Story of the Month: Fishing

imagesMy cousin Janine has lost her mind.  Or—none can deny, not even her—a part of her mind.  The part where she remembers what she did yesterday and last week and this morning.  The part where she knows her dog’s dead and her kids are grown and Ronnie Reagan isn’t President any more.  Not that Janine was ever into politics, even in better days, but she would know who the President is.  Twenty years have dropped out of her head like apples spilled out of a kicked over bushel basket.  And it happened as fast as a basket getting kicked over. 

One night, her son Kiley told me, he went by there for supper, and she’d fixed a good one, that casserole she makes with the Campbell’s cream of mushroom soup, plus a strawberry and rhubarb pie for dessert, and they all watched a basketball game on t-v, and next morning she called him and she couldn’t remember him being there or herself cooking or the game, and she’s stayed the same ever since, going on three weeks now.  She knows who everybody is and her address and phone number and all.  She’s not that far gone.  But try as she might, she can’t recall any happenings after 1988, and she can’t hold on to the little everyday things that are happening now, either.

A few days after she stopped remembering, she called me to say that something was wrong and could I help her.  She sounded like a little girl who’s lost her homework, even though she’s 66 and so bent up with bad arthritis and osteoporosis that I sometimes think of her as an old lady aunt instead of my cousin who’s only three years older.  We grew up right down the block from each other.  We both only had brothers, so our parents thought we ought to be like sisters and were always pushing us together.  But Janine was afraid of her own shadow, and I was a tomboy, and we never liked the same things.  Where I was ever ready to ride bareback and climb trees and shoot cap guns, she just wanted to play with china tea sets and dolls, or to color in coloring books.  Still, we banded together against the boys when we had to, Janine threatening to tattle against their teasing, and me keeping them away from her when the rough-housing got too much.  By high school, we spent less time together, but we kept up a kind of friendship anyway.  We had between us those memories of being two girls in a big family of brothers and boy cousins and bachelor uncles.  Later, I minded her babies sometimes and stood up as Kiley’s godmother, and Janine let me bunk in with them for a few months after my divorce. 

When Janine called and told me she was having trouble remembering things, I asked her a bunch of questions, like did she bump her head, or does her husband Tully remember an accident or something that might account for her addled mind.  She called out to Tully right while I was still on the phone. 

“Tull,” she yelled, “did anything happen to me?”

Then he got on the phone and told me not to believe everything Janine says because she’s not making sense, and he was going to take her fishing later to cheer her up.

“Fishing?” I said. 

I couldn’t see how fishing would cheer Janine up.  She can’t fish, what with her bent back and her walker, and being by the damp lake would likely make her joints ache, even if she wore that black satin NASCAR jacket Tully got her for Christmas.  I thought maybe he wasn’t really going to take her fishing, but that he was just trying to show me what a good and concerned husband he was, which he hasn’t ever had the best reputation for, but I wasn’t buying it, and he probably knew it.  But he could get away with saying he’d taken Janine fishing because she wouldn’t remember if he did or not.  He could get away with saying just about anything, like he’d been out for only a half-hour when it was really more like two hours, and Janine wouldn’t be able to go against him or even doubt him.

“Thought we could get some carp for supper,” he went on.  “Janine likes a good fish fry.” 

Janine told me that my questions had made her feel some better, even though she couldn’t answer most of them, so I’ve been calling her every day, not only with questions, but just to chat and make her think I think she hasn’t really gone over the deep end.  Not completely.  Not yet. 

One thing we all thought might’ve set Janine off was that her best friend was murdered two months ago.  We wondered if maybe in trying too hard not to think about it, which is what people kept telling her she ought to do, she overdid it.  She can’t remember Ginny at all now—they met in 1990 when they were room-mates at St. Joe’s, Janine having her gall bladder out, and Ginny getting her varicose veins stripped—which is a blessing in disguise, because not remembering that Ginny was her friend, she also doesn’t remember the horribleness of her being found in her house beaten to death after laying there two days unnoticed.  There was something about it in our town paper every day for two weeks straight.  They’ve moved on now, but with Janine like she is, Tully wouldn’t have to hide the papers from her anyway.

