Marcia Talley: Unbreathed Memories

A delighted St. John’s needed someone with experience to organize and catalog the collection. I had just spent an enjoyable and productive two days perched on a low stool in a bright workroom on the southeast side of the recently renovated college library. There I sorted through Ms. Bromley’s novels, putting plastic covers on to preserve the dust jackets and deciding what to do with the large number of books that she used as references. There were guidebooks, maps, train schedules, trial transcripts, and books on forensic evidence, just the thing if you live a quiet suburban life and need to know what a bullet can do to a person’s head at close range. I pored over Coroner’s Quarterly with the same morbid fascination that I used to give to my grandfather’s medical texts, delighted in the old maps of Savannah, Georgia, and Reno, Nevada, and marveled that in the 1950s you could catch a train from Annapolis to Baltimore every hour. In recent years the tracks had been torn up, and you were lucky if you could find a bus going there once or twice a day.

The librarian had suggested that I complete the Bromley collection by rounding up copies of the author’s short stories. They had been serialized in publications such as the Saturday Evening Post and Collier’s , so I was expecting to spend a great deal of time with Reader’s Guide to Periodical Literature , visiting other libraries that kept complete runs of popular magazines, and shelling out dimes by the ton for photocopying. I was fascinated by the work, and after only a day had decided that even if the creeps who had laid me off last year from Whitworth & Sullivan wanted me back, even if they crawled down Route 50 after me, begging on their hands and knees, I’d never agree to work in Washington, D.C., again.

The part-time job also gave me the flexibility I needed to help my parents with their recent move to Annapolis from Washington State. Dad had graduated from the academy in 1950 and had been stationed there again when Ruth and I were in high school. He liked the town so much he always swore he’d retire there, so after leaving the Navy in 1980 and spending nineteen years as a consultant to the aerospace industry, he and Mother made plans to move east. Mom seemed relieved. My recent illness had affected her more than she let on, and we both had the telephone bills to prove it.

Now the calls were local, but I preferred the face-to-face contact I had missed when we were separated by a continent. Recent afternoons found me heading for my parents’ new home in the Providence community, out Greenbury Point Road, just past the Naval Station. It was a comfortable, ranch-style house on a quiet street, one block from the water. As a housewarming gift Paul’s sister, Connie, had painted a mailbox featuring entwined anchors, a mermaid, and other nautical flora and fauna. I noticed it had been installed at the head of the drive. “Capt. George D. Alexander, USN, Ret.” gleamed from both sides in bold, gold letters.

Mother was removing glasses from a packing barrel and layering them into the dishwasher when I arrived shortly after lunch. She swiped with the back of her hand at a damp tendril of graying hair that hung down onto her forehead, then nodded in the direction of the laundry room. “Hang your coat up in there, darling, then come give me a hand.”

I smiled at my mom, a petite woman not more than five feet tall, wearing black jeans, a faded red cardigan, and a favorite pair of fleece-lined slippers from L.L. Bean. Rolls of shelf liner, a ruler, and a pair of scissors lay out on the kitchen table. “Be a dear and finish up with that cabinet over there, so that it’ll be ready when these glasses come out.”

I dutifully measured the shelves, then used the scissors to cut the paper to fit, following the preprinted grid on the back of the sticky paper while Mom continued unpacking. At one point she held up a Peter Rabbit bowl that had been mine as a child. There was a chip in the rim where I had once banged it too hard with my spoon. “Remember this, Hannah?”

“I sure do.” I remembered my favorite bowl well, but had no clear recollection of the temper tantrum that had resulted in the damage. Mom must have told me about it. I had been two and a half; no one could remember back that far. Now Georgina was trying to dredge up memories from when she was that age. I didn’t believe it was possible.

I was trying to think of a way to bring up the subject of Georgina’s therapy with my mother, but wasn’t sure how much she knew. “Mom, have you talked to Georgina lately?”

She looked at me sideways over her shoulder. “Not for several days. Why?”

“She’s been calling and asking idiotic questions about her childhood. I told her what I knew about it, but can’t understand why she doesn’t ask you.”

“She’s probably afraid her father will give her an earful after the phone call he had with her last week. I overheard him saying that if she didn’t get herself to a real doctor, he didn’t want to talk about it any more.”

So they knew about the therapy sessions. I put down the scissors. “I thought she was seeing a doctor.”

“Dr. Sturges is a therapist, but she’s not an M.D.”

“I thought therapists were M.D.s.”

“Not always. Some are psychologists or social workers.”

“But surely she’s competent.”

“Your father doesn’t think so.”

“That woman is a quack.” My father entered the kitchen from the dining room carrying a wrought-iron pot rack and a hammer. He brushed my cheek with his lips, handed me the hammer, then climbed onto a stool and positioned the rack on the wall over the stove. He turned, towering over me, a handsome, broad-shouldered man, his close-cropped sandy hair only slightly gray at the temples. “She’s filled your sister full of the damnedest nonsense I’ve ever heard.” He extended his hand, and I put the hammer in it. He used it to bang away at a nail, swore when the nail bent double, and wrenched it out of the wall with the claw end of the hammer, sending it ricocheting off the wall and skittering across the tiles. He inserted another nail in the hole he had started and began pounding again. “God!-damned!-quack!”

I looked at my mother, her brown eyes serious and unblinking. “Why don’t you use a drill and some proper screws, George?” When my father didn’t answer, she shrugged. “I’d invite you to stay for tea,” she said to me, “but we haven’t found the teapot yet.” She gestured vaguely in the direction of still more boxes piled up in the corner of the kitchen, spilling out into the adjoining family room. “There’s coffee.”

“No thanks, Mom.” I gave her a hug. “I’ve got to get going anyway. I promised Paul I’d make chicken curry tonight, now that I’m a woman of leisure. More or less.”

I squeezed my father’s leg where he stood on the stool. “Bye, Dad.”

He patted my head. “See you later, pumpkin.” As I shrugged back into my coat I heard him say, “Lois, I’ll take some of that coffee, if you don’t mind. On second thought, make that a martini.”

In the fifteen minutes it took to cross the Severn River, drive home, and find a parking spot in front of our house on Prince George Street, I worried about Georgina. What on earth was going on in that screwball head of hers? At the turn onto the Severn River bridge, I was cut off by a silver Toyota speeding down the hill through a red light. I honked at the driver, a young man with a cell phone grafted to his ear. I had owned a Toyota once, until I drove it into a pond at my sister-in-law’s. I’d recently replaced it with a 1996 Chrysler Le Baron convertible in a pale purple color the used car salesman had described, with an expansive sweep of his hand, as wild orchid. Paul called it the Grannymobile, my midlife-crisis car. Could well be. In any case, I figured it was a heck of a lot cheaper than Georgina’s shrink.