March 18
Mom and Dad are watching a recording of this year’s Oscars, to see if Bonnie and I are visible. All the actresses in ball gowns tell us what they’re wearing: I’m wearing Dior Haute Couture. I’m wearing one hundred small emeralds. I just had a cheeseburger, I’m starving.
And Dad pokes fun at the actors and actresses—remembers all their names, like any regular, not sick person.
It’s Mom who finds us. She pushes pause and points her finger to the screen, and there we are, though out of focus: Bonnie and me in our borrowed dresses and jewels and too-bright lipstick, looking not like ourselves.
“Brad Pitt!” Mom exclaims, thrilled. “Look how close you are!”
March 20
Because I’ve read that sulforaphane, produced in the body, and found in broccoli, can help keep the brain sharp, I cook broccoli for lunch and broccoli for dinner.
The vegetables are called “cruciferous” because their flowers are cross-shaped, I also read.
Sometimes I switch it up with cauliflower. I cook small, oily fish for their omega-3s. For breakfast we have oatmeal with flaxseeds, which also have omega-3s, and berries, which have antioxidants.
A diet can’t reverse harm that’s already done, I know. But what if it could halt the decline?
March 21
I’m looking for stamps. If I send in these empty coffee bags I’ll get a five-dollar manufacturer’s rebate. Five dollars buys me another bag of beans. The goal is to keep this up forever and never buy coffee again.
My stamp search is turning up empty. What I find in the junk drawer, instead, are divorce papers, with signatures from both my parents, dated the year before last—meaning well after the physicist was purportedly out of the picture.
I remember my parents used to let me have their old checkbooks, and the fake checks I used to write—to Linus, to my parents—worth billions. “VOID,” I would write on the memo line. Maybe, I thought, this had been somebody’s idea of an imaginative game. Divorce papers, all filled out.
I can’t be in this house because of everything. Plus the kitchen sink is spitting food up and there’s a wasps’ nest the size of a head outside underneath the awning. I head to the Laundromat with our hampers. It’s a reassuring thought, that the machines work there.
Outside the Laundromat, two drunks are sharing a cigarette. The man has a hand tenderly cradling the back of the woman’s head, which she appears to enjoy at first, before she begins to resent it.
“You think it’s lumpy,” she says, pulling away, suddenly. “You think my head is lumpy.”
“I don’t think it’s lumpy,” he says.
“You do,” she says. “You think it’s lumpy.”
“Baby, I love your head,” he says.
“You’re saying I’m not smart,” she says. “Is that what you’re incinerating?”
He says, “I’m not incinerating a thing.”
“It’s nothing,” my mother says, when I ask about the papers. We’re watching a show on TV: families are having their homes redecorated by TV show people, who insist the families throw out all their belongings with sentimental value and replace them with brand-new items. The people always protest when their things are thrown out.
“Mom,” I say.
“Shhhhhhh,” she says, while a video game console gets appraised.
“No way in hail,” says the owner of the video game console, unwilling to let it go.
There was a time, I’m now remembering: she let Linus cry, until my dad finally came home and changed his dirty diaper.
What could that have meant? That was before everything went wrong, though, wasn’t it?
March 22
Now I’m just looking in every drawer, like it’s my job.
Cleaning the guest room, I find, in a drawer, written in my mother’s hand, on the back of an unopened envelope:
Howard:
— Leaving empty bottles in the car’s center console.
— Crashing into a shrub in front of the house.
— Peeling open a bunch of bananas, one by one, and abandoning them naked on the table.
— Saying to me, Here’s a thought: I do not deserve you.
And below:
Howard drunk; Howard causing me sadness.
Howard, Howard, Howard.
In the glove compartment of his car I find expired packets of mustard. They were once my dad’s, I know, to fool my mother and the Breathalyzer.
Also in the glove compartment: a photo from the first family vacation I can remember, a trip to Washington, DC. On the subway, coming back from the Lincoln Memorial, Linus and I were in a pair of seats, and my mom and dad in seats opposite each other. Leaving the memorial, they’d just gotten into an argument—who knows what the subject was.
On the train, my dad had patted the seat next to him, a way to beckon her over. She shook her head slowly and seriously and tried to keep a stern face. It had taken a moment before she smiled.
Later, in the house, I find a photo of us, at the actual memorial: Linus is bright pink, like he’s been crying, and my parents are scowling and I’m eyeing the man with the cart full of ice cream, in the corner.
“Let’s not talk about this now, okay?” Mom says.
She rubs lotion into her hands and then opens the newspaper.
“For better grip,” she says, from behind it.
“You can ask me anything, dear,” she adds. “Just . . . later.”
I wonder if this is why my mother asked me to stay: she didn’t want to be alone with him.
“Don’t blame anyone else,” was what William Mulholland said, we learned, when the St. Francis Dam failed. “You just fasten it on me. If there was an error in human judgment, I was the human.”
Fasten a failure! Like a pin on a necktie.
March 23
Class this week is off campus. Because it’s raining and there’s a leak, Theo tells Dad. We’re crowded around a small table at a café. A cupping is happening: they’ve given us little cups of beans that we are to smell.
Joan, a graduate student, maybe my age, always sits near Dad. She has far-apart eyes and long, blond hair. Actually, none of her hair isn’t impressive. Her eyelashes curve in this logic-defying way, as if each set of lashes might be able to support a mothball or a marble. She bears a resemblance to Kristin, Joel’s new girlfriend. They look like they might own the same breed of dog or buy the same type of groceries. Immediately I don’t like her.
I notice Joan trying to catch his eye, my dad not picking up on it. That’s when I realize, Oh, and try not to follow that thought any further.
“Why her?” I’d asked Joel, about Kristin.
I don’t know why I thought he’d give me an answer.
Outside, there are undergraduates putting tags on trees.
When I ask what’s going on, one of the girls says, “We’re tracking squirrels.” That’s the moment Theo appears beside me.
“Squirrel teeth, I recently learned,” he says, “grow continuously. It’s something like six inches every year. But eating all those nuts and things keeps their teeth from ever getting that long.”