Truth be told, I never liked Tully.  He’s a bully.  The kind of bully you can spot right away even if he’s being nice at the time, even if he never bullied you yourself.  Kiley told me Tully and Janine used to argue about sex right in front of him and his brother Al.  It would always be that Tully wanted it and Janine didn’t, which the boys only knew because Tully would run her down about it and call her names and even push her around some.  Once she had a broken pelvis.  I’ve heard of men raping their own wives, and it’s something I can imagine Tully doing.  Not really imagine, of course.  I mean it’s something I can believe being inside of him, a kind of low meanness and selfishness.  And he would never think it was rape, either, though I guess less mean men than him might also have trouble with that.

Kiley got out of that house as soon as he was finished with high school.  In fact, he moved out a couple of weeks before graduation.  I loaned him the money for his share in an apartment with two other guys, and he paid me back from his first paycheck from the County Roads Department, which job he had lined up even before graduation.  Kiley’s what’s called a good egg.  It’s on his account, too, that I’m keeping in touch with Janine every day, so he’ll worry less, especially when he’s at work and can’t get to her or call.   

Al, the older brother, is a different story.  He’s had drug problems, law problems, job problems, and woman problems for as long as he was old enough to.  He’s 38 and still lives at home.  He treats his mother like she’s the maid, though he does drive her places and carry the grocery bags and things like that.  As for him and his father, they mostly stand in the driveway together drinking beer and talking sports, or inside the garage if it’s cold or raining.  They’re both pretty handy and have made some nice home improvements, like the sun deck and the new cabinet under the wash basin in the bathroom.  So they have that in common, working together with wood and tools.  And Al always shows Tully when he’s found a new porn site on the computer.  Once when I was visiting Janine, before this forgetting thing happened, Al called down from his room that his dad ought come upstairs and see Celebrity Crotch Shots, where photographers had caught different actresses getting out of their cars at parking lots or even in front of their own houses, and Tully got up and left me and Janine just like we weren’t there, and he never came back, though I stayed another hour.

One computer place Tully and Al check on almost every day, Kiley told me, is where their next door neighbor puts up pictures of herself.  She has a video camera in her living room, and she strips in front of it and sends it out over the Internet.  She’s in her fifties, not pretty but not ugly either, but she’s got a belly, and I’d be willing to bet she’s got cellulite thighs.  I’ve seen her arms in tank tops, and they hang and wobble, and she doesn’t shave her armpits, either.  I wonder where she gets the nerve to strip, and I wonder why she wants to, and I wonder if she knows her next door neighbors are two of her regular fans.  Kiley says neither Tully or Al has ever said anything to Marsha about it.  That’s unusual for Al, who’s got a big mouth and doesn’t seem to think before he opens it, ready to show his ignorance on just about any subject you’d want to name.  Maybe they keep quiet because Marsha steals Vicodin for Janine from the nursing home where she works, which gets Janine through when she’s used up her prescription before it’s time for a refill, which she does on a regular basis.  It’d be a trial not only for Janine, but for Tully and Al, too, if Marsha stopped bringing the Vicodin because she felt embarrassed or insulted or something.  Or maybe the quietness is part of the whole thing.  Maybe the stripping would be spoiled for the men if they were to talk to Marsha about it or even mention it to her.  Maybe it’d be spoiled for Marsha, too, to have exact faces put onto the guys she dreams of wanting her.  To be appreciated by Tully and Al wouldn’t be the most pleasant thing in the world, I think.

I wonder what they’d think about Al and his computer peep shows over at the Church of Talking In Tongues, where he goes every Sunday morning and most Wednesday evenings.  I could guarantee they wouldn’t like it, though I hear they do make a big deal about forgiveness and bringing home the lost sheep, especially if a sinner repents in public view of the congregation and in some lingo no one can quite understand.  Al’s only in the Church, I think, so’s his ex-wife will keep letting him see his kids every other weekend.  She’s not a member of the Talking In Tongues, but she is a regular church-goer and even teaches Sunday School at the Methodist church over to Reedsville.

It was a UPS man found Ginny, the front door being ajar and Ginny’s cat coming out to rub against his legs and cry piteously, hoping, I guess, that someone had finally come to feed her.  Ginny never did lock her front door, except at night.  Just the week before, Tully had stopped by when Ginny was out at the store and went right into the living room to pick up the electric fan she was loaning to Janine.  When we heard the news of the UPS man’s grisly discovery, we all remembered Ginny’s habit of leaving her  front door unlocked, and we shook our heads over it, though lots of us in this town do the same with our back doors.  Tully guessed it had been a robbery “gone bad” like they say on the t-v cop shows, though to my mind neither Ginny’s house nor Ginny herself had the looks at all of good pickings. 

