Mensa

In 2003, my friend Thaddeus and I, on a lark, took the Mensa test. We went to some public school that I can’t remember the name of, and we bubbled in the bubbles on a few Scantron sheets in response to a small battery of IQ tests. It felt horribly like the GREs or SATs, and I had to keep reminding myself that nothing was at stake. We took the precaution of telling no one what we were doing. My scores weren’t being sent anywhere. And the questions, or, at least, the language questions, really weren’t that bad. We laughed after the test, and went to the pub, and that was that.

We both got in.

And for the past 17 years, I have continued to renew my Mensa membership, despite the fact that I have been to exactly two Mensa functions since 2003. One was a lecture. Thad and I both went, and we both went to the pub down the street before the talk, for social lubrication purposes, and walked in fairly drunk. I remember talking earnestly to a good many people after the talk, all of whom invited us to various local chapter activities. They clearly thought we were extroverts. (So much for high IQs.) Of those invitations, we accepted one. We reviewed essays for scholarships. That was the second Mensa function. The experience was so surreal, an odd combination of contentiousness, formality, and zealotry, that I remember it all occurring by candlelight (which surely couldn’t be right) in a formal dining room (possibly right). Next year, at essay review time, we were “busy.”

For at least five years (and probably longer, because I’ve reached the age where everything that I think was five years ago was actually 15 years ago), I have been determined not to renew. I don’t need to spend the money on a membership I don’t use. I have no stakes in the organization (although it is a fine organization). I don’t need the validation (as much as I once did). But just as the deadline is about to slip by, I renew. Even when I had no money as a graduate student, I managed to renew my membership.

Because 17 years ago, when I received my acceptance letter to Mensa, I told my father, who guffawed and said, “Well that’s just funny.” I told my mother, who was suitably impressed. And I told my grandmother Gigi, my father’s mother, who was ecstatic. “Oh my goodness!” she exclaimed, “Mensa! Why that’s wonderful! How simply wonderful. Oh, tell me all about it. I want to know everything. Were there any cute boys? Hee hee!” We talked on the phone for an hour, and I promised I would let her know how the first meeting went.

A week later, she had a stroke in Costco, went into a coma, and died.

I had just started knitting her a scarf when my father called to tell me she’d had a stroke. “No need to come to the hospital,” he said. The hospital was in Northern Virginia, and I was in Richmond. “We’re going to wait and see how bad the damage is.” I kept knitting. I was new to knitting, and I knit slowly and carefully. The next day, my father said the damage was extensive, and she would not recover or wake up. The next day, the decision was made to take her off life support. Later, I would learn that my aunt, my father’s sister, had protested this so vehemently that my great-aunt, my grandmother’s sister, had to side with my father to overrule my aunt. My grandmother had no living will, and my aunt remembered her wishes differently from everyone else. (My aunt typically remembers most things differently from everyone else.) After my grandmother died, my father had to drive back to Northern Virginia to sign the paperwork releasing my grandmother’s body to the funeral home for cremation. My aunt refused to sign the release. Because my father had gone ahead with the funeral proceedings, my aunt stopped speaking to him for over a year.

The service was in Northern Virginia, where my grandmother had lived. At the service, my aunt blithely introduced my mother to my father’s new wife. My aunt’s son, my cousin Buzz, who hadn’t spoken to my aunt in nearly 20 years, was surprisingly there. At the reception in my grandmother’s condo, he cornered me in the kitchenette after finding out that I working on my Master’s in English, and mercilessly needled me for not having thoroughly memorized Milton. (“I should probably be the one getting the Master’s degree! Hahaha! But I’d rather have a job.”) My aunt held court in the back bedroom, and mourners were brought singly or in pairs to pay their respects. When the lights flickered and momentarily went out in the condo, my father looked at me said, “That’s Mother. And she’s pissed about all of this.”

