Cold Memory
by Sharon Mollerus
It’s noon by the broken red digits shining off her clock, like taillights at dusk--midway from last night to this. Her birthday has already flipped by, but it’s not yet ripped from the gummy pad where it rests halfway to the biblical span of seventy. Someone was here. Who would check on her? She goes to town for her mail. She has no garbage collector, but buries her cans and plastic wrappers in the woods, where she picks up the branches for her wood stove, where she heats her cans and warms her body. Her phone is disconnected.
Cheryl has been sleeping on the couch in front of the wood stove for days; it’s packed with cold ashes. Her small form is swathed in a fuzz-balled gray afghan, her feet are bound in wool socks and her hands are wedged high up inside their opposite sleeves. Her memory, frozen as her fingers, wakes sputtering and coughing, like the puke green bug in the driveway which hawks up black smoke as it turns over in the morning.
She builds the fire again with a cone teepee of a bent pizza box, bark kindling, and two fat white branches, and lights it from three edges. As she prods the fire, her warming blood ripples out to the furthest veins, like midnight breakers in a sea cave, to reach the extremities--split ends, fingertips, bony heels, and a frigid gap whistling with violate cold.
Now would be the time to own a TV, but she never got around to replacing the one on the back porch that she kicked in because the picture tube was flickering with snowy grit over the two free channels. A light hail scrabbles at the windows, and a black wave of liquid forest floor, a brew of needles and dirt and piney sap, laps across the back porch. She sits up in the dead silence, the silence she wraps herself in every day, alone unless Kerry comes, and then they hardly talk. He won’t fall asleep there, so his wheeze and snore never fill the cottage.
Someone’s been here, but not Kerry. He comes long past dinner and leaves before midnight. He has other commitments, as he calls it. Her fingers rake down the damp skin of her arms, dewy with cooled sweat. Her shoulders butt out of a threadbare skyblue robe, stippled with pimples of cold lifting off the bony humps. It was a fever, and somebody brought soup. The remembering and forgetting pour out in streams with her running nose, burning ears, and tearing eyes. It’s not chill night yet, but midway, and her seeped out flesh gasps for fresh air. Someone has been here, because there is soup which she didn’t make--the yellow crust of a cold chicken broth left on the wood stove. The saffron rim circles someone’s borrowed blue bowl, and the spoon is smeared with bright lingering oil beads.
Her usual soup is tomato-leek-onion eaten with tanging caraway bread, the needling black seeds prickling down her throat, and with it she has a salad of rigid kale or veined chard from the garden. There a plot of potatoes and carrots burrow upside down, like grim miners, in hard earth troughs. Green apples dangle from her tree until they drop, twisted with the canker blight that sends a black goop oozing from the trunk’s fissures. She snatches bittersweet red orbs from Gladys’ house while her neighbor’s at church.
On those same Sundays she goes berrying with an old Easter basket, the wicker bin strewing out bits of straw along the path and her calloused hands scratched and stained with dark winey juice. A child with blonde hair and long lashes peeks out from behind the bushes, and the dimples suck her freckles into her cheeks. Hey kid, I don’t think you belong here. As she runs, the girl’s long hair streams behind her. She was that same one when she was little and used to see her father in the berry patch. She told her mom about him, as she swung out the little silver pail full of prickly red raspberries, spilling them over the porch. Her mother said he’d moved to Florida, but Cheryl saw differently that year, watching him stack cans at the grocery store at the end of the aisle, or fill a tank at the full-serve gas station, or deliver mail down another street. She wouldn’t be the first to talk, and he never turned to look at her.
Her blonde hair shines with the follicle lube that has squeezed down the strands while she slept awash in her own sweat. Someone brought soup--she summons the image up, with the smoke of the wood fire as it combusts--a woman wearing flowers in her ears, over her breasts. It’s been days—Cheryl normally spit-bathes in a huge metal tub, raking over the dead skin with a bar of volcanic soap until new flesh springs back flecked red. She never showers, since the nozzle shoots at random and pours ice-cold like a playground fountain, and, as the fiberglass case is cracked, the water leaks out over the tile floor and floods the depressed and mildewed grout.
