Do You Remember?
By Christina Fulton
On the night before the anniversary of my
father’s death I asked my future husband,
“Do you remember that God-awful suit we buried him?” He put down his magazine and joined
me in my reverse position at the foot of the bed. I
was having a starring contest with the ceiling fan
and snuggling with his feet, until I decided to disrupt our beautiful yin-yang pose with this sudden
burst of mental diarrhea.
“I thought we buried him in one of his work
sweatshirts and jeans. You know, it was supposed
to be a symbol for him being a working man to
the end,” he said, letting his forehead lean up
against mine.
“No, that’s what my mom wanted to bury him
in, but my aunt wasn’t having it. She went out
and got him that bright red suit. Remember, I
told you my father looked like an old pimp in
that black and silver Cadillac looking casket.”
“Now, I remember you picking out that flashy
casket, but I still don’t recall the suit,” he said,
brushing a strand of hair out of my face.
“It looked like the hot-rod of all caskets. I
thought he would like it. But you seriously don’t
remember the suit?”
“Nope,” he said, snuggling me into his chest. I
started to cry a little at the thought of my father’s
tawdry exit. The next day he took me out to Denny’s and I asked,
“Do you remember when it flurried on our way
to the funeral home? It was so strange. Especially,
since it had been so unseasonably warm the week
before. It was your first time seeing snow,” I said,
cutting into a chocolate chip pancake.
“Nope,” he said, wiping syrup from my nose.
This was starting to get a little bizarre.
“The snowflakes were a strange mixture of melancholy and madness,” I whispered to my soda.
“Who talks like that?” He asked, pushing his
hamburger pickle onto my plate.
“Your future wife,” I smiled. We had been in
our new home for a year and my future husband
had been saving up for a ring he thought I deserved. I would have taken any ring but he insisted. I think it was because my inheritance bought
the house, and he wanted to give me something
to prove that he was capable of providing for me.
I knew enough about gender theory from graduate school to know that this was both ridiculous
and unnecessary, but the pretty pretty princess
that still lingered in my X chromosomes was all
giddy with the thought of an old-fashion objectification of the female nation type ceremony. After
all, I would get to wear a puffy dress.
On the way home, I was still stunned by his
lack of memories about perhaps the most disturbing week of my life.
“Do you remember my aunt turning to me in
the church and asking why the priest kept bringing up all those statistics about suicide?”
“Nope,” he said, turning the radio to my favorite station.
“What do you mean? I turned to her and said,
‘Now, it has been a few years since I have been
inside of a church, but I do recall Catholicism
having a long history of not being too particularly
fond of suicide.’”
“You didn’t say that. That’s what you wanted to
say, and you told me that later back at the hotel,”
he laughed.
“You remember that but not the suit?”
“What can I say? I have a notoriously cheesy
memory.”
“Cheesy?”
“Full of holes,” he said, turning down our
street.
“Ah, Swiss, your favorite,” I said, with a smile.
My father always told me that all men have
a highly discriminatory memory and selective
hearing. It was what kept them sane during the
onslaught of female chitchat. However, I wasn’t
too keen on lumping my future husband into the