Nothing Is Quite Forgotten in Brooklyn

by Alice Mattison

  At ten o’clock at night on the day Con’s mother died, the doorbell rang. Wondering ruefully if the burglar had come back at last, Con put the chain on the door before she opened it. There was Peggy, in a bathrobe.

  “I’m not going to make a habit of this,” she said. “I mean, I know you’re leaving in a day or two, but I won’t call you at home with my pathetic little life. Though I hope we’ll be friends.”

  “Yes,” said Con. She opened the door.

  “My boyfriend’s mad at me,” Peggy said. “I need a sensible woman to tell me whether I should apologize or be mad back. But if I’m intruding, tell me.”

  “My mother died,” said Con.

  “What?” said Peggy. “She had a heart attack?”

  “I guess so.”

  Peggy stepped forward and put her arms in their quilted sleeves around Con, who had not been touched since she’d had the news. She sobbed in Peggy’s arms and felt faint. “I have to sit down,” she said. “I didn’t know I was going to do that.”

  “Tell me,” said Peggy.

  Half an hour later they returned to the topic of the angry boyfriend. Con said he had no right to be mad. She pretended she was more sure than she felt. She wanted to keep Peggy. They finished the sherry and parted with hugs at midnight. She was not asleep when the phone rang. It was Jerry. “I didn’t know what to say,” he said. She hadn’t minded his silence. She was shocked that she hadn’t minded. Hours had passed since Joanna had told him about Gert. They’d gone out exploring and returned. “Do you want me to come?” he said.

  “No,” she said. “Let’s talk tomorrow. I’m so tired.”

  Jerry was standing in the hallway when Con, still dressed, came out of the bathroom, and as she turned toward her bedroom he came toward her. He’d put on the long T-shirt he slept in. Again he took her in his arms, and she remembered his odd remark about his possessions taking up room. He smelled like her youth. She started to step back when she felt his penis stir, but he took her hand. “Con—do you think?”

  It had been so long (five or six years; she’d cheated once with Jerry in the waning months of Fred) that he was someone new—but not new. She knew the ways in which he was a jerk, but just then she didn’t care. And she knew the ways in which he wasn’t a jerk. She leaned into his embrace, and they went together into her bedroom. She hadn’t slept with anyone in a long time, and she was postmenopausal; she rummaged in a drawer for lubricant.

  Sex with Jerry was athletic, funny, companionable; it was not especially personal, so it wasn’t sentimental—and therefore it wasn’t sad. She sometimes forgot that sex with another person was more satisfying than masturbation, which provided Con with frequent, sharply pleasurable interludes, but did not lift her spirits. Sex with someone else made her charitable. Jerry’s egotism was not annoying after sex—it was sweet, like a child’s. He stayed inside her for a long time. Then he withdrew, sleepily kissed her under one eye, and slept. He took up room in her bed. She tried to establish a hollow for her bottom, shoving slowly against his back. He didn’t move. At last she stood up, took her robe, and wandered down the hall to her little living room. They had never turned off the lights, and the sheets she’d given Jerry were still folded on the sofa. She sat for a while. Jerry’s bags—a gray nylon duffel bag and a soft-sided black suitcase—were in the middle of the rug. He’d unzipped the black one, apparently just for his T-shirt and toothbrush. Con got up just enough to pull the duffel bag closer, so she could rest her legs on it. A hassock would be a nice thing to have.

  Then she remembered that Jerry had mentioned a package addressed to her. He wouldn’t mind if she opened the bags. He had no secrets. She reached down, unzipped the gray duffel bag, and reached inside. Amid socks and shaving equipment was a wrinkled Priority Mail bag. She pulled it out. It was stuffed full. When her hands took in its weight and shape, she recognized it without being able to say what it was. It was soft, but not like a pillow. As Jerry had said, it was addressed to her at the Philadelphia house in handwriting, with no return address. She ripped open the flap, her hands trembling, and drew out a black nylon purse, shaped like a briefcase but smaller, with “Le Sac” embroidered on its trim. A piece of white paper came out as well. “Found this—hope it reaches you. Pete.”

