Nobody Remembers

I went into town today.

I don't, usually. The man brings things. Bread on Tuesdays. The post I don't open. There has been no reason to walk down the hill for years, and the years without a reason have done their work on both of us: the town has had time to decide what I am, and it decided without me.

I found out what, at the shop.

The girl behind the counter is young enough to be my great-grandchild. She did not ask my name. She said it to the woman behind me, not even low: “That's the one from the bend. The one you hear at night.”

So that is what I am. Sixty-one years of reading out loud, and the town was on the other side of the wall the whole time, listening. All of it that stuck was a noise and a house on a bend. Not a name. The name is what goes first, I think. The noise is what lasts.

I paid for tea I did not need and I walked to the other end of the street, where her house was.

There is no house. There is a gap with a tree in it, and the tree is not old. Whatever she was, the town has had sixty-one years to put something over it. It put a tree.

I asked. I am not a woman who asks, but I asked. I asked the girl at the shop. I asked at the church, which is open for the tourists now, and a woman in a lanyard showed me the book of graves like it was a kindness. I could not look anything up. Her name was never mine to keep. That is the whole trouble. I carried a dead woman's book out of her house when I was nineteen and I never thought to learn what she was called, because at nineteen a name is the smallest thing in a house and you take the biggest.

Nobody remembers her.

She read that book aloud every night of her life. She kept it alive by saying it, the same as me. The night her hand stopped, the town closed over her like water and left no seam. There is no stone. There is no name. There is a tree, and the tree is not hers.

Here is what I understood, standing in the gap where the house was.

It is not the book that forgets.

The book knows me. My handwriting has been on the last page since the night I turned nineteen, and in sixty-one years it has never blurred, never dried, never once let go. It is the only thing in this town that has ever held onto me.

The town is what forgets.

I have been telling myself a story for sixty-one years, and today it came apart in my hands like wet paper.

The book ruined me. I said it so often I wrote it as the first line of the last page, where it can never come off. I was its victim. I kept it out of pity. Out of habit. Out of an old woman's stubbornness. It took my life a night at a time and I let it, and I was the one who suffered it.

That is a lie. It is the lie a person tells about a thing they cannot put down. The town had me filed as a noise before I was forty. The book has my name. The book has my voice. The book has the night I was nineteen, still wet, still warm, and it does not care whether I am a good woman or a mad one. It only says I was here.

I walked home in the dark. I put the kettle on, because the body does what it has always done. The nine-forty shook the glass. The water was ready before the tea and I did not drink it. I did not come home for tea.

You were in the chair. You are always in the chair now, and I have stopped asking what you are.

I took the book down and opened it to the last page and read my own line out loud, the line I have said twenty-two thousand times.

Nobody remembers the book that ruined me.

And tonight I heard the second half of it for the first time. The half I wrote at nineteen without knowing I was writing it.

I remember her. Nobody else does, and nobody else will, and that is the work now.

The book did not ruin me. It is the only thing in this town that has ever refused to forget me.

So I will read it again tomorrow. Not out of love. Because the last thing in this town that still knows my name is a book, and I am not going to be the one who lets it go dark.