What You Remember I Did

by Janet Berliner

  "You are so beautiful," he said by way of greeting, and reached for her. She danced away, and, thinking he recognized the game, he strode after her, playfully backing her into a corner, bracing a hand against the wall on either side of her head and pinning her down in mock force.

  She leaned into him, moaned, and swung UP her knee. There was nothing playful about the way she connected with his groin.

  Holding himself, he staggered back against the doorjamb and slid to the floor. "What the–?"

  "I'm sorry, Matt, I'm sorry."

  Lights pulsed behind Matt's eye and he thought he might pass out. "Sorry? That hardly does it. You hurt me. Imprisoning each other is a game, Nan. We've played it before. We don't really hurt each other, remember?"

  "How could you think of that as a game?" she demanded. "How could you trap me?"

  Fury cleared his mind, for the few moments before the migraine hit full-force. He was not going to deal with another accusation. "You said you liked to pretend we're playing rough and you always seem to want sex. You initiate it more often than I do. You want it all the time."

  Nan was screaming. It was almost as if the target of her rage was someone other than him. "You're just the same as she is. You think you have the right to do anything you want to me." She was flailing her arms.

  "You're crazy," he gasped. "You need help."

  "I'm not the one who needs help." She was shouting now. "You're the one, you and my mommy–"

  Something was really wrong. Something had happened to her. He loved her–that this should be the first time he'd realized that was demented in itself. He wanted to help. He wanted to protect himself. And what about Catherine?

  He tried to rise, but the pain in his genitals had been overtaken by a roaring headache, and he couldn't move.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Catherine was startled from sleep by her daughter's call for Mommy and knew exactly what to do. Crying, "I'm here, Nanny, Mommy's here," she struggled out of bed and hurried to the doorway of the other room, trying to blink the sleep out of her eyes and pulling at her tangled nightgown. Where was she? In her house, in her bedroom, yes. Where was she going? What other room? Who was calling her? Her daughter, yes, her daughter Nan. It didn't matter where she was or where Nan was, she had to get to her.

  Someone was on the floor. Someone else was leaning over the person on the floor. Catherine hastened to make some sense out of it, even if she was wrong. "A game," she chirped, laboriously folding her body into a seated position next to the person–a man–Matt on the floor. "What are we playing?" She looked up at Nan and patted the carpet. "Sit here, Nanny. Sit next to me."

  "No." Nan stood up straight. "Stop it. Leave me alone."

  "I know you're not five years old anymore, but let's pretend."

  "I must have liked it," Nan said, looking at Matt. "That's the insidious nature of early childhood sexual abuse."

  "What the hell are you talking about?"

  It was the first time Catherine had heard Matt curse or raise his voice. She didn't like it.

  Nan said to her, "Tonya says touching you is a trigger."

  Catherine shook her head. "Trigger? What trigger?" Tears were rolling down her cheeks. Why was the young woman talking to her like this? "No guns. I don't like guns. Let's play a different game."

  "Who the devil is Tonya?" On his knees now, the man, Matt, was talking to the woman. Catherine was glad, for she certainly didn't know anybody named Tonya. Sniffing and trying hard to be cheery, she chimed in. "Yes, Nanny, do tell, who is Tonya? You should ask her over for tea."

  Nan turned on Matt. "Your son's therapist. Dr. Tonya Bishop."

  Matt had started to stand, but sat back down heavily on the floor next to Catherine. She reached for his hand; he let her place it between both of hers. His other hand was over his eye, as if he had a headache. She wanted to ask him if he did, but her mouth refused to form words.

  "I've been seeing her," Nan said in a terrible voice. "I went to check her out, to see if she was telling Eliot the truth about you, and I've kept on seeing her for–personal reasons. So what do you think about that?"

  None of this made the slightest bit of sense to Catherine. And then it did. Her child was in trouble. She didn't understand what sort of trouble, but she knew it was bad. "Nan? What are you saying? You're seeing a therapist? What's wrong, sweetheart? I'm your mother, can't you talk to me about your problems? Are you mad at me, Nanny? Did I do something wrong? Have I–"

  Quite rudely, the man interrupted her to say to her daughter in a most uncivil tone, "I thought we weren't to have secrets from each other."

