Reminder
By Clara Jeske
{Author's Note: This is a homage story to Joyce Carol Oates's "...& Answers"]
1/22/18 3:43 PM
ESSENTIAL GRACE COUNSELING CENTER
Reminder: [Alexandra Zima] has an appointment with [Mark Standford] on Thurs. 1/25/18 at 1:00 PM. To confirm, reply YES. To cancel, reply NO at least 24 hours before your appointment and call our office at (383)-448-1000 to reschedule. Standard rates may apply.
1/24/18 6:49 PM
Alexandra Z.
YES
--
Here. All the paperwork’s filled out. Sorry if you can’t read my handwriting.
Shouldn’t you know from that intake checklist I filled out?
I guess not. I’m here because—well, to get right to it, my father died about two months ago. Everyone kept saying how sad it was, that it was so soon before the holidays. Then, last week my husband asked me to think about “seeing someone.” So, I’m here.
I don’t mind. It was a lot of things. Pneumonia, primarily, but he’d also smoked for fifty-some years and he didn’t have great lungs to begin with—it wasn’t really a surprise when he got sick. He was eighty-two, he’d been in Vietnam, he took a bullet to the knee and never really walked right after that. He’d smoked, and I’m sure he breathed in all kinds of Agent Orange overseas. He hadn’t been healthy for at least ten years, always coughing whenever I saw him, but he didn’t like going to the doctor. Any doctor. It’s amazing that he lived as long as he did.
I mean—this is going to sound awful—parents die. You expect them to. So maybe I am a bit detached, but it’s not like it was a surprise. Dad was old, and sick, and his body and mind had been through hell. When it got cold and the pneumonia set in, we knew there was a high chance he wouldn’t make it. I guess that’s why I was sort of hesitant when Brandon suggested I—well. A parent dying is a normal process, and people don’t always need to talk to a shrink about it.
Sorry. I didn’t know that was a derogatory term.
Because he’s been worried. He didn’t try to force me, it’s not like he gave me an ultimatum, but you do things sometimes because you love someone and they’d worried for you. His mom’s a psychiatrist and his dad’s a pediatrician, so he’s always been balanced, so well-adjusted that I sometimes don’t understand him. He’s even tried to diagnose me, once or twice.
Of course I do!
I know it wasn’t an insult, but still. Occasionally not understanding my husband doesn’t mean I don’t love him. He’s my rock.
We’ve been married for nineteen years. I know, I know, getting married at twenty-two sounds insane now, doesn’t it? But he felt right. It felt right...Yes. He’s still right. We met at Omaha U. We just happened to be in the same biology lecture, and we joined the same study group, and you know how things go. He was young, sweet, and smart. He’s still sweet and smart, and if he says I’m not me, I do believe him. I just don’t know why I’m not. I don’t think it’s because my dad died, no matter what Brandon says about the effects of “major life change,” because when I think back on Dad dying it just feels—inevitable. It doesn’t feel like enough of a reason to be unraveling at the edges. Which is how it’s felt, some days.
He says I’ve been distracted and snappish. I haven’t been sleeping well, some nights not even five hours. I’ve just been—kind of off, you know? I thought I’d get back to center once the funeral wound down, once the sympathy cards stopped rolling in, but lately I still I haven’t stopped staring off into space or randomly crying for no damn reason or making mistakes at work.
From home. Bookkeeping for this local Omaha real estate company. Does that matter?
Right. Of course you have to ask.
Yeah, I actually do like it. People get surprised when I say that, but it’s true. I enjoy working with numbers, I like being able to sit in my office with my cat on my lap, and it’s satisfying to wrap up an audit successfully, you know? I can’t keep letting myself slip.
Stupid things. Messing up payroll figures because I reversed the order of numbers, or accidentally signing an email to my boss with “I love you” like I was texting my husband. God, that was embarrassing. But all of this—it was hard for Brandon to convince me that it was worth telling someone about for a copay, since I just sound like I’m scatterbrained. And is that the kind of thing a therapist can even fix, or is this just my mid-life crisis? But maybe he’s seeing something that I’m not, and I don’t want him to worry, even though he’s so sweet when he does. He left me a coffee this morning with a reminder note about this appointment, and he even went to the trouble of putting whipped cream on it and chocolate drizzle shaped like a heart, for God’s sake. I don’t deserve how good he is to me.
