How to Forget

by Kate Mulgrew

  There were other questions, seemingly benign, and then the examination came to an end. Dr. Fortson rose and faced the three of us. Briefly, he referred to his clipboard, then waited until he had my mother’s full attention. She was in no hurry to give it to him, and tried to make eye contact with Sam, who gently turned her back to Dr. Fortson. A humming began in her throat, and just as suddenly retreated.

  “Joan, I think there’s a very good chance that you are in the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease.”

  A familiar, terrible blankness fell over my mother’s features, the vacancy she had always disappeared into when the news was unbearable.

  “How can you be certain after such a short examination?” I asked.

  Dr. Fortson regarded my mother with a steady gaze.

  “There are other tests, certainly, and I’ll see to it that these tests are scheduled. Some are more sophisticated than others, but we have yet to fully understand the exact nature or progress of this disease, and that makes it very hard to diagnose with precision. Judging from today’s examination, and from many years of experience, I’m almost sure your mother has atypical Alzheimer’s disease.”

  “How is it atypical?” I asked.

  Dr. Fortson looked guardedly at my mother, and I said, “It’s all right, she’s able to hear this. Aren’t you, Mother?”

  Yes, my mother nodded. Yes.

  “The underlying damage is the same, but the first part of the brain to be affected is not the hippocampus, which is typically the case in patients over sixty-five.”

  There was no possible rejoinder to this, it was so thick with language I couldn’t process. He stood there calmly in his white coat, his arms hanging loosely at his sides, his elegant hands at peace. No doubt, he had spoken these words until he knew them by rote. He had memorized what could not be explained, and I was suddenly overcome with an urge to best him, to bully him, if I could, into a different diagnosis.

  “You wouldn’t discourage a second opinion, would you?” I demanded, hoping to catch a glint of fear in his eye. There was nothing like fear in his expression; instead his face softened with a pity I found unnerving. Gathering my mother’s purse, I abruptly shook Dr. Fortson’s hand and walked out the door, aware that his eyes were on us as we slowly moved down the length of the hallway.

  * * *

  DESPITE THE WARM and beautiful autumn day, we huddled together in the parking lot, saying little. My arm had settled around my mother’s shoulders, and Sam, I noticed, was lightly holding her hand. Tim stood slightly apart, his head bowed because what can a friend say that isn’t first the right of the children?

  I had flown in from Los Angeles the day before, after having pleaded for two days off from work. The producers of the television series I was currently shooting did not exactly lead with compassion, nor was it their job to do so, but resentment rose in me as the negotiation intensified, and by the time we had finished, and the two days had been allotted, I felt wrung out and defeated. Having to beg for a day off to take my mother to the neurologist had left me depleted, and I’d arrived in Dubuque exhausted, unprepared for what this day might bring.

  The full impact of what had just passed in the examining room had not yet hit me, but I knew it was only a matter of minutes before it did. My mother blinked up at me, the sunlight glancing off her glasses, her white hair like tufts of feathers moving in the breeze, and I said, “Mother, this was just an initial meeting with the doctor. The whole thing needs much more time and attention, and I can promise you, you’ll get it. We’ll visit the best neurologists in the country and see what they have to say. But now, I think it’s time to go home and rest and have a lovely dinner, what do you say?”

  Wrapped in her Goodwill trench coat, her face devoid of expression, my mother agreed.

  “Sam, I need to go to the market. Will you take Mother home and stay with her until I get back?” I asked my little brother, whose calm demeanor remained unchanged, whose hand still grasped my mother’s.

  “Of course, I’d love to take my mother home. We might go home and take a nap, or we might stop somewhere and split a beer. Come on, sweetheart, off we go.”

  Hand in hand, my mother and her youngest son started off in what Sam hoped was a promising direction.

  It came to him, suddenly, that he had no idea where he’d parked only two hours before.

