Gram glances up from her crossword book. “All right?” she says with an uptick at the end. She still has a thick English accent, even after spending half her life in the States. The way she says it, it almost sounds like one word—“aw-right?”
“Fine,” I say.
“Rose, this is a good storm, right?” Mom reaches over and squeezes my knee.
“Yeah, looks pretty good out there,” I say. I turn to Gram in an effort to be less irritable toward her. “What are they saying on the news?”
“Landfall in two hours or so. The brunt of the damage will be farther south but we could still see some flooding, evidently.”
On CNN, a British reporter named Alastair Dunsworth (which sounds more like a character out of Harry Potter than a real human) is currently standing in the middle of the street in Atlantic City, his feet planted wide apart so he doesn’t blow over and one hand holding the hood of his official CNN all-weather parka over his head.
“Can I change the channel for a bit?” I say.
No one responds one way or the other, so I switch over to HGTV, where there’s a repeat episode of House Hunters on.
“Oh, we’ve seen this one,” I tell Mom. “They pick the two-bedroom under budget. The brand-new cookie-cutter one.”
“Bad choice,” Mom says, her body whirring like a quiet refrigerator beside me—the motor inside her just humming and humming. Mom and I always agree that period features, crown molding, and subway tile trump most things. Who needs double sinks in the bathroom? You and your spouse can’t take turns spitting out toothpaste?
“Yowza,” Dad says, bursting through the front door with a sodden bag of groceries tucked under each arm. He’s got the thick, reusable shopping bags, but I can tell our food is still going to be damp.
“So it’s raining, I guess?” I say.
“You could say that. The supermarket was downright post-apocalyptic. I think I managed to score the last batteries in the city of Cambridge.”
Dad extricates himself from his soaked rain jacket and boots and drips his way to the kitchen.
“At least the power’s still on. For now,” he calls from the other room.
“Want to make your old mum a cup of tea while you’re in there, love?” Gram says. My grandmother would have tea fed to her intravenously if she could find a doctor who would do the procedure.
“Your wife wants tea too,” Mom shouts. She likes to assert that she still remembers she’s his wife. One of Huntington’s only kind features is that it tends to spare its victims’ recollections of close personal relationships. Of course, when you lose control of your impulses and start saying horrifically nasty things to the people you know you love, it doesn’t really help that you can remember their names.
“Oh, sure. No problem,” Dad says, poking his head back in the living room. “Don’t anybody worry about me, I’m only a little bit damp down to my bones. I’ll just fix the tea for the ladies. I suppose the child wants one too?”
“Yes please.” I shift myself off the couch and slink into the kitchen, where Dad’s puttering around putting groceries away.
“Chicken soup?” I ask, noting the celery, onions, and carrots on the counter next to the cutting board.
“May as well, right?”
I take a heavy blade from the knife block and start chopping the celery. Chicken soup is our family’s answer to all things challenging. Bad cold? Chicken soup. Bad weather? Chicken soup. Bad news? Chicken soup. We’ve eaten a lot of chicken soup in the last several years.
The kettle whistles. Dad puts a steaming mug next to me on the counter, and then takes the tea bag out after just a few seconds—he knows I like my tea weak.
“Thanks, Dad.”
“Not a problem, my child.”
“Hey, Dad?” I rest the knife on the cutting board. “I’m sorry about last night. I was sort of a jerk.”
He stops puttering for a moment, holding Mom’s spill-proof travel mug in both hands. The steam floats off it and coats his stubbly chin in tiny beads of sweat.
“Okay,” he says. “And I’m sorry you felt blindsided. We were doing our best to protect you, and I still think it was the right call. But I can see why you would want to know all your options now. Okay?”
I nod. “Okay,” he repeats. Then he kisses the top of my head and returns to the living room with two teas. None of this is okay, in fact, but that’s all we can say about it right now, so I go back to chopping the vegetables for the soup.
I finish the celery and then start to quarter the onion. As soon as I cut into it, my eyes start to sting. Pretty soon, hot tears blur my vision enough that I can’t cut anymore without risking my fingertips. I retreat to the living room, squeezing a dish towel to my eyelids one at a time.
“This is bullshit,” Mom says, eyes still on House Hunters.
“Mom, I told you, they pick the wrong one.”
“I know you told me that. You don’t have to repeat yourself.”
I breathe and ignore her mood swing.
“Let’s see what’s happening with the storm,” Gram interjects, trying to distract Mom. The strangest things set Mom off these days, with more and more frequency—just another mystery of her deteriorating brain. She can be happy, almost her normal self, and then suddenly it’s like an invisible switch is flipped and we can’t reach it to flip it back.
* * *
It didn’t start like that. The lightning-quick changes in personality are a more recent development of the last six months or so. In the beginning it was more subtle.
The first sign that something was wrong was that she got into three fender benders in two months. The first time, she hesitated a moment too long at a left-hand turn and got clipped. Neither car had been going very fast and there wasn’t much damage. The airbag didn’t even deploy on the guy who bumped her. But he was still pissed—he said he’d looked right in Mom’s eyes as he’d first approached and he was sure she was going to wait. And then out of nowhere, she changed her mind, hit the accelerator, and burst out into the intersection.
