Flowers for Algernon

“I told all the people in my office, and the girls at my bridge club. I showed them your picture in the paper, and I told them you’d be coming back here to see us one day. And you have. You really have. You didn’t forget us.” She hugged me again. “Oh, Charlie. Charlie… it’s so wonderful to find all of a sudden I’ve got a big brother. You have no idea. Sit down let me make you something to eat. You’ve got to tell me all about it and what your plans are. I… I don’t know where to start asking questions. I must sound ridiculous-like a girl who has just found out her brother is a hero, or a movie star, or something.” I was confused. I had not expected a greeting like this from Norma. It had never occurred to me that all these years alone with my mother might change her. And yet it was inevitable. She was no longer the spoiled brat of my memories. She had grown up, had become warm and sympathetic and affectionate. We talked. Ironic to sit there with my sister, the two of us talking about my mother-right there in the room with us-as if she wasn’t there. Whenever Norma would refer to their life together, I’d look to see if Rose was listening, but she was deep in her own world, as if she didn’t understand our language, as if none of it concerned her any more. She drifted around the kitchen like a ghost, picking things up, putting things away, without ever getting in the way. It was frightening.

I watched Norma feed her dog. “So you finally got him. Nappie-short for Napoleon, isn’t it?”

She straightened up and frowned. “How did you know?” I explained about my memory: the time she had brought home her test paper hoping to get the dog, and how Matt had forbidden it. As I told it, the frown became deeper.

“I don’t remember any of it. Oh, Charlie, was I so mean to you?”

“There’s one memory I’m curious about. I’m not really sure if it’s a memory, or a dream, or if I just made it all up. It was the last time we played together as friends. We were in the basement; and we were playing a game with the lamp shades on our heads, pretending we were Chinese coolies-jumping up and down on an old mattress. You were seven or eight, I think, and I was about thirteen. And, as I recall, you bounced off the mattress and hit your head against the wall. It wasn’t very hard just a bump-but Mom and Dad came running down because you were screaming, and you said I was trying to kill you.

“She blamed Matt for not watching me, for leaving us alone together, and she beat me with a strap until I was nearly unconscious. Do you remember it? Did it really happen that way?” 189 Norma was fascinated by my description of the memory, as if it awakened sleeping images. “It’s all so vague. You know, I thought that was my dream. I remember us wearing the lampshades, and jumping up and down on the mattresses.” She stared out of the window. “I hated you because they fussed over you all the time. They never spanked you for not doing your homework right, or for not bringing home the best marks. You skipped classes most of the time and played games, and I had to go to the hard classes in school. Oh, how I hated you. In school the other children scribbled pictures on the blackboard, a boy with a duncecap on his head, and they wrote Norma’s Brother under it. And they scribbled things on the sidewalk in the schoolyard-Moron’s Sister and Dummy Gordon Family. And then one day when I wasn’t invited to Emily Raskin’s birthday party, I knew it was because of you. And when we were playing there in the basement with those lampshades on our heads, I had to get even.” She started to cry. “So I lied and said you hurt me. Oh, Charlie, what a fool I was-what a spoiled brat. I’m so ashamed—”

“Don’t blame yourself. It must have been hard to face the other kids. For me, this kitchen was my world-and that room there. The rest of it didn’t matter as long as this was safe. You had to face the rest of the world.”

“Why did they send you away, Charlie? Why couldn’t you have stayed here and lived with us? I always wondered about that. Every time I asked her, she always said it was for your own good.”

“In a way she was right.”

She shook her head. “She sent you away because of me, didn’t she? Oh, Charlie, why did it have to be? Why did all this happen to us?” I didn’t know what to tell her. I wished I could say that like the House of Atreus or Cadmus we were suffering for the sins of our forefathers, or fulfilling an ancient Greek oracle. But I had no answers for her, or for myself.

“It’s past,” I said. “I’m glad I met you again. It makes it a little easier.”

She grabbed my arm suddenly. “Charlie, you don’t know what I’ve been through all these years with her. The apartment, this street, my job. It’s all been a night 190 mare, coming home each day, wondering if she’s still here, if she’s harmed herself, guilty for thinking about things like that.”