The Art of Forgetting

by Camille Noe Pagan

“He was fine. I mean, he went to the hospital and everything, and he acted weird for almost a month after that. He did have seizures every once in a while, too—that was scary,” Marcus says. “But for the most part, he went back to being the same Trevor as always. I haven’t talked to him in at least a decade, though,” he adds sheepishly. Blond and clean-shaven with rosy cheeks, Marcus reminds me of a golden retriever. He looks relieved that I’m not upset, and for a second, I have an urge to command him to lie down so I can scratch his belly. Instead, I suppress a smile and excuse myself to the bathroom.

  At four o’clock, my mother ushers us into the dining room. Before we sit down to eat, she asks us to hold hands around the table, and requests that Sarah bless our food. I look around, expecting Sarah, at least, to be as surprised as I am—after all, my mother is neither sentimental nor religious—but all the others, including Ella, have already bowed their heads.

  I reluctantly close my eyes as Sarah starts to speak. “Dear God, thank you for this wonderful meal, and for bringing us together here today. Please continue to bless us, and to allow us to support each other through trying times. We especially pray for Marissa today as she stands by Julia during her recovery. Watch over her and give her strength. We are humbled and give special thanks for the great blessing that you have given us: one another.”

  Sarah, who is sitting next to me, squeezes my hand before adding, “Amen.” I squeeze back, and when I open my eyes, I am surprised to find that I am just the tiniest bit teary.

  Ten

  We’re almost there,” says Julia, dragging me by the hand. All week, she has been begging to take me to a new restaurant in downtown Ann Arbor. I look anxiously down the street, which is aglow from holiday lights and colorful window displays, and try to pass my furrowed brow off as curiosity. Clearly, I won’t be leaving Svelte to star on All My Children anytime soon; Julia immediately senses my unease. “Don’t worry so much. I know where I’m going,” she informs me. What she doesn’t pick up on is that it’s not her navigational skills that are stressing me out.

  The truth is, I’m nervous to be out in public with her.

  I’ve seen Julia almost every day since I’ve been in Michigan. Things had been going, as my mother would say, “swimmingly”; we’ve had longer and more involved conversations, and she’s even brought up things from high school that I hadn’t remembered until she mentioned them. There are other good signs. She has started wearing some of her old clothing, and although she hasn’t been dancing, she’s been walking on the Ferrars’ treadmill, which her neuropsychologist deemed “a significant step forward.” Granted, she seemed a little confused when I talked about a few mutual friends of ours in New York, making me wonder if she was only pretending to remember them. But on the whole, she seemed to be on the mend.

  Then, two days ago, she had a meltdown.

  We were in the Ferrars’ kitchen making scones. Despite the fact that she barely ate baked goods herself, Julia could always turn a stick of butter and some flour into a heavenly concoction. This time, though, the dough had morphed into something more appropriate for a kindergarten art class than for consumption.

  “It’s not supposed to be this pastelike, is it?” I asked, trying—rather unsuccessfully—to prevent the mixture from sticking to my flour-coated hands. “Any suggestions?”

  Julia whipped around and looked at me as though I had just asked her if she wanted to put her head in the oven. Her eyes filled with a look of rage that I had never, in our sixteen years of knowing each other, seen—not even the day she threw a fit in the hospital.

  “If you don’t like it, then figure out how to fix it, genius!” she screamed at me. “Isn’t that what you love to do? Make everything better?!”

  I stared at her, initially more shocked than offended. She stared back so fiercely that I thought she might be trying to telekinetically throw me against the wall.

  “Jules, you don’t mean that,” I finally said quietly. But deep down, I knew that at least a little part of her did. While Julia was still in the hospital, Dr. Bauer told Grace, Jim, and me that one of the more common side effects of frontal lobe damage was unflinching honesty. “That’s not to say that you should believe everything she says; some of it will be complete gibberish,” he informed us. “But don’t be surprised if Julia seems to lack the internal filter that keeps people from speaking their minds—and hurting others in the process.” Of course, Julia was right: I am too eager to step in and try to make things okay. But it was painful to think that she’d probably held this opinion long before her accident, and simply kept it to herself in order to shield me.

