The Trouble with Remembering

Readers' choice winner of our 2014 "First Line Fiction" short story contest. Learn about the competition, meet the judges, and read the winning stories here.

Before I attached a story to any of the opening lines, I knew I wanted to write about death and memory. I have long been captivated by oral history, by our age-old game of cultural telephone—there is so much to be learned from personal anecdotes, but it’s so difficult to measure their value in any objective sense. I think Truth would love to say that its nature is determined by science—by data sets gathered in polls, maintaining control groups for comparison, and squaring away all results into nested categories with neat labels. But while the methods of science do well to produce confident facts, I’m of the belief that the truths that shape our lives come in all shapes and sizes...even, and in some cases especially, the ones that don’t end up being factually correct. 

—Christie Matherne Hall

—

"The Trouble with Remembering"

by Christie Matherne Hall

In the attic’s darkest corner, behind his Russian grandmother’s dowry chest, was a phonograph, its horn humming out the chorus of hidden bees. The last time Henri had laid eyes on it was fifteen years ago -- he was eleven then. Marie, his grandmother, had just been lowered into the wet ground, and everyone was gathered at Aunt Lorraine’s house, wondering what to do with all of her stuff.

Set out for perusal among the rest of her yellowed knick-knacks and crumbling cookbooks, Marie’s phonograph had sat in a corner that day, too -- no one wanted it, but no one could bear to throw it out, either. Henri understood why they couldn’t; it was a sentiment he figured he’d inherited from that side of the family.

•

“What happens in your head when you know you’ve hit the right chord?” he asked the guitarist sitting across from him. “Is it an ‘a-ha’ moment?”

The guitarist hesitated. “Well, not exactly,” the man said, fidgeting with his fingers. “I’m trying to think of a time that I knew I hit the right strings the first time I played them, but honestly, I don’t think I ever have.”

Henri looked down at his clipboard; the questions looked like strings of dark clouds in an overcast sky. “Maybe it’ll happen one day,” he said.

No matter who he was interviewing, Henri followed a ritual that he rarely deviated from: Look around and take mental note of curious objects and specific aesthetic details; ask basic questions first; write down all numbers immediately; then attempt to initiate a comfortable conversation. The less it felt like an interview, the more comfortable the source; and the more comfortable the source, the less he had to chisel them open with questions. All his best interviews had emerged from the days he’d managed to balance that equation, and the guitarist would be no different -- that is, as long as he remembered to write down those first few mental notes as soon as possible. If he didn’t, the world he wrote about would be robbed of that much more color.

Though no one else would ever miss those details, he would know how much was lost, and he would grieve for them as if they were alive once. To him, they had been -- and like all life that’s lost, he believed that those details deserve to be remembered.

He reached across the coffee table and hit pause on the recorder. “I’ll be right back,” he said. “Where’s your bathroom?”

•

Aunt Lorraine and Uncle Percy had traded their four-bedroom home for a cozier one some years ago, after their kids grew up and left home. For all Henri knew, the phonograph was still up there, in what was now in a stranger’s attic, occupying no one’s mind but his own.

The old, dusty thing continued to haunt him as he lay in bed that night. What beautiful noise had it sung to his grandmother in her lifetime? Mozart? Bach? Buddy Holly? What had she loved before she landed in the nursing home, before she began to forget the names she’d given her children? Had she only misplaced their names, or had she really forgotten them?

Likely because of how Marie had left the world, Henri knew very little about his Russian grandmother. His father had never been heavy on details, but he’d let a few slip through over the years: he grew up hating her ketchup-covered meatloaf, and thus forbade his wife from even attempting to cook it. Marie taught him how to sew -- she made just about everything she and her children wore. She had spoken Russian to her husband when she didn’t want the kids to hear what she was saying, and she raised her family dictating that children should be seen and not heard -- something Henri’s father chose not to pass on to his own three children.

As Henri drifted to sleep, he realized that there might be a lot more about Marie that his father had chosen not to pass on.

•

Over a drink the next night, an ex-girlfriend told him that he took his job too seriously. He knew journalists who paid people to transcribe their interviews for them, but even if he could afford it, he wouldn’t go that route -- handing it off to someone who hadn’t been present for the interview opened up too many opportunities for things to get lost in context.

