The Memory Game

by Shauna Checkley

Emptying cupboards like she was pulling the entrails out of a body, so Terran worked.

She was diligent and no-nonsense as her sister, Tabitha, knew she would be. Terran had always been like that, even when they were little girls. Terran would roll up her sleeves, concentrate. Tabitha would spin in circles.

“Can’t believe this is happening,” Tabitha said, addressing thin air.

Terran grunted in response as she dropped a handful of Tupperware odds and ends into a big, black, plastic garbage bag. Spaghetti strainer. An unused salt and pepper set.

Light was faint, abbreviated by the wine-colored blinds. Dust particles danced in the air. All was stillness. A kind of hush both inside and outside since the Regina streets had emptied on the early Sunday afternoon.

The kitchen was as dark as ever in that little wartime house. It was tinier than Tabitha recalled it as a school-aged child. With the plain wood paneling and worn, gray grouted tiles, it had a decidedly generic look. It smelled vaguely of disinfectant, soap, and some unknown spice. What was it, anyhow?

With the kitchen cleared out, they then turned to the hallway. It had a large walk-in closet with pull doors. Opening it up was like the proverbial Pandora’s box for Tabitha. “Can you believe it? All the same old stuff is here? I would have thought it’d be thrown out by now.” Tabitha exclaimed

Terran shook her head. “Why didn’t they have a garage sale, at least?”

It was the Canadian thing to do, of course: offload onto others. A weekend tradition.

Wiping her brow with the back of her hand, Terran frowned. She judged that they would probably be there the rest of the afternoon when all she wanted to do was pack up and flee for home. “So much for coffee and Netflix,” she said.

Yet with the explosion of memory all about them, Tabitha felt that familiar inner nudge. Should I broach the subject again? Should I at least attempt to bring it up? Or should I just let it lie dormant like all the stuff on the cupboard shelves?

With so much to process right then, their mother’s passing, the closure of the estate, the issue of Gerry, sorting out trauma like silverware, Tabitha felt a little fragile, overwhelmed. What should I say even? Or should I just keep my mouth shut?

Glancing sideways at her sister, Tabitha just wasn’t too certain. You can never quite tell with Terran. She’s notorious for going either way. But seeing Terran’s jaw set, her throat tighten into cords, Tabitha judged that it probably wasn’t the right time.

A layer of dust lay over everything like a fragile skin. Running her finger over the top of a Monopoly game, Tabitha said, “This closet is like a shrine to Hasbro and Mattel.” She laughed at her own joke.

It was the pre-digital eram when the board game was supreme, the king of family entertainment. Though generations of toys had come and gone, Tamagotchi’s had long since had their much-touted passing, video games had exploded, and yet Tabitha still felt a subtle reverence for their old loot. It was their stuff, after all.

Terran sneezed violently. “God, it needs a good dusting!”

The closet swelled around them like a bruise. The four wood walls seemed to press toward Tabitha, like lungs that had filled. Just for a moment, she felt claustrophobic with the urge to bolt and run as she and Terran banged into each other with clashing elbows and bending bottoms. But Tabitha remained on point. Where to start?

Their parents had succumbed. Though their stepfather, Gerry, had died from cancer five years earlier, their mother, Gloria, had only just recently passed away in her sleep. They had come to clean and clear things out, to settle the estate. And yet, with all the unravelling issues and looming deadlines, it felt to Tabitha as if she had stepped somehow face-first into a trap. Just how will things actually go?

Plucking the Kootie game off of the shelf, Terran held it up in mock-triumph. “Remember the plastic bug? This goofy game?”

They hooted with laughter.

But then Tabitha saw it. She gingerly lifted it off the shelf. Memory Game. Covered in a shroud of dust, it, too, summoned memories and soon Tabitha was awash in them in that 10 by 10-foot space.

* * *

The sisters had the orange-colored cards spread all over the living room floor near the picture window. They had been told not to play in front of the TV as they would block other people’s view. So, they played crammed in the corner.

They loved playing the Memory Game as it had become a real competition between them. Though the other games were won by mere chance, by the flick of dice, the spin of a plastic arrow, the Memory Game took some actual skill, focus and recall. They vied to try and outdo the other one. Sometimes they even cried if they lost. One sister would be victorious while the other crumpled and wept. That was when they were nine years old.

