thanks her for coming. She glares at him.
I’ve got five minutes
, she says.
All right. All right. All right. Well, well, well, Trudy, ever since we ran into each other I can’t stop thinking about you. I mean, not about you, about us. I mean, not about us but about why I can’t remember us. I’ve been to doctors, shrinks.
His hands are shaking from the coffee.
Well, that’s good, I guess
, Trudy says.
But they all say nothing’s wrong with me.
Trudy’s eyebrows go up.
So either they’re just missing something, or you’re stalking me.
Gordon has no idea how abrupt this transition is.
Well, then for sure they are missing something
, Trudy says.
That is a very interesting math equation you’ve done in your head there, Gordon. And how am I stalking you, exactly? Have I phoned you even once?
I believe you are stealth, that you may perhaps be so good at it that you’re able to make it seem like it’s not happening at all, and that what’s really happening to me is an extravagant game designed to mess with my mind so that I’ll be at your mercy.
She holds up a hand.
I’ll speak now
, Trudy says.
Gordon nods vigorously, though he plans to speak.
You need to leave me alone.
Please, Trudy, I just want to have a conversation.
Here’s the conversation, Gordon. You will stop sending me messages.
Please, Trudy. You’re the only one who can help me!
Do. Not. Contact. Me. Ever again, Gordon. I mean it.
I’m losing my mind!
he shouts after her.
Yeah, no shit, Gordon.
She’s gone.
W
ith regard to caring for Vivian and Theodore, Jean’s in a bit of a lose-lose situation. The sitter bears a good portion of the burden, at least theoretically—minding Vivian and Theodore during the day, making sure no one falls down, keeping Theodore from wandering. But much of the balance of the responsibility falls to Jean; the facts of Vivian being Vivian, and Vivian being in Jean’s house, have contributed exponentially to Jean’s emotional exhaustion. There’s always been friction between them. Vivian has a way of insulting you with a smile while leaving you uncertain of what was just said. (
Oh
, she’ll say, fingering Jean’s sweater,
I suppose this is what people are wearing now, well, that’s fine.
) It doesn’t matter whether Gordon picks up some of the slack, at least in terms of helping out physically, which he often does. In the evenings he steps up, helping Theodore get changed, getting him his meds on schedule and such, and has been attentive (if recently his mind is elsewhere—like everyone else) and eager to spend time with his father and grandmother. He’s always believed in family, and though he’s always been a bit deluded about how close they all are, in this way, at least, he’s suiting up.
Vivian is much more capable than her son is, in terms of dressing, showering, using the bathroom—basic daily activities. She can do all those things. Still, there are moments when Jean wishes that she could replace the one Vivian with three Theodores. This is one of them.
Today, Jean needs to go to the market to pick up a few things, but she has failed to put it on the calendar. We may have forgotten to mention the calendar. When the family moved in, Vivian had requested a calendar of everyone’s planned comings and goings. Vivian likes to know where everyone is at all times. Even if Jean conceded that it might be useful in some way for Vivian to know the family’s comings and goings (and with Priscilla, this is fully impossible: her work schedule is on the calendar, but otherwise she refuses to participate), errands like grocery shopping and dry cleaning Jean tends, like most people, to do on an as-needed basis, and therefore she does not always remember to mark them on the calendar. Jean has never quite understood that, for Vivian, managing the calendar comes under the heading of
things she can control
, a category that has drastically dwindled in her later years. It’s a need she’s always had, but one that has gathered steam since the family moved in. It’s so simple, she thinks, to mark the calendar. It prevents so much worry if she knows when people are coming back. If they’re coming back. You can imagine how well this has gone with Priscilla, but in fact it has always bothered Jean the most, and her solution has often been to fabricate things for the calendar, just to pacify Vivian. This was especially necessary while James was alive. Jean had a lot of appointments when James was alive. Lately, though, Jean has not really bothered.
Oh!
Vivian says.
I see! What time shall I expect you back?
Jean sighs.
I don’t know, Vivian, an hour maybe.
Vivian looks at the clock.
Oh, all right then, I’ll look for you at eleven-thirty.
