Remember Me

by Liz Byrski

  ‘Sleep,’ she says. ‘It’ll make a big difference, you’ll feel much better. I’ll come round tomorrow after work, we’ll go out for a meal. We’ll talk then.’

  The next morning I wake early and lie in the soft dawn light, calmer but bereft. Through the sloping ceiling window I watch as a parrot destroys a purple flower on the morning glory that rambles over the peppermint tree. Here I am back in the protection of my precious shell. Six weeks ago I closed the door here, confident of the reassurance and joy with which I would open it again, safe in its promise of the future, assured that it symbolised the life I would return to, the life I would always want to live. Everything has changed. Now I am terrified to step back into my own life; I fear it will swallow me up, imprison me, that I will never find my way out and back to you. Even your voice on the telephone can’t erase the terrible sense of foreboding.

  I am a stranger to myself, adrift in my own home, my own life; and for the first few days I can’t tell you how this feels. I am unable to work, unable to relate to my friends. I constantly expect the phone call that will tell me that it’s all over. I tell our love story on the phone and face to face; I answer the questions and relate anecdotes. I laugh and cry and show the photographs and promise everyone that they will meet you, one day soon. But to myself I am unconvincing.

  I can’t concentrate on anything for more than a few minutes and each time I leave the house to go shopping, walk Basil, or swim at the beach I hurry home anxious to see if you have called or sent an email.

  I am a media junkie, lost without newspapers, a compulsive consumer of radio and television news, hooked on politics and current affairs, but two weeks pass before I can pick up a newspaper or listen to a news bulletin.

  Then, the first time I switch on the television, I am hurled into a steamy bedroom scene and the actor transposes into you. Your past relationships surge in to my imagination and I struggle to rid myself of the images of you with other women. Had we met as strangers past relationships might not have mattered to either of us, but once separated again the lost years come back to haunt us both through a sense of ownership of that time. I hadn’t had you then but I had loved you and you had loved me and on opposite sides of the world we both battle images of the past; we fight the need to ask questions and the need not to know the answers.

  ***

  ‘Why didn’t you marry him when you were young?’ my mother asks, looking at the photographs.

  I open my mouth which is bursting with recriminations but they float unspoken into the ether. It would be pointless and cruel.

  ‘We wanted to get married when Karl had to go back to America but you and Dad said we had to wait a year,’ I tell her.

  ‘Why did we want you to wait?’

  ‘You felt I was too young: he was older and he was divorced. When his work permit expired he had to go back to America so he could save for us to get married. Dad said Karl had to keep me In the style to which I had become accustomed.’ I couldn’t keep the irony out of my voice.

  ‘It all sounds a bit silly to me,’ she says and a nurse who knows the story rolls her eyes at me and grins.

  ‘He’s very handsome,’ Mum said. ‘I remember he was always very handsome. How old did you say he is?’

  ‘Sixty-eight.’

  ‘Is that older than me?’

  ‘No Mum, you’re eighty-seven.’

  ‘You should marry him now. Does he still want to marry you?’

  I hesitate. I don’t want to lie, but I know she hasn’t realised that this could mean I may leave Australia.

  ‘Yes, he still wants to marry me.’

  ‘Well, there you are then. What sort of dress will you wear? I think lavender would be a good colour for you.’

  ‘Oh well,’ I say, in an attempt to change the subject. ‘There’s plenty of time to think about that.’

  But a couple of days later she has told all the staff and the other residents that I am getting married again, in a lavender dress. She has our photograph in a frame and shows everyone her ‘future son-in-law’. I try to keep control of the story as it ricochets around the enclosed world of the nursing home, until I realise that it doesn’t matter. In a week she will have forgotten all about it. But she doesn’t forget. She forgets the days of the week and her surname; she forgets her grandchildren and the name of the man she was married to for fifty-eight years but she doesn’t forget you. Three times a week for the next five months I visit her and each time she asks after you by name, and wants to know when we are getting married.

  ‘She needs to know you’re settled before she dies,’ explained a psychologist friend. ‘Now she thinks you have someone to take care of you it’s all right for her to let go.’

  From a distance I watch her dozing in the sunshine and remember who she used to be. She was a dancing teacher and when she met my father she gave that up to help him start his own business. In their wedding photograph from September 1939, my father, a short, thickset man with classic features and a small black moustache, stands rigid and straight-faced. He is wearing his volunteer special constable’s uniform, the uniform cap tucked under his arm, his gas mask and tin helmet strapped to his side. Mum is taller than him, slim and elegant, her hair in a Marcel wave under a jaunty hat, wearing a tailored suit, an orchid pinned to the lapel of her jacket, a fox fur stole over one shoulder. Was she happy? Was she in love? What did she expect from this marriage for which she had waited ten years? It was such a strange relationship, apparently so full of antagonism, so much attention paid to appearances, and seemingly so bereft of tenderness, passion or affection, and yet it lasted until his death.

  I have showed her your photographs from nineteen sixty-two, and sometimes she can remember Smugglers Cottage.

  ‘Who’s this woman?’ she asks pointing to herself, ‘what’s she doing?’