Financial worries? No. We’re fine. Brandon’s federal and makes really good money, so we’ve got good insurance I don’t have to worry about a shitty buy-in plan, but still. We did just settle on a plan to pay thousands for a funeral, and it’s not like my sister is contributing more than a sympathy check’s worth. Why is dying so goddamn expensive, I wonder? We got the one of the cheaper coffins they had and that was still $1,500. Just for a box of wood. Jen—my sister—says the mahogany would have suited Dad better, but it’s not like she—it doesn’t matter.
Oh, we’re out of time? I didn’t realize.
I can, yes, but I was hoping to do this every two, maybe once a month, since it’s a bit of a drive to get out here and it does slice my workday in half. I do think it’s a bit funny that Brandon was fussing over me taking longer on work projects, but he also suggested I take some two hours out of the day for this.
Right. Yeah. If you really think you can help. I’ll see you next week.
Message Received:
1/29/19 1:28 PM
ESSENTIAL GRACE COUNSELING CENTER
Reminder: [Alexandra Zima] has an appointment with [Mark Standford] on Thurs. 2/1/18 at 1:00 PM. To confirm, reply YES. To cancel, reply NO at least 24 hours before your appointment and call our office at (383)-448-1000 to reschedule. Standard rates may apply.
1/30/19 1:27 AM
Alexandra Z.
YES
--
Hi, Mark. I’m fine, thanks. Wait. Sorry, that’s the thing I’d say to a client I’m meeting. God, I forgot how comfortable this couch is....I didn’t get much sleep last night.
Nothing much. I’ve just worked on a couple of big property closings so I’ve been busy.
Yeah, actually. I made a pretty big mistake in calculating someone’s payroll and had to spend about six hours making phone calls and fixing budgets because of it. Just the shit I told you about, the stuff I told myself I wouldn’t let happen again after I left here last week. I did fix it. At least.
I’ve been feeling...I don’t know. It’s all sort of muddled. I keep getting these random bursts of emotions, the kind a stable woman isn’t supposed to have. Like—do you know what pissed me off so much this morning that I wanted to cry ? It was Brandon pulling out the last of the frozen casserole for his lunch, from the funeral reception dinner. So many fucking casseroles.
No, I’m not angry that people brought us food. It’s just that no one in their right mind brings an eggplant casserole to a family that’s grieving... I just don’t like it. Brandon says I need to be grateful. Consider their compassion. But all that slimy purple muck, it tastes good for about four minutes before it all goes cold and feels like Vaseline in your mouth. Or cauliflower. Cauliflower's fine as a base, as something you add to a stir fry, maybe, but the one my sister brought was just vegetables with buffalo seasoning and I’m sure she just went out and bought the basic McCormick seasoning pack that’s meant for wings. But you can’t have chicken wings after a funeral, can you? There’s no dignity in that. Greasy finger foods while you’re trying to sit around murmuring respectfully about a dead war vet. Where’s the compassion in a fucking eggplant?
Sorry. I got heated there. It’s just that—I saw those last goddamn chunks of cauliflower and then I started thinking about Jen, and then that made me even more annoyed, since she shouldn’t be able to have that kind of sway on me when she’s not even around and isn’t important in my life.
That’s not what I meant. Jen is important to me, of course she is. She’s my sister. I just don’t understand her, and why she’d bring a cauliflower casserole made only of cauliflower with shitty seasoning to our dad’s funeral reception. I don’t understand why her doing that gets to piss me off so much. But I never understood her very well, and she was always closer to Dad than I was. So maybe she knew that he really loved cauliflower and I never knew he did. Who knows.
She’s older than me. Forty-seven now, I think.
No, she hasn’t been since she moved out thirty-seven years ago. Why does that matter?
Was I yelling? Sorry. It’s just—Jen frustrates me sometimes. We haven’t been close in a long time. Not since our mother left, not really.
I could talk about her, but I don’t think it’s productive. She was funny, and airy, and loved to sing Elton Jon songs off-key too loudly when she was cooking, and I choose to remember those things and not, well—Dad wasn’t good at loving her, a lot of the time. He was distant and clumsy and I think there was this, this sort of crack in him from Vietnam that never went away. Mom had had enough. I think—I think she didn’t take us with her because she knew that at least Jen was Dad’s anchor, you know? She didn’t want him totally alone.