  “Of course she doesn’t mean it,” I heard Grace say from behind me. “Come on, honey,” she said as she walked over to Julia and put her arms around her. “I know you’re having a bad day, but there’s no need to scream at Marissa. She’s your best friend, remember?”

  “Yes,” Julia said meekly, and started to cry.

  “I didn’t mean to upset you,” I told Julia.

  “I know,” she said between sobs. “I don’t know what got into me.”

  “Let’s go lie down for a little bit, okay?” Grace said softly to her daughter, leading her out of the kitchen.

  By the time Grace came back, I had kneaded the dough so many times that it had become dozens of little balls that refused to adhere to one another.

  “You can’t take it personally, Marissa,” she said, looking at me sympathetically.

  “I know.”

  “That’s what I say, too,” Grace said. She sat down on a chair and crossed her long legs under her like a pretzel. “It still hurts. She’s lost it on me a few times. Several times, actually. Her neurologist says that it’s to be expected, even now. Those frontal lobe issues.” She touched her hairline, as if to remind herself. “She told me I looked old the other day, and didn’t really seem to understand why I was upset about it.”

  “Yikes.” It’s true that Grace has let her hair grow gray and hasn’t succumbed to the Botox craze, but it’s precisely her silver streaks and the smiling creases at the corners of her eyes that make her beautiful. Still, there was a shred of truth hidden in the statement, however cruel.

  Grace went on. “Her new neurologist says the area of her brain that acts as the mental ‘brakes,’ so to speak, isn’t working correctly. So instead of heeding red lights, she flies through them full speed.”

  “That’s an eerie analogy.”

  “Isn’t it?” she said, laughing a little and making me feel better in the process.

  But it’s that very analogy that has me worried as Julia steers me through the crowds on Main Street. We veer off the bustling thoroughfare and onto West Liberty, which is calmer and reminds me of some of the best parts of Brooklyn, with its cozy brick buildings and low-arching vintage streetlights. After a block, we stop in front of a small, sleek-looking café. Above the door hangs a sign: BEBER. Clever, I think, recognizing the word for “drink” from the Latin American phrase book that became my bible when Dave and I were in Chile two years ago.

  “Okay! This is it!” she tells me, clapping her hands with delight.

  “Cute,” I say. “Let’s go inside.”

  “Okay! But I have something to confess.” She looks positively giddy as she tells me this, and I almost expect her to start jumping up and down.

  “Spill it.”

  “Um—” she starts, but before she has a chance to finish, I see something through the glass. Even though I only catch the smallest glimpse of the person at the bar, it is enough that I recognize him, and at that instant, I realize why Julia has brought me here.

  “Jules, why would you do this to me?” I say, drawing in my breath sharply. I pull her away from the window and toward the cobblestone parking lot so that we are out of sight.

  Too late.

  “Oh my God,” drawls Nathan, grinning at me as he walks through the door onto the sidewalk. “The two amigas, together again. I had to come outside to see if I was hallucinating.” He wi
pes his hands on his jeans and I see that he is leaner, more muscular than he was in college, and slightly gray around the temples. If it is possible, he looks twice as good as he did a decade ago.

  I don’t want to meet his eye, but I don’t want to be rude. As we survey each other, I feel mildly light-headed. This cannot be happening , I tell myself. But it is.

  “Surprise!” says Julia, giving Nathan a big hug.

  He doesn’t seem even the slightest bit alarmed that Julia sounds like a prepubescent version of herself, leading me to believe that he not only knows about Julia’s accident, but has actually seen her since, rather than just corresponding via e-mail.

  “I’m glad you were right—it’s so great to see you both,” he says, but he is looking straight at me.

