My daughter tells me the stories of my life.
Today I find a ticket to the Met from a couple months ago when Tildy was home on break. We went to the museum? How nice––I had no idea. Back at college now, Tildy explains over the phone that it was a big day. First, I had that medical procedure, then we had lunch, then we went to the museum. She tells me about the onigiri we got at a Japanese grocery store to eat in the park and the sphinx with the archaic smile we saw in the Greek sculpture gallery. Apparently, she’d written an essay about that sphinx for her art history class, and I’d read that essay and liked it. Extraordinary, what other people manage to remember!
The big events that fall off the edge of my mind are the showiest evidence of my memory problem, so I’ve got examples ready for any neurologist who seems overly reassured by my ability to pass the dementia test. Sure, pin a prize on me for spinning up words that start with the letter F. But how about Tildy’s high school graduation last year? Or dropping her off at college a few months ago? I’m no expert, but I feel like normal people remember that kind of thing. I did too, once upon a time.
But disappearing milestones are only the glitzy headlines of this odd condition I’m in. It hurts more to lose the little things: shared rituals, breakthrough conversations, in-jokes, eccentric anecdotes, all the small-scale knowings that thicken life with context and complication. I wish I remembered the time Tildy and I went to the Yiddish off-Broadway production of Fiddler on the Roof, but it’s worse to forget the stray cat who lived by the pier, the one Tildy and I named Clarinet and greeted each time we went down to the water. I know we went to Fiddler because the program is still floating around my apartment. I know we knew that cat because when I tell Tildy I saw a stray by the pier yesterday, she asks me if Clarinet came back. There’s a long silence while I wonder who Clarinet is before Tildy realizes she’ll have to tell me the whole story. These days that’s a common kind of silence.
When I was a child, I’d wake in the night and go patrolling through the house. My mission was to check the clocks in every room so that I could memorize the time each told. Otherwise––red alert!––I’d never know which minute I’d just passed through. An insomniac spy on a trail of trivia, I archived meaningless details in order to prevent them from being lost forever. Light was as significant to me as time: I constructed a mental map of which lamps were lit where––living room? kitchen? my sister’s bedroom?––and catalogued the pattern of windows, light and dark, in the houses across the street.
I didn’t know the term “obsessive-compulsive” then, but I certainly knew I was doing something deranged and embarrassing, so I tried to avoid being caught at my work. If I crept back to bed quietly enough, I wouldn’t have to explain to my parents the urgency of my nightly patrol, the necessity of gathering my temporary facts, the final ritual of reciting them to myself in the dark.
That was how I warded off the horrors of forgetting at a time when I could remember with ease. These days, I have my daughter to help.
With colored pencil, Tildy draws me an amulet with powerful Hebrew words to defend my memories against supernatural assault. Our theory is that there’s a demon involved. I haven’t shared this hypothesis with my doctors any more than I shared my nightly surveillance work with my parents decades ago. Medical professionals may not agree that I’m the victim of a malevolent spirit campaign, but until they stop sending me out for tests and settle on a diagnosis, I’m going with the most plausible scenario. It’s unclear where this demon has taken up residence––possibly in my brain, to fill spaces where memories might otherwise be stored, or in my heart, to interfere with the blood flow that keeps me upright and coherent. Or perhaps the demon burrows through my veins in interpenetrating fashion, gnawing at memories as it goes. I keep Tildy’s amulet on my bedside table.
I admit that my condition requires superstitious means of resistance to supplement the more pragmatic amulet. So I take the pills the doctors recommend. I follow a rule until the rule fails, and then find a new rule. I have to take a vitamin, or not take a vitamin. I must remove sugar from my diet, or gluten. I must be in bed by nine and eat yogurt at breakfast. I must take ten thousand steps––in the park, down subway stairs, along the water, to the library. I must read every day, I must write every day, and––back to realism now––I must thank God when I wake for returning my soul to my body.
I fainted for the first time in Italy, my patient ex-husband informs me. (He, too, is burdened with having to tell me the stories of my life.) That was in 2003. Not long after, I wrote a story that began by cheerfully speculating about why I could no longer remember words. Later I seemed to get my words back, but in 2016 I began to faint again. Sometimes I didn’t faint but rather had dizzy spells, a term that does little to convey the hallucinatory despair that signals their approach. There were times when I would say, “Oh, my memory is so bad.” Self-deprecating, still cheerful. I wrote things down to compensate. No doubt the trouble was the internet and too many podcasts. Once I decided to be clever and industrious again, my previous intellectual capacities would be right there waiting for me. If I read more, I’d remember how to remember. I did the New York Times crossword puzzle every day. I did Hebrew lessons on my phone and wondered why the words didn’t stick in my head.