  Con’s hands trembled. She held the bag. The person who had mailed it—Pete, whoever Pete might be—had wiped dust off it. It was streaked, but not grimy. She continued to sit, holding the bag but not opening it, for a long time. When she went to the bathroom she carried the bag—lightly, as if it might be dangerous to touch—and placed it on the edge of the bathtub while she sat on the toilet, then brought it back to the table. Then she filled the kettle and stood warming her hands near it until it boiled, then made herself a cup of Lemon Zinger with sugar in it. She still couldn’t bring herself to touch her old purse.

  The apartment was cold at night. Con wanted her pajamas under her robe, and finally left the bag so as to walk carefully into the bedroom and get them without waking Jerry. She decided that if he woke up, she wouldn’t tell him what she’d received. But he didn’t. In the kitchen, the bag was still on the table. She was relieved, as if leaving the room had been taking a risk. She took off her bathrobe quickly—eyeing the bag—put on the pajamas, put the robe on again over them, and tied the belt tightly. Then she drank some tea. Then, at last, she opened the bag.

  As I’ve said, this is not a story about memory, and in November, 2003, Con hadn’t been thinking about the week in 1989 that I’ve chronicled. If anything this is a story about forgetting. Con had forgotten that week as much as it is possible to do so. I don’t blame her. Fourteen and a half years had passed. If we’re accustomed to reading novels, we’re used to stories told by someone who remembers, much later, the order of events, who said what, and how each person moved and gestured. Of course we all have detailed, possibly accurate memories of striking scenes from the past—but not of what happened an hour later, or the next morning. In real life, aside from vivid flashes, we usually can’t remember the exact words of a conversation we had minutes ago. We remember, a week or a year later, that someone’s story made us uncomfortable, but not necessarily why, or what the story was about. So, Con had forgotten a great deal, but any of us might have done the same. Maybe not quite the same; Con had tried to forget.

  During the week in 2003, the earlier week had come to her mind only once, when Peggy talked about how they’d met. And even then, Con got it wrong. Marlene’s coming visit might have reminded her of that week, but Marlene had visited several times since Con had moved to New York, and Con had had a lifetime of contacts and associations with Marlene. In the first week of November, 2003, Con was not thinking about her mother’s death or, indeed (except when Peggy talked about her), her mother. She carefully and habitually did not think about her mother.

  But some things are unforgettable, and she knew, of course, when she had lost the bag: the night she arrived in her mother’s apartment, at the beginning of the week in which her mother died. Something in the bag was hard, with corners. She pulled out the hard object first, and it was a wooden box on top of which was a copper plate engraved with a map of France. A girl in wooden shoes stood at the side, pointing at the map. Con gasped, because she had known it all her life. It had belonged to her mother. It had her mother’s jewelry in it. It was locked. When she was young, her mother used to let her take the key, open it, play with the contents, and lock it up again.

  Now she put it aside and drew the remaining contents of the bag out, one thing at a time, handling the objects carefully as though they might crumble on contact with the air. On the table, she lined up objects that looked familiar but were also new. In the bag were a red nylon wallet with bent edges. Inside were no bills but some change. There was a small orange plastic hairbrush with reddish hair on it, brighter than her present hair, and a five-by-eight-inch notebook with a green cover and spiral binding. The notebook had been old when she lost it, and the point of the spiral binding had
worked loose. When she picked it up, the tip grazed the side of her hand in a way that felt familiar. There was a copy of the Sunday New York Times Magazine of April 16, 1989, opened to the crossword puzzle, which was partly completed. A pale blue plastic tube that contained two tampons, something she no longer needed. Keys on a big ring with a big brass ornamental key on it. An unreserved Amtrak ticket to Philadelphia and a Northeast Corridor schedule that had expired in October, 1989. A checkbook in which the checks said “Constance Tepper and Jerome Elias.”

