Cheating a little bit here – this was packaged as a book on my eReading App but is really only about 50 pages long, which wouldn’t qualify as a book on paper, maybe a long short story or a short novella. I’m getting a bit desperate: we’ve been out of town for most of the month and I am reduced to writing about books I have on my eReader (although somewhere in this house is a copy of Heart Like a Chainsaw that I loaned my niece who secretly shares my love of horror, against her mother’s best intentions, that I’ve been waiting for her to return so I can write about it, awesome book), most of which I’ve only read once and can’t remember all the details of.

But this book seems appropriate. This week we’ve been parent-sitting my 90-something year-old in-laws. My MIL has been suffering from short-term memory loss for years, and will ask where my SIL’s family is and when they are coming back, and then take a bite of dinner, chew and swallow it (which takes several minutes), then ask again where my SIL is and when the family is coming back – and she’s just as surprised each time we answer.

My FIL, who is a few years younger, has pretty good short-memory and pretty good long-term memory, but is starting to lose track of reality, certain that he needs to call his boss and explain when he’ll be back to work, or deciding to find a new home.

At dinner, they join us in the dining room and my FIL begins telling stories from his life. My MIL sits quietly, gazing at him as lovingly as Desdemona gazed at Othello when he enchanted her with his tales (but without the same domestic abuse). These tales go on forever, loop back on themselves, restart, repeat as soon as he is done, repeat with more and different details. And she listens and smiles and chuckles admiringly, as if she had never heard them before – although he just finished telling the same darned story – because she can’t remember that she literally just heard the story two minutes ago. They are a match made in heaven and I get a kick out of watching them, so much in love even after all these years.

Take a Look at the Five and Ten features a woman in her 80s, Grandma Elving, who tells the same story over and over, about the time she worked at Woolworths at Christmas while she was in college in 1960, an experience that she loved and relives every time she tells the story. The main character, Ori, picks up Grandma Elving and brings her family Thanksgiving, listening to her story all the way there. Over dinner, while a Great Aunt finds fault with Ori (and everything else), Grandma Elving tells them about the nativity sets that Woolworths sold, about working the lunch counter, about the decorations, the weather, her bus trip through the light-filled, decorated, city. Ori’s obnoxiously snobby stepsister can’t shut up Grandma Elving, nor can the step-sister’s pretentious mother (determined to upscale Thanksgiving with seaweed and octopus salad and broiled partridge served on a bed of pear tree twigs).

However the stepsister’s latest boyfriend, Lassiter, is a med student specializing in neuroscience and is fascinated by the depth of detail in Grandma Elving’s recollection, something he calls “flashbulb memories” which he believes to be caused by a traumatic event, the same way that some of us remember exactly where we were and what shoes we were wearing and the exact words that the people around us said, when the Challenger crashed, on 9/11, or when we realized who was going to win the 2016 election.¹

Lassiter ropes Grandma Elving into a memory study that he is doing – and she loves it! She hires Ori to drive her back and forth to her appointments at his clinic, paying her by the hour to sit with her and Lassiter, and listen to the memories she loves recounting so much. But something is wrong – Lassiter is convinced that the memories are connected to a traumatic event but it must be so traumatic that it is buried deeply in her memory and she can’t dredge it up. Perhaps, Grandma Elving suggests, they could go downtown – seeing the building where the Woolworths is may jog her memory, and it’s so lovely this time of year, with the snow falling, and perhaps they could just stop for a cup of coffee or dinner…

As Ori finds herself spending more and more time with Lassiter, she discovers – to her horror – that she is falling in love with him, a love doomed to fail, since he is with her glamorous and possessive step-sister. But then she discovers something horrible about Grandma Elving’s memory, something she must share with Lassiter, if only she can pry him away from Christmas dinner, just for a moment…

This is classic Willis, at her best. The scientific underpinning the humor, the doomed love of an “ordinary” woman for a man absorbed in his work, a confusing underpinning.

And a heart-warming ending, for it is, after all, a Christmas story.

Christmas in July!

Have a little patience with the elderly folks in your life who love to tell stories over and over again.

1. For my own flashbulb memory, I remember exactly when I decided to leave my job at the company where I had grown up, I remember exactly where I was sitting, the legal pad in front of me, what I had doodled on the pad while the person that made me quit was talking, the questions I asked, the tight feeling in my chest, and the sheer sense of rage that swept over me, while I kept my affect flatly polite, as if what they were saying was something I would consider. I knew what he was doing while he was pretending to do something else. Weak, pretentious, insecure, useless Asshole. ↩︎