Cortisol released by your adrenal gland during stressful situations can result in adverse effects, such as damage to your hippocampus, an essential part of memory creation. — C/f internet sources
Piroshki (Russian, literally a “small pie”)are Russian puff pastries…stuffed with…meat, cheese, or vegetable filling— C/f Webster’s
Chapter 54: Piroshki trauma
As spring came that year, I was a sailor whose binnacle was lost full fathoms five beneath a cruel sea, all cardinal points of my moral compass awash in cortisol. Psychogenic-amnesia researchers liken emotional trauma to a cortisol tsunami flooding the hippocampus, disorganizing memory.
Mired in clinical depression to start with, I was poorly equipped to withstand continuing jolts of emotional shock. Some researchers assert such repetition can lead to post-traumatic stress disorder as surely as violent combat. My memory began to slip. I never saw it coming.
I had taken memory for granted since fourth grade, when the Episcopal Day School said mine was “photographic.” It confused me at first because I assumed everyone remembered as easily as I did, and didn’t trust those I thought were pretending they didn’t. Eventually I understood my quirky memory was superior to most. Spelling bees were a snap. I simply looked at the word in my mind and read it off. My best victory was with chrysanthemum.
Over the years I got accustomed to people’s amazement I remembered events in their lives better than they did. For instance a phone chat with a man I had not talked to in twenty years. I mentioned him missing a shot at a New Brunswick black bear because his Canadian guide made American hunters carry their rifles with an empty chamber. When a trophy bear broke cover, he forgot to lever a big .348 round into the chamber of his Model 71 Winchester. Click. The guy laughed:“Ish, I’d forgotten that! You’re a freak of nature.”
Only the matriarch’s vaunted memory matched mine, and she was a family legend. When she “lost her mind” to Alzheimer’s the idea a disease could steal memory terrified me more than death. It never dawned on me mere stress could induce forgetfulness. Not even combat stress. My maternal uncle and my father detailed their bloody World War Two infantry experiences so vividly they became my own once removed. Like the matriarch, I was keeper of oral history.
As for personal stress, I never forgot a childhood hurt or teenage slight. I held grudges. When a prominent Episcopal bishop died in the South, I said I hoped he died in pain. As our parish priest in Florida, his sexual “grooming” of a virginal teenage acolyte — me — shamed me when his caresses gave me an erection. Thereafter I carried a switchblade to church, vowing never to be cornered again, but never told the matriarch because she thought he “walked on water.” He was promoted to a cathedral before I had to gut him.
I read of the old bishop’s death in an Episcopal periodical when I still was employed, and active in a Northwest charity providing group homes to girls abused sexually by their families. And here’s where my vaunted memory breaks down: I recall Chloe’s sympathy for victims, not her saying it stirred her own nightmares. Yet she told Mr. Jazz Musician she told me she was sexually abused. All I recall is her saying a “dirty old man” looked up her dress as a girl. And gave her money not to tell.
Nor did my sense of betrayal by the old bishop prompt her mention of Barry’s sexual grooming. I don’t recall Mr. Jazz Musician suggesting her incest memories were blocked. Not that I would have believed it. Maybe your own memory has to jam — unable to remember if he said that for instance — before you can comprehend such a thing.
“Confidential” group therapy for female in-laws about the incest replaced decades of family secrecy. Once more I was on the outside looking in. With Chloe’s family, I had always been on the outside looking in. I felt cut off, alone. I no longer knew — certainly did not trust — the woman to whom I was married.
I don’t recall my son saying any more about what Barry did to him, and his male cousins. And he was around the house a lot, talking about the home he was designing to build in our pasture. Focused on the future, not the ugly past. I envied his resilience. He used his heavy-equipment skills to grade a long driveway from the street and prepared the site, acted as his own general contractor to supervise foundation pours, and fought with town planners about a sewage hookup. When he enlisted me for my “mouthpiece voice” to speak to the city council supporting his petition, my argument was he represented the third generation on land purchased by his grandfather; stability a small community needs. Maybe only I saw the irony.
He said I tipped the vote, but otherwise was strangely aloof. I wondered if he was ashamed he told me what Barry did to him. So much unvoiced tension that spring. I got a notion his wife the Bible thumper didn’t like me much; don’t recall why. Chloe and I still attended couples counseling. I am sure she never stopped defending using Barry as babysitter. Sure the incest hung over our sessions — our lives — but I don’t remember. I don’t even remember all I don’t remember.
