Memory Keeper

1.

It was stitched at the bottom-left corner of the navy blue bath towel hanging from a hook; sewn in a girlish loopy script in pale pink silk thread was her name, Belen.

Sitting on the loo with a hand resting on my chin, that one word stared at me at eye-level and suddenly brought on a wave of melancholy. My grandfather must have had the same matching navy blue bath towel, with his own name etched on the bottom-left corner: Lino. But it had been two years since his death and my grandmother had folded it away in a box along with his other clothes to give away to relatives or the electrician.

Now that she was the sole owner of the bathroom, there was no need to hang up a towel with a reminder of whom it belonged to. There would be no confusion over whose towel it was, no countering that the other one’s towel was out in the backyard hanging on a clothesline to dry. It was the only bath towel left, it was only my grandmother who was left.

2.

She cut most of her hair off in a surprisingly chic bob. The cut suits her wavy pearl hair. I’ve never seen her sport such a short cut before; she always had thick long curly hair that she kept up in an old-fashioned bun near the base of her neck. It has since become the uniform hairstyle I associated with grandmothers.

The only times I saw her with flowing, unbound hair was when she and my grandfather spent the night over at our house. Clad in a nightgown, she would brush it out carefully before going to bed. As a child whose mind was filled with fairytales and books, I thought she looked like a lovely, albeit haunting, Victorian lady.

My mother was ecstatic upon seeing her new look; she gushed that she should’ve had it cut a long time ago. My grandmother merely smiled and I, sitting next to her in the backseat, wondered if she cut her hair off as a symbol of mourning, the same way Native American wives do when their husbands died in battle. Or maybe she saw her hair as a heavy weight binding her and wanted to be free of it. I read in a book that memories are retained in our hair; the longer it gets, the more memories are stored in each strand. Maybe that’s why our hair weighs us down, our heads heavy as we walk around. I used to be one of those girls who took out her problems on her hair. During my student days, I invariably found myself heading for the salon for a quick cathartic snip when the solution to a particular problem eluded me.

Whatever the reason, my grandmother refused to divulge and leaned back on the seat, lifting a hand to absently pat the base of her neck, like trying to remember a phantom memory from long ago.

3.

There were deep scratch marks gouged in one of the armchairs in the living room, courtesy of my cousin’s stupid dog. The mantelpiece was cluttered with photographs of her grandchildren, eighteen in all, minus the one who had died as a baby—my sister. There were new paintings on the white walls, presumably to brighten up the room with their vibrant hues. There were no noticeable traces of dust on the furniture, but nevertheless the room gave off a feeling of neglect, of abandonment.

My grandmother, seated in the other armchair that was not victimized by the psychotic dog, seemed content to sit there the whole afternoon as she chatted with her daughter-in-law about a particular case of a failed marriage of the present day, spanning a total of four months before the couple got an annulment. Young people nowadays don’t try hard enough to make their marriage work because there’s an easy way out, she muses. She married her best friend just before the Japanese invasion, in order to have a husband to protect her from the soldiers’ filthy raping and pillaging. After the war was over, she could’ve separated from him, but instead went on to spend 60 years of marital bliss. That was the rule in the old days, but today a marriage like theirs was the exception.

After all the children have grown, it’s inevitable that they leave home. That’s just how life is. I listened to her words and thought, has it been worth it? She has six children but no one remained near to take care of her, even after their father died. She seemed to blend in the furniture of this place, becoming part of the silent atmosphere of the forgotten. I made the conscious decision to remain close to my parents a long time ago. I didn’t have a choice if you look at it morally. I was the only living child they had. Who would take care of them in their old age? I couldn’t bear the thought of either one of them being part of a silent room, watching dust motes dancing in the air as they sit in broken chairs, thinking, that’s just how life is.

4.

Still breathing, was my grandmother’s reply to how she was doing. She said this with a laugh, like it was the punch line to some cosmic joke. I hugged her good-bye, telepathically telling her to keep breathing until Christmas, until I turn thirty, until my wedding day, until I place her first great-grandchild in her arms. Until I can show her that I can try hard enough to make my marriage last a lot longer than four months.

I suppose love makes it all worth it, as cliché as it sounds. Love is what continues to sustain you to live after loss, to sole occupancy of an abandoned room decorated with gossamer dust from the past. She doesn’t need her hair to retain the memories; she keeps them alive all around her, of a home filled with the sounds of laughter and footsteps of six boisterous children and a husband that protected her from the meaning of singularity, of loneliness.