Conversation with Gertrude in Car, Age Twenty

1. There is nothing more disorienting than knowing someone completely.

2. In second place: not knowing them at all.

3. Each visitor is given a single notepad for private reflection. The pads contain one hundred blank squares. This is not the sort of thing I remember, so I will write this down, even though it takes up one percent of my allotted space. 

4. I’m not sure why they limit you to one pad, or why it’s a hundred squares and not one-fifty. Melodrama or budget constraints?

5. Every waiting room feels like the time between Christmas and New Year’s Eve.

6. Ten years ago, you needed a therapist’s note to make an appointment at The Archives. This was before the Lehman paper came out. Apparently people were concerned about the psychological effects of stepping into someone else’s memories. They worried this might cause ego death.

7. Nobody ever worries about the id.

8. My therapist believes this experience will either result in profound damage or extraordinary healing. Is it possible to have one without the other?

9. The lab coats are an affectation, as are the clipboards. The archivists are not medical professionals, and all demographic and psychographic information is digitized.

10. However, I’ll admit to an embarrassing swell of comfort at the intake form. Once you’ve transferred something to the cloud, you can never destroy it. If I wanted to crumple up my medical history and toss it into the waste bin, I could do that. I could do it all day.

11. Okay, three memories. The Basic package only comes with three. Deluxe was too expensive and I didn’t think I could handle all twelve.

12. Mom’s catalog reads like the world’s most boring track list. Summer Outing with Uncle Charles. Collecting Donna from the Hospital. She called my grandmother “Donna,” never softening to “Mom” or even “Mother.” Library Visit with Donna. Muffins with Gertrude, Age Three.

13. My therapist: “If there’s anything you find notable or shocking, write it down so we can talk about it during our next session.”

14. Notable: Bunk Beds with Maggie. She used to talk about the bunk beds a lot.

15. Shocking: Conversation with Gertrude in Car, Age Twenty.

16. Mom picked my coming-out. This is inexplicable, undefinable. After I came out to her, she stopped responding to my calls. At the store, a chance meeting, she stared through me. She has chosen to preserve the last event before she wrote me dead.

Unease, profound unease. My mother was an anxious person. I am an anxious person. The unease is mine. This body is hers, mine.

17. Dad stayed with her in hospice. He says a smiling man in a T-shirt arrived the second day. The man explained, Mom should choose twelve memories. Each would be preserved in the Rememberly Archives, where anyone could check them out for a fee. Dad said she nodded twice.

18. First will be Bunk Beds with Maggie. Then Beach Day with Mom and Sammy, something light—a break, maybe. Last will be the conversation.

19. Like the waiting room, the memory room smells of cucumber water. Imagine an Apple Store and a hospital. I want to keep this image but my grip strength isn’t good, so I’m storing it here.

20. Even the smallest headset sits oddly around my ears. I’m reminded of how the whiteboards at the business school were too high.

21. “Sorry, most of our clients are men. We haven’t quite figured out how to market to women.”

22. Before Google bought Rememberly, the startup ran focus groups. One participant said they felt peeled like an apple when the memory started.

23. Mom would have good days and bad days.

24. On the good days, she would tell this story about how Donna, my grandmother, surprised her and her sister Maggie with bunk beds. I’ve only known my grandmother in stories.

25. “We came home from school one day and the beds were in our room. Maggie started jumping on the bottom bunk. I climbed up top. She bought us these fluffy sheets, these really girly sheets. We loved those beds. We kept those beds even after we outgrew them. We would curl up to fit.”

26. With my mother, almost every story wore a disguise. That’s how it was. As I got older, the stories peeled off their coats, their hats, their shirts, and finally their skin, peeled like an apple, exposing the bone beneath. The stories were sad, usually. Often they hid her own mother’s abuse. But the bunk bed story stayed the same.

27. Maybe you could market to women by telling them how they will feel in the body of their own mother. First they will realize that this is the body that created them, so they will feel like the universe. Then their limbs will feel too small and their torso will feel too short. Even if their mother is ten years old in the memory, they will think about the awkward things. Jesus, my mother had sex in this body. Tenderly they will recall how they once clung to these legs. As the memory kicks in, they will decline to separate themselves from her.

28. I must separate myself from her.

29. Oh God, I need to get out.

30. “Visitors may experience a moment of panic as the subject’s memories replace your own. Once you put on the headset, you have limited agency. You can turn your head, but that’s all.”

31. I need to get out of the water. I can’t drown in her again. Participants are encouraged to reflect on why they are here. I’m here because I’ve never been anywhere else. I’m here because I used to think I could get away from her by getting away from her. Getting inside of her is the only other escape route I can think of.

