“Hm.”
I took a large bite of mozzarella and pesto and tomato and chewed aggressively. “Do you not like him?”
“I just don’t think he’s very smart.”
Ouch. “Well, at least he was inclusive.”
He looked at me sharply. “The others weren’t?”
“They were fine. They just weren’t... my people, I guess. And I also sort of thought—it might be just the two of us sailing.”
“Ah.”
I glanced over at him, but his expression was unreadable. He kept his gaze ahead. “So—you wanted it to just be the two of us?”
I shrugged. “I guess.”
He looked at me, and I looked at him, and I was scared and nervous and uncertain. Maybe both of us were, hedging our languages inmaybes andguesses andbuts. So because I was an idiot incapable of letting moments happen, I asked, “Are you going to eat your pickle?”
“What?” He let out a burst of laughter. “No. It’s yours.”
“Thanks.”
He leaned back on his elbows and considered me. “I thought we could go talk to the rabbi.”
I almost choked on the pickle. “What?”
“As our next step. You want to know about your grandmother, right? I think talking to the rabbi is a good idea.”
“I didn’t even know Nantuckethada rabbi.”
“Sort of. During the summer, she comes each Friday. What do you think?”
I thought Noah Barbanel making a plan to help me made me want to swoon. “I did look up if there was a Jewish community before I came, and the congregation was founded in the 1980s, so long after my grandma would have been here.”
“True. But even so, the rabbi might know something we don’t. She might have talked to someone, or know someone we should talk to, or have access to records we haven’t even thought about. In any case, it can’t hurt, right?”
“Good point.” And it would give me more reasons to hang out with Noah. “I’m in.”
Fifteen
I couldn’t recall when the dementia arrived for certain. No distinct line existed in my memory, only moments before and after. Before, O’ma repeated the same stories every time we saw her, about working in New York, about buying lunch at a cafeteria for five cents and sitting on the steps of Trinity Church to eat it. She couldn’t hear out of her right ear, and not well from her left, so if you wanted to talk, you had to lean close. Often, she refused to answer questions. “No, no,” she’d say, waving a skeletal hand covered in paper-thin skin. “Don’t ask me that.”
After, she sat in her armchair in the nursing home. She had a hard time remembering us, but she remembered her routine: hair blown out once a week, nails professionally done, Chanel No. 5 applied. She could still do her lipstick in a car without a mirror. In the nursing home, she’d hung professional portraits of my mom and aunts from when they were little. Mom was maybe eight in hers and glowed with happiness. “Do you know who these are?” O’ma would grip my hand with her frail one. “These are my children.”
Those were the sweet moments. The less sweet were when she didn’t recognize us, when she asked where O’pa was over and over, when Mom shouted, “He’sdead, Mom. He died fifteen years ago!” and O’ma stared at her with her pursed lips and said, “Who are you?”
My parents were terrified of early-onset Alzheimer’s. Everything was a sign. If Dad forgot a word, he spent thirty minutes with a storm cloud embedded in his brow. If Mom put a pint of Ben & Jerry’s in the fridge instead of the freezer, it was as good as a professional diagnosis.
Memory was a funny thing. Some people refused to disclose the past; some people recalled the same event differently; some people couldn’t remember anything. Maybe this was why I wanted to study history: if only we could record everything, we wouldn’t forget our pasts, and maybe we wouldn’t be doomed to repeat them. We could turn over the stones of the past even if our own memories failed us, or if our family members shut their mouths.
But how did we record everything accurately? How did we make sure to pass the knowledge from one generation to the next?
How did we decide what deserved to be remembered, and what forgotten?
“Hey there, bookstore girl.”
I froze on the step stool, my arms filled with sharp-edged children’s books. I’d been arranging and rearranging these shelves for five minutes in order to fit a dozen copies of this title in a face-out. Now I carefully turned on the top of the stool. “Tyler! Hi.”
