LITMIR.BIZ

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a language that could absorb all the shipwrecks, all the landings, all the changes, the disruptions and upsets. Imagine a language that could reach anywhere with its sound and meaning. If Stephen could just speak, he could cover his absence in the restaurant, which he now remembered. He could explain it, make it understandable or acceptable or tolerable. He wanted a language with boundaries that were never settled, as if the language were water, both changing the shore, as it was changed by it.

      “Didn’t you wonder where I was?” She asked. “What did you do for dinner?”

      Stephen could say he had amnesia. He could make light of his forgetfulness, but that wouldn’t work.

      He hadn’t even remembered to take Brown, the dog. Solome would have to walk him later.

      Did Stephen want to ride?

      He’d rather walk, he told her, and Solome drove on. Stephen followed, crossing the street, walking toward their cul-de-sac, the houses circling like a squall.

      Stephen Savard

      I was walking when Solome drove up, angry. The next morning, I wondered about my oversight. Why hadn’t I been at the restaurant? What was I thinking when I left my office? I didn’t know. Had I written it on my calendar and forgot to look? Why hadn’t Jan, my secretary, reminded me, as she often did? Somehow it slipped away. What had I done that day? I felt stupid. It was a feeling I felt more often. There was a clear space in my mind. A place where nothing came. No thoughts. No ideas. I was in meetings— finance and long range planning. Further cut-backs were necessary. I had to remember the numbers. The reasoning. I had lunch with a board-of-trustees member. Tenure review. Allocations. More policy decisions. I could list them. Often I felt irritable. My job frustrated me. It was going by fast. I had trouble keeping up. I didn’t always have time to give my family the attention they needed. Jan, my secretary, told me that Mark Stephen was protesting something on the commons. Didn’t Mark know his father was provost?

      What was the name of those bushes on campus I liked to smell? They bloomed purple in the spring.

      “Lilacs,” Jan said.

      “Of course,” I answered.

      “It will be a while before they bloom.”

      I sat in my office with the door closed. No, I had given my family everything I could. I felt angry over their demands. What were they demanding? Their weight on my shoulders. Yet I liked them. I felt pleasure with my family. How could there be contradictions? Confusion. I also thought of the presidency of the college. But the president wouldn’t retire for years. I felt it slip past me, though Solome wouldn’t give up. No, she wouldn’t. Not because of anything or anyone I could blame. But because of something within myself. I could retire— be through with this, though I would like to teach one last history course. I was on the spot. What would I say next? They were looking at me in the meeting. Sometimes I saw impatience in faculty members.

      There was a frustration. A fuzz. I wrote out the report I would give at the faculty meeting at the end of the day. It took me longer than I thought. My calls were backed-up. My e-mails. My appointments.

      That evening, on a walk with the dog in Hill Park near our house, I watched a plane turning on the horizon until it was gone. Solome mentioned a recent plane crash that had been in the news.

      I couldn’t remember. I was thinking of something else, long ago, but I didn’t tell my wife. The little black box I carried was my childhood. It would survive a crash. What was I thinking? What crash? I worried about my memory. I didn’t want to think about it, but I knew something was happening. I felt like I was experiencing something I didn’t know. I felt a darkness in my thinking. A panic. Or a dread with a panic behind it. The feeling sat on me with its weight. I couldn’t move out from under it. I didn’t know what it was. I grew more sullen. Quiet. Sometimes I caught Solome looking at me. But it was the black box— the memory of my early years. The repeating without knowing.

      “You’ve said that Stephen,” I heard Solome say.

      One evening, the word, “Alzheimer’s” struck me. Where had it come from? I remembered my mother wondering if her father, my grandfather, had died of Alzheimer’s before anyone recognized what it was. I suddenly thought of a day that would come when I would be in a small room looking from a window waiting for someone, and I wouldn’t know who they were, nor recognize them when they arrived. The word and the thought that followed didn’t often come, but once in a while, as I sat in my office, or in a meeting, the dread came over me again. Was I slipping as my grandfather had slipped and died before anyone knew the word, “Alzheimer’s?” What had my father died of? Heart attack. He had been young. Maybe it hadn’t had time to show. Maybe the thought of it had crushed him.

      Solome Savard

      Imagine speaking someone else’s words. A mother’s. A husband’s.

      She was on the phone calling members of the Faculty Wives Club when the past rolled into her memory again. She was telling the wives about one of the other wives, who had just had surgery. She was ordering flowers, making conciliatory comments. The college had turned a corner toward downsizing. She was the provost’s wife. She was a diplomat smoothing the way.

      Solome stood in Stephen’s study. Jan had called. Had he left his briefcase by his desk? No. She couldn’t find it. Had he left it in the car?

      She looked at the photos on the shelf. There was the family lined up in front of the Depot Museum in Duluth: Stephen, Solome, Gretchen, Susanna, Mark Stephen. There they were in front of an antique store in Stillwater. In front of Paul Bunyan in Brainerd. Was that the trip Stephen was supposed to leave with them, but some meeting had come up at the college, and she had driven ahead with the children? Later, Stephen had taken the bus to Brainerd. He had gotten off the bus with a confused look on his face, but she was there to meet him.

      “Here we are,” she had called him. She remembered the relieved look on his face as he walked toward us.

      There was the family at the Black Hills and Mount Rushmore on their South Dakota trip. There were the photos of the family at her parents’ cabin on Crane Lake; her father with a fishing pole in his hand. Sometimes his absence still caught her off guard.

      There was Brown, the dog, with snow on his nose.

      The wedding of Susanna and Brian, their son-in-law.

      The baby Susan. Her first birthday party.

      The photo of Solome and Jane Mead, a friend since high school, who was like a sister.

      The photos of New York on their visits to Gretchen.

      There were photos of several trips Solome and Stephen took to Europe. There they were in Madrid.

      Stephen Savard

      It came in waves. The forgetting. The remembering.

      Over the summer, work began on a new student center. It would be completed in a year. I could see a piling for the corner of the building from my window. I could hear the cement trucks.

      I was functioning. Completing my work for the day. Knowing where my briefcase was. My car keys.

      Then the pot hole.

      What was that game in which a woman pushed something like a teakettle on the floor and two other women rushed ahead of it, sweeping the ice clean and slick? Shot put came to mind, but that wasn’t the name. Ask Solome—

      Why did I care about it anyway? I thought as I got in my car.

      Sometimes men played the game also.

      Most days, I was myself. Then papers jumbled on my desk. Moved by themselves. A forecast— What was there wasn’t there any longer. Looking at something what was it?— what did I have to do? Think of the word I needed but couldn’t find. Everything tumbling. Get a grip. Keep it buried. Don’t let them see. Get ready for the meeting. Where’s the briefcase? Call Solome. Look in the car. Not there. Not here. Can’t go to the meeting without papers. Secretary— print out minutes again. Get lunch bring to me. I don’t have—

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