  ‘It’s you Mum. You were doing an American Indian dance for Karl.’

  ‘How stupid,’ she says. ‘Why would I do a thing like that?’

  ‘It was a joke,’ I explain. ‘So that he wouldn’t feel homesick for America.’

  ‘He must have thought I was daft.’

  ‘Not at all. He loved it. You used to tease him about his American accent.’

  ‘How old was I then?’

  ‘Fifty-three.’

  ‘Old enough to know better.’

  There is a close-up of Mum and I side by side in the garden and the look on her face reminds me how proud she was to be the wife of a successful businessman. She took a delight in being a splendid cook, housekeeper and hostess, a good mother. I realise how little I know her, how ignorant I have always been of her desires and disappointments and that it is too late to change all that. What I do know is that I am the only person who really matters to her now and that the decisions I make now will affect her dramatically. For years she looked after her own father who lived to his nineties and with severe dementia became an incredible burden.

  ‘When I’m old I don’t want you ever to stop doing what you want to do because of me,’ she said to me many times over the years. ‘If you ever want to go off to the other side of the world you must do it and not worry about your father and I, or me if Fm on my own.’

  In nineteen sixty-two they had wanted to keep me with them to protect me, but also I think to protect themselves from the aridity of being alone with each other. But as they aged they had found a gentler way of being alone together. I understand why they wouldn’t let me go with you then, the anger and the bitterness was over decades ago, but how much does it affect the decisions I have to make now.

  ‘We didn’t do right by you,’ she says, opening her eyes as I put a cup of tea down beside her. ‘Your father and I, we let you down. Karl, he was the right one for you, I knew that later.’

  I don’t know if is true or not, and it doesn’t really matter. She believed it and she needed to say it. And I am still caught in my own painful internal dialogue, for what happened thirty-seven years ago does not diminish my sense of resp
onsibility to her today. Can I really leave here for six months, maybe more, or should I wait until you can come to Australia? I know she has the best of care but do I have a right to go away? As recently as ten years ago she would have told me I had every right, that I should go and live my life and bring you back to see her whenever I could. But now?

  ***

  How did people manage before telephones, before email, before reasonably efficient postal services? How did it feel to wait weeks or even months for a letter, to yearn for a husband or lover miles away in a foreign war never knowing if he was alive or dead? I would have been useless in those days, I am useless now with all the best communications technology on hand. At least twice a day you call me, each time I open my email there is a message of reassurance and every week the mail brings your letters, poems and sketches. You call to say good night and good morning, to tell me how you think of me constantly while at work, how you are unable to sleep without me, how you long to be with me again. Yet I still wake each day fearing that you will leave me if not today, then one day soon.

  I hate myself for my neediness, my insecurity and my morbid self-indulgence. I fear my pathetic clinging will hasten your disenchantment. Each morning I drag myself out of bed and take a cup of coffee onto the deck and sit drinking it in the early morning sunshine, looking at my beautiful surroundings and trying to count my numerous blessings. Each morning I end up in tears. I cry for the past and I cry for the present, because you have come back into my life only to leave me again, and you don’t even know that you will do it. I think I might be reliving nineteen sixty-two and I feel as incapable of dealing with my emotions as I was then. Although I mention my fears to certain close friends I never disclose the full extent of my depression and anxiety to anyone because it seems so neurotic and contradictory.

  ‘You can call us even if it’s the middle of the night,’ say Sue and John, both therapists, and dear friends who seem to take my neurosis in their stride. ‘Don’t battle with it on your own. We’re always there.’

  But it is too complex and frightening to reveal too much: speaking it aloud seems to make it even more real. I have just been reunited with the love of my life, I am supposed to be ecstatic, I feel terrible and I know1 look overwrought and exhausted.

  ‘Do you think I looked for you for all those years just to leave you again?’ you say gently. ‘That doesn’t really make a lot of sense.’

  And you’re right, it makes no sense at all. In my head I know it, in my heart the fear reigns.

  The situation is compounded by the fact that I seem unable to write. For years I pompously told my students that writers’ block was a luxury they couldn’t afford.

  ‘Journalists don’t get writers’ block,’ I’d tell them. ‘If they did they’d be out of a job. You just keep writing, even when you don’t feel like it, even when it’s rubbish—just write something, keep writing.’

  Now I sit at the keyboard and stare at the screen. All I can write are emails to you. Day after day I love-bomb you with messages so that you can’t forget, won’t doubt, can’t be free of my need for you. My inability to work and meet my deadlines becomes increasingly worrying. I have one book half-finished and a contract that requires that another, not yet begun, be completed by the end of June. I have workshops to run and some tutoring commitments, and I need to work towards meeting other longer term deadlines. I throw myself on the mercy of my publisher and beg for a temporary suspension of the contract. The story warms their hearts and they are generous in the extreme.

  ‘You should write the story,’ they tell me. ‘We could publish it.’

  ‘Write the story,’ you say. ‘If you can’t write anything else just write our story.’

  ‘You should write the story,’ says Carolyn. ‘If this is the only thing you can write at the moment, then write it.’