The interment of her ashes was in West Virginia, where my grandmother grew up. My father drove, and I sat in the backseat of the car, with my grandmother’s urn resting on the floorboard, still knitting her scarf. I have almost no memory of the interment. Instead, I remember my stepmother in the front seat, getting a paper-cut on a book she was reading, and insisting we stop at a drugstore for antibiotic ointment. She hopped back in the car and slathered the ointment on her finger. Thirty minutes later, she began to feel strange, and decided to check the ingredients in the ointment—after all, she was allergic to sulfa drugs. And lo, the antibiotic ointment did indeed contain sulfa drugs, and she began to go into anaphylactic shock. My father sped down the windy mountain roads in search of a hospital, and when he finally found one, 20 minutes later, he pulled up to the ER entrance. He helped my stepmother into the ER, and the ER staff whisked her into treatment. My father came back outside and parked the car in a parking space. He stood outside the car, locking the car again and again with the key fob. The mountains echoed the repeated half-honks.

“After all,” he said, pressing the button on the key fob, “my gun’s in there. And Mother.”

I finished knitting the scarf on the drive back, and then I read in the back seat. I put the scarf in my knitting bag. I tried to wear it once, and wrapping it around my neck felt like suffocating in memory. But I couldn’t give it away, or throw it away, or do anything with it at all. For 17 years, I’ve carried the scarf with me, from home to apartment to home, from Virginia to Georgia, and every winter, when I pull out my hats and mittens and gloves and scarves, I find it again. Off-white cream, feathery, with soft watercolor pastels here and there. Sassy and soft and subdued all at once. She would have loved it. And I put it back in the box.

I know that this year I’ll probably renew my Mensa membership again, even though right now, I tell myself I won’t. But I don’t throw away the notice either. I hide it on my desk until March, and when my membership is just about to expire, I’ll have it waiting. And I’ll have it waiting because I don’t have her. Because I never drove up to the hospital to see her one final time. Because she always believed in me and treated me with kindness. Because she always loved and encouraged my writing. Because when my father shook me and knocked me down and called me stupid so many times I thought I was going to die, I snuck into his bedroom and called her, because only his mother, my four-year-old self reasoned, could tell him what to do. “Please,” I begged, “please tell him to leave me alone. I promise I’ll be good, please tell him that I don’t want to be hurt anymore. Please spank him so he knows how it feels to be hurt. Then he won’t hurt me. And break his toys so he knows not to do that. Okay? Please?” She asked me to put my father on the phone, and I refused, because I would get into trouble for using the phone without permission. So we hung up, and she called back. I held my breath and hid in my room. When my father found me, he told me never to talk to my grandmother without his permission. But he also left me alone. For an entire week.

When my grandmother died, I had already lost both of my grandparents on my mom’s side. My grandmother Boo died in 2000, my grandfather Man in 2001. My parents divorced in the fall of 1998, and my father married the woman he’d been having an affair with a few months later. She came with two young children, and my father gave them all the things he never gave me or my brother. He went to their soccer games. He bought them bicycles. I watched them closely for signs of abuse. But they never had to call my grandmother in secret, begging her to stop my father from hurting them.

After I got into Mensa, and after my grandmother died, I applied to a PhD program in Atlanta. I got into that, too. And I moved to a city where I didn’t know anyone. It never felt like starting over. It felt like starting. My mom supported me and came to visit often. My father never visited. And time covered the holes and gaps of loss. The loss of my grandparents. My hometown. The father who would never be a father to me. Living far away from my mom, my friends, my brother.

But the holes are still there. And sometimes, when the stars align just right, and the right scent or right sound or right memory surfaces, time whips the cover off those holes and I fall in. Time is a fickle bitch. After 17 years, I think I’m safe. I think I’ve had enough time. And then memory knocks me down and shows me that really, I don’t know anything at all.

And that’s what Mensa is, a defense, an homage, a blessing, a protection. It’s the sound of my grandmother’s voice, soft, thrilled, quivering with excitement. It’s my mother’s pride. It’s my decision to change my life and start my life, to stop letting life happen to me, and to start making my life happen.

I’m still not sure what I’m going to do yet. Will I let go, because 17 years is long enough? Or will I keep holding on, carrying my membership card like a talisman of remembering? Maybe I’ll renew, and finally attend another event. But I’ve told myself that before, too. I’ve been in this limbo before. I’ve been awash in the tides of memory and past and future, rolling like oceanic dreams that I can’t quite wake up from. But I know one thing for sure. Soon enough, it will be March. And I’ll decide.