  "You can tell me, Nanny. I'm your mommy," Catherine crooned desperately, squirming away from the rude person whom she didn't remember inviting into her house. "I'm your mommy–"

  As if in one of her nightmares, Nan kicked her. She didn't mean to; Catherine saw her trying to get away, lose her balance, fling out her foot. She let go of Matt's hand and clutched her hurt breast, though it was a most unladylike thing to do.

  Matt jumped to his feet. "Watch out, Nan. Control yourself." When he put his arms around Catherine and helped her up, she thought she might swoon. What was happening? Who was he? Why did she hurt so much, a physical pain as if her heart would break? She could hardly breathe. "She needs her inhaler, Nan." somebody said far away. "Where is it?"

  "Damned if I know where she hid it this time." The voice was mean, cold, but unmistakably Nan's. Catherine sobbed and choked.

  "Find it! Nan! Whatever's going on with you, we'll deal with it, but find the damn inhaler!"

  How sweet, Catherine thought in bewilderment. This one's a keeper, Nanny, and didn't know why she would be thinking such a thing. She heard herself whisper, "Tonya," though she'd never known anybody by that name. The wheezing had grown worse. Something heavy–a truck, a bus–pressed down on her chest. She tried to push it away. Pointing at Nan as if to fix her in place, she mimicked pressing down on an inhaler before she lost consciousness.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Nan turned and ran, not out of the house and away, as she wanted to, but into the bathroom where she kept extra inhalers. By the time she returned, her mother was on the sofa, looking perfectly relaxed.

  "Pack a bag for her," Matt commanded from where he sat beside the old woman. "I'm taking her to my place. I can't leave her here while you're–"

  "While I'm what?"

  "I don't know." Matt was obviously making a great effort to keep his voice calm, as if dealing with someone crazed and violent. "I honestly don't know. But I do know she's old and confused. I can't let you do to her what Eliot did to me."

  "I'm not old–" Catherine began.

  Without waiting for the packed bag, he ushered Catherine from the room. Nan heard the front door open and shut. What seemed like forever later, Matt's car noisily started up. She couldn't believe she'd stood there and let him take over. It ought to have made her furious. Instead, she was numb. She walked outside, sat down on the porch and lit a cigarette. They'd be back in a moment and she'd have plenty to say.

  But they weren't back in a moment, or in an hour, or by midnight. Determined to wait it out, Nan lay down on the sofa, where she fell asleep.

  When she awoke, it was dawn. Her first impulse was to rush over to Matt's place and retrieve her mother, but a guiltily pleasant lightness of being persuaded her otherwise. Damn Matt. Let him stew in his own juices. Her mother was probably having a high old time.

  She began to drift back to sleep, images of things they might be doing with each other exploded like fireworks in her half-dreams. Nausea brought her fully awake. So much for lightness of being. She called Tonya's answering service and left a message that she needed to see her, then ran a hot bath, unwillingly thinking of how Matt washed and washed himself.

  After a long soak and a protein breakfast, she had more or less come to grips with having to pick up her mother so that Matt could go to work and Catherine would not be alone in an unfamiliar place. But it wou
ld not do for her to be anywhere around Matthew Mullen herself this morning. When Liz arrived for her shift, Nan dispatched her on the errand.

  She was almost ready to go off to work herself when the phone rang. She considered not answering it, but it could be Tonya confirming an appointment or Liz with a problem about Catherine. Or Matt. It could be Matt. What would she say to him?

  "It's me. I remembered something. You told me to phone if–You kids cut that out! Sorry, Nan. Never fails, whenever I get on the phone–"

  "What, Becca? What did you remember?" Nan's stomach felt as if it had lodged itself in her toes.

  "Maybe it's something, maybe nothing. It was so long ago."

  Nan tried to think of some way to fast-forward her sister, but she knew from long experience that Becca would take her own sweet time to say whatever it was she wanted to say.

