Virgin Territory (8 page)

“I’ll catch up with you guys,” I tell my posse, as if we’re already old friends with a long history of coming and going. “It’s a work thing.”

Felder comes charging out of the clubhouse wearing a set expression and a fancy golf shirt. He’s not a big man; in fact, he’s shorter than I am. So short that he’s forced to tilt back his small round head in order to shout at me: “Didn’t I tell you I don’t want my employees kibitzing with trespassers? Are you listening to me?”

I don’t respond, because Angela is already backtracking toward us, and she’s got a look on her face that spells emergency.

“What’s the matter?” asks Felder, speaking for both of us.

“I think we found her,” she replies, but her words are directed at me. She doesn’t even glance at Felder.

“Found who?” he asks. “Who are you talking about?”

“His grandmother.”

I don’t bother to ask her how she recognized Marie. We both just take off. Felder stays behind, fuming and lobbing empty
threats at us. According to him, we’re going to be really sorry one of these days.

Marie is sitting alone on a milk crate under a palm tree next to the entrance sign. She’s wearing her favorite dress, the black one with the pink tropical flowers and bright green leaves. Her hands are lying slack in her lap, and her hair is crooked. Something’s not right. Even from a distance, I can tell that she’s been crying. A few women are standing over her, asking her questions and offering her water from a plastic jug. But Marie can’t see them; she’s focusing on something that’s happening somewhere else. She’s trying to see the thing that’s happening in the distance, but the distance can’t be measured in yards or miles or even light-years, because the distance isn’t
outside
of her, it’s all inside, deep inside.

“Is that her?” Angela asks me as I make my way toward Marie. I nod and keep going.

There are about a dozen women hovering nearby, and they’re all relieved that I’m able to identify the woman in the black-print dress. They don’t want to think of her as a crazy person who doesn’t know where she lives. They want to think of her as saved, healed, a seer of miracles, a believer, one of their own.

“She had a vision,” a woman with bright red lipstick whispers to me as I kneel down beside Marie. “She saw something.”

Marie looks up and smiles at me. She recognizes me in that way that only a family member can recognize another family member—with the full weight of our combined history between
us, causing us to know each other without words and at the same time causing us to know ourselves better than we can by ourselves.

“Dylan,” she says, and I can tell by the sound of her voice and by the way her lower lip is quivering that she wants to tell me about the something that’s happened to her. I lean forward, fuss with her hair, and take one of her limp hands in mine.

“What’s up, Gram?”

“I saw her. I saw her with my own eyes. She was standing right there. I’m not crazy. I know it sounds crazy, but Dylan, you have to believe me. I saw her.”

“Who?” I ask as I look over my shoulder at the place on the grass where she’s pointing. “Who’d you see?”

“Her,” she says. “Your mother. I saw her. She was standing there. Right there.”

Kat died when I was six years old. I cried myself to sleep for months. I clung to her clothes, her memory. I combed my hair with her comb, brushed my teeth with her toothbrush; I did anything I could to be closer to the things that were close to her. But then after a while I found I was having trouble remembering her. I couldn’t call her up on demand. That made me cry some more. First her nose disappeared, then her chin, then her lips, and finally one day, when I was about thirteen, her eyes were gone.

We used to have a whole collection of photographs of Kat, pictures of her and Doug and me together. But when Doug and I left New York, he accidentally left behind a cookie tin filled with actual photos of our family. We were just over the Florida state line when he broke the news to me. I was furious. I made him pull over and call the people who had just moved into our loft. They said that they hadn’t found any cookie tin. I made Doug go into his computer and see if any pictures were stored
in his files, but when he did we discovered that his photo file was empty. Weren’t there any images still in his camera, I asked. But he told me he sold the camera a few weeks ago. Eventually and reluctantly, I accepted the fact that the images were gone for good—along with our past life. Doug said it was all for the best. I never asked him,
Best for whom?

Naturally, I blamed Doug. As punishment, I forced him to tell me stories about my mother so that I could keep memories of her in play. I made him repeat the same stories over and over until I felt that I could see them as plain as the life that was happening right in front of me.

Doug met my mother at a soup kitchen in the basement of a church in Manhattan. She had worked the kitchen for almost ten years, ladling out the stuff, buttering bread, shaking hands, and mopping floors. By the time she bumped into Doug, she was famous for the way she remembered the names of the old-timers, how she handled cleanup, and how she always knew how much bread to buy so that everyone got plenty.

After only a month, Doug proposed to her. They got married in Woodstock, and she moved into his downtown Manhattan loft. He had a thriving video business and was paid good money to make brides adopt whacky poses, get grooms to the church on time, and enroll guests in activities that they later regretted when they saw themselves in the wedding video. Doug’s business was more popular than most because he didn’t do things by the numbers; he upended all the traditional aspects of the
marriage ceremony and made each event seem like an original rite of passage.

Kat wore tie-dyed scarves and cowboy boots, wrote the occasional article for the
Downtown Free Press
or the
Village Voice
, taught poetry in the New York public schools, and hosted an annual Fourth of July poetry slam on the rooftop as a way of protesting the bombast of fireworks coming off the river, which she considered a public glorification of war.

Then, of course, I was born. It was a big deal for Doug and Kat, because they hadn’t planned on having kids. Apparently, Doug used to make a big speech about how the world was a mess and not a fit place to raise children. Then I showed up, and he had to revise his idea about the world. We lived in that loft together for a few years, not exactly happily ever after, but happily enough until everything changed.

Marie is totally wired. She’s up and running around the kitchen, cleaning every surface, determined to see herself reflected in the toaster, the range, the countertops, and the microwave.

