Still Alice

by Lisa Genova

  Still clutching the handle of her suitcase, she stood in the dark kitchen and watched several minutes advance on the microwave. The disappointed but forgiving voice in her head faded to a whisper as the volume of a more primal one began to build and spread out. She thought about calling him, but the expanding voice rejected the suggestion outright and refused all excuses. She thought about deciding not to care, but the voice, now seeping down into her body, echoing in her belly, vibrating in each of her fingertips, was too powerful and pervasive to ignore.

  Why did it bother her so much? He was in the middle of an experiment and couldn’t leave it to come home. She’d certainly been in his shoes innumerable times. This was what they did. This was who they were. The voice called her a stupid fool.

  She spotted her running shoes on the floor next to the back door. A run would make her feel better. That was what she needed.

  Ideally, she ran every day. For many years now, she’d treated running like eating or sleeping, as a vital daily necessity, and she’d been known to squeeze in a jog at midnight or in the middle of a blinding snowstorm. But she’d neglected this basic need over the last several months. She’d been so busy. As she laced her shoes, she told herself she hadn’t bothered bringing them with her to California because she’d known she wouldn’t have the time. In truth, she’d simply forgotten to pack them.

  When starting from her house on Poplar Street, she invariably followed the same route—down Massachusetts Avenue, through Harvard Square to Memorial Drive, along the Charles River to the Harvard Bridge over by MIT, and back—a little over five miles, a forty-five-minute round trip. She had long been attracted to the idea of running in the Boston Marathon but each year decided that she realistically didn’t have the time to train for that kind of distance. Maybe someday she would. In excellent physical condition for a woman her age, she imagined running strong well into her sixties.

  Clustered pedestrian traffic on the sidewalks and intermittent negotiations with car traffic in street intersections littered the first part of her run through Harvard Square. It was crowded and ripe with anticipation at that time of day on a Saturday, with crowds forming and milling around on street corners waiting for walk signals, outside restaurants waiting for tables, in movie theater lines waiting for tickets, and in double-parked cars waiting for an unlikely opening in a metered space. The first ten minutes of her run required a good deal of conscious external concentration to navigate through it all, but once she crossed Memorial Drive to the Charles River, she was free to run in full stride and completely in the zone.

  A comfortable and cloudless evening invited a lot of activity along the Charles, yet the grassy area beside the river felt less congested than the streets of Cambridge. Despite a steady stream of joggers, dogs and their owners, walkers, Rollerbladers, cyclists, and women pushing babies in jogger strollers, like an experienced driver on a regularly traveled stretch of road, Alice retained only a vague sense for what went on around her now. As she ran along the river, she became mindful of nothing but the sounds of her Nikes hitting the pavement in syncopated rhythm with the pace of her breath. She didn’t replay her argument with Lydia. She didn’t acknowledge her growling stomach. She didn’t think about John. She just ran.

  As was her routine, she stopped running once she made it back to the John Fitzgerald Kennedy Park, a pocket of manicured lawns abutting Memorial Drive. Her head cleared, her body relaxed and rejuvenated, she began walking home. The JFK Park funneled into Harvard Square through a pleasant, bench-lined corridor between the Charles Hotel and the Kennedy School of Government.

  At the other end of the corridor, she stood at the intersection of Eliot Street and Brattle, ready to cross, when a woman grabbed her forearm with startling force and said, “Have you thought about heaven today?”

  The woman fixed Alice with a penetrating, unwavering stare. She had long hair the color and texture of a teased Brillo pad and wore a handmade placard hung over her chest that read AMERICA REPENT, TURN TO JESUS FROM SIN. There was always someone selling God in Harvard Square, but Alice had never been singled out so directly and intimately before.

  “Sorry,” she said and, noticing a break in the flow of traffic, escaped to the other side of the street.