  A memory, it turns out, is not just a memory, or so I discovered during one of my marathon Google sessions on brain health. Studies show that the more times a person recollects something, the less accurately she is able to do so; her memory becomes affected by other factors, like how she feels about the incident and what other people say about it. The brain, in turn, responds by lumping fact and influencing factors together, making it difficult and often impossible for the rememberer to decipher what’s real and what’s imagined. This is why people who witness crimes often testify about what they read during a news report instead of what they actually saw. This is also why, although I vividly recall the last time Nathan and I spoke—March 18, 1998, to be exact—I cannot be certain about the fidelity of my recollection. Because I have thought about it dozens, hundreds, maybe thousands of times at this point.

  I didn’t break things off right away. After all, I reasoned, I only promised Julia that I would let him go, not that I would do it immediately. She must have suspected my hesitancy, because she repeatedly e-mailed and called me to find out how Nathan took the news. I never hated her more than I did then. And yet I could not bring myself to stand up to her, even though every cell in my body was screaming, I take it back!

  Nathan didn’t know that each conversation, each touch over those few winter weeks was a long good-bye. I wasn’t about to tell him about my conversation with Julia, and so I acted like nothing was wrong. If anything, we were more in love every day. We stayed up until dawn, studied together, moved in concert, became Nathan-and-Marissa. He was the first thing I thought about when I woke up, the last person I spoke to at the end of each day. I could not imagine life without him.

  I couldn’t imagine life without my best friend, either. And eventually, Julia’s check-ins, which I had been ignoring, loomed too large. It was time.

  I decided the only way to handle the situation was to get bombed out of my mind and unceremoniously dump Nathan. Like many best-laid plans, it did not go accordingly.

  We went to a local pub for dinner. I soon discovered that getting drunk wasn’t going to happen: I didn’t have the stomach to so much as sip at my gin and tonic. I was so tense that it wasn’t hard to pick a fight, though, and so I began to complain that we would never work out, given that he wanted to stay in Ann Arbor after he graduated the following year, whereas I was determined to move to New York.

  “It makes zero sense for us to keep this up, when we’re just going to end up in a long-distance romance,” I informed him, trying to look bold even though my legs were shaking underneath the wooden booth we were seated at.

  “M, we’ll make it work,” he told me, kissing the inside of my wrist. “If I have to live in New York for a few years, so be it. I’ll do what it takes to be with you.”

  “A few years?” I said testily, whipping my hand back to my side of the table. “It will take me at least a decade to become an editor-in-chief. And I’m certainly not planning on leaving after that happens.”

  “Fine, we’ll figure it out when we get there. No reason to ruin what we have based on pessimistic speculation,” he said, popping a fry in his mouth nonchalantly.

  “You’re just saying that to shut me up. And the point is, this is a college romance. There’s no way that it can last,” I said, repeating what Julia had said to me in my dorm room.

  “My parents met in college and they’ve been married twenty-nine years.”

  “That was the seventies,” I said with disdain. “And my parents met in high school and managed to wreck each other before divorcing fourteen years later.”

  “Okay, Marissa, I honestly don’t know what’s going on with you.” Nathan sighed. “Why don’t we talk about this tomorrow, after we’ve both had a good night’s sleep?”

  “I don’t want to sleep,” I said, feeling as though my chest had been hollowed out and the remaining cavity was filled with rocks. “I want to break up. I want to see other people. There’s no point in being committed when it can’t last.”

  “Marissa, you don’t mean that,” Nathan said, leaning forward.

  “I do,” I said, looking down at my silverware so he wouldn’t see that my eyes were filled with tears.

  Nathan grabbed my hand. “Marissa Rogers, I will marry you tomorrow, if that’s what it takes to show you that I’m committed. You say the word and we will go to city hall at nine a.m. and tie the knot with a couple of bums looking on.”

  “You can’t be serious,” I said, but as I looked up at him—his golden-green eyes peering intently into mine and trying to understand what was making me say these horrible things—I saw that he was.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, again, pulling away from him. I grabbed my coat and turned to leave, but halfway to the door, I turned around and walked back to the table. Then I leaned over Nathan’s stunned face and kissed him, trying to memorize the feeling of my lips on his.