When their mother worked the late shift as a cleaner at the hospital, the sisters would be left in Gerry’s care. He was their stepfather. He was a fairly new arrival on the scene, as he had joined them only two years before. That was when he swooped in knight-in-shining-armor-like to aid the hapless widow. Their mother, Gloria, was only too happy for the help. Coming home exhausted from work, reeking of industrial cleaner and sweat and cigarette smoke, she believed he was a Godsend. She and the whole neighborhood, in fact, thought so.

Turning over the orange card, Tabitha showed the circle shape on the other side of it. She smiled. Goodie, that’s easy to remember! Then she quickly turned it back with orange side facing up and returned it to its spot on the floor.

Terran eyed her handful of cards. Then she stared at the cards spread out on the floor.

She sucked her underlip furiously. Her brow fell into folds like a fan. Reaching over to uncover a card, it was a mismatch.

“Aww!” Terran groaned

“My turn,” Tabitha said

Joining them on the floor, sitting on his haunches, Gerry watched and smiled. He smelled vaguely of Old Spice and tobacco and alcohol. He had a graying fringe of hair and a gap between his stained front teeth that Tabitha found disconcerting. He was older than their mom. The girls were embarrassed that he looked like an old grandfather rather than a regular dad. He even wore baggy old-guy clothes.

Though they weren’t over the loss of their father, who had been killed on the job, on a shoddy, subpar construction site, the girls accepted Gerry as best they could. “They’re real little troopers, couldn’t ask for anything better,” their mother would wax to anyone within earshot: the neighbors, the rest of the extended family, even the girls at work who stood amidst mop and pail, who chewed gum and nodded appreciatively.

Plucking a card off the golden-colored shag carpet, Tabitha turned it over. It was one of those many-sided shapes that they wouldn’t learn the proper name of for a few more years in math class. But for them it was a stubbornly complex shape. The one hard to decipher, remember.

Tabitha stared at it, with her whole might, desperate to recall its spot when the time came. Then she turned it back over and set it down.

Soon, though, Tabitha began to realize that Gerry was watching her instead of the game.

It made her feel awkward, uneasy. All she saw was the stained, gapped teeth. Can’t concentrate. I wish stupid Gerry would go away...

They continued to take turns flipping over cards. Memorizing spots. Matching shapes when they could.

Finally, losing to her sister as she often did, Tabitha flew into a rage. “Not fair! Gerry was bugging me!”

“How?” Gerry queried. He smiled, bemused.

“By staring.” Tabitha stomped off to the girls’ bedroom.

Gerry followed behind her and shut the door. They were in there for a long time. Later when Terran tried to enter to retrieve her set of Troll dolls, the new ones with the multicolor, neon hair, Gerry sent her away. All was unsettling, quiet, like the strained arrival of bad news.

* * *

Watching Terran quickly clear out the closet, Tabitha was struck at her sister’s raging lack of sentiment. Tarrying over the mound of forgotten and abandoned games and dollies, Tabitha was tripping down a memory lane both smooth and pitted.

She found a pair of Lolita glasses, pink with heart-shaped rims, the ones she recalled wearing one very hot, long summer years ago. Back when she was a tween and wore jean cut-offs and pastel tops. She slipped them into her pocket. Her jean jacket was beginning to bulge with trifles.

“Hey, slow down, c’mon.” Tabitha entreated.

“Then do it yourself,” Terran said. She spoke simply, without malice. She made a beeline for the master bedroom. It was their mother’s room and the last area to be cleared out.

While Tabitha brushed the dust off of the dolls fronts, smoothed any errant curls, she heard her sister at work across the hall. There was lots of shuffling and thumping, doors opening and shutting. Even one loud crash.

But Tabitha stood slack-jawed, with a glazed look on her face. To any observer, she would appear to be deeply lost in thought, down a rabbit hole of remembrance, a reverie that would last until she finally emerged from its spell. It wasn’t so much reminiscing as it was reliving. It wasn’t so much thinking as it was feeling. Was I snapped into a myriad of strange pieces, odd shapes? Have I been broken or just shaped?