  And so I begin to write the story and slowly, as I write I begin to believe that you are not going to leave. But as the fear of your imagined desertion evaporates it is replaced by fear that you will die before we can meet again. Each time I feel the stirrings of confidence the fear intervenes, warning me not to take anything for granted.

  In San Francisco you are coping with your own separation anxiety. Your frequent calls are not simply to reassure me, you need to check that I am really there, that I still love you, that I haven’t changed my mind. Your search for me was long and frustrating and always underwritten by the fear that I might be harbouring long-held resentment. Perhaps I would refuse to speak to you, perhaps your approach would be met with anger and bitterness. For years you became stalled on the belief that I might have died and fear of discovering that made you stop your search. You had wanted to explain the past, to apologise, to tell me that you had really loved me. Always a dreamer but wary of creating a fool’s paradise you had permitted yourself only the occasional flight of fancy that perhaps I would hold some residual affection for you. A friendship? Maybe even a chance to meet again.

  Our ecstatic reunion disrupted your emotional state just as much as it did mine. After our two weeks in Germany you were back at work the afternoon of the day you arrived home and there wasn’t a break in sight. An intense and passionate love affair as you approached your sixty-ninth birthday had never seemed like a possibility. You are just as vulnerable as you were thirty-seven years ago, but this time you have the courage to talk about it, and this time you are prepared to take the emotional risks.

  As I battle my identity crisis and my neurotic Fear, you struggle with the weight of the past that hangs heavily on you and from which you seem unable to free yourself. You continue to feel that the full responsibility for what we lost rests with your own immaturity and lack of courage. Time and again we rehash the events of those days when our world fell apart; we relive the feelings, the letters, the things said and unsaid, the fears and misunderstandings. We agonise over our respective roles and try to convert the bitterness of regret to optimism about the future.

  11

  The weeks become months and our conversations about how we will organise our lives take on a firmer shape. We both have a strong desire to live the story as it was always meant to be, you want to see Australia and would be willing to live here when you have met your present work commitments, but being together in San Francisco is hugely important to both of us. And we both want to go to England together, to take a sentimental journey there, very soon. You may be able to take some time off in the middle of the year, I can’t leave here until I finish my work, but I am still struggling to meet even the most simple deadlines.

  In an effort to get a grip on the situation I take your advice and join the gym. As I start to work out three or four times a week my energy seems to return, and with it some confidence. The discipline of the physical exercise seems to bring some form and substance into my days, some discipline into the rest of my life. My morbid fear that you will die continues, but it intrudes less and less into my life and I start to work on things other than just our story. I complete some writing assignments and run some media training sessions, host a forum on drugs and the media, and write and sell some articles to newspapers, among them a feature about us.

  Headed ‘Meet Me in Frankfurt!’ it is published in the Review section of the Weekend Australian. When I read it in print I can see the evidence of what I had suspected. My writing has changed, you have put me in touch with my heart and feelings. I look at the story with some satisfaction, and I clip a copy and mail it to you.

  Later that day the telephone starts to ring and the following day the emails and letters start to arrive. They come from friends and acquaintances but predominantly from strangers, from people all around Australia who are touched by our story. The article is read aloud on three different radio stations in two different states; listeners are invited to call in with their own memories, stories of first love, lost love, love regained. The letters and messages tell me about so many roads not taken, foolish mistakes, lifetime regrets and some joyous reunions. Hundreds of kilo
metres away in South Australia a songwriter sits down at his keyboard and composes a song to go with the story; he records it on a compact disc and posts it to me. The story, he says, inspired the song, he hopes he has captured the feelings.

  ‘I can’t believe it,’ you say, ‘people like the story so much they think it’s so romantic. This guy writes this crazy letter leaving the girl he loves and then goes back thirty-seven years later to apologise and tell her he always loved her, and finds she’s still in love with him. Why don’t they say this guy must be really stupid?’

  ‘You know it’s not like that. You’re such a romantic, don’t pretend to be a cynic.’

  ‘But I have to be the luckiest man in the world that you even spoke to me, let alone wanted me back.’

  ‘People love a good love story,’ I say. ‘And our story is the proof that anything, really anything is possible.’

  The change in my writing-is a reflection of the change in myself and I begin to understand its nature. You were my first real love, you awakened my sexuality and I experienced feelings that I had never known before. I felt safe to push out the boundaries and explore what it meant to be a woman. We were laying the foundations of real intimacy and it was totally different from the relationships I saw around me between my parents and their friends. It was romantic and sensuous but it was also deeply spiritual, there was no room for artifice, no space for social performance. Coming from my background which had relied so much on appearances and social acceptance, it had been a revolution. As we began to map the territory of the heart and the spirit I was also moving towards a new maturity.

  When your letter came the people who wanted to protect me thought they could do so by denying what had existed between us. When they told me that it had always been wrong, that you had never loved me, that I was too young to understand, and that I had thrown myself at you, that emerging sense of myself was invalidated, denied. Somehow over the years womanhood came to me in other ways, but I lived my emotional life at a distance, a spectator, always holding back enough of myself to be safe. I longed for closeness but shied from the sort of intimacy in which the self is stripped bare through discovery of the other.