32.
It is important for me, whenever I relive this night at the Landrys’, to first remind myself of other, better, memories. This is how I keep darkness from winning. This is how I stay healthy.
So, let me tell you:
My mother had a crush on Robert Stack.
This was after the divorce, after Hannah, after Lindy, after I had broken into the Landrys’ house, and after Rachel had moved back out on her own, in a time when it was just me and my mom again on Piney Creek Road, in the fall of 1992, my senior year of high school. She had recently taken another part-time job to keep busy, this time at a beauty salon, working as a receptionist at the counter about four days a week and, on the days it was raining, or if we had decided to go out to dinner after one of my soccer practices, she would pick me up in her car that now smelled strongly of the rank acetone they used at the salon. I would throw my stuff in the backseat and sit down in the front and my mother would reach over and squeeze my arm to greet me. She would tell me how happy she was that I had started soccer again, how much better I was looking, how proud she was of me, and I’d say something like, What’s the big idea? You bucking for a promotion?
Things were pretty good between us.
This was not the trouble.
The trouble was that my mother was still insatiably sad. She put on a brave face and filled as many days as she could manage with work but even this seemed only to remind her of what she had lost. The salon, for example, was frequented by women my mother had known in what she called her “previous life.” These were ladies she’d played tennis with at the country club or gone to real estate conventions with along with their spouses and the constant reappearance of these people in her “new life” seemed to throw my mother off-balance. While driving me home, for instance, she would say things like, Do you remember Lucy Gifford? You played tennis with her son, and I would say things like, I don’t know, Mom. That was a long time ago. Why? Yet she rarely had an answer.
The obvious reason, I always imagined, was that she had seen Lucy Gifford at work that day and, whether or not Lucy Gifford looked ill or well, my mother had to wonder if Lucy Gifford knew about what my father was doing with the eighteen-year-old biology major who worked at the pro shop those years back, while he was still married. And who knows, my mom may have even been suspicious about Lucy Gifford herself. What was going on at those conventions when my father came back to the room later than she did? What did Lucy Gifford mean when she said she always enjoyed seeing us at the club? Once the trust is gone, you know, all of history changes. A person doesn’t know what to believe. My mother was no different.
Worse still is that what surely followed these encounters was the way my mother backtracked in her mind to wonder about the Giffords’ kids and how they’d come along, a boy near my age, she remembers, and a daughter near my sister’s. And then there would be Hannah, always dead and waiting for her. There would be love and loss and regret and injustice and the inside knowledge that the way that life fleets can just crush you.
So despite her best efforts, my mother still struggled to get through the days without exhaustion. This led her to give up dating, to stop being set up by friends, and to stop going to any social events that might require her to be emotionally engaging, although she was still a charming and beautiful woman. This also led her to become less energetic around the house. She began closing off doors to certain rooms and no longer dusting or vacuuming them as rigorously as she used to. She also spent less time cooking, which is a strange thing to do in Louisiana. This is not to suggest that she was lazy, because she wasn’t, but if she came home from work excited about some new recipe the manicurists had passed along, it had nothing to do with the pleasure that meal might provide, but rather the fact that the whole thing took little time to prepare.
Meals that required forethought, like peeling or slow roasting or marinating, became rare. If they happened at all it was only on weekends or holidays and our weekly supper rotation came to consist of a predictable series of baked pork chops and sloppy joes and plain spaghetti, until even these dwindled down to skinless chicken breasts that my mother would buy in bulk and cook in the microwave. The results were pale and continent-shaped entrées that she would present to me with different names. Chicken a la Ranch Dressing. Chicken a la Ketchup. Maybe some peas on the side. I ate these meals without praise or complaint.
What does a boy say?
But on Wednesday nights my mom would order pizza that came to us in one large greasy box at seven forty-five p.m. The cash would be sitting on the planter by the front door, and I would hand it to a guy with long hair and a skull-and-crossbones earring in his left ear. He wore a Sony Discman attached to his belt, and I would often recognize the song blasting through the headphones around his neck. Each week he would take the money and flip through the bills and say, “Thanks, bro,” and I would walk the pizza into the den, where my mother had set up trays. We’d lay our slices on paper plates and turn down the lights as my mom sat next to me on the couch to watch TV. Our entire house would then be transformed as the dark and eerie theme song for the show Unsolved Mysteries came on. The host, the actor Robert Stack, would then step out of a shadow on-screen and talk directly to us.