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  As we drove to the supermarket, I struggled to explain to my husband what had transpired in the examining room. Tim was patient, resigned, a man long accustomed to waiting. I left out any emotional clarification; that part of the account remained elusive, and so what Tim heard was a story that sounded almost comical. When I described the abrupt manner in which the doctor had presented the diagnosis, my husband asked, “Can you think of a better way to do it?”

  Driving along a stretch of highway I’d traveled a thousand times before, I felt as if I might suffocate. The schools and churches and benchmarks of my childhood hurtled past me: the tree-lined street where the boy who had given me my first kiss lived; St. Joseph’s grammar school, where in first grade I had wet my pants and Sister Leonard, white with fury, had rapped my knuckles with a ruler; the Ground Round where my mother regularly ordered the appetizer platter, a mound of mysterious and, from my mother’s point of view delicious, fried foods; and on past the movie theater where I had so often sat with my mother, spontaneously bursting into applause when the lights dimmed and the previews came on and whispering with a kind of delirious anticipation, “Don’t you just love the previews?” and past the Kennedy Mall and the only Chinese restaurant in town and the tire shop that had sprung up where Long John Silver’s once stood, and up John F. Kennedy Road until we turned in to the parking lot of the A & P.

  Inside, I suggested that we split up, it would be faster that way. Tim agreed, and walked off to find the butcher’s counter. I headed for the produce section, which I somehow remembered was at the far left end of the supermarket, partially hidden from view. There was an urgency to this task, and I walked hurriedly over to the long rows of vegetables, each variety neatly piled in its own crate. I stood for a moment, looking around me. What was I after? Ah, yes, potatoes! I’d make meat loaf and mashed potatoes. Comfort food. My mother would like that.

  Looking at the mounds of potatoes, I trembled; the air-conditioning was excessive, I couldn’t see where they kept the small plastic bags, and I was about to shout this complaint to a girl in the next aisle wearing a red apron—why on earth do you make it so hard to find the goddam bags? I was about to say to her—when suddenly I reached into the bin containing Idaho potatoes and taking a potato in my hand and feeling its roughness, the earthiness of the skin, I pressed it to my face and started to weep, overcome with grief and unable to control the tears that poured down my cheeks, and equally unable to stand up straight, keening over the potatoes and sensing the first stirring of real terror as well as an intense loneliness, I experienced an almost unbearable yearning for my mother as she was yesterday, as she was ten years ago, and even allowing for the griefs in her life that would need to be relived, I would have gone back to them without hesitation, if it meant that today would be taken from her.

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Like Pavlov’s dog, I returned to work on Star Trek: Voyager. In it, I had found salvation, strength, and purpose. It acted beautifully as an excuse to step away from the more severe challenges of life and cast me daily into a vast and rigid machine over which I had no control. In fact, the crew called it the Machine, fixing wry smiles to early morning, exhausted faces. I took daily comfort in the sheer immutability of Paramount Stages Eight and Nine. Once inside the door of that soundstage, an “otherness” prevailed that was very like the undertaking itself. Otherworldly, contained, meticulously organized. I had only to chuck myself into that Starfleet uniform, and I was magically transported to a world of military make-believe, relieved of mundane concerns. Every morning I plunged into this world as if from a great height. The deman
ds, from my perspective, were all-encompassing, exacting, and rigorous, the rewards almost entirely private.

