Mary Sambarra doesn’t remember her daughter.

I don’t hold that against her. I don’t remember mine either. Mind you, mine has been dead twenty years.  Dead and gone these twenty years.  Or is it twenty-one? Let’s see. Tony and I were married in ’76 and Cindy was born the next year, so it’s…..twenty-one. It is twenty-one. She was barely a year old. Funny, I can’t recall her face or whether her hair had highlights or was dark as winter midnight at the Arctic Circle. I couldn’t tell you if she had teeth, though she must have at a year old, don’t you think? I don’t know if she was a little on the scrawny side. But I remember how warm her body felt, pressed against my breast, as she slept, so tight against my breast.

Mary Sambarra’s daughter visits every weekend.  She strides in, husband and two kids trailing behind her like the wake of the Titanic, every Sunday afternoon precisely at three. Sometimes I wonder what my daughter would look like. Would she be a beanstalk like Mary’s daughter Francesca? Danny de Vito short and tending to chubbiness like Ellen Carstairs’ daughter? Would she have curves like Janie Cramer’s redheaded teenager or hard, tight muscles like Jean Clarke? Jean arrived just last week, screaming her fool head off. They had to sedate her right away before she hurt herself. I asked the nurses what was wrong with Jean, but they ignored me. I found out from Ed Brown that she went crazy when her lover left her.  Well, I said, why cry over a man? There’s lots of other fish in the sea. I watch the soaps; I know the score. Ed said it wasn’t a man and he nudged my arm and rolled his eyes when he said it. My goodness, what’s Toronto coming to? I said. I asked Ed if he knew how they did it, exactly, two women, but before he could answer, that scrappy head nurse made him return to his own ward.

I like to believe my daughter would be slim and trim, not too tall, not too short, like Goldilocks’s chair, just right. She felt that way, pressed tight against my breast. Just right.

Mary Sambarra sits in the music room and plays the piano. Her daughter talks and talks, her lips hardly ever close, as if she’s afraid of silence, but Mary just sits and plays Mozart operas. Every now and then she looks up, smiles at her daughter and says, “Nice to meet you.” Once she looked up, smiled angelically and asked, “Who are you? Do I know you? You look familiar.” Francesca ran away down the hallway, her long full, flower-printed skirt billowing behind her. Her husband grabbed her arm. “Honey, honey,” he kept saying. “She’s not herself.”

Well, who the hell is she then, I wanted to say. Swear words aren’t allowed. Mary is exactly the way she’s been since she came here, when was that? Last year? The year before? Tempus fugit. She hasn’t changed, but Francesca sure has.

I had visitors. Right after the blank time, not lately. Right after the blank time, some woman named Alicia came into my room. Her face was all bunched up like a baboon’s, like she had a mouthful of something she didn’t want to say. She was wearing a black suit so I knew she was going somewhere important. And high heels with black stockings. “Oh Lissy,” she said over and over. “Oh Lissy, I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry.” The ward nurse said she was my college roommate. I asked why she kept saying she was sorry. What did she do to me to be so sorry? The nurse just shook her head. I heard them whispering at the nurse’s station. “It’s a blessing, really.” Someone named Larry who said he was my brother came by a few days later. Or a few weeks, a few months, whatever. I thought it was ever so cute, the way his hair curled over his shirt collar. I told him so. He cried. Goodness, why would my saying that about his hair upset him so much? He stayed the better part of an hour, maybe longer, I don’t have a watch, they’re concerned about the glass, and he cried the whole time. I told Nurse Nancy I didn’t want to see him again. He’s too sad, I said.

He came again, though, at dinnertime one night. I don’t remember what he said, but I remember he screamed when he saw the blood.  I haven’t had many visitors since.

Francesca is a lovely girl. Visits every Sunday, shine or deluge. I heard Ken, her husband, tell her it’s not her fault her mother doesn’t remember, it’s probably her mother’s fault. She cooked with aluminum pots all her life. Francesca gets this woebegone look on her face and her kids both hug her. I look at them and think, that’s probably what my daughter would do with me. She felt so warm. Once, Ken said, “Jesus Christ, Fran. Let’s get out of here. I’ve had as much Altzheimer’s as I can take in one day. I need to get drunk!” Someone attacked him with a chair. They say it was me. I don’t remember.