  "I had these silk stockings. I bought them for myself. They were really special to me. She took them out of my drawer while I was at school and she wore them. Then she put them right back in the drawer without even washing them. I could smell her on them. It was awful, Nan."

  Nan laughed quietly, mirthlessly, hoping her sister hadn't heard. "Thanks, Becca. Appreciate your call."

  "I hope it helps," Becca said plaintively. "I hope it helps you."

  Catherine returned from Matt's place clutching a volume of Lord Byron's poems and a framed pencil sketch of Rudolph Valentino, which had been hanging in the bathroom. Nan could see her taking it down and tremulously pressing it against her bosom as, dewy-eyed, she told Matt how much she loved the black-and-white sketch with the single red rose in the lapel of the white evening jacket and how very much Valentino had always meant to her. "I had a lovely little holiday," she told Nan. "He is such a nice man, your poet."

  There was no point in doing anything but smile. The Valentino-and-rose picture had clinched it: Matt was Catherine's hero. Nan hung the new treasure in the old woman's room, where she could see it from her bed, then impulsively put the tallest of the roses she'd bought for herself yesterday into a single flower vase she'd found at Amsterdam's duty free airport. When she placed it beneath the picture, Catherine beamed, and Nan felt the little explosion of joy she'd always felt when she'd made her mother happy.

  Over the next few weeks, her work with Tonya reached an almost hallucinatory intensity. Though the therapist said what they were doing wasn't hypnosis, Nan was definitely in some sort of altered reality from nearly the moment she sat down, met Tonya's steady gaze, and began to talk. Tonya asked careful, gentle questions, and Nan was remembering more and more:

  "Was there ever any touching of your genitals with hers?" Sitting on her mother's lap in the bathtub: wet, bare, open labia pressed against each other.

  "Did she ever insert any foreign objects into you?" Lying back on her bed, morning sunlight in her eyes, her mother down below where she couldn't see her, something pushed between her legs, hard but it didn't hurt.

  Being in the same room with her mother made her skin crawl. It was impossible to avoid touching her; Liz couldn't be there all the time, though Nan did increase her hours, and Catherine needed more and more physical care–bathing, dressing, bathroom assistance. Her mother seemed to want to hug and kiss her more than ever; she'd always been affectionate, which Nan used to think was sweet and nurturing and now made her sick.

  Catherine knew something was wrong; the hurt in her eyes was gratifying. Confused, unraveling, she took to dogging Nan's footsteps.

  "Leave me alone! Quit following me around!"

  "Nanny, please–"

  "Didn't you get enough when I was little and couldn't protect myself?"

  Catherine drew herself up and pronounced, as if it were the end of a scene, "A mother can never kiss her child enough." Nan shuddered.

  Between sessions, Nan carried writing materials with her at all times and filled notebook after notebook to show Tonya. In the middle of the night she'd erupt into wakefulness, turn on the light, scramble for the pen, write furiously. Taking care of her mother, she'd free one hand to jot down a stray image or remembered sensation, panicked that sometime Catherine would get into the notebooks and read what she'd written, ferociously hoping she would. At school, she missed segments of many a committee meeting and most of a one-on-one discussion with her department chair because, under the guise of taking notes, she'd been frantically recording a newly-surfaced memory before it submerged again.

  Becca called again. Her story of sexual inappropriateness was even more of a stretch this time, something about their mother helping her change in and out of a swimsuit at Coney Island. "Did she do anything to you?" Nan pressed wearily.

  "Well, no, I don't think so. I don't know–What, girls?" The receiver was muffled for a moment, and then she came back on the line. "I don't know, Nan. I'm sorry."

  "You don't have to be sorry."

  "I want so much to–you know, support you."

  "I appreciate the thought, Becca, but you don't have to try so hard." Her sister's desire to talk about it was thwarted by a huge crash and children's screams.

  Minutes after Nan shut herself in her room, there came a delicate, ladylike knock on the door. "Nanny?"

  Nerves by now perpetually on edge, she pulled the door open and found her mother standing there with a photo album in her arms.

  "Look!"