32. The problem of my mother can’t be written out of me, or studied, it can’t be examined on a therapist’s couch, it can’t be scrubbed clean in euphemism or shorthand, the cycle of abuse, I can’t eat or drink it away, I can’t break my hand on a wall enough, I can’t fall in love enough.

33. It sticks to me like—what? Like glitter. I shine with her, but they’re microplastics and they’re going to kill the marine life.

34. Okay, relax. “Three counts in, three counts out. Remember to breathe.”

35. The bunk beds are not new. Somebody’s kid ran a yellow crayon across the bedposts.

36. During orientation, they said to pay attention to your feelings. You will become a palimpsest of emotion. Those are my words, not theirs. The subject’s memories will sit on top of your own. Those are their words, not mine. The more time you spend in memory, the less of you will exist.

37. Unease, profound unease. My mother was an anxious person. I am an anxious person. The unease is mine. This body is hers, mine.

38. Anxious, I watch Maggie start to jump on the bottom bunk. Maggie likes to cause problems. I am good. Every morning I pray to be good. My pants are too short. A whistling breeze stings my ankles. I am aware of my world, which is cracked. I am aware that I am good enough to keep the cracks from widening.

39. Maggie knocks her head against the top bunk, not very hard. She begins to wail for her mother.

Memory saves people. In prison camps, in solitary confinement, people inhabit memories.

40. A flicker of me: It’s disconcerting to see what an old person looked like when they were young. It feels like going on vacation in reverse.

41. “Why weren’t you watching her? Do you want me to get in trouble? Is that what you want? You want me to get in trouble with the cops so they can take you away? You don’t want to live here anymore? You hate it here?”

42. With each question, Donna raps her knuckles against my skull.

43. Afterward I crawl into the top bunk. The sheets are fluffy; they’re girly. The rest of the room is books and primary colors.

44. The bed is rimmed in high wood. If someone walks into the room, they won’t see me.

45. “After-care is very important. We will provide a room for that purpose.”

46. Maybe she hoped I would forgive her if I saw. I don’t think so. She wasn’t that self-aware.

47. They certainly aren’t spending their Deluxe money on the lunch trays.

48. I’m surprised there were so many books in her room. This is the same woman who said college took me away from her. The more I read, she told me, the further I went. But she said “farther,” not “further,” and I corrected her, so maybe I was the problem. 

49. The antiseptic on the headset stings my eyes. The memory is starting but I’m distracted by the coconut aftertaste of the previous wearer’s shampoo. I’m on the beach now. I guess that guy is Sammy. I never knew a Sammy in my mother’s life. I wonder what memories coconut shampoo accessed.

50. Why do other people put themselves through this experience? The most recent CNN poll found three main reasons. I want to relive a memory of my loved one. I want to answer an unanswered question. I want closure on a difficult experience.

51. I think “unanswered question” is a euphemism for “I want to see if my husband was cheating.” I think this is Santa Cruz but I can’t be sure. Like a silent movie, I notice the absence of smell. I want popcorn, wind, ocean, sunscreen. That requires the Deluxe package.

52. My caricature body tells me I’m a teenager. I remember she talked about the beach, but I don’t remember a Sammy. “It was all about Maggie. It’s always been about Maggie.” I’m a teenager. I’m on the beach. My limbs are starting to look like somebody else’s.

53. Maggie and Sammy and Donna are walking ahead. I’m not wearing shoes. Sammy is Donna’s boyfriend. I can turn my head; I have agency. Sammy doesn’t mind that Donna is smart or crazy. He maybe loves her. That’s why he won’t stick around.

54. Everything is so generic. The ocean looks like water. I hate my body because it has begun to draw attention to itself. At school, a kid named Joe started talking to me last week. I hated the thick dark hair under his collar. I hated the heat. Sammy takes Maggie’s hand. When she’s around him, she doesn’t seem to feel her usual pull toward trouble.

55. Most memory has no valence. I learned that in grad school.

56. Not her but me.

57. Not me, her.

58. Sammy walks over. He’s not wearing shoes either. “I think your Mom’s happy.”

59. “Really?”

60. “You don’t think so?”

61. “She has a hard time with that.”

62. Sammy looks at me and his face is sad. The ocean is sad too, because there is so much of it. With Sammy, it’s different. I think he’s sad because there isn’t much of me, and Donna has made everything I am. “You be careful, Lilian, okay?”

63. “With Maggie? She just wants attention.”

64. “Not with Maggie.”

65. Dad said Rememberly contacted Mom when she went into hospice. They put little metal stickers on her head. Most memories aren’t viable. They provide a list of the ones that are. It’s usually around sixty. You choose twelve to preserve in the archives. You can opt out at any point.

