There’s very little—and very few people—I actually miss. Sometimes it seems that I had no choice, that if I tried to hold on to any part of my life—much less anyone else’s—I’d die, though not from the effort. I’ve always guessed that it’d be something like drowning: It’s not the work you put into getting in over your head that destroys you; it’s the stuff that you’re in that’s submerged you.
I haven’t tried to remember, or hold on to, mother. It seemed that no matter where I was, she was always on the other end of the line. Now, that’s not so benevolent, as I’ve seen, as I’ll probably see again and again. I don’t think I could not’ve spoken to her as I did, just about every week. Over time, I stopped visualizing the woman who stayed on this block because that was all she could do for me after I left.
This isn’t to say I didn’t need her or she didn’t need me. To the contrary: We were—still are—the only constant in each other’s lives. Or in her death. Will that change? After all, she won’t be there when I die, when my body ends up wherever it does. As far as I know, I don’t have a soul or anything that transcends my own bones. I never did tell that to mother: Even after all I’ve described, I still wasn’t about to break her heart—or that of any other living person—unnecessarily.
Soon she will be buried—just like everyone else who dies on this block, including Adam—and then what? I don’t know where she’ll end up in my mind, in my recollections, much less in the chaos of the cosmos.
I think about the what-next mainly because that’s what she would’ve wanted me to do. Will I think about her wishes, desires, ten, twenty years from now—if I’m around that long—if I survive the operation? Will it matter? As far as I know, I’m the only one who’s thought about Adam for a very, very long time. I must say, though, that I have no wish to bring him back. Even when I was young, just after he’d died—been murdered, really, just like every other man on this block who stayed—I felt this way.
Maybe mother thought of him, or more precisely, thought back to him. And what does it matter now? Maybe she’s taking some image of this place—of the light that didn’t fill rooms or spaces of any kind, that ended but never quite brightened or reflected colors, like the glass panes inside the front doors of some houses.
All those days in the shadows and in bound, muted illumination, passing one after another like all things never heard because they’ve repeated the same dull and pointlessly violent echoes you hear when you pass through some place you’re bound to return to because you don’t know that you are. Sounds, words used to muffle a scream, a shout of anger, murmur like rumbles buried deep In the ground and return to the surface when you stay on this block, wherever you are. And when the sun visits, shadows spread across windows and open eyes.
And so Vivian gave me one of the few, if not the first, of the experiences I would miss, that I miss now: an autumn afternoon, not much different from this one, maybe chillier or more brisk because we in those flat, open and, at this time of year, deserted areas around the beaches. There was no place where you couldn’t feel the late October sunlight, rippled and whipped across water, sand, rock and splintered wood, as it turned to wind. The young, oiled bodies were long gone. Vivian’s car, like the others, rattled along the sand-swirled road but never stopped or hesitated.
The people—especially the men—seemed as if they’d been there forever and would always be there, their days stretching ahead and sometimes around them, even they knew they would end, perhaps that winter or the one after it. They, like Vivian’s father, had been left there; the tide would not take them back out even if they’d flung themselves into it. They’d come ashore from everywhere in the times before mine, before Vivian’s: the wars, the wars from which they’d escaped; they came, the onetime surfers and musicians.
One man, who’d been fixing fishing rods and making shell and pebble bracelets for as long as Vivian’s father could recall, said he survived his first twenty-seven winters on codfish, potatoes and beer. In the summer, there were lobsters and farmers offered up corn and fruits; in the fall, the women baked pies. And she was the first to bake one—cherry, my favorite (I hate pumpkin!)—for me.
Memories And Those Who Stayed 