The Memory Root

For a while, Doris remembered when it started. A January day. Mild: 65 degrees, gentle breeze blowing in from the Gulf. She had brought her biology students to a heron rookery deep in the Everglades, an hour trip by launch and then another half-hour poling their skiffs through the  mangroves. They saw heron, all right, and snowy egret, but also the startling contrast of the anhinga with its black-and-white wings and colorful neck – taupe in the female, glossy black in the male, with his stripe of brown like a closed apostrophe. Their babies had S-shaped necks, fluffy as ducklings.

“It goes by other names,” she said. “Snakebird. Water turkey. And of course, the Latin.”

But she could not come up with the Latin. It was like driving on a foggy road at night, when a deer springs up in your path and you have to slam on the brakes. She could see no farther. The answer was on the other side, but it might as well have been 100 miles away.

The students did not notice her discomfort. They assumed it to be a kind of test. Serena had the answer. Only as the other young women’s heads bobbed over their tiny notebooks did Doris feel the heat rising in her cheeks. The answer could not have been simpler.

The bird’s Latin name was Anhinga anhinga.

To be selected for a field trip with Professor Doris Chastain Blane was a badge of honor. She took only her best students. Known as a tough grader, a “task-master,” as she had overheard one say, Doris had the added cachet of being a minor celebrity. Her book, The Last Road of the Naturalist, had been a brief best-seller decades prior. At her home in Virginia its foreign editions filled the bottom shelf of her office bookcase: French, Portuguese, British, Japanese. Accessible, chatty, the book had been seen as a call to arms for anyone concerned about the changing climate, disappearing wildlands, and threatened species. But university deans don’t take well to popular literature. She had nearly lost her shot at tenure because of that book, one reason she never wrote a sequel. She still received a royalty check every six months, a nice sum but not enough to live on. She needed her day job.

When she returned from the Everglades, Doris tried to forget the momentary lapse. For surely that’s all it was. It had happened right before lunch, when she was a little light-headed. The answer was so obvious, but her normally hot-wired brain had shorted out. Laughable, really, that she could not come up with it.

The Virginia spring arrived earlier, and warmer, than usual. After classes began in late January, a spell of downpours sent water roiling down the city’s hilly streets, then ushered in blissful blue-sky days. Students lolled on the campus green, books propped on their knees. By spring break the South sweltered. Florida topped 100 degrees daily; Doris overheard some students planning trips to New England instead of Miami or New Orleans.

Cape Cod in March. Doris didn’t know whether to be amused or troubled. “This can’t last,” she told her T.A., Marissa. “Pack a sweatshirt.” Only she couldn’t come up with the word “sweatshirt.” She couldn’t even summon “sweater” or “coat.” The two words, pack a, hung in the air between them, until Doris waved the girl away impatiently. “Pack,” she repeated. “Go on.”

She read the look in Marissa’s eyes as the girl backed out of her office. Hurt at her brusque tone. But something else: an epiphany that remained unspoken. Marissa knew. And, as discreet as her assistant was, it probably wouldn’t be long before others noticed as well.

Like the robins and mockingbirds who flew north to more temperate climes, Doris’s words began to disappear. Latin names were the first to go. The professor who could rattle off the genus and species of virtually every North American bird and flower began including the names on her PowerPoints, ostensibly so students could copy their spelling but in truth so the instructor could remember them. People’s names took wing next – all those explorers whose tales she had told in Last Road, from William Bartram to William Beebe, all those writers who had inspired her own work, like Marjory Stoneman Douglas and Rachel Carson, became infrequent guests at the roundtable of her mind. She took to bringing their books with her, holding them up awkwardly like Donald Trump flashing a hastily secured bible. She might be sailing along smoothly, explaining concepts like life zones and parasitism, when a simple term like “altitude” or “pollination” would fail to appear. She would stumble ahead, throwing in a hand gesture as though to dismiss the thought she could not capture. This is so simple, I’m not even going to say it aloud.

Like late migrants, the words returned eventually. At 3 in the morning or when she was in line at the food co-op or while walking (briskly – students always had trouble keeping up) to the faculty parking lot, the term would pop into her head. She had too much on her mind, Doris told herself. Stacks of grading and students needing recommendations and service on the faculty governance committee (a nuisance she should have declined) kept her in a perpetual state of catch-up. If something occasionally went undone, if a student’s electronic submission could not be found, was she really to blame? The job, once a profession, had become clerical. She should be in the Virginia woods, looking for warblers. Instead she was filling out Excel sheets in triplicate.

