Waiting on Memory

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“That may be so,” she says. Her voice trails off. I can’t help getting the feeling that Marianne is losing faith in this Frank scenario. If so, this calls my role into question. If Marianne, in a moment of clarity, has realized that Frank isn’t coming to pick her up, if she has suddenly remembered that Frank in fact died a while ago (I checked Marianne’s file: Frank was her husband, and he has been dead since the late ’90s), then she might look at me and wonder: Who is this woman pretending that Frank might show up after lunch? I become the crazy one.

Marianne eats quickly. She has so much to do, she tells me. She has to get home and take care of things, she says. She wants to leave me a note with names on it, her “contacts.” I find her a piece of paper. She walks off with it, returning a few minutes later to ask if Frank has called, if he’s left a message. She’s agitated, but not in that needy way Eloise is when she’s agitated. Marianne is more like a harried executive with too much on her plate and too little confidence in her subordinates, of which, I believe, she considers me one. I tell her there is no phone in here, but I will check at the main desk to see if any messages came in. It’s exhausting playing along with these scenarios.

Some days I lie so much that I forget my own lies.

The next day, Marianne is agitated again. The first thing she says when she sees me is that she is expecting a phone call.

“I don’t know from whom, and I don’t know when,” she says, which, I can see by the way she raises her eyebrow, sounds strange even to her. She wants to make sure the call comes through. She wants me to alert the front desk. I tell her that I will. Sometimes I am concerned that feeding her delusions may ultimately be harmful; other times I feel certain that, for Marianne, living in a fantasy world is a protection, a solace, and I cannot destroy that.

These days I think more and more about alternative realities, about the different worlds inhabited by the people I care for. I have long understood that reality is subjective, that, for example, the mother-child conversation I experience as well-meaning and inspirational can be to my teenage son invasive and embarrassing. But at least we both agree we were in the car together that afternoon, that it was raining hard, that we were a mother and a son on an errand. We experienced the moment differently, but not so differently, not Marianne-differently.

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