In particular, she held the Memory Game box. She gripped it hard for a long time. She peeked inside it once then dumped it in the garbage with a flourish.

Tabitha then joined her sister in the master bedroom. Being hit with a blast of her mother’s scent, that familiar floral fragrance, almost moved her to tears. Likely the last time I’ll ever smell her. What was her perfume, again? But she bit the tears back and regrouped.

“Wow, you got a lot done.” Tabitha marveled at the speed at which Terran had worked, signified by the half-dozen, garbage bags that sat full, like supersized, black bugs.

“Just wanna get this over with,” Terran said, her breath beginning to sound ragged. She had a light film of sweat on her temples. With her dirty blonde hair behind her ears, the perspiration was only too evident.

Finding a drawer that hadn’t yet been emptied, Tabitha set upon it. The smell of mothballs filled the air. Plucking scarves, panty hose, old lady underwear out, she sought to do her part as well. I’ll hear about it later on if I don’t.

The women had a familial resemblance, like sisters. The same deep-set green eyes, the dark blonde hair, with only Terran the heavier of the two. She had always had a weight problem, even as a child. Unfortunately, it had often caused her to be overlooked by others, passed over like a blemished piece of fruit.

Yet differing so much in other respects, temperament, energy, outlook, nearly everything else, really, they had become somewhat estranged. They had lost the sisterly kinship they had shared in childhood. They had lost many things, Tabitha judged. What have we become? Where will we end up? Is there even “we” anymore?

Glancing over at Terran, who was bent over in an odd shape, Tabitha wondered at how little she understood her sister. She was like one of those complex, many-sided shapes in the Memory Game. What were they called again, decagon, polygon, octagon? All those abstract, exotic constructs, Terran was as undecipherable as they were.

“Never could have believed that Mom had so much junk,” Terran remarked. With her mouth open, she was like a fish that had come up for air. “Guess it just builds over time,” she added

Tabitha nodded. Then, against her better judgement, Tabitha blurted out impulsively, “Look, I thought maybe we could talk about Gerry... y’know that time we were playing the Memory Game. I just wanna hear your take on—“

“On what?” Terran said, snapping upright. “It’s so long ago. Everyone’s dead now. I’d rather just let it be in the past where it belongs, if you don’t mind.”

Tabitha shrank. That little wartime house seemed to get even smaller in dimension, the bedroom, especially.

She had broached the subject before and always was given a curt dismissal. What is she so opposed to, so afraid of? Denial like a many-sided abstraction, an unfathomable set of lines and points that led to nowhere, created nothing. Like a Hindu god with all those arms, a juggernaut of strange and epic proportions.

Rushing to and fro, Terran worked like a wild thing on a mission.

Tabitha recalled the status quo back in the day. See no evil. Hear no evil. Say no evil. Watching her harried mother struggling, floundering really, until the much-vaunted Gerry came to the rescue, Tabitha said nothing, kept quiet. How could she upset Mama’s peace and wellbeing? How could she spill the proverbial beans? She couldn’t. And she didn’t. It would have shaken their world into a myriad pieces, reality would have snapped, unlocked. Not just Mama’s but everyone’s, as the consensus had always been that Gerry was a saint, a guardian angel. He was the best thing that happened to them since their fool father had to go and get himself killed.

Dropping a handful of mothballs into the garbage, Tabitha heard them land. Plink! Plink! Plink! Her nose crinkled at the sour smell. But she knew that their late mother had been big on covering up things, masking scents with potpourri, floral diffuser, candles, anything. It was the family way, in fact.

“I’m gonna start hauling all this to the dumpster out back,” Terran said, almost rhetorically. She disappeared with a garbage bag in each hand.

Tabitha nodded. But she didn’t know who to, as Terran was looking away and already leaving the room. She was just a flash of blue jeans and a jean shirt.

Spying what was likely a set of Dollar Store glass praying hands on the end table, Tabitha picked it up and stuffed it in her jean jacket pocket. That’s what I’ll keep, then, from Mom. Got a little bit of everything. It’s all good.

Grabbing a garbage bag in each hand, she headed for the big, red Lorass bin out back. Time to get rid of this baggage once and for all.