The matter came to a head, as most issues of aging and employment will. The following semester an undergraduate protested a failing grade, insisting she had completed all her work. In the spring another young woman, who peppered her with questions in class, filed a formal complaint alleging her incompetence. The dean was blunt. Doris, she said, it is time to retire. The university offered a monetary sweetener. She was done.

So she boxed her books, nearly five hundred of them, and hired a mover to bring them to the house. Tossed three decades of lesson plans and audiovisual aids; no one used transparencies anymore. On her last day in Hawthorn Hall, the window air-conditioner moaned its sad chorus of goodbye. Outside, the temperature reached 101 degrees. It was April.

Like many retirees, Doris busied herself with a long to-do list. The house had been neglected – the exterior needed painting, the living room wallpapering, the walkway sealing. She hired a firm to redo the floors and paint the walls. Then she spent two days unpacking her books. Now, at last, she could return to the sequel. No longer did she fear people frowning upon her “popular” work. And so much had happened since Last Road was published – surely the world would want to hear what she had to say about the changing climate, and all her predictions that had been borne out.

But no matter how hard she tried, Doris could not get any traction. She would start each morning, eager to begin, but by noontime had accomplished nothing but shuffle papers. By afternoon, she needed a nap.

So she hired Serena. The young woman who had been so quick with Latin nomenclature had received her master’s in botany and was enrolled in a Ph.D. program. In return for a little help, Doris offered Serena room and board. She imagined her star student would put her papers in order so Doris could concentrate on her writing. Serena eagerly set upon the task. She divided notes and printouts of ornithological and botanical studies into folders, neatly labeled in marker: Nesting behavior. Invasives. Extinction. Each morning Doris sat at her desk, picked up a folder and rifled through it. But like the words that had flown, so too had their migratory routes. What had she been thinking when she printed out this study? Why did her handwriting seem incomprehensible? It was as though someone else had collected all this data, written these notes, researched the literature. Doris could not recall any of it, and the words huddled on the page, as though waiting for the seasonal cue to fly – a signal that would never come.

A year passed. Serena no longer organized papers. Now she ran the household: paying bills, reminding Doris of her appointments, shopping, cooking, cleaning. Doris paid her a salary in addition to room and board. When Serena left on research trips, a woman named Cora who worked in Housekeeping at the college took over. Doris watched, helpless, as her life slipped away. Serena and Cora treated her with kindness; she knew that. But some days she couldn’t find the words to thank them.

She stood at the picture window every day, trying to grasp what was happening. The world devolved into three seasons: rain, drought, and fire.  All summer, mountain blazes circled the city. Each year the fires became more intense, ripping through hillsides only a half-mile from Doris’s house. The average daily temperature was 110 degrees. The city emptied each summer, as those who could fled north.

In October, when the heat relented, Serena decamped to Florida on a field trip, and Cora moved in, bringing her wok and baggies of spices and herbs. She stirred up meals that Doris did not recognize. Their taste stayed on her tongue long after she swallowed. Over and over she said, “What is this? It’s good.” And Cora always responded, “Good, and good for you.”

After a few weeks, Doris no longer asked Cora her name. She woke earlier. She began feeding the birds again, and did not have to be reminded where the sunflower seeds were kept. She returned to her desk and leafed through her notebooks. While she jotted notes, Cora brought her cups of herbal tea that she bought at the Asian market. Doris was writing again! But her head pounded, and when she got up from her desk, the books on the wall swam in a blurry mist.

“Where is Cora?” Doris wanted to know. Serena was buzzing through the house, muttering, tossing items from the kitchen counter into the garbage. 

“Cora isn’t coming back,” Serena said, without looking up.

“Oh, that’s bad.”

“What’s bad is she was feeding you ginseng, which is not safe for a woman your age.”

“That’s the memory root.” Doris surprised herself by remembering this. “The Great Smokies.”

“Yes, you can find it sometimes in the Smokies,” Serena said, her tone softening. “But it sent your blood pressure skyrocketing.”

“I like Cora,” was all Doris could think to say. She knew she had lost a chance at something.