  “I love you,” I said. “But this will never work.” Because I love my best friend more than you.

  And with that, I ran out the door and onto the street.

  Never once turning back.

  Since that night, I have imagined reuniting with Nathan so many times. In my mind, he was The One That Got Away—never mind that I was The One That Ran Away—although over the years, I eventually stopped pining for him and simply missed him. I had told him things that I had never told anyone, not even Dave or Julia—like the fact that as a child, I used to dream of luring my father back to my house and duct-taping him to a chair until he agreed to stay. Or the fact that although I didn’t mind being five-two, I was scarred by my mother telling me at age thirteen that a girl of my height couldn’t afford to gain even five pounds and I would have to spend the rest of my life on a diet.

  But seeing Nathan standing here in front of me is not the blissful reunion I envisioned. In fact, I am not happy to see him. Not under these circumstances. And particularly not hugging my best friend.

  “I thought you said you couldn’t convince Marissa to come visit?” he asks Julia.

  “She definitely never asked me,” I say, my mind spinning with questions. Why would Julia tell Nathan that? Did she not want me to see him before now? And if so, why?

  Julia ignores me. “Did I?” she asks Nathan, a puzzled look on her face. “I don’t remember.”

  I look at him, and then her, and a familiar bubble of anger rises in me. Don’t make a scene, I chide myself. But another voice in me says, Marissa Rogers, it’s time to grow a pair, and this is the voice I heed.

  “So I’ve been a favorite topic of conversation for the two of you for some time now?” I ask. “I figured out a while ago that you were e-mailing back and forth, but I certainly didn’t think it was about me.” Even as I say this, my curiosity bubbles up again; I’m dying to ask them, Why? Why are you talking about me? But the festering anger inside of me wins this round.

  “Really? How did you know we were talking?” Julia says.

  I ignore her and turn to Nathan. “Obviously, you’re aware that Jules is a little messed up in the head.”

  He raises an eyebrow at me, but doesn’t look angry. “The accident? Yes, I know.”

  “Then you know all about her memory issues. Conveniently, Nathan, she neglecte
d to tell me that you two had become so close.” I spit out the last word as though it’s a curse. I’m fully aware that I’m causing a scene, but the floodgates have opened and I see no reason not to drag everyone under the current with me.

  “I was only—” Julia starts.

  “I’m not really interested in what you were doing,” I say indignantly, even though this is a bold-faced lie. “I decided a decade ago that what’s done is done, and if you want to revisit the past, then you can do it on your own.”

  “Marissa, I’m sorry,” Julia whines. “Please don’t be mad.”

  I want to storm away, to be the one to leave Julia behind for the first time in our long and sordid history. At the same time, I know that I cannot strand her without a ride. Especially when I’m not even sure she understands why I am upset.

  “Fine,” I say. “I forgive you. Now let’s get the hell out of here.”

  “Auntie Marissa, are you crankypants?” asks Ella as I move my little yellow man three squares on the Candy Land board.

  My niece is peering at me with a concerned look on her face. This makes me laugh, which makes Ella giggle, making me laugh even harder. Before I know it the two of us are doubled over.

  “Crankypants? Is that what Mommy says when you’re having a bad day?” I ask, wiping my eyes with the back of my hands.

  “Yes!” she giggles, bouncing up and down on her knees, which are folded under her.

  “Then yes, sweetie, I think I am.”

  “You need some ice cream!” Ella declares. “That’s the only thing that makes me feel better on crankypants days.”

  “Ice cream makes me better, too, Ella,” I tell her. “Let’s see if Mommy wants to go get some with us.”

  Sarah agrees that ice cream is just what we need—never mind that it’s twenty degrees out—so the three of us bundle up and head to Stucchi’s, which, in a survey of one particularly picky diet editor, was voted the best ice cream on the planet.