Not really. I’ve had thirty-some years to process it. It stung when I was a kid, of course it did, but as I got older I—I got why she left. She died a few years ago but we hadn’t spoken in over a decade. I never once thought of my mom at the funeral, or at the reception, or even after that when Jen stayed behind to help clean up and talk to me even though I wanted to be alone.
I was eleven when she left. Jen was sixteen. We both stayed with dad, but Jen moved out when she was barely seventeen, I think, and got a job waiting tables at nights after school to make rent at some shitty dump of an apartment in downtown Norfolk. She met the man who’s now her husband some two years later, she moved to Ohio, and she was gone.
I’ve thought about it a lot in the past thirty-some years, but it’s just not really the kind of thing you ask, is it? “Why did you leave me alone with dad all those years ago?” Especially when you’ve just put said dad into the ground and all she wants to do is reminisce, and all you want to do is tell her to be quiet so you can have a glass of wine in peace, and she just won’t stop trying to talk about his Purple Heart and what a brave man he was and you just want to take her by the shoulders and shake her and tell her to just shut up if she only remembers that and not the fits or the shouting, but you can’t, because you already feel guilty—sorry. Sorry.
I’m not getting angry. It’s more just—exasperation.
No, really. I’m not. But she was trying to use our dead parent to reconnect, and it felt cheap. We haven’t had a relationship worth more than a phone call every odd month in two decades.
She’s always been the sentimental type, even when she didn’t earn the right to be sentimental, and I’m not. I’m just not. You know, I barely remember Dad’s funeral? I can only think of it in flashes. The snow on the ground, one of the first of the year with that thin sheet of ice underneath that makes you terrified you’re going to slip on each step. And the hymn at the end of the program. “Abide With Me,” I think. I can’t get it out of my head even though I don’t remember anything beyond “helper of the helpless, oh, abide by me,” and I’m the one who planned the whole damn service. And Jen crying when they lowered the casket, that ugly honking sob that everyone has to pretend not to hear. I wasn’t. I should have been, and she was, when she’s the one who took off and left me to play guard dog for Dad for all those years...wow. Sorry. I really ran off again.
No. I don’t really want to explain what I meant by that, if I’m being honest. Which I am.
It’s a lot to explain. More than I think we have time for right now.
I’m not deflecting. Look at your clock, we’ve only got a few minutes left, and right now I don’t think I’ve got the words.
I think so. Like I said, it makes Brandon feel so much better that I’m coming here, and who knows. Maybe I’ll uncover some repressed memories or something.
Yeah, you too. See you next week.
Message Received:
2/5/19 1:28 PM
ESSENTIAL GRACE COUNSELING CENTER
Reminder: [Alexandra Zima] has an appointment with [Mark Standford] on Thurs. 2/8/18 2at1:00PM. To confirm, reply YES. To cancel, reply NO at least 24 hours before your appointment and call our office at (383)-448-1000 to reschedule. Standard rates may apply.
2/6/19 11:32 PM
Alexandra Z.
YES
--
Hi, Mark.
Hm. You’re good at reading faces, aren’t you? Something did happen. On Sunday. Brandon and I got into a pretty big argument.
It really shouldn’t have been that big of a deal. It’s just, well, I told him we talked about Jen last week, that I got kind of heated, and he said well, Jen actually called me yesterday to talk about you. This isn’t the first time she’s gone behind my back like that.
Just that she’s gone to Brandon before when she knows I’ll probably shut her down.
Do you really need examples?
Fine. If it helps. Like...when I said I couldn’t come to the baptism of the twins she’d adopted out of foster care—eight years ago now, I think—because I was pulling overtime at work and didn’t want to fly for four hours to Cleveland to see babies dipped in water. She... didn’t care for my phrasing. Or when I told her—I don’t remember when this was—that I wasn’t going to her vow renewal ceremony, because I don’t believe in that kind of thing.
I don’t.
That wasn’t me avoiding her. And yes, I know they make me a bit of an asshole, but I just genuinely don’t believe in those sorts of rituals.
No, I’m not. Mom had tried to raise us kind of a vague Christian, but she let me stop going to church when I was ten and started asking too many pesky questions about why God lets people hurt. Dad never talked much about God except to say that he probably should have stopped so many men from slaughtering each other in the jungles. Anyway, this time she wanted me and Brandon to come out to her presentation she’s giving at some community center about foster care standards for American children. It’s not usually the sort of thing she’d ask. Like I said last week, I think she’s just trying to find some sort of reconnection that isn’t happening.
