I'll Be Seeing You

by Elizabeth Berg

  My mother tells me that she’s lost some weight and may be able to fit into some of Tish’s clothes. “They’ll be nice for you to have,” I said, wondering if it was true. “As for the knickknacks,” my mother says, “there’s a little glass coach she had—you know, like a Cinderella coach? I want that. And that’s all.”

  My mother says Patty told her that when she was over at her mom’s place, she came across a plastic bag holding something. She looked inside and found the clothes that her mother had worn into the hospital, that place from which she never returned. “She sat right down and cried,” my mother said.

  “I can imagine,” I said. And what I wonder is, would she have wanted anyone with her then? Or, in this age of oversharing, is grief something that we only pretend others can enter into with us? And is that where the consolation is, in the temporary lifting from reality that pretending brings?

  JUNE 2, 2011

  “He’s worse every day,” my mother says of my father. Those words seem to be her mantra. But what do they mean, exactly?

  “Can you have a conversation with him?” I ask.

  My mother thinks about this, then says, “I can have a conversation with him, but then he forgets right away what we talked about.”

  “Hmm,” I say. I’m sitting outside on my back deck on a perfect day: not too hot, not too cold. Next door, a bunch of guys are painting my neighbor’s house. I’ve watched them for days. They are meticulous, thorough, and they seem to enjoy their work. They laugh, call out to one another in Spanish, sing. At lunch, they sit knee to knee on the front porch steps of the house, enjoying the common pleasure of eating with others. These guys are going to paint part of my house that needs repainting, too; we shook on the agreement this morning. There’s always something to do when you own a house.

  But my parents’ house might be sold before it even goes on the market, without our fixing anything. Someone wants to know the instant it becomes available, because her sister, who has two little children just as she does, is moving onto my parents’ street, and she would love to live there, too. Chelsea Street. It’s a nice name. And it’s such a nice idea, the two sisters, the four children, the cycle beginning again.

  But.

  Something hard-edged rises up in me. “Make sure you ask enough for it,” I tell my mother. “You can always come down, but you can’t go up.”

  “Yes,” she says. And then, “Well, I guess some decisions are going to have to be made. Maybe when you come.”

  “Okay,” I say.

  We talk some more about life there: my dad went to the Wednesday ice-cream social alone, as my mother was tied up with something. When she was out getting her hair done, my dad rode his scooter in the halls. When she asked him how that was, he said, “Boring.”

  “And you know, he’s not supposed to ride that scooter,” my mother says. “He’s supposed to use the walker.”

  I want to say, He’s getting out. He’s doing something. Who cares if he rides instead of walking? Can’t you tell me one good thing about him?

  Instead, “Hmm,” I say.

  My mother says, “I bring him the crossword puzzle, he won’t do it. I bring him tapes and he won’t listen to them. He doesn’t want to do anything.”

  “He wanted to go to the dining room for dinner with you,” I say. “Have you gone down to dinner with him?”

  “I told him I’d go,” she says.

  “When?” I ask.

  “This week,” she says. Vaguely.

  I think, When I get up there, I’m taking him out to dinner every night.

  But when my mother says yet again, “I wish someone else could be with him for twenty-four hours and see what this is like,” I feel bad for her, too. I feel bad, period.

  I hang up from talking to her and sit in my chair, unmoving. Then I ask Bill if he can have breakfast with me at George’s Diner. Egg white omelet with spinach and feta, that’s what I need. I tell him I’m having a hard time.

  “What happened?” he asks.

  The little house on the corner of Chelsea and Nebraska. The way that this will all keep on until it comes to a hard finish. The way it’s really true that if someone is diagnosed with Alzheimer’s they leave long before they leave.

  “I…” I say. Bill waits. Finally, I say, “It looks like my parents’ house is going to be sold. And I’m having a reaction to that that’s all out of proportion to…I mean, I never even lived there.”