Ellen’s daughter doesn’t visit very often. Not that I blame her, either. I guess it’s not much fun visiting someone who rocks back and forth, repeating, “I want to kill Melanie. I want to kill Melanie.” I don’t understand Ellen. If I still had a daughter, I wouldn’t kill her. Ellen’s daughter needs to lose fifty pounds and get her hair cut and she’s forty and unmarried, but I don’t think that’s reason enough to want to kill her. Melanie doesn’t stay long. Oh, maybe twenty minutes, tops. Ellen eats like a pig. She puts her face down to the plate and snorts her food.  She reminds me of Janet Grayley, one of my dorm mates at Havergal. Mary is a ladylike eater. She has a knife and fork and she eats like Audrey Hepburn. They won’t let me have a knife or a real fork. It’s hard to cut meat with a plastic fork, but I try my best. I get a stomachache unless I chew the pieces really well.

They say I used to live in that house across the valley. See? The big one, red brick, dormer windows.  Yes, that one. Sometimes I can recall standing at the kitchen counter, reading a cookbook, laughing when Carl  reads it upside down. Shhhhhh, you’ll wake the baby. 

Sometimes whole sections of my Philosophy 350 class, the philosophy of morality, right and wrong, good and bad, flash into my head. When I tell Ellen this, she imitates a hedgehog, curls herself into this multi-colored ball and rocks back and forth. “I want to kill Melanie,” she moans. “I want to kill Melanie.” Louder and louder, until the nurses come and inject her. I remember my professor. Good morning, we’d say, grinning because we knew his answer: “What’s intrinsically good about a morning?” I wonder if Cindy would have studied Philosophy 350.

I can hear a car climbing the hill, going too fast. Creak. Clang. Screeching tires, braking brakes. Ooops, Nurse Karrie is looking at me with that look again. I have to whisper.  Angela Cramer brought a car, a little one, maybe two or three inches long, to Janie this afternoon. “See, Mom, it’s a Mercedes E320. That’s the car we bought.” Someone took the car and threw it through the closed sunroom window. Ed Brown says I did it. Don’t you think I’d remember something like that?.

A woman came to visit Jean yesterday. Pretty woman, about my size, only her feet are bigger. Way bigger. Probably tens or elevens. Nice dark blonde hair in a French twist. If I had to hazard a guess, I’d say her dress was Louis Feraud. I wonder if my daughter would have worn a fresh pink Louis Feraud dress. She looks like a math teacher. Tailored. Neat. I was an English teacher, they say, though I don’t recall too much about it except the sound of the chalk on the blackboards, like a knife scraping on a china plate.  They let me have an unframed photo, no glass, of me with my eighth grade class two decades ago. They won’t let me have a china plate. Only paper. She had big, huge brown eyes and the longest lashes. Probably curled. I used to curl my lashes before I put on mascara. Isn’t that strange? I’d forgotten that. Carl used to laugh at me, curling them before and after mascara. Jean’s visitor sat beside her on the sofa in the sunroom. She held Jean’s hand as she talked. I wondered if it was her lover, but Ed Brown says it was her sister. How does he know so much? Traded his dessert for information, I suspect, as usual. I heard her say Jean can stay with her when she gets out. Jean didn’t look too enthusiastic, so I suppose Ed is right.

Sometimes I have what they call lucid periods. Sometimes I am lucid for almost a week. Carl survived for almost a week in St. Joseph’s, they say, before his poor brain accumulated too much fluid. They say Cindy died instantly. Instantly. In an instant. Snap! Just like THAT! She wasn’t in her car seat. She was sitting on my lap when the drunk driver hit our Mercedes. We were two blocks from home, two blocks down the Yellow Brick Road from the house at Pooh Corner. They say she was crushed between me and the dashboard. 

I don’t remember that. I only remember how warm and snuggly her body felt, just before the blank time, pressed tight against my breast.

It’s a blessing, really, they say.

I wonder if she’d wear her hair in a French twist.

Copyright 2004  Ev McTaggart