“What’s out there?” Doris asked Serena one day. She had no words to explain that the lawn was no longer green, but brown thatch. She had forgotten the names of all the flowers she had once grown around the yard. The plant with the long tongue. The tall bell-like blooms. The one with the silky petals. Perhaps it did not matter, because they had either dried into sticks or disappeared altogether.

“Come sit,” Serena said. She brought lunch and set it on the tray: the soup that is red, the cheese that sits hot between bread.

But Doris did not want to sit. Her world had vanished. Maybe she was in Hell. That was a word she recalled. “Damn it to Hell,” she said, louder than intended.

Serena’s lips flattened into a straight line. They did this when Doris was being difficult. Serena rarely uttered a cross word, but sometimes a veil came across her face.

“You are exhausted,” Doris said, happy to have come up with the word.

“I’m just hot,” Serena said. She fussed with the napkin and spoon. “The AC can’t keep up.”

Doris was not keeping up. “I had a plant with a long tongue. The color of soup.”

Serena, frowning, looked at the bowl. “Do you mean like a pitcher plant? Something – carnivorous?”

Doris, still at the window, shook her head. “No! Not that!” She could picture the Venus fly trap – she had found it once, years ago, in North Carolina – but she could not remember its name, either. But she knew it had never been in her yard.

“You have to eat,” Serena said. “You know what’s happening tomorrow.”

Doris turned back to the window. She had no idea what was happening tomorrow, but sensed that if she ate lunch now, tomorrow would come all too quickly, and whatever Serena had in mind was not going to be good.

“Hibiscus?” Serena said. “Was that it?”

Doris turned toward her, then meekly sat down. Serena fed her body, and then she fed her mind. Yes. Hibiscus.

The girl sat on the floor, bare legs crossed, leafing through papers. Next to her lay file folders  in haphazard piles. Doris sat by her window with the binoculars. She focused and refocused them, but all she could see were unclothed branches. “There’s something wrong with this thing,” she said, taking it off her neck. She had long ago lost its name.

“Doris, you never told me you found Shortia.”

In Doris’s mind a blank white field, like snow, lay where Shortia used to be. “I didn’t?”

“No. And in Virginia!” Serena, to her annoyance, did not look up but continued to read the typed papers in her hand. Doris knew that the characters on the page had come out of her head and through her hands to her fingers, which had tapped out words on a device she could no longer identify. She began tapping on the wooden arms of the chair. The quick brown fox …

“This is incredible,” Serena said. “And all these botanists came to see it. You searched for a nearby garden where it might have originated. You took samples and sent them to the Gray Herbarium at Harvard, and the Smithsonian. They must still be there! And they named the stand of Shortia after you.”

“My,” was all Doris could think to say.

“The rarest of the rare! That little white flower. And you found it, Doris.”

Outside, a gust of wind. “Where?”

“The location in your article is vague, for obvious reasons. But there must be notes somewhere.” Serena began sifting through first one folder, then another.

A pinprick of light came. “A book of notes.”

“Of course.” Serena stood up. She wore barely any clothes. It was hot, but Doris insisted on her long pants and white cotton shirt. “Now, where are your notebooks?”

Doris turned to the window. She was not really interested in Shortia, whatever importance that white flower had once held. She did not want to see her handwriting again. “What month is it?”

Serena opened and closed the drawers of Doris’s desk. “April. But don’t worry. We’ll be out of here before fire season.”

“Where are we going?”

“You know, Doris. We’ve been over and over this.”

She did not know, but felt ashamed to say so.

“Here it is. Nineteen sixty-eight.” Serena began leafing through the notebook.

Doris had another pinprick, this time in her fingers and her nose. Worn cardboard, scent of libraries and woods.

“There’s a map! Doris, let’s go there.”

“Where?” Only suddenly she saw, through the keyhole of her memory, a rutted dirt road, a stream, and a stand of low-lying, creamy blooms.

“We’ll go tomorrow, early, before the sun’s up.”

Doris did not want to go out tomorrow, or any day. “You just want to steal it for yourself. So you can put it in your – piece of writing.”

Serena’s lips made a long line. “That’s an awful thing to say, Doris.”

“Maybe so,” Doris agreed, meek again.