Jean suddenly understands her daughter’s tendency toward eye-rolling. Her version of this is just to widen hers while simultaneously clenching her jaw. Part of the thing with Vivian’s relationship to the calendar is that she calculates the amount of time she believes any given appointment should take, so that she can anticipate their safe return, and know when to begin worrying. Not worrying isn’t an option, though it’s been suggested. Jean wants to ask Vivian what she thinks will happen if she doesn’t return promptly at eleven-thirty, but she’s asked this question many times before, and the response tends to be
Oh! Well, nothing, I suppose
, because it would be improper to speak of possible car accidents or such, and then Jean says,
Right, nothing, Vivian. Nothing will happen, the world will not cease to exist as you know it
, but then later Jean feels bad about being sarcastic to a ninety-eight-year-old woman, realizes that without the calendar Vivian’s world very well might cease to exist, and eventually Jean apologizes. A lose-lose deal. It doesn’t matter if the ninety-eight-year-old woman is bitchy and controlling. It’s just not nice to be mean to the elderly. Jean’s better than that. But. Things are a little different right now.
Jean picks up the red pen that’s tied to the calendar with a string, marks on today’s date
MARKET
, and walks out.
EVER SINCE THE FAMILY noticed Vivian’s interest in mechanical toys, they’ve been a staple of her Christmas stocking. At ninety-eight, she’s accumulated quite a collection—a drawer full, actually—and she likes to take them out now and again, just one at a time, and demonstrate to the family what great fun they are. One that she’s had a particularly enduring affection for has been the Furby she got about a dozen or so Christmases ago, whenever it was that they were popular. This one she keeps out on her dresser. Vivian believes, wrongly, that it responds directly to what she says, that it repeats her words much as a parrot does. She thinks it’s just darling, just a marvelous thing, even though she’s never seen half of what it can do, although we suspect that if she ever saw it interact with another Furby she’d freak out completely. What this one does is quite enough. It says
Sun up!
in the morning, every morning, which cheers her to no end; it says
Tickle!
, which she does; it says
Again!
, and
Whee!
, and it dances, and says
Boo
when it doesn’t like something. But Vivian’s favorite thing of all is that it says
Love.
When the Furby says
Love
to Vivian, she very nearly believes it loves her, and we know for sure that she loves it. It has appeared, at times, that Vivian loves the Furby more than she loves her own family, more than her beloved fancy college-going nephew, more than just about anything. Vivian has always been forthcoming with use of the word “love” toward her family, and in fact even says it with a certain amount of warmth, but pretty much everyone can tell the difference between how she says it to them and how she says it to the Furby. Theodore in particular. Plus, she never says anything snarky to the Furby, which tends to cancel out some of the nicer things she says to the family.
Today is not a good day for the Furby. Vivian’s out with her friends and the Furby has started to scream. This particular Furby has never screamed before. Theodore goes into Vivian’s room to find out what’s going on, quickly locates the source of the scream, and brings the Furby to the kitchen table to see what he can do. Unlike Vivian, Theodore has always understood that the Furby is a piece of machinery, one he can surely stop from screaming if he just opens it up. Unfortunately, with the fur covering the entire thing, Theodore is unable to locate the screws so that he can start taking it apart. He spends a good long time poking and pulling at it too, probably an hour, before he decides to take more serious measures.
Vivian arrives home to a dreadful whirring noise but doesn’t add it up until she finds her son at the kitchen table with the power drill. She’s much too late. About an hour ago, he drove the drill into the back of the Furby’s head. This, unfortunately, is the exact wrong place to do this; it’s where the sensor is located. It’s hard to know whether Theodore has any ulterior motive in doing this. His interest in taking things apart may be masking a separate but equal interest in destroying something his mother appears to treasure more than she does him. It’s entirely possible that Theodore himself doesn’t know.
Now, the kitchen table is strewn with tiny pelts of fur, little wheels and springs, a beak and a bare pair of eyeballs. As with the can opener, the parts of which are now in a box on his desk (having been retrieved from the trash by Jean, who knew Vivian had thrown it away, and knew how upset Theodore would be about letting it go, even if he never did get to it again), Theodore is sure this will all work out just fine. Vivian is beside herself.
Oh! Oh, Theodore, what have you done! Where is anyone when you get into these things, I swear!
She scurries into the main house. Otis is at the kitchen table doing some homework. Vivian is unable to conceal how distraught she is. She stands in the doorway, looking around for Jean.
Where’s your mother, dear?
She went to the store.
I don’t think that was on the calendar.
What’s the matter, Gramma Bibbie?
Vivian has never cared for this nickname, it sounds too much like Libby, the name of a runny-nosed girl she’d known in elementary school. But
Bibbie
had been bestowed on her by two-year-old Priscilla, whose Vs and Bs were one and the same, and the name had stuck around even after she worked that out.
Oh! Your grandfather destroyed my Furby!
No one has ever seen Vivian cry, because she doesn’t. Not even alone. Ever. Hasn’t since she was a small child. But in this moment, there’s a feeling moving up into her throat and close to her eyes that she does not like one bit, and is working hard to overcome. But not before Otis sees it.
