A Stitch of Time

by Lauren Marks

  That’s true, she said, her tone still a little uneasy.

  Well? I asked her. See how that turned out? Perseverance is not always a good thing.

  Justine broke into a laugh.

  Had no idea where you were going with that! she exclaimed. But it’s an astute observation to make: the unintentional consequences of perseverance. Lauren, I think you’ve found yourself a theme.

  •  •  •

  The assignments from speech therapy had gotten me motivated, and I wanted to find sources to explore the subjects of perseverance and idioms. But to do that, I would need my mother to drive me to a bookstore.

  Bookstores had been a touchy subject in my family, namely because of my brief stint working at The Strand years earlier. I’d been hired my sophomore year at NYU and convinced my parents the job was ideal for me: not only would I be gainfully employed, but I’d also be getting steep discounts on books I would be buying anyway.

  Summer at The Strand. For The Girl I Used to Be it had been pure bliss. At the time, I lived on the same block where a young Allen Ginsberg had written “Kaddish.” On the way to work, I’d pass St. Mark’s Church, where I heard an elderly Lawrence Ferlinghetti read some of his new poems. During my shift at the store, I’d park myself on top of ladders to look like I was working, but usually I was just reading. In a place like The Strand, with its stacks and sheer volume of books, you rarely found what you were looking for, but often a better treasure would present itself. And while I was discovering Kundera, Szymborska, Miłosz, I was also falling in love for the first time.

  Jason was another acting student at NYU; his frame was thin but athletic and his delicate dark features showcased the very best of his Chinese and European ancestry. He was impulsive, sometimes reckless, and considered himself a hopeless romantic. He loved to surprise me at work. I’d be crouching down to replace items near the warped floorboards, and I would suddenly feel his small hands clasped around my hips. There was no air-conditioning, so the ceiling fans would circulate the assortment of odors: the damp in the old books, the fresh glue bindings in the new ones, the sweat and car exhaust clinging to the glistening summer bodies. The Strand never felt like a public place to me. It was like a church, but when Jason and I managed our furtive embraces, I was certain all of the saints on the shelves encouraged our behavior. I was rich in words, rich in love. A fall from that grace was hard to imagine.

  But after only a few months, I had to quit the position. All the money that should have gone to groceries and rent was instead going to new book purchases. My mother and father were frustrated when I asked them to help me out, and it became an established family fact that I couldn’t be relied upon to exert common financial sense where books were concerned.

  I don’t think I remembered this detailed interpersonal history when I asked my mother to take me to Vroman’s Bookstore in Pasadena that November afternoon. But I did have an indistinct impression that places like this were off-limits for me somehow. When I brought up this sinking sensation to my mother, she reminded me of some of the conversations we had over the years about not spending too much money in bookstores. However, she was quick to add that after my rupture and diagnosis, she had started to worry I’d never want to set foot in a bookstore again and was happy that she’d been wrong.

  I think this field trip is long overdue, she said with a smile.

  Though I loved Vroman’s as much as I loved The Strand, I’d loved the former for much longer. When I was a kid, my parents’ first office together was on the same street as the independent shop, making the bookstore feel a bit like the extension of our own family library. This time, Mom left me in the nonfiction stacks, near the cookbooks and the metal tree of hanging aprons. As I stood among the shelves again, I realized not much had changed. It still brought on a sense of peace.

  When I found a book on English phrases, I quickly turned to the index and stumbled upon a short entry for facing the music. There were a number of speculations about how the phrase came to be, beginning with the military. In the American army, when a soldier was dishonorably discharged, a drummer played while he was marched out of the barracks. This was the “music” of his forced exit. The second provenance was theatrical. In a classic proscenium theater, there was a stage, an orchestra pit, and the audience. Since, architecturally speaking, the orchestra is situated between the performer and the audience, the actress was always facing her music. I kept flipping between the index and other expressions, trying to learn as much as possible. This was exactly what I’d needed.