  If, six years into the discipline, I was no longer quite as agreeable as I’d once been, it is because Pavlov’s dog had begun to chafe at the leash that had for so long ordered her movements. It became harder and harder to take that early morning dive without a nervous glance backward, into my life. Somewhere in Iowa, light-years from Paramount’s Stage Eight, my seventy-year-old mother struggled to understand what exactly she should be doing with the large jar of turpentine she had found in her art studio and, finding no easy solution, had poured the liquid into a saucepan and carried it to the kitchen, where it looked as if it belonged on the stove top, and so that is where she put it. The small fire, extinguished by her alarmed and disgruntled husband, carried reverberations, and soon I received a phone call from Sam telling me of the incident. The incident had been relayed to him by Joe who, on my father’s advice, had downplayed its seriousness. Feeling overwhelmed by the constraints of my job, I asked Sam to bring our mother to Los Angeles as soon as possible. My argument, I assured him, was sound. Our mother was vulnerable in the big, empty house, presided over by a man in open denial of her struggle, and therefore she needed to be removed from any possibility of harm. Furthermore, I continued, she would be seen by the best neurological team at UCLA Medical. This was the second opinion on which so much hinged. No one could contest this, I promised him, and even if they wanted to, they didn’t have a leg to stand on. Our mother had signed the official document making me her health-care guardian.

  This decision had been arrived at two months earlier, following the diagnosis by Dr. Fortson. After a dinner of meat loaf and mashed potatoes, I had suggested to my mother that she might want to take a bath, and that I would accompany her upstairs.

  “Want to split a beer?” I asked her.

  My mother watched as I opened a can of Budweiser and poured it evenly into two glasses. Leaving Tim to do the dishes, my mother and I climbed the front stairs to the bathroom, where the colorful prints of Fables de La Fontaine hung in their separate frames on the depleted pear-colored walls, where the mismatched rust and yellow towels were draped carelessly over the rod, where the clean, soft bath mat waited on the tiled floor, and the medicine cabinet holding my mother’s bath accessories stood ready to transform the tired room into a sanctuary. Turning on the faucet, I poured a capful of Johnson’s baby shampoo under the hot running water, scattered a handful of bath salts into the tub, and folded a washcloth over the rim. Once my mother had immersed herself in the water, I placed her glass of cold beer on the washcloth and, with my own beer in hand, curled up on the floor, my arm resting on the rim of the tub. This was the way it had always been. No one disturbed the sanctity of the bath.

  “Isn’t that divine, Mums?” I asked, sipping my beer.

  “Mmmm,” she answered, plucking yet another washcloth from the towel rod behind her, and immediately draping it over her breasts.

  I observed her for a moment, her left hand pressed against the washcloth covering her breasts, her right hand holding a glass of beer, her gaze distant. My mother’s limbs were slender and soft-skinned, her plump breasts still youthful, only the softness of her abdomen betrayed the wear and tear of childbirth. She had always been unconcerned about this, as if a slight paunch was the price one paid for bearing children. About her breasts, however, she had always been inordinately modest.

  Soon, I would have to get on a plane and return to Los Angeles. Communication with my mother, necessarily limited by distance, would be further compromised. There would be no way of knowing with certainty that she was protected. My father’s love, though unquestionable, obscured his reason. Among the ranks of her own children, there existed the very real possibility of dissent.

  “Mother, I need to ask you something,” I said, leaning on the rim of the bathtub with both arms.

  My mother looked at me, questioningly. Her eyes were frightened, unsure. She did not fully comprehend what had happened at the doctor’s office, nor did she want to. She wanted only to take her bath, the bath she had always regarded as her reward at the end of a long day.

  “Mother, I know you’re exhausted, but I think we need to talk about something. We’re a long way from any answers I’m satisfied with, all of that will come, but in the meantime it’s important that you have a legal document protecting you. You need someone who you trust to protect you, no matter what. A health-care guardian. Do you understand?”

  Drained, my mother nodded, then lowered her head. How she wished she had never called me, never confessed to the spiders coming out of the wallpaper. This was too confusing, too hard, and now her daughter was making yet another demand.

  “Who would you like that person to be, Mother? You have to choose,” I said.

  For a long moment, I watched her struggle with the importance of what was being asked. Forcing herself to process this information, she gathered her knees to her chest and rested her cheek there, like a young girl. Her left hand let go of the washcloth and she dipped her fingers in the water, strumming them lightly on the surface. My mother slowly lifted her hand from the bathwater and, pointing a finger at me, mouthed, “You.”

