When the Spanish explorers arrived in the real California, between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, they didn’t think the place looked like much: no particularly valuable natural resources—none, at least, that they were interested in. Only trees and mountains, mist and fog—nothing to write home about. They stuck around anyway.
Five minutes before class ends, Theo takes a bathroom break to survey the situation. He texts me that Levin’s car, for some reason, is still in the parking lot. But he’s also not in his office. Meaning he could be anywhere.
Theo text messages all of us with a new plan. We’re going to have the tallest students walk Dad to the car, thereby blocking view of him. Theo will be on one side; Jake, who’s six two, will walk on the other. I’ll walk ahead, scouting.
“But Ruth is a liability,” someone else texts.
“Do you have sunglasses or something?” Theo texts me.
The Amigo’s parking lot is now full of cars, but I spot him pretty much immediately: Levin is leaning against a silver Camry, sipping from a to-go cup and checking his cell phone. He seems distracted; he isn’t looking our way.
Theo slings an arm around Dad and we pick up our pace. Levin’s glancing at the Se?or Amigo’s door, then at his watch, then at his phone. We get Dad into the car successfully.
I’m still wearing my sunglasses. I think Levin notices us pulling out of the parking lot, but I don’t know for sure. My heart is beating crazily.
On the drive home, Dad is chatty. He’s happy, he’s making plans. He wants to finish writing his book this month, he says. Maybe attend some conferences in the spring.
“Sounds great, Dad,” I say, as convincingly as I can.
February 10
In last night’s dream, I was in high school geometry class. There was a class pet: a canary who chirped with the correct answers. He’d been trained in square roots. A classmate, wanting to stump the canary, asked what was the square root of 28,561? The bird chirped confidently to 169.
In the morning, I was impressed: not with the canary, but with my subconscious mind, for knowing the math.
Dad is in his office, already at work, and he’s taken a loaf of bread into the room with him. But instead of fully closed, the door remains ajar, filling me with the smallest measure of hope.
I look in the fridge. Inside there is a jar of guava jelly and a hard, wizened piece of ginger. In the very back of the pantry, there’s a box of linguine, a box of hardened brown sugar, and a bag of almonds, two years past its sell-by date.
I type into the search engine How long to starve to death? and am somewhat heartened by the answer, which is anywhere from three weeks to seventy days. I eat what’s left in the jelly jar.
I head to the high school track where I used to run laps, half-expecting—hoping—to find a wandering canary. It isn’t there, of course. There aren’t any yellow birds, or any birds at all. But there is my ex–gym teacher, on the ground, searching for something. She says she’s looking for a dropped earring.
She looks the same, only grayer. She wears her hair like usual: cropped haircut, miniature pigtails. Her brow is furrowed. She doesn’t seem to recognize me. I get on all fours to join her, but the track is very big, and the earring is very lost. The girls’ track team descends the bleachers in tiny shorts and ponytails.
“It’s green,” she tells them. “It’s jade.”
They drop to the sand. It’s a good twenty minutes before one of the girls finds it and holds it up. It’s no bigger than a popcorn kernel.
I run six laps, a mile and a half. The high school girls run like beautiful ostriches past me. I am panting by lap number two.
“What’s the problem?” my ex–gym teacher says. I am hunched over, catching my breath, wishing I’d eaten something. “What’s the problem?” she says again, and I straighten. I jog away from her, without saying anything.
“Hey!” she calls after me. She really was the worst. “Hey, I’m talking to you!”
But I keep running and don’t bother to look back.
On my way home I stop at the grocery store and buy a head of garlic and a can of tomatoes. Canned goods are forbidden, of course, but I am feeling defiant, and how is Mom going to find out, anyway?
Mom’s thrown out everything but a glass baking dish. She claims she’s shopping for safer cookware. I spread the tomatoes on the baking dish, with salt and oil, brown sugar, slices of garlic, and ancient dried oregano from a sticky plastic shaker.
While the tomatoes are roasting, I rinse the tomato can out and boil the water in the can itself. I cook the pasta in batches in the small can. I toast the almonds from the pantry and blend them with the garlic and the tomatoes and the herbs. Suddenly there is pasta and there is sauce and the semblance of a real meal. I set the table for two. I head upstairs and knock on his door and call “Dad?”
Nothing. I think, Please, Dad, please, please. And still nothing.
I’m turning around, unsurprised but still disappointed, when against all odds the study door opens. Against all odds he follows me down the stairs and takes a seat at the set table. Dad eats the pasta, and at first I am too stunned to join him. I can hardly believe my luck.
He asks me how class is, from my perspective. I tell him I think the students are enjoying it, and I am, too. I’m learning a lot. This news pleases him. He washes our two dishes and two forks, pats me on the shoulder, and returns upstairs.
What on earth just happened! I am ecstatic, until it occurs to me that Mom might find the tomato can in the trash. I dig the can out of the trash, put it in a plastic bag, take it to the park, and drop it into a bin there, like it’s a bag of dog shit. But even during this excursion, I’m jolly.
This is how calibrated my happiness has become to him: I’m happy all night.
February 11
I consider getting the mail. I decide against getting the mail.
I have all these postal service–related fears, like the fear of mailing letters on Saturday, because I’m worried they’ll be lost on the off day. But more relevantly: the fear of running into the mailman while I’m at the mailbox—catching the mailman at the exact time he’s filling the mailbox, and having to wait awkwardly.
The fears are unfounded, I know. My mailman in San Francisco was an upstanding guy. Once he tackled somebody who stole a woman’s sunglasses from off her face. The thief ran four blocks. The mailman leapt on him and was able to return the sunglasses, intact.
I watch some videos on the Internet that demonstrate how to cook without using pots and pans. For example by putting eggs into a fire.
Another video explains that you can use a basket with water in it, and heat up river rocks, and drop them in, the Native American way. I click on more videos: How to make a candle from an orange. How to open a can without a can opener (but you need a parking lot). A prank that is basically loosening the lid on a ketchup bottle so the ketchup spills all over your prankee’s food.
It was daytime when I began looking into this, and now, somehow, it’s not.
Here’s the thing: I cannot eat any more pizza.
What I’ve been learning from the Alzheimer’s forum is that consuming cruciferous vegetables can help with memory loss.
“Cauliflower, cabbage, cress, broccoli, and bok choy,” I read aloud to Mom.