  My mother saw my enthusiasm and bought the book for me on the spot. Not only was it interesting, it was also on my reading level. My memory couldn’t accommodate a long or complicated story and I was unable to manage multiple narrative threads. But in this book, each saying had a completely self-contained entry and was rarely longer than a paragraph or two. This turned out to be the perfect length if I wanted to both learn new information and retain it.

  I started to make a game of the index. First, I’d guess the origin of the idiom, giving it an imagined biography. Then, I would read the actual story about how it came into use. It was like a makeshift version of the game Balderdash. BJ and Laura never exactly warmed to it, but I could usually enlist Jonah to play it when he called. And my friend Grace enjoyed the game most of all. Having met at an all-girls high school, we had read the same books, written the same assignments, grown up in language together. Now this wordy practice was something we could do together again.

  Guess how this phrase started! I’d say. I’ll scratch your back if you scratch mine.

  Our guesses were consistently incorrect, but it was still a valuable exercise. These origin stories were vividly drawn. They were alive with images, so I could find a reason for why each word was used the way it was. I still wasn’t able to memorize the phrases very well, but I started to hear their melody a bit more.

  Facing the Music was the jazz funeral. And the army barracks. And the actress onstage. Because a story gave an idiom a life, and three stories would make that life more diverse.

  6

  She wanted to discuss our plan (maps). What we will do. What my “goal,” my end result from therapy. What it means I take from her questions are what I will be that she wants me to describe what will be called recovery. But this is more complicated than she suggests. Heal the wound. Scar. I try to complicate trouble the question. For There is no “back” or “retreat” or “recover.” There is only cover. Advance. Forward. What she calls recovery sounds like life before and that is not on my map.

  Alicia and I were in a room that smelled of bubblegum and sunscreen at the back of the therapy complex. I no longer had the hesitation I had come into the building with weeks ago. In fact, I was here so often I was starting to develop a newfound confidence.

  So how long do we get to do these sessions? I asked Alicia. A few more weeks? A couple of months? When do we stop?

  Alicia’s voice became hesitant, and her right hand wandered to her head, uncomfortably resting on a few loose strands of hair near her shoulder.

  Aphasia is . . . well, aphasia is not something that can be exactly cured. Has Justine talked to you about that? We are here to help you build some compensatory strategies to make it easier for you to communicate.

  I understand. And I want to stay here as long as I can. But you said I’m getting better much faster than you expected, right?

  That’s right, she said, and started to unconsciously tug at that unruly patch of hair.

  Yeah, I think I’m doing really well, I said. I am feeling pretty confident with my words.

  Tug. tug. And that’s . . . good, Alicia said, tugging a little more firmly now. That’s sort of . . . the point. Tug.

  I felt I had to put her at ease. Speech therapy is the best part of my week, I said, trying to lighten the mood. I’m just asking—when do I have to stop? And what am I supposed to do next?

  Well, this might be a good time to define some goals for yourself
in therapy. Alicia seemed to give up on her mission to tug and smooth her hair into submission, and finally let her eyes rest on me. Do you know what you’d like your recovery to look like? Because it probably won’t be exactly like what your life was before.

  Like most people I’d interacted with since the stroke, Alicia was assuming I wanted my life to look the same way. But that wasn’t something I was yearning for. For example, my brother was going to be in town again soon, and I was looking forward to engaging with him in person. Over the occasional phone call, I sensed our dynamic wasn’t the same as before, but that wasn’t so bad, was it? I wasn’t trying to get back to the life before. How could I make Alicia understand?

  This wasn’t a retreat. This was an advance.

  7

  When you acclimate (?) in your environment, the environment dissappears. The As quickly as you recognize your present, your past erases.

  My past is erasing even as I I e teaching/practing myself words like “erasing” and “practing.” After each syllabul repairs, it is forgotten.

  -Dread has returned. Not as thorny as it was. My own memories arise fear I don’t know. Now death is plausible and now (terrifying)? not terrifying. but something else. dreddful?