When she walks through the neighborhood, she spies Gladys’ pillbox hat that she wears to church and some billowing dress with carnations or long-stemmed daffodils splashed over it. The larger the dress, the bigger the flowers. Gladys is suspicious. Hers are the best tart red Braeburn apples. The woman with curly brown hair was her mother’s best friend, and her son Jerome was once her own best friend, in second grade, until he betrayed her, tattling about her smoking. Gladys watches the windows to see the shadows of Cheryl’s boyfriends. Gladys Masses and confesses.
At her first confession, Cheryl lied about stealing a pen from Steven, which she didn’t. Instead, he traded her a cigarette for a peek under her dress. She smoked behind the trashcans, and Jerome saw. She didn’t tell that to the fat Irishman sweating over his collar in the narrow box. He gleamed behind the wooden crosses of the grate, his face red and white like Gladys’ carnations. He told her to give back the pen to be forgiven. So she left her best pen in Steven’s desk. For who can reverse a peek or worse?
Gladys sweeps leaves in the fall as they jump off the trees, and she chases the snowflakes on their first airy tumble from sky. In the spring, she pushes the dirt back into the beds with her thick broom. Her housedress puffs out like a judge’s robes—you get three chances. The petals on this gown are deep violet with dark, entangled stems. She digs flowers in or out, and she cuts them down, shoving them into a glass with water and a little sugar to perk them. In the summer she guards the sidewalk with her hose ready to spray stray cats. She watches the windows, and Cheryl watches back behind the pinking lace. Gladys wonders who’s there, what he’s doing and how long he’s staying.
It might have been Jerome who came by while she slept, like the time she let him in as a joke when he knocked and asked for two eggs. Grown Jerome, now gawky with glasses, checkered shirt, and a blue ink stain strapped across his breast pocket. Want to steal a pen? A look under my dress for a cigarette. It was a Sunday, like today, and her hands were red with berry juice and bright thorn scratches. Gladys was at church. He came back with a box of chocolate-covered cherries, sweating and flustered with his witless grin. She adjusted the garters, and a run trickled down one black twisted stocking from thigh to toe. She picked him up, laughed him off.
Later he dropped yellow tulips at the door as she slammed his foot in the jamb, the petals flattened, the leaves torn. Eenie, Meenie, Miney, Moe, my mother says. And later still she told him about it, never mind Kerry whose in all probability it was. For Jerome it was all the wonder and pleading after the discovery, the news, and then the promises of the presumed: love, marriage and a baby carriage. It was nothing Kerry could understand--Kerry never kissed the wooden feet of the crumpled man in a darkened church. With shrill laughing, she dug the seed back up out of her frozen ground and planted it in Jerome’s salt-watered garden.
Between them she’d walked, hand in hand, like the game of swinging the girl in the berry patch, 1-2-3-whee. One woman had short graying hair and a wide belt looped high in her black jeans, and the other wore a peasant dress and long hoop earrings brushing her shoulders. Blue stringed beads dangled around her neck, and she ducked under the gauntlet of murmurs and chants, banners and white sneakers. Two little blonde girls gripped the stroller handles from both sides as they pushed their baby brother; they were afraid: they knew what she could do. She wore sunglasses, like at the beach or for funerals, like movie stars dodging the paparazzi; there could be photographers gathering evidence—she was there. She carried an umbrella with a snaky wooden handle pointed to the ground, like a cane for the blind, or a weapon, if needed.
The attendant’s distaste--she cleans up like a janitress—was shelved in the metal cabinet before her shift and always donned at the end, briefly, like a coat for the wind between the office and the car. She then left it in the trunk as she turned the key in the ignition and drove home, shaking out her brunette ringlet curls, with her bumper trailing behind her littered with decorous sentiments—visualize, vote, village. Inside, there was the whispering, the waiting, the ringing of the phone, and all so quiet one could almost hear the chanting outside just below the mood of Muzak. The woman bunched the slick tissue in a ball and gathered the cold metal pieces to blast with steam hot as ice. Cheryl’s teeth were clenched, and she was nauseous, sitting in a chair out of the way. It was raining as it did the time before.
