Today we’re in a lecture hall because Harry, one of Dad’s students, tipped us off that his philosophy teacher, who typically teaches a class on Plato during our exact time slot, has been out with the flu. The space is comically large—big enough to accommodate 150 students. The eight of us settle into the first two rows.
Today he’s talking about the gold rush, which those of us who grew up in California already know something about from our fifth-grade curriculums: the tens of thousands of men who came in hopes of striking it rich.
We panned for planted gold at Knott’s Berry Farm. In the books we read, men had to bathe in champagne because water was too expensive, and women sold pear blossoms to prospectors—tagging the trees with their names. One day they’d become pears or they wouldn’t. Everything was a gamble back then. Everything maybe still is.
Every day in San Francisco, on my commute home, I would pass the same elderly Asian woman, standing on a street corner, holding a napkin to her face and giggling behind it, playing peekaboo with nobody. Once a man talking to a mail slot turned to me and told me he was an angel. All I had on me was a five-dollar bill, which I gave to him.
A long time ago I stopped wondering why there were so many crazy people. What surprises me now is that there are so many sane ones.
After class, Theo and I convene at his apartment, to do what teaching assistants are supposed to do. What we’ve told Dad is that we’re entering essay grades into the computer system. But actually we’re eating delivery pad Thai and reading the notes Dad’s written on students’ papers. The notes are critical but thoughtful; the papers are long and well researched and earnest. I’m choking up a little bit at this whole unbelievable situation.
“How was your bedside manner, working at the hospital?” Theo asks.
“Unobtrusive,” I say. “Like a lamp.”
After I tell him about the loofahs, he shakes his head.
“Sometimes it’s just the way of the universe,” he says. “Once I got a ten-pound box of sour belts.”
“Did you send it back?”
“Not going to dignify that with a response,” he says.
Now he’s squinting at his fortune.
“Are you,” I ask, “farsighted?”
Immediately he looks sheepish.
I read it out loud for him: “You will grow slightly fatter every year.”
He fishes his glasses from his backpack.
Joel had better vision than I did, and so he was the one who, in the mornings, when we woke up, could tell me the time.
Sometimes I think: he could see things coming that I couldn’t.
The last ultrasound I gave was to a woman named Lucille. She was five months pregnant with a boy. I said something only marginally funny and she peed all over the examination table.
That they’re called “pregnancy symptoms” has always struck me as strange—symptoms, I mean. I remember the start of a yoga class, the instructor asking if anybody had any injuries, and a pregnant woman raising her hand.
“Well, you know.” She shrugged.
Same thing with “patient.” At the hospital the other day, the doctor, referring to Dad, called him “the Alzheimer’s patient.” Patient for what, I wanted to ask.
“Earth to Ruth,” Theo says. “You okay?”
Later at home my phone rings and it’s Grooms, who, instead of saying hello, is weeping into the phone. Kevin said “blah”! The most chill first word.
March 10
Dad’s in the backyard, cutting up wood and cursing. I’m walking to the library to return the DVD when a small child on a scooter shrieks at me: “A WOMAN!” In case, I guess, I’d forgotten.
Lately my thing is inventing new yoga poses. The Onion is one. You make yourself very round, then peel yourself, limb by limb.
March 11
Tonight I try my hand at dessert: baked Alaska, because of course. It’s so epic! How can you bake Alaska? How can you not?
March 12
I’m losing it, too. I intended to return a book to the library but dropped it, by mistake, into a mailbox. At the library, where I’ve gone to explain myself, I run into Regina, who was homecoming queen our junior year. She had hay-colored hair to her waist and I envied it. She has children now. They share names with hurricanes—I don’t know if it is intentional or what.
“This is Katrina and this is Sandy,” she introduces. The children are four and eight, and even so young, their expressions look overcast.
March 13
Okay, and then today: I dropped stamped mail into a trash can.
Online I read that the youngest person to have ever been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s was aged thirty.
March 14
I’m spending the weekend with Bonnie. We are at the drive-through. Someday we’ll make more money, Bonnie is certain. I’m less. For now we’re buying hamburgers because cheese is ninety-nine cents more. Bonnie has slices stowed away in a pocket in her purse that we insert into our burgers.
After, at an estate sale, inside a tackle box, we find a compartment with teeth in it: filled and gold-capped teeth, and bits of pried-out gold fillings. We buy them.
We have a job to do tonight: we’re seat-filling for the Oscars—there to make the ceremony look full. Bonnie talked her boss into letting me work, too. We’re sharing the same tube of Chanel. The color is “Pirate.” I’m wearing loaned diamonds, and Brad Pitt is two rows away.
In the bathroom, we discuss things I could do for an actual living. I could get a job nannying? Parents I did ultrasounds for would sometimes bring me their born babies—let me hold them.
“No,” Bonnie remarks, without missing a beat. “Repeat what you just said to yourself.”
Afterward, we’re paid in cash, and we decide to spend it at Jared’s sushi restaurant. The restaurant is called Tomorrow. It’s in a strip mall in Tujunga, and we have to step over a dead cat in the parking lot.
We order omakaze. Seeing us, Jared claps his hands together. He carves me a rose from a radish.
“Let’s see that eel peeling,” I say, and he turns suddenly shy.
It’s fine. The sushi is fine. Because there’s no alcohol at home, I haven’t had a drink in weeks. I put too much sake into my body, by mistake.
Back at Bonnie’s place, I say to Bonnie, “Let me cut your hair, just to try.”
“This is terrible,” she says, once I’m through, staring into her reflection. “That’s my professional opinion.”
March 16
The sun is out and it feels like spring so we propose having class outside, which Dad thinks is a great idea. He suggests the lawn outside the library; we suggest Mission San Gabriel for the historical element. It’s not chronological, Dad protests. We’re past the 1700s. But we have our way, and the class divides into carpools. We spend the sunny day in the grass, all of us in sunglasses, in view of the tombstones.
On the way home Theo, Dad, and I, in Theo’s Subaru, stop by an In-N-Out. Theo orders a hamburger rather than a cheeseburger. I hold the burger hostage instead of immediately handing it over, and interrogate.
“Why a hamburger? Because it’s cheaper?”
“It’s not that,” he says. “It’s just, I don’t know if it’s worth it. I don’t think I can taste the cheese.”