Savard
The radio station was full of static, fading in and out. Solome listened to it at night as she fell asleep, so Stephen’s snoring wouldn’t keep her awake. Solome remembered when she had returned with her parents Sunday nights from Crane Lake or after visiting her grandparents in Hastings, Minnesota, and they would hear a station in Mexico.
When she first had the children, Solome couldn’t handle the feedings, changings, spills, colic, erratic sleep patterns, the predictability of the messes. She worked all through the day and ended up at the same place each evening, exhausted, frayed, with another pile of laundry, another pile of toys scattered over the house. Stephen’s voice had pulled her through. He had called during the day, sometimes leaving between his history classes at Cobson College to eat lunch with them. Her mother helped too. But it was Stephen who talked her through the crises.
Jane Mead, her friend since high school, was always going through a crisis of her own making. Most of the time, it was Solome who listened to Jane.
In the years that followed, Solome often thought about how long it took to raise the children. Fifteen more years before they were grown. Ten more. Five more. She felt the long haul of cooking, cleaning, car-pooling. The school activities. But again, it was Stephen’s voice she heard. Now Solome was on a smooth course. Hadn’t she earned it with her responsible life? But what if Stephen’s signal was fading? NO!
She felt the thought of losing Stephen. It was a tremor in her bedrock. Was she like one of those animals who could foresee an earthquake? Whose erratic behavior gave a signal it was going to happen?
Sometimes Solome remembered the tumult of their family history. How children tore up expectations, went their own way, stretched the family into territories the parents wouldn’t have gone. But now it was Stephen who was slipping. He could remember fifty years ago, but where was yesterday? He was not yet 60 years old. How could this happen? It still seemed like they were just beginning. Was the end already here? Did it all pass that quickly?
Sometimes he stood in the kitchen while she fixed supper. Sometimes she looked at him. “Do you know where you are?” Solome asked.
“Of course, I’m in the kitchen.”
“What are you standing there for?”
“I don’t know.”
“Sit down. Look at the paper. I’ll have supper ready soon.”
Sometimes she could hear his childhood when he shared an old memory with her. Sometimes he struggled for the words he wanted. It was Stephen who first mentioned the word, “Alzheimer’s.” What would she do if their light went out? What would she do without marriage? What if their language together fractured and shut down?
Often, her husband stumbled over his words. Trickster language. Taking as it had once given. Full of fractured words broken off from other languages, making new words that then joined with others. Wasn’t it Noah Webster who imposed uniformity of spelling on words? Otherwise, her American language would be more like water, which it was. How often she thought of Crane Lake.
“We could move to a smaller house,” Stephen told her at supper. But where would the children stay when they came for a visit? Solome asked. Where would someone stay if she needed help with Stephen? When she needed help with Stephen, she thought.
What was she thinking? Maybe Stephen was just overworked. Yes. There were financial and political decisions at Cobson. A department to be eliminated. There was tension between faculty members. There was a starkness in academia, despite the festive caps and robes the professors wore during convocations and graduations and official events. Maybe that was the reason for the robes. There was student unrest and editorials protesting college policies in the student newspaper. Didn’t pressure cause forgetfulness? Yes, it did. Maybe Stephen needed to rest. Then he’d pull out of it.
Stephen Savard
I was in a meeting with the president and several faculty members who were protesting a change— opposing it— the elimination of their department. Arguing for their case. After the meeting, the president asked me to stay in his office. He said he felt I was gliding through meetings, not catching what was said, not adding my thoughts as I always had. My opinions were listened to— they were needed. Often, I took heat for the president. What was wrong? The president asked. Was I feeling all right?— Was there some problem he should be aware of? Was it family? Was Mark Stephen the problem? No. No. I was thinking we could eliminate a section of a department, instead of the whole department. It would be easier. In language, for instance, Russian has had a diminished enrollment for several years. Yes, the president said he could consider that. I returned to my office and closed my door. I put my head in my hands. I shut my eyes and swam in the darkness there. It was the first time I’d been called on my forgetfulness— my absence of mind in meetings. They had noticed. I’d been discovered. What could I do to cover my loss before they told me to leave?
“I don’t want to go to church this morning,” I told Solome. “I know there’ll be people I should know, but won’t remember their names. My memory doesn’t work like it did.” There— I had told her. But she let it slip without comment.
If Solome walked into church walked first, and said their name— she explained to me— then I would know. But I couldn’t rely on her every moment. Sometimes she stopped and talked to someone and left me standing in the open. Someone else I should know would approach and speak as though I remembered who they were, and what they did. Often I knew that I knew them, but didn’t see them often enough to remember.
“I don’t want to go to church,” I said again. But she didn’t let it slip.
“I could go alone, Stephen. Students and other faculty would wonder where you were. We belong to that church because it’s close to campus and you could be with colleagues and students. What if they no longer saw you? What would they think?”
Solome was right. Was I losing the ability to reason? I went upstairs and put on my suit.
Solome Savard
Solome’s Bible Study group became a small, tight-knit group, despite their differences. The man who came without his wife— what was his name? John Everett?— was the only one not solicitous to her.
What did Solome want? She questioned herself in times of introspection with the group. What did she hear in the bark of the dog? What longing? What? She wanted recognition of herself. She wanted Stephen to see her for who she was.
No, it was more than that. She wanted to know who she was. It seemed to her that Stephen had been himself all his life. He was his own authority. He knew what he was doing. She knew also, or had known once, but it had been pushed aside while she raised her family and thought of herself as Stephen’s wife. It was hard for her to put in words. She wanted to feel her whole being. She wanted to feel the whole of being.
Solome had lunch with Jane Mead whom she’d known most of her life. After high school, Jane had married, had been Jane Harrison for a while, but took back her name after her divorce, and kept her name when she married again. She had since divorced a second time.
“I don’t know how you stay married to one man. I don’t have the stamina it must take. I just want out when I’m not happy. Then I’m single again and all I think about is the next man I’ll meet. I look for him at the grocery, when I’m with my friends, laughing as though being with other women is what I wanted, when all the time I’m looking for a man in the crowd who’s looking at me.”
“It