I said no. Brandon wasn’t happy with me.
He thinks I ought to honor that she’s trying. For me it’s too little, too late. She’s sort of tried in the past to say airy things like “I’m sorry you’ve felt that way,” but even I can figure out that that’s not a real apology.
I mean, she left. Like I said. The only two times she came back to Norfolk after that were for my wedding and Dad’s funeral.
I would have wanted to see her if she’d given a damn. But clearly, she didn’t. I’d call her sometimes from our house, not long after she moved to her first apartment, when Dad was off. Ask her to come over, ask her what to do, and she’d always just say she was sorry and find a reason to drift away again. And remember when I said I never asked Jen why she left the way she did? I was wrong, I remembered, I asked her when she was packing up her old bedroom to leave. She said something that I didn’t understand, at the time. “I just can’t stand being around Dad when he stares off into space like that.”
I do.
No, not really.
Because it—it's hard to describe. And because, well, does it really matter when the issue is with my sister now, not my dad then?
At this point? Yes. I think she is. Why else would I get so goddamn angry that she’d called my husband instead of me that I had to sit alone in our bedroom for an hour trying to do one of those stupid guided meditation videos—even though I still wouldn’t want her to have called me? Every time I think about Jen recently, it’s like this weight at the back of my throat, and I still don’t know why I let her have so much power over me.
Maybe. But I don’t want to forgive her, and I don’t want to ask her to forgive me.
Because it’s not something you can fix with invitations to christenings and chipping in three hundred to Dad’s funeral and bringing a shitty casserole to the reception. She can’t fix it by pretending our dad was a war hero and then trying to cry on my shoulder.
He wasn’t. He was just an ordinary man who got shipped to the swamps to kill people and watch his friends die for reasons I don’t think her ever understood. He got wounded and they never even got all the shrapnel out of the muscles around the kneecap that got hit, and so I always knew when he was walking around the house because of that uneven step of his. I guess putting his memory on a pedestal helps her forget that she wasn’t there.
Well, one day I should probably apologize for how I’ve been to her. That’s a should Brandon likes to remind me of. But it’s not a should I’m ready for, and it won’t be for a long time. Not to the golden girl. You know, she was the one who could actually deal with dad? With the way his eyes would slide out of focus? She could talk to him, say something sweet and sunny, and he’d come back to himself and remember to turn a tap off or shut off the stove. She could even get him to stop raising his voice by pleading all soft. I couldn’t. Dad never looked at me like that, or hardly ever, like I was as real and alive as she was. Kind of made me wonder why my parents had me, sometimes, if he was just going to look at me like I was a ghost.
No, no. I’ve never felt that. It’s more of a morbid curiosity.
Yes, I’m certain of that. I just wondered, sometimes, if my parents thought having another child would make their lives normal again, and then realized that Dad would never come all the way home again. I even used to think that Dad looked differently at Jen because he loved her more, or he knew how to love her. That she was a reminder of something good from before. But that’s just trying to put a shine on it, because he wasn’t always so—well. He wasn’t always the better man when she was there.
I wouldn’t call it abuse.
I do mean that.
He was just hard to live with sometimes. But listen, I think we’re at time here, aren’t we?
Probably. Maybe. It depends on how I feel, if I feel like I need it. Maybe getting this all off my chest was enough.
Take care.
Message Received:
2/12/18 11:24 AM
ESSENTIAL GRACE COUNSELING CENTER
Reminder: [Alexandra Zima] has an appointment with [Mark Standford] on Thurs. 2/15/18 at 1:00 PM. To confirm, reply YES. To cancel, reply NO at least 24 hours before your appointment and call our office at (383)-448-1000 to reschedule. Standard rates may apply.
2/13/18 10:43 PM
Alexandra Z.
NO
Message Received:
2/21/18
ESSENTIAL GRACE COUNSELING CENTER Reminder: [Alexandra Zima] has an appointment with [Mark Standford] on Fri. 2/23/18 at 1:00 PM rescheduled from 2/23. To confirm, reply YES. To cancel, reply NO at least 24 hours before your appointment and call our office at (383)-448-1000 to reschedule. Standard rates may apply.
2/22/18 1:22 AM
Alexandra Z.
YES
--
Hey again. Sorry about last week. Something came up.