  Sp. Therapy Isn’t just communicate/ing. It takeing on a world of thoughts many occupied with anxiety and fears.

  There was so much I enjoyed about speech therapy, but I was also becoming aware that my rehabilitation was just as much about input as it was about output. Communication, to me, now meant more than just being able to create sentences and say words; it entailed taking in the world of thoughts and ideas of those around me, and some of those thoughts produced anxiety.

  I thought back to that day in Edinburgh when Jonah and I had talked about death in the Patersons’ garden. What had changed in the span of two months? I knew something had.

  Day by day, my vocabulary was steadily building. In Los Angeles, I was joyously reacquainting myself with positive terms like recovery, better, and healthy. I loved the specificity I was becoming able to employ. But soon, these words would be paired with others, and their antonyms were thornier and much less welcome, words like sickness, morbidity, and permanent. Because when a mind grasps a semantic concept like fragile, it is bound to reflect on its opposite at some point.

  Am I fragile? Am I likely to break?

  It is incredibly difficult to understand how information is stored in our brain, and what form our knowledge takes there. A popular view in psycholinguistics is that the human mind groups associated ideas, represented in words, in what is called a “semantic network.” In this weblike arrangement, closely related concepts, like categories and attributes, appear very near one another spatially as nodes. Less-associated concepts have more distance between their nodes.

  This idea of the semantic network resonated with me, and matched my experience quite closely. Instead of a web, however, I envisioned it as a tree. If I were to create one of these personal charts now, it would begin with the trunk of that tree. For this exercise, I’ll chart a network for the word blue.

  There would be branches on this tree, bearing fruit representing other colors like green, orange, and yellow. Another set of branches would represent aspects of the natural world that I associate with blueness, like sky, sea, and river. Other branches would represent cultural touchstones: songs, paintings, and plays that mentally linked with blueness. But once the rupture occurred, this scene changed dramatically. Aphasia was like a mad gardener that sliced the branches and limbs away from the trunk. This sparse topiary cut me off from my usual points of reference, keeping me from associating my thoughts with one another, and affecting the predilections and predictions inside my mind.

  Before the stroke, blue might have brought to mind Picasso’s blue period. That could get me thinking about the Picasso exhibit that was on in Edinburgh at the same time as the Fringe Festival. From there, I could think about my eighth-grade art class where I originally learned about Picasso. I could think of my ostrich-necked teacher with her big glasses on their long, colorfully beaded chain. There might even be the distant yearning for her to turn around and praise my sketches, or the fearful excitement for the boy I had a crush on to glance over in my direction.

  After the stroke, one thought could not lead to another in this way, which made me feel like a stranger in the forest of my own memories. Language is at its best in its firmness—in its ability to make ephemeral things more like objects. And although not all thoughts are paired with language, thoughts without language tend to be much more fleeting. Things were starting to change during speech therapy, as I was reattaching the branches to the trees of my language. But ultimately, this process of reconnection would take many years and my perception was shifting constantly. It was not the formal end of the Quiet by any means, but my self-directed speech was starting to resurface. I had enough language to view, analyze, and describe myself differently. Where there had once been vacancy, there was now clutter.

  When I had spoken to Jonah in that garden in Edinburgh, telling him I wasn’t afraid to die, it might have been easier to say it, easier even to think it, without the cluster of associations I had spent a lifetime amassing. The mainly negative thoughts (or at least the ones that were represented in language) that were related to death and dying in my mind just weren’t as present to me at all.

  It’s interesting that my first moments of nagging fear were not when I was facing a lack of language, but when I began to regain it. The process was introducing a number of new variables, an abundance that I wasn’t yet able to sift through or organize. This lack of clarity makes it difficult to pinpoint exactly when my inner voice finally turned on, and what form it took when it did, though I suspect my uneasiness in November was at least partially related to its re-engagement. The Quiet was no longer my default, or at least not always. It was like something in the air just wasn’t quite right.