The second time, she’d taken a wing mirror off a parked car while she was making a right-hand turn.
And the third time, she’d stopped short at a yellow light, and the woman behind her couldn’t stop fast enough. It was the other driver’s fault, obviously—it always is; they teach you that much in driver’s ed—but it was still weird behavior for Mom, not taking the yellow light. Mom had always taken yellow lights.
Dad made her go to the emergency room that time, even though she wasn’t really hurt—she’d strained her neck a little bit, that was all. But he joked to the doctor about prescribing a drug to improve her driving, because this was her third accident in a row. Three months of tests later, they named the thing that was changing Mom. Looking back, once she had the diagnosis, we saw that what all three accidents had in common was that she’d been unable to make the kind of quick decisions everyone makes behind the wheel—when to turn, when to stop. Decisiveness is one of the first things to go with Huntington’s.
And no, we didn’t see it coming. My mother’s father died in his early fifties of some kind of crazy thing that no one talked about much—Mom always said he drank too much and lost his mind. Her mother had already been dead for years by that point. So Mom went out into her life unaware of the ticking time bomb she was carrying in her gene pool.
* * *
Gram switches the channel back to CNN, where Alastair Dunsworth is now clinging to a pathetic little tree that’s swaying back and forth.
“This poor chap again,” Gram says. “You know I think he used to be on BBC One back in the day. He’s too old to be doing this nonsense.”
Outside, the wind howls, and a sudden gust splatters fat raindrops against the window, making me jump.
I go to the window and look out at our near-deserted street. Leaves are plastered to the wet pavement, and no one’s out except for one crazy neighbor jogging in shorts and a T-shirt, completely soaked through to the skin. I
can sort of understand the attraction of going out there in the thick of it, just you and the rain and the big gusting winds. It must be kind of a rush.
I resist whatever impulse I have to run outside and tear my clothes off, however, and instead go back to the kitchen to brave the onion again. Once it’s chopped, I scrape the chunks off the cutting board and into a pot of cool water, to get them out of the vicinity of my stinging eyes, then add extra garlic—two whole cloves. It’s the garlic that seems to differentiate Jewish chicken soup from Asian chicken soup, I’ve noticed. When you get soup at a Thai restaurant, it’s always nice and garlicky, but for whatever reason, us Jews haven’t caught on. I’m personally changing that, one pot at a time.
I leave out the carrots. Mom would make me put them in, just for the color, but I hate carrots once they get soggy, and I figure no one will miss them once the soup is finished. Gram might, I guess—having grown up in London until she moved here with my grandfather a million years ago, it’s sort of a point of pride for her that she loves vegetables with all the life boiled out of them. On second thought, I put a tiny saucepan of water to boil next to the big pot, and toss the carrots in. Carrots optional.
I dump the raw chicken in the pot with the vegetables and bring the whole thing to a boil, stirring it and watching the pieces swirl together as tiny bubbles rise to the surface. The steam makes my cheeks clammy. When it’s bubbling nicely, I set it to simmer.
Within an hour, the smell starts to creep into the living room. On CNN, they’re looping through the same correspondents up and down the East Coast and saying the same things. Landfall’s coming; power outages are expected throughout the region; if you haven’t evacuated yet and you’re in an evacuation zone, it’s too late and you should’ve listened to your mayor or governor or whoever earlier. In Cambridge, we’re far enough from the water that we never have to evacuate, but one time we were up in Maine during a hurricane, when I was about seven, and we had to spend a night in the local school, sleeping on the library floor. I worried because I’d left my favorite doll behind. In the end, she survived.
I put my feet up on the coffee table again. Gram’s disappeared upstairs to take a nap, and Mom is reading the magazine section of Sunday’s Boston Globe next to me, probably going over the same page three times. Huntington’s makes it harder for things to stick in her brain. Just as I lean over Mom to grab the arts section, the lights flicker around us and then suddenly we’re in darkness.
“Shhhit,” Mom says. “There it goes.”
Dad appears in the living room, holding a flashlight under his chin and making what he thinks are spooky ghost noises. “Oh, laaaaaadies … mwa-ha-ha-ha.”
Mom tosses the magazine at him, missing by a wide margin, but he stretches an arm out and grabs it midair. “What? Did I scaaaaaare you?” he says in ghost-speak.
“Dad, Casper, whoever you are,” I interrupt. “I’m hungry. Did you get anything good?” I’m hoping he came back from the grocery store with popcorn or M&M’s or something other than the bare necessities.
“Do I hear doubt in your voice, child?” he asks, shining the flashlight right in my eyes. “You think your old man doesn’t know how my women like to prepare for a good storm?” He goes into the kitchen.
“What about this!” he says triumphantly, emerging with a box of Entenmann’s chocolate doughnuts, the yellow cake kind with the shiny coating. “When was the last time you saw these babies?”
I can’t remember. It feels like another life.