Doris was not good in the morning. Serena had gotten her up at 5 and jammed her into the car like a sack of groceries and now they were driving outside of town toward a faint yellow line on the horizon. What had happened to her car? With its deep plush seats?

“I hope that’s just the sun,” Serena said.

Doris sniffed the air. “I had a car. I bought it after – they kept me.”

“After you got tenure,” Selena supplied. “Your car was very old, Doris. We had to sell it to the junk man. Besides, it was a polluting gas-guzzler.”

The girl’s car had a small TV screen that mapped where they were going. Doris could not make head nor tails of it, but soon they arrived at a rutted dirt road. Serena proceeded cautiously until the trail narrowed to a footpath, and then she parked.

Doris could still walk fast. She trudged as though she knew what lay ahead, although it had been more than 50 years since she’d been here. With the same stubbornness she had resisted leaving the house, she plowed forward and refused to stop when Serena tried to consult her notes.

She heard the creek’s chuckle long before her former student did, and she broke through a barberry thicket to get to it. And there it was at her feet, an array of white and pink flowers for which she had no name, English or Latin.

“Doris, for Christ’s sake.” Serena, a little winded, caught up. “Oh, my God, there it is.”

Doris kneeled. The muscle memory of decades of identifying, exploring, and collecting kicked in. She cupped the creamy blooms in her hands. She scrabbled around the roots, feeling for the plants’ runners. Her brain had lost the words “propagation,” “stolons,” even “seeds,” but her hands expertly parted the blooms’ petals to reveal stamens and pistils.

“It’s incredible,” Serena said. “This whole ecosystem is intact. Everything you mentioned in your paper is here – Nyssa sylvatica. Fagus grandifolia. Liriodendron tulipifera.”

Doris said, “Black gum. American beech.” She could not come up with the easy one, “tulip tree.”

Serena opened her mouth and closed it again. Doris pointed to the tiny herbs at her feet, but before she could get the words out Serena shushed her.

“Do you smell that?”

She did.

“That wasn’t the sunrise we saw.” Serena said it was time to go. Doris did not want to. How could they leave without collecting? Hadn’t Serena brought bags, tape, the digging thing? She dragged her feet as the girl alternately pushed and shoved her back onto the trail. She looked back, past the brush toward the creek. There were more white flowers down there. She was sure of it.

The smoke foiled Serena’s plan. The girl was going to put her in prison up north, but now the whole city was locked down, the airplanes grounded, and they had to stand at the window in Doris’s study, wondering how to evacuate.

“We could drive, but it would be a long detour to the west before we could go north again.”

Doris ignored her. She did not want to go anywhere, but no one cared what she wanted.

“It’s safer in Vermont,” the girl said. She had become a – what did you call someone whose mouth spewed words? Some kind of box?

“My parents have a camp up there, and there is a very nice facility for you.”

“Facility?”

“A senior home. Your room would have a view of the Green Mountains.”

Doris sank into her chair. She wanted to nap, to have the dream again about the white flowers. But every few minutes the girl’s tiny phone made a God-awful noise to wake the dead.

A week later Doris sat polishing the chair arms with her hands, drawing circles and squares, when the girl rushed in, her hair half out of its stretchy thing. “It’s gone. All of it. The fire took the entire ridge, according to the news.”

Doris looked at her. She did not remember the trip to the creek.

“I should have just let you collect it. I don’t know what I was thinking.” The girl’s lips vanished into her mouth. “I wish I had never seen it.” The girl was yelling now. “I wish to Christ I didn’t know.”

Doris walked to the window. “Know what?”

“Those brave little flowers, so white, barely up to our knees.” The girl’s face was wet. “Shit. I can’t stand this.”

“Come to the – glassy place,” Doris said. She held out her hand.

“No, no, no. I can’t look anymore.” But Serena let her herself be pulled.

Nothing remained to look at, but Doris turned toward the outside anyway. The world had a cigarette in its mouth. The tip glowed just over there, beyond the edge.

“I’m glad you found the Shortia,” Serena said.

Doris wanted to comfort the girl. She no longer remembered her name. She was unsure what Shortia was, but she sensed it had been burned up in this hell, along with everything she had once loved.

“Shhh,” Doris said. She gently turned the girl’s blonde head toward the yellow flaming light. The girl made a hiccuping sound. She leaned on Doris’s shoulder.

“Forget,” Doris said.