66. I was both surprised and unsurprised my mother didn’t opt out. On the one hand, her illness—my therapist thinks borderline personality—whatever it was, it inflated her sense of self. On the other hand, her later years were dominated by an extreme attachment to conspiracy. The corporate elite was going to steal our identities.

67. Strangely, she wanted a legacy but didn’t want contact with me. Perhaps a queer daughter, a genderqueer daughter, a genderqueer daughter with a PhD in American Studies who taught at a coastal university—perhaps it was better to let the royal line die than to let such a person sit on the throne.

68. The less paper you have left to fill, the more you’ll hurry to fill it.

All stories are autobiographical, aren’t they? Maybe if I’d made my characters feel something, I would have felt something too.

69. The less you’ll care what you write. 

70. Memory saves people. In prison camps, in solitary confinement, people inhabit memories.

71. I never had that kind of relationship. I’ve been estranged from memory for years.

72. Oh God, it’s so boring. Writing saved me. Reading saved me. I created and inhabited other people’s memories.

73. Mom once told me about a painting on the wall of her delivery room. Throughout her labor, she focused on the painting to calm her breathing, a portrait of a little girl with pudgy knees, a book in her hand, a blue sailor dress. She decided I would be that girl.

74. I took one creative writing class in college. The professor told me I’d never make it. He did me a favor. I’m a terrible writer. I didn’t want to say what the characters were feeling because to do that, I’d have to feel. So I’d write about what they were wearing. I spent so much time on the internet learning the names of different hats.

75. [I doodled a bowler here.]

76. I came out to her in a car. Her car, to be exact. Her Mercedes, to be exact. We don’t know what memory is made of, just like we don’t know why anesthetic knocks you out. The VR technology lets me see what she saw but I can’t feel what she felt. I can only extrapolate. I will not know what she was thinking. I count backward from ten, just like when I got my tonsils out.

77. Gertrude is sitting in the passenger’s seat. This is what people were worried about prior to the Lehman paper: what it’s like to be outside yourself. My daughter is sitting in the passenger’s seat.

78. This experience is jarring, though not in the way I expected, and that too is jarring. It’s jarring to feel an alien attachment to this person who went off to college and came home different.

79. In the memory, you can turn your head, but that’s all. You have to say what she said. I’m in the driver’s seat and the car isn’t moving. We’re parked. We went grocery shopping together, quiet. Near the impulse candy, Gertrude told me she wanted to talk. I thought maybe if I didn’t say anything she wouldn’t either.

80. Gertrude is telling me she’s in a relationship. “With a woman, Mom. I think you know that. I just wanted to share it with you. I know you always wanted me to be happy. Anything less than that is anathema to you. I know that. And I’m really happy, okay?”

81. My daughter’s hair is so short. I kept it long until she went to school, when I became afraid it might get tangled up in the swing set. I’m afraid of her. She went to college and she came back with words I don’t know and a girlfriend. I prayed to be good because I was praying to be normal. Nothing hurts you if you keep your head down.

82. I can’t think my mother’s thoughts, can I?

83. Can I not?

84. “Mom? Are you going to say something?”

85. I’m studying her eyes. Her eyes haven’t changed since she was a baby. As long as I remember that, maybe I’ll still know how to love her. Gertrude, she hates her name. She thinks it’s frumpy. I wanted her to be respected. What is she wearing? What is she saying?

86. “Mom, do you understand what I just told you?”

87. “I’m not stupid.”

88. “I didn’t say you were.”

89. “Look at the car you’re sitting in. I worked and worked so we could afford this car. Your father worked and worked.”

90. “What does that have to do with anything?”

91. “I just wanted everything to be quiet for you.”

92. The bunk beds and the sea, Maggie jumping and Sammy on the beach, “be careful,” it was all so loud.

93. You’re not allowed to sit on the floor of the experience room.

94. The world makes it easy for smart women to go crazy and then breaks them when they do.

95. My therapist encouraged me not to use the word “crazy,” but she slipped on our third or fourth meeting. She told me not to expect anything out of this experience. We go around in circles during my sessions. I can’t understand why my mother replicated her own mother’s abuse. I can’t understand why she didn’t recognize it as such.

96. I wonder if they’ll charge me extra for the private recovery room.

97. All stories are autobiographical, aren’t they? Maybe if I’d made my characters feel something, I would have felt something too.

98. I’m not a writer.

99. All I do is talk. Teaching is talking. Writing is talking. Remembering is talking. Don’t we ever get tired of it? My mother died of a heart attack, by the way. Everyone assumes something more nefarious. We were still estranged, me and memory. I never visited. I regret it.

100. There’s so much meaning if you know where to look. But looking is exhausting. Seeing is believing. Talk is cheap. Paint the town red. A bird in the hand. A burning bush. I told you I’m not a writer.