Oh no, Gramma Bibbie, that’s terrible!
Otis gets up and gives Vivian a hug. She’s a bit frozen. She’s usually fine with hugging, but presently feels unable to respond in kind. It feels to her as though her arms at her sides are containing all of her, that to release them would be to let loose something she’s not prepared for, that perhaps what’s been happening to her son is worse than what’s happened to her toy, that sons are not supposed to go before mothers, that life without her husband
and
her son would be unendurable. So she continues to stand there for as long as her grandson hugs her—the longest hug of her life, she is sure—in the hope that the moment will pass.
This is one of the worst days of Vivian’s life.
G
ordon’s up in the middle of the night thinking about his problem. He frankly can’t understand why Trudy would think
he
was the stalker. He was simply trying to get to the bottom of his memory loss. For a moment he tries to put himself in her position, to imagine what it might be like for a person you were once intimately entangled with to hear that they have been forgotten, that they were not memorable to you. Oh. Hm. But he doesn’t have time to take it further than that. His is the more serious problem, the one that needs immediate attention.
Lately, he’s been doing puzzles and memory games; he’s heard these can improve one’s memory. He’s even taken a bit of interest in Otis’s crossword puzzles, though he sometimes finds them more difficult than, say, a
Times
puzzle. As you might imagine, Otis’s puzzles, which often use words drawn from his life, tend to leave Gordon mystified—which only serves to confirm, of course, that his mental problem is real and may be worsening.
Earlier today, Gordon sat down with Otis and a crossword he’d recently created. Examples of clues Gordon gets stuck on:
a. 3 across. “Talks too much,” seven letters. Ironically, Gordon is not thinking of a person—which in this case would be Bethany—and has no self-awareness about how much he himself talks; instead he tries to think of seven-letter synonyms for talking too much.
Rambling?
Too many letters.
Garrulous?
Also too many. Never mind that he’s sure Otis wouldn’t know the word “garrulous.”
Verbose?
No, there’s an F in FREAK where the B goes that he’s fairly certain of; even Gordon couldn’t miss that clue.
b. 21 across. The clue is “Up in your head.” The correct five-letter answer is CHAIR. Gordon can’t imagine it’s anything but BRAIN, and he already has the A and the I, but trying to make BRAIN fit practically makes Gordon’s brain swell right out of his head.
c. 7 down. The clue is “They kill themselves,” six letters. Gordon’s mind, of course, is nowhere remotely near the correct answer, LOVERS, even though OVER is already right there for him. Nor does he add up that these very personal clues in his son’s puzzle might indicate some issues that needed addressing. He has a vague memory that there’s an insect genus that kills itself after mating, but he can’t think of it. He plugs in the S at the end, since he knows from the clue that it’s a plural, then tries a series of letters to make actual words: COVERS, MOVERS, ROVERS, HOVERS, LOVERS. Gordon vaguely recalls that he may have mentioned
Romeo and Juliet
a time or two; could that be it? That must be it. Though he doubts he’d have said “kill themselves” to his young son. Could Otis have overheard the news about that teacher friend of Jean’s? What would that have to do with lovers, though? Does he want to know? He doesn’t. Needless to say, the fact that he can’t think of something he usually has within easy reach is extremely disturbing.
So now he’s awake in the middle of the night, going over the puzzle in his head, concluding that he’s royally screwed, mentally. Perhaps he hasn’t been paying enough attention to his kids or his wife; perhaps he actually
has
repressed traumas, as his shrink suggested, or has suffered some kind of brain injury, as his doctor hinted. He goes downstairs for an extra pint of blueberry juice, one of the superfoods he’s heard can improve memory, and sits down in front of the TV to try to get his mind off his mind. He passes over several channels he’s ordinarily quite interested in. The History Channel is showing a rerun of
Swamp People
; Gordon silently laments that the History Channel has lost its focus on history. PBS is showing
This Old House
, which he loves but which isn’t quite the ticket. Usually he’d watch any episode of Paula Deen more than once; he loves cooking shows and secretly finds her sexy. But what he’s hoping for right now is an episode of
Nova
, or something about the brain, specifically about what if an ex-girlfriend comes around and you can’t remember her. No such luck. Changing channels, he finally lands on something better: an infomercial for something called
Stop Memory Loss
. The product itself is not immediately identified, but in his present state Gordon would order this product if it involved strapping himself to a rocket and blasting himself to Mars. One caller on the show describes his experience with the product, claiming not just that his memory improved, but that he felt imbued with a renewed sense of purpose. Gordon is on the phone, credit card in hand, faster than you can say
This is a very misguided idea indeed
.