My stumbling memory bothered me as much as all the stress. I researched “amnesia,” trying to grasp how trauma damages recall. I said I was working on a novel inspired by a famous amnesiac newspaperwoman. She walked out of her life one day and wasn’t found until years later, with zero memory of her previous life — scary to me as the matriarch’s Alzheimer’s.
It would be long after that summer when my old friend Hollis called my memory evidence of hyperthymesia — a twenty-first century take on my childhood’s alleged “photographic memory.” Which seemed an ultimate irony, because after that summer I no longer trusted it.
Both my children seemed made of sterner stock than me. I recall my grown daughter refusing to participate in group incest therapy she likened brutally to an “emotional circle-jerk,” choosing not to probe or permit probing blank childhood memories. She essentially said let the dead past bury its dead and practiced self-actualization better than I ever did in my positive-thinking years. Which included forgiving Mom her trespasses involving Barry. That decided, she wanted to reconcile their long-festering differences. Still considering me the Dad who could fix things, she sought my help.
She said the two of them needed to go away somewhere to talk, just the two of them. No shrinks or in-laws or outsiders. But she didn’t make enough money for a vacation, and Chloe would never voluntarily spring for the expense. Fix it, Dad. I did. I’d held novel proceeds beyond Chloe’s administrative control, so I funded a stay at a Victoria, B.C. hotel with happy memories for them both.
It would be pretty to say my action was purely altruistic. But while I have forgotten a lot, I cannot forget it wasn’t. My moral compass was shot. My thinking was muddled and selfish. I wanted stress relief of my own. So I arranged for Di to visit me while they were in Canada. And made an idiotic blunder that — deservedly — more than doubled my stress.
Di wanted our “chapter two” to include eating Pike Place Market piroshki with me that I told her about during my writing seminar. And to see the Pacific Ocean. Simple pleasures. We did eat those piroshki. We did go to the beach so she could see the Pacific. There was a photo, lost in those lost years along with so much more, taken by a friendly beach walker: the two of us in matching sweaters. She was big enough not to be lost in the XXL sweater I gave her when she admired its twin.
Apocryphal or not, her story that one of the sex toys she packed switched itself on and vibrated in her carry-on, alarming airport security, was memorable. Simple pleasures were not all she had in mind. There is a vague recollection of plumbing her front and back with her powered dildo and another inert one. And the electronic vibration of her clit against my lips while she fellated me.
Then a dim scent-memory of her arousal in the car coming from the beach. Of pulling off to pee, and her saying don’t put that away. Leaning my elbows on the roof, spinning headlights in my dazed vision, while her unseen mouth stiffened and then emptied me. She had enough eroticism for a sultan’s harem, imagination indefatigable as she was. The only other surviving memory is flatly refusing her hoarse request to fuck her with my revolver’s six-inch barrel, a fantasy too far. I never played games with guns.
Details all buried under later stress unless I saw the word piroshki. It became a kind of memory peg for the blunder I didn’t realize I’d made. A blunder that began my precipitate slide into a long, dark decade. When they returned from Canada, my daughter told me contentedly she had reconnected deeply with Mom, and praised me for making it happen. After she left for her apartment, Chloe acknowledged they had a wonderful time. Then added flat-voiced she was determined to enjoy their trip, even knowing I was off fucking somebody else. My reflexive denial sounded weak, even to me.
She fairly crowed. “You never could keep a straight face!”
The boil of my panicked emotions froze me. She laid out her evidence: my blunder was leaving a rental-car reservation in my briefcase, which her obsessive snooping uncovered. It had seemed prudent to rent because too many people knew my Bronco. In retrospect, hard to say what upset me most: her accusation, or my stupidity.
In Cynara’s case, a resort-operator’s blunder alerted her spouse. But this was all on me. The perils of philandering. The car reservation proved nothing; Di rented the car in her name. My name was on no motel register. It didn’t matter. Chloe knew what she knew. She announced she was leaving, and flounced out. This time she didn’t come back.
Eventually she let me know she was living with her sister, when she called to ask if I would still attend couples counseling. She was slightly mollified when I said I would. For most of the rest of the year, I saw her only meeting with Mr. Jazz Musician. Incest took a back seat to her fury at infidelity.
She was evidently tired of being defensive about Barry. My blunder put her on the attack, asserting I “always” followed the old double standard that a husband could fuck at will, but not the wife. Always was incorrect. But that was a quibble a suspect would make under interrogation, amounting to confession. A second blunder I refused to make. I stood by blanket denial.