  That’s what’s in my brain. Those are my words. But as soon as I say them, the veil drops and here comes something else, a memory of me as a little girl, maybe four, asking my dad what his favorite color was. I needed to know. I needed to know him, and this would help me. He thought a minute, and then he said, “I don’t know; blue, I guess.” I knew his answer didn’t reflect any lack of willingness or enthusiasm for answering the question. Rather it revealed something I realized I knew about him instinctively. He loved all colors. He thought they were all beautiful. He would pick one, if I asked him to, but he appreciated them all. He had a slide from a museum he visited in Holland. It was of a painting that showed a man’s hand holding a candle in the dark. You could see the red glow from the blood in the fingers, the black of the dirt caked into skin folds. The flame had the deep yellowness of real flame. “Look at that,” he said, when he once showed it to a few people who were gathered in the living room. No one said anything. But I, who sat in the corner and kept as silent as anyone else, felt my whole middle self leap up in acknowledgment. It was so close to joy, at first I thought that was all it was.

  JUNE 8, 2011

  On the drive to Minnesota for the family meeting, I turn off the radio to listen to the song of the tires on the pavement and let my mind empty into the landscape I’m driving through. Much of that landscape is tedious: freeways and rest stops and billboards and the mud flaps of semis. But there are also gorgeous stretches through Wisconsin: green rolling hills, rock formations so interesting and imposing they could stand in museums. When one makes the necessary pit stops, there is the interesting mix of fellow travelers. You see old people with sunglasses built into visors, teenagers with rainbow-colored hair, babies with Cheerios stuck to their chests, and dogs pulling frantically at their leashes to make pit stops of their own.

  I like driving across country alone or, as in this case, in the company of a dog. My four-month-old golden mix, Gabby, is stretched out across the backseat like the Queen of Sheba, and she thinks every idea I have on this trip is fantastic, mostly because the ideas usually involve stopping for food. I like the way time is real time, how you can count down the distance from here to there. And that even though you’re not really doing anything, you’re doing something.

  I’m anxious about this trip, because I fear I’m going to be told my father is worse. I fear he’ll be humiliated, confused, saddened. I fear we all will be. I was greatly distracted when I packed this morning, and I’m not sure I brought enough of what I need. But then I tell myself what I always do when I worry about not having what I need when I go on a trip: Where are you, on the moon? If you need something, you can just buy it there.

  I pull up to my parents’ house around seven that night, and my sister arrives almost immediately afterward, to give me the keys to both the house and to my parents’ new place. Before she goes home, we get some Chinese take-out at Wong’s, and we sit at the booth in the kitchen to eat it. It’s so familiar, this booth, this table, this food; there have been so many meals shared here with our parents. Their absence now is like a hulking ghost.

  Before I go to bed, I take the dog out. It’s such a lovely neighborhood we pass through, full of small, pleasant-looking houses, all of them different from one another. I look into the lit-up windows of the houses I pass, and I see that some of them are still the same as I imagine they were in the thirties, and some have been updated with fine kitchen cabinetry and stone counters, wit
h new windows and doors. Yards and gardens are well tended, seemingly well loved, and are excellent examples of how you can do big things in little spaces. Over and over, I am charmed by what I see people have done, sometimes in spaces not much bigger than a shoe box.

  You can walk to the grocery store from this neighborhood, if you’re young enough; you can walk to the bookmobile on the days it comes. My mother used to go to the bookmobile every week, and she brought the librarians pecan pralines every Christmas. This served as a bribe, she told me, so that she could move to the top of the list when requesting a popular book.