This hour was like a vacation.
At the height of its popularity, each episode of this show consisted of several retellings of “true” events both realistic and supernatural that even the most decorated detectives were unable to puzzle. The scenes would be dramatized by unknown actors and occasionally made use of special effects, all of which were narrated in voice-over by Stack.
If you don’t know, Robert Stack’s voice was a human miracle. His deep baritone had a strange influence on everything he said, and this, along with his good looks, sustained him through a long and varied Hollywood career at the back half of the twentieth century. It wasn’t that his voice merely made things sound frightening or dangerous. It was that he made them sound important. The disappearance of a small-town girl from Utah, the abduction of a businessman from Des Moines, these sounded from Stack like a global crisis. So you couldn’t help but listen when he explained the details of a case. You couldn’t help but agree when he told you how necessary it was to come forward if you knew anything. And you couldn’t help but legitimately wonder about the topics he pursued that no one else seemed willing to talk about, even when he began the show with impossible questions, such as, “Are we alone in the universe?”
This hour of the week became a true pleasure for both my mother and I, one of the few a teenager can share with a parent at that age, and our shadows sat like hills on the wall behind the couch as we watched. I remember it so well, and yet it is easy to underestimate moments like this when we’re in them. It’s easy to take life for granted. Everybody knows that.
But here’s the thing.
It is also easy to dismiss the random ways in which these memories return to us, often in dreams or strange flashes, as merely the unpredictable shuffling of our human mind that is, in itself, an unsolvable mystery. How does it even work? Brain clouds? Electrical currents? Associative recall? Ask a doctor. They don’t seem too sure. In fact, even some of our brightest psychologists and surgeons will tell you that the human memory, in its true intricacy, may never be parsed. But, I’ve come to think it’s much simpler than that.
I believe the reasons we hang on to seemingly insignificant snippets of conversation, the smell of a particular pizza delivered by a particular guy, the shape of certain shadows on a particular wall, is that there may come a day when we are sitting in a hospital room visiting our mother as she lies on an uncomfortable bed, still recovering. And we are asking her questions and feeling nervous about what the doctor has said could be permanent damage caused by a blood clot the size of a pinpoint and we don’t know if the way she is struggling to find the right words is a temporary exhaustion or the new reality and all we want to do is tell her we love her in a language no one has used before because we mean it in a way that no one has meant it before. And this will be a difficult time for us.
But then, in a break between the words, a commercial may come on the small television hung up in the corner of the room that we did not even know was playing. It may advertise some new drug, some insurance plan, and our mother will smile at the voice of the handsome actor standing in front of a green screen. She will then close her eyes and squeeze our hand, the one that she has been holding since we walked in, and say, “Oh, I used to have such a crush on him.”
When she does this, our memory will be waiting.
As soon as we look at the actor, as soon as we recognize him, memory will gladly rebuild for us the flickering den, place again the taste of pizza on our tongues, and even fill the hospital room with the smell of acetone that clung to our mother’s hair those decades ago. It will then perform other invisible miracles as well, allowing us to travel back in time to once again look at the woman sitting on the couch next to us watching TV, where she is now a much different person than the one we saw as a teenager. She is much more complicated, as with memory we are able to consider her life as a whole. We are able to consider both of our lives together. The sacrifices she made for us. The pain we went through. The trouble we caused her. The way she raised us. Yes yes yes. It is love that we feel here.
This is the purpose of memory.
But where memory fails is in touch.
We cannot physically go back to that dimly lit den and push aside the television trays to lie down and rest our head in that woman’s lap. We cannot feel her fingers in our hair, her hand on our shoulder. We can try if we want to, sure. We can close our eyes. We can imagine as hard as we like. It doesn’t matter. The touch is gone. Memory understands this.
So it enables the voice of Robert Stack or someone else like him to do for us what it needs to, which is remind us that every moment of our lives is plugged in. Every moment is crucial. And if we recognize this and embrace it, we will one day be able to look back and understand and feel and regret and reminisce and, if we are lucky, cherish. The way our sister tapped the top of a door frame. The way our father danced in the den. The way a grown man cried in the grass. The way Lindy, or at least some stolen version of her, once raced to a tree in the schoolyard. This is the best we can do.
And this is not so bad.