  In the wallet’s zipper pocket were two quarters and a handful of pennies. The plastic slides had in them a Visa card, an ATM card, a driver’s license with a startled young face and her address in Philadelphia, a photograph of Joanna looking plump and impatient, a photograph of Barbara waving from the steps of a red London bus—and then she remembered taking it, and how the bus took off with Barbara and without her, and how she’d chased it, laughing. A photograph of Jerry, looking like a boy.

  A red address book. For months, back then, she hadn’t had people’s addresses or phone numbers. After her mother died she had spent a few days each week in the apartment, trying to deal with everything. Barbara had been little help, but she had put together a memorial service and had somehow found relatives to attend it. They’d had a fight about something of her mother’s, which Barbara, in the end, had taken. Con had wept as if it were her mother that Barbara wanted and had managed to secure, but now she couldn’t remember what the object had been, or whether she’d taken it when Barbara died, whether she’d even thought of it.

  A bottle of aspirin, 325 milligrams each. Now her headaches often didn’t subside even if she took extra-strength aspirin. A lipstick. She looked at the keys again. One was the key to her mother’s apartment, one to their car. Now she didn’t have a car, and Jerry had a different one. She didn’t recognize some of the keys, though they all looked familiar, looked as if her fingers might have identified each one in the dark.

  Jerry stood in the doorway. “What are you doing?”

  “You forgot to give me my package.”

  “What was it?”

  She stared at him. He was naked, his forearms long and tapered, like a young man’s, his legs thicker—middle-aged—but held lightly, as if he might spring away. He’d grown hairier—on his arms, his shoulders—as he grew older. His belly was still almost flat. He worked out at a gym. His hands had always looked too wide for the rest of him, and they still did; he had the hands of a wide, squat, muscle-bound man, but he was a long, narrow man. He had a way of turning his palms so he looked as if he wore something on his hands; they were small mitts. His hair was graying but still mostly dark; it had the texture of a black man’s hair.

  “It’s my purse,” she said.

  “What purse?”

  “It was stolen. Years and years ago. The week my mother died. From her apartment.”

  “Are you kidding me?” said Jerry. “Is the money in it?”

  “Just some coins,” she said, “but lots of other things.” Then she said, “Aren’t you cold?”

  “Not particularly.”

  She found herself standing, anyway, as if to warm him with her body. She took him in her arms and wept a little.

  “What is it?”

  “I don’t know. It’s beautiful, but sad, somehow. Look.” She showed him the keys, the wallet.

  “Come to bed,” he said.

  “I don’t know what to do about Joanna.”

  “It’s the middle of the night. Don’t you have to go to work in the morning?”

  So she followed him back to bed and pulled herself next to him, leaving what she’d found on the table. She wouldn’t let him sleep in her bed when anyone else was in the apartment. She slept, then awoke once more and went to look at the bag. She couldn’t thank Pete, who’d found it and mailed it, who’d spent several dollars on postage, mailing what he’d found to someone who might be dead or might never receive it. She couldn’t let him know it had reached her. She was sure Pete wasn’t the burglar. Someone who didn’t bother to take the coins from the wallet would not bother to return the bag, even if he’d had a change of heart.

  She looked at the old crossword puzzle. She’d filled in half the blanks. She remembered that she used to work crossword puzzles, but she didn’t remember doing one before her bag was stolen. It was called “Name Game.” For one across the clue was “salami purveyor” and she’d written “deli” in ink. Five across was “provoked.” She had not written anything there. She didn’t let herself find a pen and finish it. Jerry was right. It was the middle of the night. But before she returned to bed, she turned some of the pages, starting at the back of the magazine. The recipes were for shrimp and vegetables with champagne, salmon fillets braised in red wine, asparagus and mushrooms with fresh coriander. Fancy food. Con strained to remember reading the food page—probably on the train from Philadelphia. She couldn’t. In the Style section an article said, “Now, at the end of the 1980s it is the height of high style to wear almost everything a man does, in versions scaled to a woman’s physique.” The sentence seemed innocent—old-fashioned and simple-minded. She couldn’t imagine a time—only fourteen and a half years earlier—when this sentence might have seemed like something to write and read. She left the magazine and returned to bed. She didn’t know she slept, but she must have, because what awoke her next was not a nightmare—it had no story—but perhaps the residue of a nightmare. Con felt herself falling, falling into emptiness that was featureless and unending. In a moment, if she didn’t stop herself, she would be no one, not there, not anywhere. Nothing held her, nothing kept her from falling into featureless space or timeless time except the thought of Joanna, and she screamed and in her mind reached to hold onto someone. She reached for Jerry and held his arm, and when she sensed that she’d touched someone, she clung harder.