  From this neighborhood, you can walk to the elementary school and the Mexican restaurant and the barber shop and the dollar store and Key’s restaurant, where you can get a hot turkey sandwich and a sugar cookie with a diameter roughly equivalent to the planet’s. You can walk to Como Park, which has the band shell, where concerts are offered in the summer for free. The park also has the zoo and the kiddie rides and the picnic grounds and the conservatory and the golf course, which is where I now take the dog off the leash and let her run. It’s gotten so dark I can hardly pick out Gabby’s form as she runs in ever-widening circles, her leash bumping behind her. (This so if I am accused of having my dog off-leash, a ticketable offense, I can say, Uh-uh, look; she’s got it on.) My white jeans are glowing, as if they’re under black light. Gabby is ecstatic with the kind of freedom that is hard to come by in the neighborhood where I live; I imagine she’s thinking, Boy, am I glad we moved here! Or maybe it’s just me, enjoying the fantasy of living here, because that’s exactly what I am doing. Also, I’m imagining my parents and how happy they must have felt, moving into a place that offered so much. I’m imagining how when the last box was unpacked, they must have dusted off their hands, thinking that after all those years of traveling around in the military, there!—they were finally home, and they would never have to move again.

  That night, as I lay in bed, I hear the sounds of the grandfather clock ticking. It can’t be; the grandfather clock is in the new place, but I hear it. I stop breathing and I hear it still. And I think, Fine. A ghost clock. Welcome. I have always loved the sound of a ticking clock; I love it just as well in phantom form. Wel-come, wel-come, wel-come.

  JUNE 9, 2011

  “I would like to ask you to do a few things,” the occupational therapist—let’s call her Janet—says. She’s a blond woman with a ponytail, maybe mid-forties, wearing a white coat over her dress, and she has with her another woman, who is a student, there to observe. The student sits in the background and occasionally scribbles furiously away.

  Janet shows my father a piece of leather with various kinds of stitching around it: a running stitch, a whipstitch, and a more complicated, overlapping one. “I’ll show you a stitch, and then I want you to do it,” she says. She does one stitch, and then hands the leather over to my dad. He does a running stitch as well as he can—his compromised vision is a problem. He’s so pleasant and accommodating. “Okay,” he says; he might be accepting a mint julep at the Kentucky Derby. In the way that going out anywhere these days has become an outing—an occasion—he is in company mode. There is no apparent embarrassment that a man of his former might is now reduced to needing to show someone he can run a large needle through a large hole. He does not say, Why in the world would I ever have to do this?

  No. He could not be more obliging; he takes the needle, and he does exactly as she told him. But he skips a hole; then, I think, another. “Good enough!” Janet says. I look down, lest my expression give anything away. He doesn’t know he missed holes; he’s pleased that he seems to have done well.

  Janet says she won’t be giving the test to dole out pills into a MedMinder; he can’t see well enough to do that. Or to sew! I think, but I recognize my own defensiveness. I’m the daughter with a virtual slingshot in my back pocket, looking to deflect from my own sorrow.

  When he first sat down, Janet asked my dad if he had any hobbies. “Golf,” he said. “But I haven’t gotten a chance to go out yet this year.” This worried me; my dad hasn’t played for years now. He can’t see to play. Or walk the required distance.

  He said another hobby was that he liked to get out and drive around, but “I’m told I can’t do that anymore.” He looked over at Janet, and I was wondering if there was faint hope in his heart that she would say, What? Well, that’s not right; of course you can drive around! Naturally, she didn’t say that. She simply smiled and moved on to the skill tests.

  Now she brings my father to a wooden wardrobe full of clothes, both men’s and women’s: a pink fuzzy bathrobe, a tan raincoat, etc. She tells my dad to dress himself as though he were going out on a cold, rainy day. He puts on the raincoat, a hat, and picks out an umbrella from the accessories. Pass.

  Next he is asked to “go shopping for a belt.” There are rows of belts hung on the wardrobe door, and he is given a wallet with money inside of it. His task is to find a belt that fits and that he can afford, and then pay for it. He looks for the price tag of one belt and reads it with some difficulty: “$9.99,” he says. He looks at a few other belts, which are also $9.99. “They’re all $9.99,” he says, and Janet does not contradict him. He finds one that fits, then goes to the wallet to pay for it. Not enough money is in the wallet; he’ll have to go back to shopping. At first, he is a bit confused: Aren’t all the belts $9.99? But Janet guides him into looking further, and he discovers a cheaper belt, which he then pays for. Good enough. Janet takes the money back and my dad says, “Oh, I don’t get to keep it?”