  She wanted to continue walking but stood frozen instead. She didn’t know where she was. She looked back across the street. The Brillo-haired woman pursued another sinner down the corridor. The corridor, the hotel, the stores, the illogically meandering streets. She knew she was in Harvard Square, but she didn’t know which way was home.

  She tried again, more specifically. The Harvard Square Hotel, Eastern Mountain Sports, Dickson Bros. Hardware, Mount Auburn Street. She knew all of these places—this square had been her stomping ground for over twenty-five years—but they somehow didn’t fit into a mental map that told her where she lived relative to them. A black-and-white circular “T” sign directly in front of her marked an entrance to the Red Line trains and buses underground, but there were three such entrances in Harvard Square, and she couldn’t piece together which one of the three this was.

  Her heart began to race. She started sweating. She told herself that an accelerated heart rate and perspiration were part of an orchestrated and appropriate response to running. But as she stood on the sidewalk, it felt like panic.

  She willed herself to walk another block and then another, her rubbery legs feeling like they might give way with each bewildered step. The Coop, Cardullo’s, the magazines on the corner, the Cambridge visitors’ center across the street, and Harvard Yard beyond that. She told herself she could still read and recognize. None of it helped. It all lacked a context.

  People, cars, buses, and all kinds of unbearable noise rushed and wove around and past her. She closed her eyes. She listened to her own blood whoosh and pulse behind her ears.

  “Please stop this,” she whispered.

  She opened her eyes. Just as suddenly as it had left her, the landscape snapped snugly back into place. The Coop, Cardullo’s, Nini’s Corner, Harvard Yard. She automatically understood that she should turn left at the corner and head west on Mass Ave. She began to breathe easier, no longer bizarrely lost within a mile of home. But she’d just been bizarrely lost within a mile of home. She walked as fast as she could without running.

  She turned onto her street, a quiet, tree-lined, residential road a couple of blocks removed from Mass Ave. With both feet on her road and her house in sight, she felt much safer, but not yet safe. She kept her eyes on her front door and her legs moving and promised herself that the sea of anxiety swelling furiously inside her would drain when she walked in the front hallway and saw John. If he was home.

  “John?”

  He appeared in the threshold of the kitchen, unshaven, his glasses sitting on top of his mad-scientist hair, sucking on a red Popsicle and sporting his lucky gray T-shirt. He’d been up all night. As she’d promised herself, her anxiety began to drain. But her energy and bravery seemed to leak out with it, leaving her fragile and wanting to collapse into his arms.

  “Hey, I was wondering where you were, just about to leave you a note on the fridge. How’d it go?” he asked.

  “What?”

  “Stanford.”

  “Oh, good.”

  “And how’s Lydia?”

  The betrayal and hurt over Lydia, over him not being home when she got there, exorcised by the run and displaced by her terror at being inexplicably lost, reclaimed its priority in the pecking order.

  “You tell me,” she said.

  “You guys fought.”

  “You’re paying for her acting classes?” she accused.

  “Oh,” he said, sucking the last of the Popsicle into his red-stained mouth. “Look, can we talk about this later? I don’t have time to get into it right now.”

  “Make the time, John. You’re keeping her afloat out there without telling me, and you’re not here when I get home, and—”

  “And you weren’t here when I got home. How
was your run?”

  She heard the simple reasoning in his veiled question. If she had waited for him, if she had called, if she hadn’t done exactly what she’d wanted and gone for a run, she could’ve spent the last hour with him. She had to agree.

  “Fine.”

  “I’m sorry, I waited as long as I could, but I’ve really got to get back to the lab. I’ve had an incredible day so far, gorgeous results, but we’re not done, and I’ve got to analyze the numbers before we get started again in the morning. I only came home to see you.”

  “I need to talk about this with you now.”

  “This really isn’t new information, Ali. We disagree about Lydia. Can’t it wait until I get back?”

  “No.”

  “You want to walk over with me, talk about it on the way?”

  “I’m not going to the office, I need to be home.”

  “You need to talk now, you need to be home, you’re awfully needy all of a sudden. Is something else going on?”