  8

  It’s your brother’s twenty-first birthday today, my dad said, while preparing his morning coffee. He was speaking to me between the pulses of the grinding beans. Grind, grind, stop. It’s a major rite of passage. Grind, grind, stop. And he isn’t going to want to go out with his old fogey parents. Grind, grind, stop. I wonder if you might consider taking him out tonight, if you feel up to it.

  I considered the idea. I guess I can manage it, as long as I nap beforehand.

  Attagirl, my dad said, patting me on the shoulder. Mike’s lucky to have an older sister like you. I remember how you used to climb into his crib with him. Even though you two are almost seven years apart, you were such a slip of a girl, you really could fit in there fine. If he had been crying for a while, you’d try to help calm him down. You’ve always been looking after him, and even though he doesn’t say it, Mike still looks up to you.

  I wasn’t sure how to respond to that. I appreciated the praise but felt a little ambivalent about it, especially since my memories weren’t nearly as sharp as my dad’s. And things had been a little off with Michael since he’d arrived home from Monterey. His first day back, he’d found me in my bedroom ripping up carpet, surrounded by cans of red paint.

  That’s quite a mess, he said, looking around. I wasn’t in my bedroom proper—it was all wood floors in there—the carpeted area was more like an anteroom on the way to the bathroom. Mike and I shared that bathroom, a kind of Jack and Jill setup, with the toilet and shower in the shared space, but the two sinks were on our opposing sides. This is a lot of change to take in, he remarked, sounding a bit uneasy. You aren’t planning to tear up my side too, are you?

  I shot him a weary grin. You’re safe, I said. The mess stays on my side. I was dizzy from the astringent smell of adhesive remover. We had spoken over the phone a few times since Scotland, but hadn’t seen each other since my return to LA. As my brother helped me stumble to my feet, we kept holding on to each other, in a tight hug.

  After a moment or two, he fumbled through his jeans, producing a tiny green bag of pot. He shot me
a playful grin. His skin was so light that even this blush of pink made his cheeks look as red as his hair.

  Want to join me downstairs? he asked. About to roll one.

  I declined. There was a period of time when I would’ve enjoyed a smoke with my brother, but it was difficult enough to get through a regular day without adding the obstacle of intoxication. My mind was pre-scrambled.

  Suit yourself. He shrugged. But you are missing out—this is primo Northern California bud.

  We can talk without smoking, can’t we? I asked. There was so much Mike didn’t know about what had happened in Scotland or what it was like being back in LA after a decade away from the family home. This room renovation was the least important of it all. When he had called, he was never really calling for me, and we didn’t chat long. He had always been interested in my life; we used to talk openly and often, though as the older sister I had given more advice than I received. Now, face-to-face, I assumed he might have a couple of questions for me, and I wanted to give him an opportunity to address topics he might have been too nervous to ask about earlier.

  We can talk about the aneurysm, if you want, I said. It doesn’t make me feel uncomfortable.

  Oh, well . . . Mike looked down to his faded black Converse sneakers. Not right now, he said. Just really glad you’re home.

  And that was it. Our conversations hadn’t really evolved since then.

  •  •  •

  Late that night, we walked over to The Rancho, a local dive bar known for its pool table, jukebox, and stale pretzels. Mike ordered a bottle of Heineken and a Maker’s Mark. I got a Diet Coke. For years, whiskey had been my drink of choice as well, but I had preferred Wild Turkey with maraschino cherries instead of ice. I had a poet-bartender friend back in New York who had dubbed the combination “the Dorothy Parker,” for the girls who looked like girls but drank like boys. Since it was my signature drink, my pal would sling it as soon as he saw me walking up to the door of his pub and have it waiting for me before I even sat down. But I hadn’t had alcohol, or even a cup of coffee, since my time in Edinburgh. Now that I was starting to actually hear my language hiccups, I was getting the impression that to the outside world I sounded drunk even when I was sober. The bartender passed Mike’s beer to him but I cupped my hand over my brother’s glass before he poured the whiskey.