She’s since told me that, that year we didn’t speak, she had an Afro.
What a thing to have missed.
On the Alzheimer’s message board, I introduce myself and write:
I don’t know if I’m cut out for this.
This job is for someone purer of heart.
And the responses come:
No one here has never not thought that.
Your heart is in the right place. Or close enough.
Your heart has nothing to do with this.
You know what the origin of that phrase is, “cut out”? It’s from tailors. Having their cloth cut out for them.
Things that take up room in my brain that I wish didn’t:
? 3.14159265
? The names of all the world’s major and minor straits
? The entire screenplay of Mrs. Doubtfire
? How to turn an unwritable VHS tape into a writable one (tape over the little square in the lower right-hand corner)
? “We Didn’t Start the Fire”
? Ditto “Gangsta’s Paradise”
? The catalog of movies Joel has seen, at least up until last year
? Parakeet diseases
? Various taxonomic ranks
? The knowledge that the king of hearts, in a deck of cards, has no mustache, while the kings of spades, clubs, and diamonds do
Dad’s study is a mess. It’s my fault, for not checking it out sooner. The smell, when I open the door, is awful. There are half-eaten sandwiches in the drawers, and there’s mold on the bread. It looks like Dad has ripped pages from books and is assembling the disparate pages. There’s one stack of pages he’s rebound with craft glue and construction paper, as though he’s building a better book, compiling a book of separate books, a book that would improve upon the originals.
There is a bedsheet draped over the fish tank, and who knows how long it’s been there. The fish are still swimming, but their bodies seem drained of gold. They’re small ghost fish.
I call the pet store, and it’s Bill who answers. He says not to worry: goldfish cells produce pigment in response to light. Leave a goldfish in the dark, he says, and in time it will turn completely white.
Downstairs, my father has peeled a clementine, and now he’s sitting at the table, looking at this skin that’s fallen from the fruit in the shape of two perfect lungs.
Here, now, I’m wishing things were different. The other day I read that patients in later stages of the disease will eat the entire banana or orange. They will fail to recognize the peel.
It’s a terminal disease, all the literature keeps saying.
“But isn’t everything terminal?” is what I say to nobody, out loud.
June 1
And then, somehow, it gets better.
Dad, Linus, and I go for morning walks, and on our walks we notice bicyclists having a good time. We tell ourselves we’ll dust our bikes off and bike around ourselves, and another day we follow through: we ride our bikes past the community pool, and vow to bring our swimsuits back for a swim, which we do. We stop at the grocery store for cruciferous vegetables. Linus borrows DVDs from the library—movies we’ve never heard of, and mostly they’re bad, but still.
June 2
We’re at the store looking for capers and can’t find them.
“Can I help you?” the employee asks.
“We’re looking for capers,” Dad says.
“That’s a kind of fish, right?”
“It’s like a tiny olive,” I say.
Somehow she leads us straight to them.
June 3
I’ve bookmarked a recipe I want to try: patati con agnello scappato, potatoes with escaped lamb. There is no lamb. From now on I’m going to make macaroni and cheese “with escaped beef” and rice pilaf “with escaped pig.”
Linus is in the guest room, supposedly writing. I can hear Dad singing in the bathroom, revising Smokey Robinson: Though she might be cute, she’s just a prostitute, you’re my permanent one.
Mom joins me in the kitchen, not saying anything. She picks up a peeler and starts to peel potatoes. It’s her first time in the kitchen in who knows how long. I’m too surprised to comment. Out the window, our new neighbors Rollerblade by, the woman in her sports bra, the man wearing knee pads, obviously mad at each other but unwilling to neglect their exercise regimen—skating angrily.
From across the kitchen, Mom tosses a peeled potato into the stockpot. I try and miss; it lands in the carafe of coffee, splashing coffee everywhere. Mom shoots another one perfectly into the stockpot. Mine flies out the window. Mom laughs and laughs.
“There’s a potato in my coffee,” Linus remarks later.
“Potato?” Mom and I say innocently, at the exact same time. We crack right back up.
June 5
Mom isn’t in the mood for driving so I drive her to the doctor’s office for her regular physical. I nearly hit a stopped car, looking at the reflection of her pretty, just graying hair in the windshield. This is a fact: my mother is beautiful. When she was nineteen she broke her back and, after it healed, got a tattoo over the damaged vertebra. As a teenager, she chipped her front tooth on a jam seed. Her eyes have always made me think of pitted olives, the way they remind you—in case you’ve forgotten—that pupils are empty.
In the waiting room, under the fluorescent light, her transparent, vein-rich wrist, holding a water bottle, looks even more transparent. I never once heard my dad say she looked pretty. Instead he’d say, “Annie, you look so memorable.”
During the worst of it, my father was regularly carrying gin to class in a clear plastic water bottle. There was a day my mother found him passed out on the couch, with his shoes and tie still on, sleep talking as though to a classroom.
When my mother noticed him, she took off his shoes, removed his tie like a wife who might greet her husband home from work. Then she unbuttoned his shirt and gently lifted him out of his pants and boxer shorts, and left him to sleep in the nude in the living room until morning. She is telling me, now, that why she did this—out of kindness or malice—she still isn’t positive.
“You know what I miss the most?” I remember her telling me once, on a vacation to Mexico we took together in my sophomore year of college, after we’d had a couple of margaritas. “I miss that time your dad broke his leg.”
He’d fallen from the apex of an A-frame ladder. He’d ascended in the first place to extract leaves lodged in the basketball net. That was a long time ago: I was fourteen. After the injury they would practice walking backward. It was doctor’s orders, because going backward puts less strain on the knees. Mom would hold both Dad’s arms as he proceeded slowly in reverse—even up and down the stairs. He needed her, and that’s what she missed.
“Of course he needs you,” I’d said. I still don’t know if it was true back then. In any case, it was becoming true now. It was what my mother had wanted, although these circumstances were different, perhaps, from what we had pictured.