  The word needy smacked a vulnerable nerve. Needy equaled weak, dependent, pathological. Her father. She’d made a lifelong point of never being like that, like him.

  “I’m just exhausted.”

  “You look it, you need to slow down.”

  “That’s not what I need.”

  He waited for her to elaborate, but she took too long.

  “Look, the sooner I go, the sooner I’ll be back. Get some rest, I’ll be home later tonight.”

  He kissed her sweat-drenched head and walked out the door.

  Standing in the hallway where he’d left her, with no one to confess to or confide in, she felt the full emotional impact of what she’d just experienced in Harvard Square flood over her. She sat down on the floor and leaned against the cool wall, watching her hands shake in her lap as if they couldn’t be hers. She tried to focus on steadying her breath as she did when she ran.

  After minutes of breathing in and breathing out, she was finally calm enough to attempt to assemble some sense out of what had just happened. She thought about the missing word during her talk at Stanford and her missing period. She got up, turned on her laptop, and Googled “menopause symptoms.”

  An appalling list filled the screen—hot flashes, night sweats, insomnia, crashing fatigue, anxiety, dizziness, irregular heartbeat, depression, irritability, mood swings, disorientation, mental confusion, memory lapses.

  Disorientation, mental confusion, memory lapses. Check, check, and check. She leaned back in her chair and raked her fingers through her curly black hair. She looked over at the pictures displayed on the shelves of the floor-to-ceiling bookcase—her Harvard graduation day, she and John dancing on their wedding day, family portraits from when the kids were little, a family portrait from Anna’s wedding. She returned to the list on her computer screen. This was just the natural, next phase in her life as a woman. Millions of women coped with it every day. Nothing life-threatening. Nothing abnormal.

  She wrote herself a note to make an appointment with her doctor for a checkup. Maybe she should go on estrogen replacement therapy. She read through the list of symptoms one last time. Irritability. Mood swings. Her recent shrinking fuse with John. It all added up. Satisfied, she shut down her computer.

  She sat in the darkening study awhile longer, listening to her quiet house and the sounds of neighborhood barbecues. She inhaled the smell of hamburger grilling. For some reason, she wasn’t hungry anymore. She took a multivitamin with water, unpacked, read several articles from The Journal of Cognition, and went to bed.

  Sometime after midnight, John finally came home. His weight in their bed woke her, but only slightly. She remained still and pretended to stay asleep. He had to be exhausted from being up all night and working all day. They could talk about Lydia in the morning. And she’d apologize for being so sensitive and moody lately. His warm hand on her hip brought her into the curve of his body. With his breath on her neck, she fell into a deep sleep, convinced that she was safe.

  OCTOBER 2003

  That was a lot to digest,” said Alice, opening the door to her office.

  “Yah, those enchiladas were huge,” said Dan, grinning behind her.

  Alice smacked him lightly on the arm with her notepad. They’d just sat through an hour-long lunch seminar. A fourth-year graduate student, Dan had an overall J. Crew appearance—muscular and lean with clean-cut, short blond hair, and a toothy, cocky smile. Physically, he looked nothing like John, but he possessed a confidence and sense of humor that often reminded Alice of John when he was that age.

  After several false starts, Dan’s thesis research had finally taken off, and he was experiencing an intoxication that Alice fondly recognized and hoped would develop into a sustainable passion. Anyone could be seduced by research when the results poured in. The trick was to love it when the results weren’t forthcoming, and the reasons why were elusive.

  “When do you leave for Atlanta?” she asked as she rifled through the papers on her desk, looking for the draft of his research paper that she’d edited.

  “Next week.”

  “You can probably have it submitted by then; it’s in good shape.”

  “I can’t believe I’m getting married. God, I’m old.”

  She found it and handed it to him. “Please, you’re hardly old. You’re at the beginning of it all.”