Three
Since our Labor Day weekend was marred by the combination of the rare genes walk and Hurricane Christine, Lena and I wait until the following Saturday to do our back-to-school shopping. Or her back-to-school shopping, more accurately—like every year, I’m really just along for the ride. We head downtown on the subway to exhaust ourselves combing the aisles of awful chunky platform heels and faux-leather boots at Designer Shoe Warehouse, all of which will undoubtedly look great on her and laughable on me.
Lena talks loud, and as she expounds on her theory about white guys with Asian fetishes, I glance around the subway car, trying to ascertain if anyone is paying enough attention to be offended. I’ve heard this monologue before: Lena will date white boys, but not, on principle, white boys who habitually date Asian girls.
“It’s when they say, ‘I’m so interested in the Asian culture’ … that’s when you know they have a thing for Asians, and they don’t know what they’re talking about.”
“Lena, has anyone actually ever said that to you?”
“Yes! That guy Chris, at camp last summer. What, did he think I was going to tiptoe around the house and bring him tea and be all submissive and whatever? I really think that’s what he thought a Chinese girl would be like. Clearly he’d never met one.”
Her face flushes. She pushes a strand of thick, wavy black hair behind her ear.
“Yeah, but Chris was a jackass,” I offer.
“That’s my point. You’ll never have this problem because no dude ever says, ‘Oh, I love dating white girls because they’re so…’ I don’t know. ‘Perky’ or whatever.”
“You’re right,” I say. “I’m pretty sure no one would ever call me perky.”
Lena’s current boyfriend is Anders, who is Norwegian and hence probably the whitest white guy I’ve ever met. She’s fine with that. He adores her, and his last girlfriend was as blond as he is, so she’s confident that he doesn’t have a fetish. Personally, he’s not my type, but then I’ve never even kissed a guy. I’m pretty sure that qualifies me as not having a type.
The subway emerges from underground and rumbles up over the bridge. As we pass over the Charles River, I catch a glimpse of the red triangular flag flying over the Community Boating docks below. The red signals a windy day; my dad taught me that when I was little and we’d walk across the river together and get ice cream in Beacon Hill.
Across the subway car, two City Year boys eye us (or more accurately, eye Lena). They’re earnest looking with baby faces that don’t really need to be shaved but are anyway, judging from the red pinpricks and the little piece of gauze on one of their chins, and they’re wearing the telltale City Year uniform: red hoodies, baggy khaki pants, and construction boots. City Year is one of those programs that get well-meaning young people to do a year of community work for next to no money. A couple kids who graduated from our high school last year decided to do it to beef up their college applications.
Lena nudges me, hard, but I ignore her. She persists, leaning in and whispering without taking her eyes off them. “The blond is kind of cute. He’s checking you out. Smile at him.”
I jab her in the ribs. The boys get the message and chuckle, turning away to study the subway map more closely than they need to.
Lena sighs melodramatically. “Those ballet girls are a bad influence on you.” Lena loves to insist that the girls at ballet are inferior friends in every way, compared to her. It’s true: I’ve danced with those girls since I was three years old, but I’ve never quite fit with them, not the way Lena and I fit together. Still, I’m pretty sure it isn’t their influence that makes me ignore the City Year boys.
“How are you supposed to get a boyfriend if you won’t even smile at a totally cute guy who’s looking at you? And, hello, he’s into public service! He’s perfect.”
Caleb flashes through my mind unexpectedly for a second, carrying a box of T-shirts at the rare genes walk, finding me in the crowd to give me a small. I brush him aside as quickly as he appeared. I keep telling Lena I’m not looking for a boyfriend. Actually the thought makes me feel a little ill. How do you explain to a seventeen-year-old guy, “Hey, I know your plan is to just chill and make out with me and watch DVDs and have sex after prom, but guess what, when you come over can you also help me take care of my increasingly crazy and uncontrollable mother and also deal with this nagging little issue I have about a possible bum gene of my own?”
That’s very attractive to a teenage guy, I’m sure.
Of course, then there’s a teenage guy like Caleb, who already knows about bad genes.
Next to me, Lena shakes her head. “You overthink everything. It’s probably taking years off your life.”
She’s right, obviously. I’m pretty sure I come by anxiety genetically, from both sides. When I was eleven, my mother tried to make me write my worries on slips of paper and hide them away in a box. She said I’d forget about them that way. But I never did write them down, which I guess explains why I never stopped worrying.
The first thing I remember worrying about was cancer, after Lena’s father died of it—colon cancer—when we were ten. He used to take us ice skating on the Boston Common and buy us hot chocolate in paper cups with extra marshmallows, and then he got a stomachache and then he was dead, or at least that’s the way it looked from my ten-year-old vantage point. For the rest of that year I wanted to know everything about the color and texture of my parents’ bowel movements. Yes, I realize how totally weird and gross that is, and they set me straight pretty quickly. (Dad: “Rose, under no circumstances am I going to discuss my stool with you.” That’s how I learned the word “stool.”) But I thought if I imagined all the bad things—the cancers, the car crashes, the burst aneurisms—they wouldn’t happen. Because you can’t predict the future, right? So if you predict every bad thing that could possibly happen, it probably won’t.
Rules for 50/50 Chances Page 3