  “Con, wake up, it’s all right.”

  She had thought she was awake. She was awake, but it didn’t help, because she still felt that letting go of this human arm might release her to fall over an edge, into a cessation of everything. She held Jerry’s arm and he turned and surrounded her with his body, and soothed her like a baby. Any decent human being would have been enough to keep her from falling, but what if nobody had been in her bed? Usually, nobody was. Usually she was alone in the apartment. She sobbed with her whole body.

  In the morning she slept through the alarm clock. “Con?” Jerry said, finally. He was standing in the doorway.

  “I’m staying home,” she said and slept again. When she awoke, sunshine told her that hours had passed. She heard the shower. She went into the kitchen. Jerry had moved the objects from the bag closer together, so as to make room for a cereal bowl and a coffee mug (which sat near them, with a little milk in the bottom of the bowl, and some coffee in the mug), but he had kept Con’s things in the same relation to one another: the bottom left corner of the green notebook, with the twisted spiral of metal, rested just below and to the right of the wallet, and so on. The wooden box was off to the side. She tried to open it again. She’d have to pick the lock. It was a simple lock and probably she could open the box without trouble, but she wanted to wait and be careful, so as not to mar the wood.

  She phoned the office and said she was sick. It was almost true. Her head felt wrong. She would not finish the task she’d set this week; it would have to wait. She poured herself a cup of coffee, took the notebook, and went back to bed. When Jerry emerged from the bathroom, wrapped in a towel—he still hadn’t unpacked, and indeed there was no place to store his clothes—she said, “I’m looking at something” and waved him away. He padded into the living room and didn’t come back.

  The first page of the notebook was dated March 3, 1987. She’d been carrying it around for two years when it was stolen. Now she didn’t carry notebooks like that.

  “Jo to doctor 4/6 4:00” was written on the first page. Under it she’d skipped a few spaces and had written “Office meeting Wed. 3” Then came a l
ist of jobs she’d planned to do, maybe over a weekend: laundry, buy shoes Jo, call mother.

  She turned the pages. Nothing was funny. She’d been an earnest, hardworking mother. After a bit came notes from the visit to the doctor. Joanna’s height was five feet, four inches: she’d already been taller than her mother. Under that was “Plaintiff’s lawyer—Bernstein” and a phone number. She’d been so sure, at the time, that she’d know which plaintiff was meant that she had not written it down. And then she suddenly remembered Bernstein. She’d liked him. They’d settled that case.

  Con read reminders of errands, notes about work. Sometimes she had copied a few sentences from a newspaper article or a book. Sometimes she argued with herself on paper. “If due process violation, then—” she’d written. Then nothing, but two pages along came the working out of the argument. “It’s a due process violation,” she’d written. “Plaintiff should have offered notice and a hearing. As in Hendrix. But Hendrix had to do with firing. But still.”

  Next came a few pages of what looked like a letter, but then she realized it was a journal. She had rarely kept journals or diaries, only when she was upset. “Another day, no phone call,” the diary began. Maybe Jerry had been on a trip. But he never called from his trips.

  She’d gone on, “She wouldn’t give up on me, never has in all these years, yet always the sense that it’s because she knows I’ll never do such-and-such, never say such-and-such. But I don’t know what such-and-such is, so I might have finally said or done it. Last time—more disdain? When M. bragged about the ribbon?”