  The album was from her fifth and sixth years. Ignoring Catherine's oohs and aahs and spin-off tales, she looked for clues in the old snapshots. In many of them, she and her mother were holding hands or her mother's arm was around her shoulders or she was sitting in her mother's lap. The child in the pictures looked happy enough. Nothing in the slightest incriminating had been caught on film.

  To her relief, Catherine decided to go through all of her photographs–sixty years worth of albums. That kept her busy for a while. Then she asked for the trunk containing all of the correspondence she had kept over the years. Love letters, hate letters, birthday cards. Pressed flowers so old they crumbled at her touch. Most of the time, she was happy doing this alone, but sometimes she wanted to talk about things, people, places–memories that may or may not have borne any resemblance to her actual experiences. Some of it Nan remembered, some meant absolutely nothing to her. Some caused uncomfortable twinges–shame? Desire?

  She went into her room to call Matt. Her need to make love had become desperate, and she didn't care how ludicrous it was in light of what had happened between them yesterday. He didn't answer. She didn't leave a message.

  Jordan came for Halloween. Acceding to Catherine's pleas, Nan took her along to buy a pumpkin, which the three of them carved together. Jordan made snaggly teeth. Nan cut triangular eyes. Catherine plunged elbow-deep into the pumpkin guts, which Jordan refused to touch. It was almost like old times.

  Jordan declared scornfully that she was too old for trick-or-treating, but she and Catherine dressed up in ball gowns and feather boas to hand out the treats. Obedient to the same tradition that ensured cloudy skies to obscure the fireworks every July Fourth, trick-or-treat evening brought bitter cold and a slight drizzle, which didn't begin until the children started to arrive–the shy ones and the extroverts, the gypsies and the tramps, the aliens and nurses, a monster and a Mary Poppins. While paying them off in Candy Kisses and Pennies, she fantasized. She saw herself as a stripper, a whore, a librarian naked beneath her mother's Casablanca trench coat, knocking on Matt's door.

  This was too much for her. Earlier than usual, she put out the porch lights and locked up. "That's enough Halloween for this year."

  "Oh, Nanny! We were having such fun!"

  "It's only eight-thirty, Grams."

  "I know what time it is," Nan snapped.

  Jordan stared at her, unwrapped the pink boa from around her neck, and stepped out of the gown, the sweats underneath seeming drab and even forlorn by comparison. "You're no fun. I'm going home."

  Much as she loved Jordan, the idea of sending her home didn't feel all bad. Her mother and Jordan
were both seriously getting on her nerves. "I can't leave Grams."

  "Mom can come and get me."

  "Do what you want, Jordan," she said, more sharply than she intended. "I'm too tired to fight."

  "Why are you so tired?"

  Because I've been climbing an emotional Kilimanjaro, Nan thought, but did not say. Instead she offered to make tea. "It'll wash down the candy," she said.

  Jordon made a face. Catherine clapped her hands. "Let's drink tea and watch The King and I." She burst into a raucous chorus of "Getting to Know You," mugging shamelessly as she warbled, "Getting to know you/Getting to know all about you." On the third reprise, Nan joined in, and then so did Jordan, and they were all laughing.

  Evenings like this with her mother had become rare, mostly because of her own moods. Nan put on the movie and settled down to watch. Catherine didn't miss a second, even getting up to dance with Jordan when the King and Anna waltzed in the palace ballroom.

  Most of the rest of the week was a mess. Three consecutive rain days were one too many for Nan. On the first, she completed her accumulated paperwork. On the second, she took Catherine and herself for haircuts. By the third, she was ready to go to a bar and pick up a man, any man, to satisfy her raging libido which tennis apparently had kept under some degree of control. But the courts remained soggy and she stayed frustrated.

  Leaving Catherine with Liz, she went to the school gym and worked out on the machines, which only made things worse. She hadn't noticed the instructors before; today their musk cologne was a come-on.

  Drained of enthusiasm and energy, she dismounted the machine she'd been fighting, picked up her towel, and headed in the direction of the Spa.

  "Nan!"

  "Dan!" They laughed. "Playing hooky?" Nan asked.

  Dan shook his head. "No classes till late afternoon. I thought I'd boil myself for a while. You know...spa, sauna."