  He sat down and flipped through the pages, furrowing his brows at the red scrawls in the margins. The introduction and discussion sections were the areas where Alice, with her deep and ready knowledge, contributed the most to rounding out Dan’s work, filling in the holes in his narrative, creating a more contiguous picture of where and how this new piece fit into the historical and current linguistics puzzle as a whole.

  “What does this say?” asked Dan, showing her a specific set of red scribbles with his finger.

  “Differential effects of narrow versus distributed attention.”

  “What’s the reference for that?” he asked.

  “Oh, oh, what is it?” she asked herself, squeezing her eyes shut, waiting for the name of the first author and the year of the work to bubble to the surface. “See, this is what happens when you’re old.”

  “Please, you’re hardly old either. Don’t worry, I can look it up.”

  One of the big memory burdens for anyone with a serious career in the sciences was knowing the years of the published studies, the details of the experiments, and who did them. Alice frequently awed her students and postdocs by offhandedly rattling off the seven studies relevant to a certain phenomenon, along with their respective authors and years of publication. Most of the senior faculty in her department had this skill at their fingertips. In fact, there existed an unspoken competition among them to see who possessed the most complete, readily accessible mental catalog of their discipline’s library. Alice wore the imaginary blue ribbon more than anyone.

  “Nye, MBB, 2000!” she exclaimed.

  “It always amazes me that you can do that. Seriously, how do you hold all that information in your head?”

  She smiled, accepting his admiration. “You’ll see, like I said, you’re just at the beginning.”

  He browsed through the rest of the pages, his eyebrows relaxed. “Okay, I’m psyched, this looks good. Thanks so much. I’ll get it back to you tomorrow!”

  And he bounded out of her office. That task completed, Alice referred to her to-do list, written on a yellow Post-it note stuck to the hanging cabinet just above her desktop screen.

  Cognition class

  Lunch seminar

  Dan’s paper

  Eric

  Birthday dinner

  She placed a satisfying check mark next to “Dan’s paper.”

  Eric? What does that mean?

  Eric Wellman was the head of the psychology department at Harvard. Did she intend to tell him something, show him something, ask him something? Did she have a meeting with him? She consulted her calendar. October eleventh, her birthday. Nothing about Eric. Eric. It
was too cryptic. She opened her inbox. Nothing from Eric. She hoped it wasn’t time-sensitive. Irritated, but confident that she’d recover whatever it was about Eric eventually, she threw the reminder list, her fourth one that day, in the trash and pulled off a new Post-it.

  Eric?

  Call doctor

  Memory disturbances like these were rearing their ugly little heads with a frequency that ruffled her. She’d been putting off calling her primary-care physician because she assumed that these kinds of forgetting episodes would simply resolve with time. She hoped she might learn something reassuring about the natural transience of this phase casually from someone she knew, possibly avoiding a visit to the doctor entirely. This was unlikely ever to happen, however, as all of her friends and Harvard colleagues of menopausal age were men. She admitted it was probably time that she sought some real medical advice.

  ALICE AND JOHN WALKED TOGETHER from campus to Epulae in Inman Square. Inside, Alice spotted their older daughter, Anna, already sitting at the copper bar with her husband, Charlie. They both wore impressive blue suits, his accessorized with a solid gold tie and hers with a single strand of pearls. They’d been working for a couple of years at the third biggest corporate law firm in Massachusetts, Anna practicing in the area of intellectual property and Charlie working in litigation.

  From the martini glass in her hand and the unchanged B-cup size of her chest, Alice knew that Anna wasn’t pregnant. She’d been trying without success or secrecy to conceive for six months now. Like everything with Anna, the harder it was to obtain, the more she wanted it. Alice had advised her to wait, not to be in such a rush to check off this next major milestone in her life’s to-do list. Anna was only twenty-seven, she’d just married Charlie last year, and she worked eighty to ninety hours a week. But Anna countered with the point that every professional woman considering children realized eventually: There’s never going to be a good time to do this.