  “Everybody tries to pull that on me,” Janet says, laughing, and I’m relieved she recognized that he was joking.

  My father is now asked to choose things from a box of disparate items in order to wash his hands. He picks up the soap but is at a loss as to how he is meant to really wash his hands; he hasn’t noticed that there’s a sink across the room. He is directed to it and he washes his hands thoroughly, then dries them well.

  He is brought to a kitchen-like area of the room and asked to toast a piece of bread, butter it, and put jam on it. “No plug,” my dad says, and Janet, pleased, says, “Right!” and carries the toaster to another part of the room, where my dad plugs it in. He puts the bread in the toaster, and when it pops up, it’s not brown. He puts it in again, and the same thing happens. He looks over at Janet, play-exasperated, and she says, “Okay, well, let’s finish up.” He puts the toast in for a third time, and this time it pops up brown. And then he butters it, puts the jam on. A+, I think, but this will turn out to be not so. She will take points off for him trying to brown the toast again instead of buttering it, even though I try to politely argue that what he did was completely logical, that it is what I would have done, too. I say, “You know, I think if you had said, It’s okay that it’s not brown, just go ahead and finish preparing the toast, he would have gone to the butter right away.” She stares coolly at me and says, “These are standardized questions.” Then standardize your toaster so that it toasts, I want to say, but don’t.

  My dad takes a map test, which requires him to find his way around the corridors outside the room; this he does very well. Then he and the therapist sit down to calculate his average. Janet tells him he got four out of five on this test, three out of five on that, and so on. Then she grabs her calculator to figure out his average, but before she finishes entering the first number, my father says, “Four point six,” and he’s exactly right. Janet looks over at him. “You’re good at this,” she says. My sister and I look at each other triumphantly.

  In the family meeting with the doctor, my brother, back home in Hawaii, is on the speakerphone as we all discuss what’s next. One of the things that comes up is that a social worker will be calling my mother to try to help get my dad into an adult daycare program at the VA twice a week. “I’ll have to think about that,” my father says. “Transportation is a problem.”

  “They’ll come and get you,
” Janet says.

  “We’ll see,” my dad says, and now it’s my mother and I who exchange glances, worried ones. My dad has got to do this, to give my mother some relief. She is so frazzled and worn out, she has no patience left. I’m not sure anyone would. Still, my sister and I gossip about her, the way she scowls when he kisses her good morning. “Would it kill her to go down to dinner with him?” we ask each other. “He took care of her for so long!” But it’s like that old argument about how your parents took care of you when you were a baby; now it’s your turn. It’s not the same. Baby butts are cute.

  When it’s my mother’s turn to speak, she complains that she gives my father crossword puzzles to do, Sudoku puzzles to do, but he won’t do them. “He can’t!” Janet says, in a way that sounds more than just a little peeved. She says, “It’s frustrating to try to do something you used to be able to do and just can’t do anymore!”

  My mother looks down at her hands.

  I inspect my own.

  My brother is saying nothing, and when the doctor asks him if he has anything to add, he says, “Hi, Dad,” and in those two words it’s like he’s come into the room, taken my father away from the table, looked into his eyes, and said, “Whew! They’re raking you over the coals a little bit, aren’t they?” My brother talks about how maybe what my dad needs is a nice motorcycle ride with him. We all smile, and I think it’s a pretty safe bet to think that we’re all wishing it could be so. But those days are over, and we need to deal with the situation at hand. Not long ago, I am embarrassed to admit, I told my mother, “Each stage of life comes with its own challenges.” As if she doesn’t know that. It was uncommon courtesy and grace that kept her from shaking her head and walking away from me.