“Robbers is stupid,” was Tully’s answer when I gave my opinion.  “All they care is getting in easy.  Everybody’s got something a robber could take and make a little money from.” 

I had to admit he had a point there.  But the papers said it didn’t look like anything was taken and that it had the marks of a rage killing.  Now, Ginny could be annoying, like anyone can—she was sort of a faultfinding person, quick to act like she knew best and was above you—but it’s beyond me how someone could get mad enough to kill her. 

Janine was the one person I never heard Ginny speak against, which is maybe why Janine loved her so much.  Even before Janine was sick and needed so much help around the house, Tully would have complaints running all the time.  Once he told her he was going to put a time clock in the kitchen so he could be sure of getting a fair day’s work out of her while he was away at the factory.  He never did, of course.  Even he could see it made no sense.  But Janine did keep that house spotless for months after he said that.  It was Ginny told her to ease up, that she was making her condition worse.  It was near the time when Janine’s arthritis and osteoporosis were digging deeper into her and starting to weaken her.

“You butt out,” Tully said to Ginny in that snarly way he has, but she wasn’t scared by him, which is probably another reason Janine loved her.  Tully knew she wasn’t scared, too.  His “butt out” was mostly show.  His heart wasn’t in it.    

I have a psychiatrist for my Prozac.  Mostly, I just phone in to get my prescription renewed, but every three months or so, I have to go chat with him about how it’s working, how I’m feeling, and so on.  I don’t like doing it, but he won’t keep up the prescription otherwise.  It just so happened I had one of those appointments set for this past week, so I decided, for a change, to get my money’s worth and ask Dr. Weinstein his opinion of what would make a woman suddenly lose part of her memory. 

“Dissociation,” is what he said, and he wrote it down for me on the back of his business card so I wouldn’t forget it or repeat to someone that he told me something he hadn’t. 

“It happens as the result of psychological trauma,” Dr. Weinstein said.  “It’s a more common reaction in rural areas than in cities.  A person experiences a shocking event and, as protection, the mind wipes it out from conscious knowledge.  Sometimes, like in your cousin’s case, the person forgets a whole block of time.”

“So it’s like having a secret from yourself?”

“You could say that.”

“Will she ever get her memory back?”

“She can, if she gets treatment.”

“You mean like Prozac or Zoloft or something?”

The doctor cracked a big smile when I asked that.  I guess you had to be a psychiatrist to get why that was funny.  Then he explained that Janine would need to come talk to someone like him and for more than one time, too, and that gradually bits and pieces would come back to her until she would finally know what it was she was forgetting. 

I couldn’t see how that would work.  I thought about the hiding games we used to play when we were kids, calling out to the person who was looking, “you’re getting hotter, you’re getting colder.”  But Dr. Weinstein wouldn’t be able to give Janine hot and cold clues because he didn’t know what the terrible thing was that had made her forget in the first place.  And, of course, Janine herself wouldn’t be any help.  It’s not like she decided on purpose to forget.  Some part of her mind that she didn’t even know was working made the decision for her.  To her, it was something that had happened to her more than something she had any part in, like a bird shitting on your head, which happened to me during the graveside prayers for Ronnie G after his motorcycle crash.

But Dr. Weinstein stuck firm to his opinion that without someone to help her poke around inside her head, Janine would stay like she is.   

“Now, tell me about yourself,” he said and leaned back in his big leather chair,  and I knew I wouldn’t get any more out of him.

The most logical thing is that it’s Ginny’s murder Janine doesn’t want to remember, but Dr. Weinstein said dissociation happens right away, and Janine didn’t lose her memory until a few weeks later.  So it was some other thing brought it on.  From one day to the next.  But what could be worse than your best friend being beaten to death? 

Besides a psychiatrist, which Janine would probably not want to see and which I’m not convinced would work anyway, I can’t think of who could help her find out what the terrible thing is that she doesn’t want to remember.  I’m afraid even to tell her there is a terrible thing she doesn’t remember.  What business is it of mine to out-guess her own mind?  But I didn’t feel right just sitting on my hands, either, which is why I went to the auction of Ginny’s things, thinking I would get something for Janine, in case it might help jog her memory.  Or, I thought, in case her memory comes back on its own later, she might want to have something that had belonged to her friend. 