  After I had helped my mother into her nightgown and tucked her into bed, I called Sam on the upstairs phone, out of earshot of my father, who sat brooding in the TV Room, nursing a drink, an empty crossword puzzle spread out before him on the coffee table. I told Sam I felt strongly that I should be our mother’s health-care guardian as long as he agreed and, in so doing, that he would assure me of both his allegiance and, if necessary, his help.

  Sam wholeheartedly approved of my decision, although he, too, was troubled about what our father would perceive as a betrayal. As it turned out, this concern was warranted. My father wanted no part of it and was particularly insulted by my presumption in assuming health-care guardianship. I could see that he considered this strictly his right and was furious that once again his oldest daughter had stormed in and usurped his position, this time undermining his dominance in a way almost unforgivable.

  The following day, I arranged to meet with a lawyer and, in the privacy of her office, watched as my mother signed the papers giving me full authority over her health care. Had I been less frightened, maybe I would not have acted so quickly, and so apparently without concern for my siblings, but I was filled with a sense of foreboding that eclipsed all other considerations. It was intolerable to imagine living thousands of miles away in a bubble of ignorance, never knowing with certainty the state of my mother’s condition. I did not trust my father, and therefore I feared for my mother.

  Before confronting my father, I had anticipated a harsh punishment, but I did not expect to be blamed. His denial of my mother’s affliction was not only resolute but critical to his sense of authority, and because his pain was immeasurable and his disorientation extreme, he turned on me with a vehemence that struck like a blow. My father needed me to share his anguish, the fury he felt at having been betrayed, his outrage when, one afternoon shortly following the incident of the fire, Sam arrived at the house, said hello to our father, and half an hour later reappeared with our mother on his arm. She wore her trench coat and carried a small suitcase.

  “Where the hell do you think you’re going?” my father demanded.

  “I’m taking Mom to Los Angeles, Dad. Katy’s her health-care guardian and that’s what she wants,” Sam replied, looking into our father’s eyes. Then he led our mother through the kitchen and down the short brick path, where he had parked his car. Sam settled our mother in the passenger seat before turning and glancing back at the house. If he expected to see our father at the window, he did not find him there. Sliding behind the wheel, Sam forced a smile and, taking our mother’s hand, said, “Guess what, sweetheart? We’re going on an adventure—we’re going to see Katy.”

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  If a cat shitting indiscriminately all over the house is any kind of a bellwether, then I
was forewarned. Ebony nuggets were found in the folds of my gold brocade curtains, in the toe of my slipper, on the silky border of my Turkish rug. The cat himself was disinclined to favor us with his company, and streaked past us at all hours, creating chaos. And to think, only three weeks earlier, he had been the most desirable creature in the world.

  “The smartest cat in the kingdom,” my mother had promised, her hands clasped in excitement, as she gazed at the animal in its metal cage.

  “Will it be fun?” I’d asked, leaning down to get a better look at the tawny feline as he prowled back and forth on the newspapered floor of his pet shop home.

  “Fun to study,” my mother had assured me, with eyes full of wonder.

  I bought the Siamese cat for five hundred dollars and we released him in the living room of my pretty Brentwood house, expecting to see him as soon as he had acclimated himself. He never did grow accustomed to his new environment and, despite our naming him Sebastian and calling his name day and night and putting out tempting dishes of Chicken of the Sea and sitting for hours on the living room couch waiting for him to appear, he refused to show himself. He waited until we had gone to bed, and then practiced a stealth, as well as a repressed hostility, seldom observed in a domesticated animal.

  After three weeks, I looked helplessly at my mother and told her I was sorry about Sebastian. She was sitting on the patio, a book lying open in her lap. After a moment, my mother shrugged and said, “Why?”

  “Because you haven’t been able to study him,” I reminded her.

  She shrugged again, indifferently, and went back to looking at her book.