Her mother swayed overhead from some puffy white cloud; Cheryl thought she might have waved. Her mother knows what’s inside her, and how far in is in, and she’s high enough up to know the end. Wouldn’t you like to light a candle for your mother? Gladys asked. When? No—she already hurts my eyes.
Cheryl remembers that, just before the soup, she came home sore, woozy, but refusing pills—a hemorrhage of guilt is cured only by secret remedies, like the potions of witches. For apostates, there is no whispering on kneelers in shadow boxes with triple Hail Marys. From the remnants of childhood practices, like the prodigal’s bovine husks, she devoured the expiates of fever, body cramp and bleeding and added gritted curses for her incantations.
Why not take the narcotic, if it’s all the same, calm the memory cruel as a raging rotten tooth to sleep troubleless. In the end, cheating fathers are unlatched from lovers and tossed babies land upright; the little ones fling stars like jacks and roll planets across the sky like rubber balls in four-square. They needn’t wake for school or have their hearts cramped with double-crossed love. The fuss here is for no reason, since there are all good things for all good people and damnation to the rest. To dare to say it doesn’t matter either way is a laughable presumption which will bloat her body with giddiness until it fizzles to hell pricked like a collapsed balloon. And who cares? She doesn’t, she doesn’t, she honestly doesn’t. Her mother wept over those evil things people did—her child, her husband, herself no doubt—salt tears scented with healing herbs: mustard to lift gloom, honeysuckle to escape memories, impatiens for irritation. Cheryl’s tears were freeze-dried and reconstituted into angry nuggets of curses, a biting hail encasing soft raining grief.
She must have lost weight over these three days, the sweat treatment, the sauna cure, and of course the blood--her mother’s ring swings around her finger. The ever-married woman always wore it, even after he left. She stuffed the paperwork he sent into this same stove and lit it; it blazed and ashed, as she was herself by the end of her cancer.
When her mother was ill, they once went to see some old biddy who had cracked her hip slipping on the icy church steps during the first snow of the season. The old lady should have stayed home that day--what do people think? Her memory was gone; she was calling her friend by her sister’s name and screaming for her dead husband because the staff had kidnapped her and he was coming today with the police to rescue her. There was some black and white picture on the dresser with a torn border—a by-then dead man with a hat and a little girl with a full dress of some sunlit color: bright lavender, rosy pink, antique white, sky blue. The girl had a funny round hat, like she’d turned her berry pail upside down over her head. The two are in front of some little white house in some godforsaken treeless town—on the plains or someplace with the trees clearcut. The mother couldn’t remember her daughter’s name anymore. The girl had died as a child, and the woman followed her there the following week.
Memories can be released like helium balloons that rise until they burst and drop in shreds over miles of bright cloudy sky. If one takes care to forget. Like names. Like Kerry, soon, three nights ago, must be. She’s forgotten other names, so she can his. He’s moving. Why? To get away from her. “Why? Why? Why?” the little girl asks.
“Once more for old time’s sake,” she says.
“If you like.”
She couldn’t explain it to him because Kerry didn’t get it like Jerome did. Kerry will know how to forget even before something happens. But for her the effort of forgetting forms a circle of woven memories. So she’ll drop the letters of his name carefully, one by one—it can take years. She’ll call him Kerr after some months, then Ker, and later just the first initial. After the name, him. It's not his face that will be the last to go, although that would take a while. The last thing she will remember is the end of him, the way he holds the cheeks tight.
Now it’s Gladys at the door who brings more soup and sees the sick woman dressed, and she wants Cheryl to come to church to light a candle. From her mother’s funeral until these three days, it’s been all black asphalt and broken white lines between her and her neighbor. Her mother’s soft warmth glows beyond Gladys’ puffy lids. Cheryl will light the wick not for a woman who sees only sun, but for her father in Florida, and maybe for Kerr in Colorado, and always for the little girl in a berry patch who still looks for eggs on Easter.