“It’s not like you’re interviewing the President on foreign policy or anything,” his ex had said. Henri’s beat was art and entertainment, not foreign policy, so why not take the risk of a minor transcription error in exchange for some much-needed free time?

“Why is anyone less important than anyone else?” he told her. “Why would I bother doing this work, or doing anything at all, if I didn’t take it seriously?”

“Because the rest of your life is suffering for it,” she said. “You can’t be the world’s historian and live your own life at the same time.”

“Well,” he hissed back, “I can try, can’t I?”

•

One Sunday afternoon when Henri was nine, his family went to visit Marie at the nursing home. It felt the same as it had every time he’d been there: the smell was a disturbing melange of urine in a field of fake lavender, and they were greeted at the entrance by someone’s grandpa, trying to escape. The bulletin boards were decorated with the kind of festive paper borders you’d see in any preschool room, littered with jovial-looking event calendars and large-type cafeteria menus.

Other than the residents, the only person who wanted to be there less than Henri did was his father -- which seemed odd, considering his father was the one who’d forced everyone into the car that day.

“Hey mom, how ‘ya doing?” he sputtered with enthusiasm.

“I’m going to my mama’s house in Lutcher,” Marie politely replied.

“Are you really? That’s nice,” he said. “It’s me, mom -- it’s Charlie. It’s real good to see you.”

“Who?” She asked, in all honesty. “I’m going to my mama’s house in Lutcher.”

“It’s your son, Charlie,” he said again, straining to hold his smile together.

She smiled at him -- a smile so warm, it almost melted the baked-on odor of the place. If her smile had emanated a smell of its own, it would have been chocolate chip cookies, fresh out of the ancient stone oven that had once been the centerpiece of her kitchen.

“It’s nice to meet you, Charlie,” Marie said. “I’m going to my mama’s house in Lutcher.”

•

Henri’s car didn’t have a working air conditioner, so on a hot August day, a drive to New Orleans from Baton Rouge meant riding with the windows down. He didn’t mind, really -- he liked jutting his hand out and trying to make the most aerodynamic shape possible. When he was a kid, his dad used to tell him it was a good way to lose an arm to an eighteen-wheeler, but he figured roads were wider nowadays -- everything else was wider, anyway.

Henri passed the Lutcher/Gramercy Exit on I-10, as he did every time he covered a story in New Orleans. In the years since that day in the nursing home, he’d never been able to pass it without acknowledging the existence of Lutcher in some small way; usually no more significant than a mental note that he’d seen the sign. Over the years, it became a subconscious tic -- he did it without thought; a reflex.

On that hot August afternoon, however, he became aware of it.

“My grandma was from Lutcher,” he absently told the photographer in the passenger’s seat.

“Oh?” he said. “What’s Lutcher like?”

“I don’t know,” Henri replied, somewhat surprised to realize he’d said anything aloud. “I’ve never actually been there.”

“Oh,” the photographer said, distracted by the word puzzle on his phone. “Okay?”

Henri held his breath like he was about to say something. He thought hard for a moment, searching for more details, but there was nothing more to say -- not about Lutcher, not about his Russian grandma’s life there. All he had was the only detail he’d ever had: A generic, green Interstate sign and a white arrow, pointing to Lutcher.

•

“Dad, what was Lutcher like when grandma was growing up?” Henri asked as his father prepared dinner that Sunday.

“Mom said it was a small community,” Charlie replied, hands caked with mustard and fish fry. “They didn’t have a lot of money -- no one did, so they just had a community chicken pen and they all took care of it. They all had gardens; grew their own food, shared with each other.” He washed his hands and pulled a cigarette out of his back pocket. “There’s nothin’ out there now, though.”

“I wonder what that was like,” he pried further. Finally, some details, he thought. Color.

“She seemed to like it,” Charlie began. “I guess… I mean, she wasn’t the warmest person on Earth, so it was probably as good as anything else in her life.”

Cold, he thought. Russians can come off as cold personalities. “Did she ever teach you Russian?”

His father paused, confused. “Why would she do that?”