It’s a long story.
I know we’ve got time, but—God. I know I should talk about it, but it’s just more shit about Jen and I wonder if I’m giving her more power over me by talking about her so much.
I don’t know how I feel. It’s just this lump in my throat.
She called me.
A couple days before the appointment that I rescheduled. It was just so—I was making dinner, boiling pasta and frying onions, and out of nowhere Jen calls to ask me why I blew her off again, and why I’ve been blowing her off for years. I asked why she talked to Brandon. She said that wasn’t the point. I kind of—I blew up at her. And I’d actually felt good that day. I know I’ve only just started this whole therapy thing, but even just venting has made me think that maybe I was starting to find the threads that got all tangled. I’d gotten work done early, and was making manicotti because it’s Brandon’s favorite—as a way of saying thank you for dealing with me so kindly—and then my sister called and fucked it all up.
No. I didn’t apologize. It’s what I should have done. I said that.
I don’t want to remember.
Because it hurt.
And because I wasn’t good. I was awful to her, Mark, and not to the first time.
I don’t remember how it started, but somewhere, she pulled something like “you’d think that since I’m you’re only family you have left, you’d try harder to be in my life,” or some sappy shit that’s make me supposed to feel all sweet and sad.
No. It didn’t. I told her she hasn’t been close family to me since the day she left and cut me loose in all the ways that mattered. She told me she was trying. I told her to fuck trying, since she stopped trying since the day—since she made it clear she wasn’t going to be any big part and my and dad’s life. I told her she couldn’t make up for it with crying too loud over her dad’s grave when she hadn’t seen her dad in more than ten years.
Because she didn’t want to, I guess.
And because he was hard to be around.
Fuck, it’s because he wasn’t there, okay, I don’t know how to describe it because you’re going to say abuse again, aren’t you? My dad was a ghost for almost all the time I spent with him. He tried to be a loving dad who taught his kid to ride a bike, in the early days, but with every year he stared into space more and he’d stare through me and call me by the name of some man who’d died in a rice paddy years ago before coming back to earth. He’d yell and shake, sometimes, but the yelling wasn’t really meant for us, it was just him screaming because I think it was the only way he could keep surviving. He never raised a hand to me, but Jesus if I can’t remember him hugging me past the age of five. The Rob Zima I knew was a shell, a shell selfish enough to have a kid he didn’t know how to love, and Jen grew up with me through all that. Jen helped him down out of his moods and helped him remember to eat and comforted me when dad couldn’t remember things like my soccer games or school plays. She’d be there for the times when the man from before came back, in those rare times when he’d laugh again and do card tricks for us and take us to the movies, and after all of it and when the paranoia started getting worse, when we sometimes would catch him in the living room cleaning the parts of his shotgun all methodical and slow when they weren’t dirty, she left.
Of course she had to leave eventually. I get that. She grew up. But she wouldn’t come back to help even when I’d beg. She knew, she knew my dad needed someone to anchor him or he’d go somewhere dark, she knew she was better at it than me. There was a time, not long after Brandon and I got married, when Dad called me and all I could hear was gasping. I drove to his house—forty-five minutes, I only managed to get that fucking far from him—to find him having a panic attack, probably a flashback, he could hardly breathe and kept asking for Jen.
Do you know what it’s like to be in front of your father and have him ask for the other child? But Jesus, I called and begged her to at least talk to him, and you know what she said? “I don’t think I can handle that level of emotion right now, Alex, I’m really busy with the baby right now.” When Dad got really bad with hallucinations, and I had to commit him to a hospital for his own safety, I think seven years ago? She wouldn’t come down because “he had me, at least.” She couldn’t deal with it and she made me. And then she tells me she’s trying, she stepped out of our lives and wants to talk it out over a Monday night phone call, tell me she’s sorry for not being there when I needed her, and Mark, I told her to choke on her sorry and then I hung up.
I know that was harsh.
She decided what my life would be when she left me behind. Left me with someone who couldn’t be left alone. How is that fair?
And I thought I was surviving, and here I am unraveling again, and I swear all from me getting pissed off about a goddamn casserole.
No, I don’t want to. I don’t want her to call me again, either. I just wish she’d leave me alone so I could stop re-running funeral hymns in my head.
I know I should try to. But I don’t know if I can. I don’t even know if I want to.
Maybe. Maybe it would be easier.
I don’t know.
THE END