Doug barks at her: “Ma. Siddown already. You’re making me crazy.”

Marie looks at Doug as though she’s seen him before, like maybe he’s an off-duty plainclothes cop she’s tangled with in her not-so-distant past. If she can just recall the guy’s name, she
can appeal to his sense of decency. But judging from her expression, nothing’s coming to mind. Blank. She looks around the room, appraises it all, and says, “I just thought maybe we should leave the place nice for the people who live here.”

Doug slowly rests his head on the counter and lets out an enormous sigh.

“When your father was a kid,” Marie says to me, “I charged him ten cents every time he sighed like that. I did. If I’d actually collected, believe me, I would’ve been a rich woman.”

Doug looks up, exasperated. Marie sometimes forgets where she lives, but at other times she can recall random incidents from her past. It’s weird: there’s no telling which Marie you’re going to get and when. Doug digs deep into the pocket of his jeans, pulls out a dime, and then, as though he’s placing a bet on a bad hand, he places it on the countertop.

“For the last time, Ma, think. How’d you get from
the place
to the golf course? Did someone drive you? One of the nurses?”

“Teleportation?”

“Funny,” says Doug without a stitch of humor.

“I can’t remember?” she replies, adding a little lift at the end of the word to make it sound like a question.

“Ma?”

She swivels around and stares at me as though I might be able to help her, as though I have something handy up my sleeve that can divert Doug’s attention. But I know for a fact that when Doug gets like this, there’s no reasoning with him. It’s how he
behaved when he found out about my virtual babe in Tampa. He was furious.

“It was a friend,” she says as though suddenly remembering. “Definitely a friend. That’s who drove me! A friend.”

“And the name of that friend?”

“Am I staying here tonight?” Marie asks, trying to change the subject, and then she looks around and adds, “Wait. Who did you say lives here?”

“We do!”
Doug booms in a big voice from across the room.

“May I be excused?” I ask, hopping down from the counter stool and eyeing the door.

“No, you may not,” Doug replies rather sternly. And then, without adjusting his tone, he says to Marie, “Who is this friend?”

Marie fusses with a roll of paper towels on the countertop and then raises her face to me. I recognize the look—she’s lost the thread, not just the thread of the conversation, but also the thread of her life. The weave is undone, the space between things has widened, and she’s falling through. Down, down. For her, there’s no bottom, and Doug and I are just two faces looking at her from up near the rim of the well.

“This has got to stop,” Doug says as he bangs his fist down hard on the countertop. “You cannot be running around town. It’s not safe. We’ve been through this before.”

Marie begins to whimper.

If Kat were here, she’d know what to do, she’d say the right thing. She’d calm Doug down, make him believe that everything
would be all right, tell him that he shouldn’t be such a bully, and that he ought to stop worrying so much. No one was hurt, she’d say, nothing bad had happened. She’d know how to handle Marie, too, how to guide her up the stairs and into bed.

“C’mon, Gram,” I say, taking hold of Marie’s bony shoulders and leading her into the living room. “Let’s get you ready for bed.” And then to Doug I say, “Let it go. No one got hurt. Nothing bad happened.”

“Is it true?” Marie asks me as we shuffle from the kitchen into the living room. “Do we live here?”

“Yes. For now. But it could change at any minute. That’s the thing. Things change.”

“And they
do!”
she says, surprising herself with this bit of information. “They really do.”

She stops in the living room and looks around as though a light has been switched on and at last she can see what’s what. When she spots her china cabinet standing against the far wall, she heads straight toward it. She calls it a breakfront. This is where she displays her collection of plates from around the world—Italy, Spain, Germany, Japan. Each plate is like a ceramic story told in miniature. In the old days, Marie used to sit for hours serving up the whole world in those old plates, recounting every detail of where she’d been and how she’d spotted the plates in some market or store window or street stall. She’d slip in an exotic phrase or two as she described how she had worked the vendor to get the best price out of him, and she could remember
exactly how many pesetas, drachmas, yen, or francs she paid for each plate. I keep a close eye on Marie just in case she decides to do something crazy, like toss them one by one around the room.

“These mine?” she asks without turning to look at me.

I feel a sharp twinge somewhere in the vicinity of my heart. Actually, I think it might be happening somewhere deeper down, like in my gut. I realize that she can’t remember all those trips she’d taken with Granddad to foreign places. I feel sick, as though the floor’s just been taken away, and I am falling, down, down, down.

“You remember these plates,” I tell Marie. “You collected them.”

She has to remember. She has to think back. If Marie forgets the plates, then it’s just a matter of time before she forgets everything else, like me, for instance. “Those plates meant the world to you.”

“Have I been to Spain?” she asks, looking at me with the quizzical stare of a lost child.

“You went with Granddad. You visited the Alhambra and sent me a postcard from Madrid. You brought me back a bullfighter’s cape.”

She snaps her head back to get a better look at me. She’s lost the thread, but I’m right there to set her straight.

“You’re not a bullfighter, are you?”

“Don’t be silly, Gram,” I say as I give her a quick squeeze so she can feel the real me. “It’s me. Dylan.”

“Right,” she says, getting it together. Then she pauses and pulls in close, lowers her voice, and adds, “And the only bull you’ve ever known is
bullshit!”

We both laugh.

I steer Marie toward the carpeted steps, and she begins the climb.

“Hold up, you two,” Doug calls from down below. “I got a question about this friend of yours. Ma, can you hear me?”

Marie pauses on the stairs and directs her gaze upward, as though she’s heard Doug’s voice coming from above instead of from below.