“I don’t know, dad,” Henri said, a bit flustered. “Why would any parent teach their children about where they came from?”

“Well I get that, Henri,” he retorted, “but mom didn’t know Russian. She was born in Lutcher; she spoke French like everyone else there.”

Sitting on a barstool in his parents’ kitchen a few minutes later, chin in hand, Henri tried to remember what moment in his past had led him to believe that Marie was Russian. Was it something his father had said, years and years ago? Was it mentioned during a sleepover at Aunt Lorraine’s?

Or, had his brain just made up an exotic story to fill in the gaps?

“You never thought much of French,” Henri’s mother stated as she put away the last of the clean silverware. “You told me once that everyone around here has French descent, and that you thought it was boring to hear about Cajuns all the time.”

Henri could hear his teenage self saying the words; the memory made him wince.

“But what would’ve given me the impression that she was Russian? That had to come from somewhere, right?”

“Beats me,” his mother replied. “She might have given you that Russian doll when you were a kid. Wasn’t that doll Russian?”

“Yeah, it was,” he remembered, all too well. The strange thing had scared the daylights out of him, to the degree that he hid the doll at the top of his bedroom closet only a week after he’d received it. Who gives a little boy an old doll for Christmas, anyway? he wondered.

“How funny is that, though?” his mother added, grinning. “All these years, you thought dad was a second-generation Russian immigrant!”

“In Russia, they’d call this a дерьмо.” Henri sighed and waited for his mother to ask him what it meant. He thought that uttering a foreign profanity would cheer him up, but in context, it only made him feel more like a fool -- and his mother never asked what it meant.

Alone in his apartment, Henri ate his dinner with his headphones on, trying to figure out when he’d lost touch with his father’s side of the family. The Christmas Eves of Henri’s childhood had been spent with his father’s five siblings, dozens of cousins, and Marie, the matriarch. But after Marie died, the paternal side of his family gave up on being one -- there were no more Christmas Eve gatherings at Aunt Lorraine’s. Instead, they opted for an annual family dinner at a restaurant, but it was never on Christmas Eve, and the kids weren’t invited.

By the time he hit college age, Henri was invited to the family dinners, but he was no longer interested in going. The age gap was huge -- the youngest of his cousins was still four years older than him; the oldest was his 45-year-old Godmother -- and he wouldn’t have known anyone well enough to talk about anything of interest. He’d forgotten many of his cousins’ names easily enough, so why had he never managed to forget about the dusty phonograph?

•

On the day she died, the holes in Marie’s eyes had hinted at the holes in her brain, but in a way, they served to hide the colorless fields that lurked behind them. Henri’s father had probably lived most of his life wondering which of his siblings had inherited the bomb; who drew the short straw?

They all knew how to spell its awkward name by the time she died; it was on their lips when they watched her exhale for the last time. That word that would haunt them all until the day that they, too, could be certain its shadow had skipped over them. The trouble with that particular shade of certainty, Henri thought, is that it only came at the end -- by the time Marie had been dead for a decade, it was clear that there had been more than one short straw in her children’s lot.

Henri knew that no test nor shortcut could say which of his own siblings had inherited the family jewels; all he could be certain of is that one of them had, and the other two would know it first. After that, all the straws would look like short ones.

He began to wonder if there had ever been a phonograph to forget.

“I’m trying to think of a time that I knew I hit the right strings the first time I played them,” the guitarist said once again, through his headphones, as he transcribed the interview.

“But honestly, I don’t think I ever have.”

•

As he typed the guitarist’s words, Henri wondered if the terror of losing his own history would disappear as the rest of it started to disintegrate inside of him, as it had inside of his French grandmother -- and how lovely it would be to experience the true color of the present; free of the ever-present obligation, even the ability, to commit any of it to memory.

He remembered his Russian grandmother’s smile, like fresh-baked cookies from a beautiful brick oven. A gauzy memory he’d gleaned from a time when Marie gave him a souvenir of his own history for Christmas, rather than a ghostly doll without a home; from a time when she was fluent in Russian, not French. When his father was a second-generation, pre-Soviet immigrant who couldn’t stand the thought of bastardized French meatloaf.

It was as real a memory as any of them were, he thought. They all deserved to be remembered.