I got the frilly glass candy dish Ginny always kept on her coffee table filled with peppermints and other hard candies.  I wasn’t at Ginny’s house that many times, but when I was, I never saw anyone take any of those candies.  They might have been the same ones every time, for all I knew. 

“Nobody eats that kind of candy no more,” I remember Tully telling her once, but like in so many other things, Ginny wasn’t moved by popular opinion.

Janine appreciated the dish when I gave it to her, but she didn’t recognize it.  Of course, none of us told her where it was from.  The funny thing was, though, that she set it out in the exact same way Ginny had, on top of a stack of magazines on the left hand side of the coffee table.  But she filled it with those little chocolate bars like you get for the kids at Halloween instead of with hard candies.

Just the other day, I saw a dish exactly like it at Stateline Sales over in Denton, for less money.  That’s the chance you take at auctions.  Ginny’s dish was a genuine antique, the auctioneer had said, plus I think everything in the house went for a little more than it might have in an ordinary sale because it had all been part of a murder scene.  Somehow death, especially when it’s a tragedy, puts a value on things that they don’t hold on their own.  It’s like the life-size cardboard cut-out photo of Dale Earnhart that Tully won in a poker game once and that he has standing in the dining room.  Tully brought it up from where it used to be in the rec room in the basement after Dale crashed and burned at Daytona because he said it was worth a lot more now that Dale was dead. 

It’s crossed my mind that it might help Janine for Tully to hear about what the psychiatrist said, but somehow I don’t want to tell him.  I feel like he’d take a piece of news like that and store it away until he had a use for it that would benefit him.  Janine already doesn’t know so much, I don’t want to give Tully another fact to hoard away from her.  Because when I’ve seen them together since her memory’s been gone, that’s the idea I get, that he’s hiding things from her, when you’d think he’d be doing just the opposite, trying to put memories back into her head for her, trying to remind her of things he knows she’s done or said or seen over the years, or even just yesterday, even if they’re unhappy things. 

“She’ll be all right,” he said just the other day, like he’s so kindly and patient, and like he trusts in God or something. 

“But what if she’s not?” I asked.  “What if she stays like this?”

“It won’t kill her to not have some memories,” he said.  “She knows all of us, and she remembers bein’ a kid and her mom and helping her mom can peaches.  Lots of people don’t have that much.”

“But she thinks her mom’s still alive and that they canned peaches just last week.”

“Oh, she says stuff like that, and in the next minute she says she knows that’s a mistake.  Like I told you, you got to not pay attention to what she says no more.”   

So I’m left with doing what Tully is pretending to do: being kind and patient and trusting in God.  Or maybe, a little, in the lady detective in charge of Ginny’s case.  If they find Ginny’s murderer, maybe Janine will be jolted into remembering the same way she was jolted into forgetting. 

I talked to the lady detective once and told her about Ginny’s unlocked door, but I’m sure other neighbors already gave her the same information.  She wouldn’t tell me what she planned to do, even whether or not a CSI team would be coming.  I suppose that’s normal.  On the t-v cop shows, sometimes they will tell someone what they know or suspect or what some witness said, but other times they won’t.  And sometimes, when they do let someone know what somebody else said, that someone turns out to be the guilty one and turns around and kills again just to keep certain information quiet or not able to be proved.  But I don’t see how that fits here, because Ginny lived alone and didn’t have much visitors, so who is there to know something that might be dangerous for the killer? 

Life’s not like t-v, anyway, though I like watching “The Bachelor” and “The Biggest Loser” and “Survivor” as much as anyone, and I know the things on those shows do really happen, even if what sets them off is arranged ahead of time.  But there wouldn’t ever be a show that had a sad sack like Janine on it, unless maybe it would be “Montel” when he has that psychic Sylvia Browne on.  Too bad it’s all the way in California, or I could take Janine there and she maybe would get a message from Ginny that would help her remember. 

Or maybe Tully is right, as much as I hate to admit it, and Janine is okay just as she is, not knowing her best friend is gone, not knowing what Al is watching in the bedroom next to hers, and not remembering, the next day, how she stood all afternoon in the wind on a cold lake shore watching Tully fish.

                                                     

1 Comment


  1. This story pulled me in through the voice of the narrator. I liked the way unexpected shifts and additions came to what she was telling us, like when she suddenly tells about Prozac and her psychiatrist, and also the bird shitting on her head at the graveside and the detour into Dale Earnhart. And I liked how the mystery was left to ponder. Nice work.

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