Meanwhile, I allowed magazines and papers to collect in unsorted piles. I had boxes from the last move that I never unpacked. Over time, jobs and men and friends dropped away from me; maybe hanging on to co-op grocery lists and Tildy’s second grade spelling tests felt like balancing the score. Tildy and I made plans to organize, of course, sort it all so I could start over properly, but there was always something more important to do. Anyway, the flotsam was ungovernable, full of mystery items concealing their origin stories. At least the old New Yorkers are easier these days to toss. No need to keep back issues in hopes of educating myself eventually––if I did read the articles, I wouldn’t remember them anyway.
Magazines are one thing, but books present even more of a challenge. It’s hard to go on reading when you don’t remember what happened twenty pages ago, so I haven’t read many novels recently. But that’s because the authors––such ambition!––insist on telling brand-new stories. Living is easier than reading because mostly nothing brand-new happens. On any given day last month, I was probably just at work, or going to the laundromat, or getting the groceries, and now here I am, at it again. The grocery store is on the same street it’s always been, though the location of the yogurt case feels occasionally unfamiliar. And if the subway stairs at Atlantic Station seem to take up unpredictable positions at times, well, the MTA has kindly arranged for signs to help me out.
Nor is the MTA my only benefactor. If I forget the location of the dairy plates in my father’s kosher kitchen, he’ll remind me gently, the way he explains again the story of how he met my mother. When I don’t know anymore how to get to the H wing in the building where I work, my ally in the office escorts me there herself. It’s no problem, she says, she needed to stretch her legs. Mostly I can carry on even if the path leading up to today crumbles at about the two-week mark. It’s just a bit awkward now having friends outside the family, because really, what kind of barbarian am I? I ought to know what their job is by now. Their boss, their break-up. That thing that happened with their mom. It’s rude to ask all over again. It’s embarrassing.
I’m also haunted by less personal questions. In The Metamorphosis, what did the narrator metamorphose to? Where was Babylon? What was the name of that awful man in Othello who caused all the trouble? Whence the assertion, “I once was lost and now am found?” What does “nomadic” mean? Which party controls the Senate? What was that cockamamie idea about bringing things into being with the power of your mind? Google serenely explains it all. It doesn’t say, “Miriam, oy, we discussed this already!” Google is never disappointed in me.
“What I feared has overtaken me,” says unhappy Job in chapter three, after his patience runs out. “What I dreaded has come upon me,” he adds, in case you missed the point. It’s as if he’d read about the law of attraction in that godforsaken bestseller, The Secret. (Thanks, Google.) What if he hadn’t feared and dreaded, successfully manifesting his own doom in the process? What if I never tried to remember the position of the clock hands at night or the wives of Henry VIII, never fretted about the possible cognitive impacts of air pollution, long COVID, iron deficiency, pesticides, and microplastics? My precious, glorious brain, to be fed, stoked, stimulated, protected! As it happens, there’s no environmental culprit that could have erased so much so tidily as my presiding demon. Such an unfair thing to happen to someone who eats organic vegetables.
Perhaps I will remain unjaded by age, given how many things I discover as if for the first time. One day I see glossy black birds in the park by the water. How pretty they are––a bit of blue from this angle, then purple, then green. They’re fussy and self-important; they strut on the ground like pigeons. Carefully, I take a video so as to document the find to my daughter the birder. “Grackles, Mom,” Tildy identifies sadly and reminds me how often we see them. So grackles are only commonplace, nothing special, except that anything’s special when it feels like the first time. And I can be surprised by all kinds of old news: my work schedule for next fall. Tildy’s dislike of almonds. The death of a friend.
Perhaps in having to abandon my lifelong pursuit of being right about everything and winning every argument, I will at last attain a certain Socratic humility. But death sentence aside, Socrates had it easy. When he was obnoxious enough to insist on his ignorance, he only meant he didn’t know the nature of piety or justice or love or politics. He probably knew he ran into Glaucon in Piraeus last week, and how Xanthippe greeted him when he didn’t get back in time for dinner. Still, I could aim for a kind of amiable naive receptivity, not to mention a compassionate release of stockpiled slights, wrongs, and humiliations.
Perhaps my brain will just get better. Don’t forget––you never know!
Over the phone, Tildy explains that my kleptomaniac demon is likely using what he takes from me to build a house to live in, maybe even a soul of his own. The nerve of him––such sticky-fingered presumption! Our indignation is consoling. Better to imagine some subterranean Gollum crooning over my memories than to accept them being lost completely. To think him capable of making trades, even: fine, keep the twenty-four-episode ancient history podcast I apparently listened to last summer, but give me back the last time I heard my mother’s voice.
Tildy tells me she’s sewing me a new talisman from felt and spices and kabbalistic insight. I can keep it in the compartment of my fanny pack reserved for other life-saving items, like hand sanitizer and extra bobby pins. My daughter’s got lots of other important news too. The potatoes at the dining hall were too watery. There was a fire alarm in her dorm in the middle of the night. She saw cedar waxwings in the campus nature preserve. I listen carefully to the stories of her life, hoping to remember.
