Violet paused. Her words were pacing back and forth in her head and gaining momentum. "They think I'm stupid just because I’m old. They think I don't know her rigid surveillance and
twisted body animations to what they're doing. Well I sure as hell do. And now I am going to catch them in the act. Then you and I can... well, we’ll call somebody… we’ll call the land officials and we’ll call the police. We can call Joe Novatny! Yes, Joe has a lot of connections. He knows people. You remember Joe don’t you?"
[ Joe was a policeman and friend to my father. When I was picked up for driving without a license, hitting a tree and another car after running a stop sign and put in a holding cell… my father called Joe. ]
"Everyone is gonna know what they're up to. I got'em this time."
Violet's words screamed to a halt. The sound was like teeth on ice. Her eyes opened, her eyes closed. She squeezed her madness out, madness so black it seemed purple. The moon was agitated, shining so fiercely it dared any cloud to get in its way.
I knew the more Violet talked the angrier she would get. And I knew that if I tried to convince her otherwise, all hell would break loose.
I was not about to question my partner's credibility.
"I'm here with you. We'll catch'em. Just tell me what to do." I slowly moved in closer to the wall and put my body in the surveillance position. A blue soft light hunched over both of us, a kind gesture from the moon that he joined our mission.
"Don't let them see you, shhhhhh, talk quietly. They don't know we're watching."
I slowly leaned over and quietly asked a question like a good partner. "What do these boys look like? I mean how big are these neighbor boys?"
"I said big, for cryin’ out loud. You know… BIG. Don't you know anything? What's the matter with you?” Her voice was despairingly agitated. “Shush now." Violet did not fully trust my intentions. She must have felt she had no choice but to give me a meaningless task. "You just watch my purse," pointing to the stuffed black bag partially covered by the couch's pillow. “Keep an eye on it so no one steals it.”
The situation was tenuous. Violet was unsteady. She wasn't sure where the enemy lines were drawn and who to trust. For now she would have to keep one eye on the neighbors and the other on my intentions.
"I don't know who you are but if you're NOT going to help, just get otta' here."
"I'm sorry. Like I said, just tell me what you want me to do."
Everyone was quiet.
The airheads in the room barely moved in fear of squeaking against each other.
The trees’ leaves turned to look, the tenant birds peeked over the edges of their nests. On the ground, the plastic begonias tried to focus their attention but they either couldn't see what was going on or they simply didn't want to be part of my mother’s paranoia. Violet stopped talking. Everything was mute. Time just sat in the moon's night waiting for instructions, waiting for something to happen.
"Mom, I'm hungry. Do you have any ice cream?"
The sound of ice cream seemed to slap the damp air out the room. The modus operandi had changed. From that razor edge moment, my mother changed her tone like a commercial in the middle of a TV crime drama. It was as if she pressed the pause button on her remote. Her voice softened the room and the world of reconnaissance.
"I love ice cream!" she said in a perky warm voice.
We shuffled our way into the kitchen, side-by-side, moving hand-in-hand as if we were glued together. The room’s large windows went with us. When we got close to the refrigerated destination we stopped.
Together we slid down into a squat and pressed our backs against the cabinet doors just under the counter top. It was a safe place where we could not be seen. Then all at once I went for the Kenmore’s handle.
"The light, the light, they'll see..." Violet still had a few remnants of paranoia in her head.
The refrigerator's breath steamed out. Before Violet could finish talking, I frantically grabbed the only container I could see, hoping it was ice cream, hoping it was butter pecan and slammed the door quickly. Not sure who was playing with whom at this point for I actually started to enjoy my part in her dementia. It was full of excitement and quite freeing.
I opened a drawer above my head and let my hand rummage through the utensil tray for two spoons. Despite it being quite dark, I took a quick look at the outside of the frozen carton. For sure it was ice cream. I thought myself to be lucky at that point and opened the top lid of the winning butter pecan.
“It’s butter pecan, mom. Your favorite.” and handed her a spoon.
"Oh dearie, we can't eat ice cream out of the carton. We need bowls. Open that cupboard over there.” She pointed to the lower cabinet door just a few feet away.
“Let's use the fancy Bavarian bowls with the scalloped trim and tiny pink and yellow roses. They’re on the second shelf in the back. The flowers are hand-painted, you know. Margie bought that set for me when she lived on Harlem Avenue. It was our ten, no maybe it was our fifteenth wedding anniversary…”
I turned my head and looked at this stranger, previously my mother, as if she was an alien from some other planet; an alien who also had a sister named Margie. Where did all this recovered memory come from?
I couldn’t move. You would have thought I was a Rodin’s sculpture commemorating the experience. Her story about the china kept going on and on, falling all over the place and landing on top of me. How could she remember that? Not only knowing precisely where the bowls were located in the kitchen but their damn history for God’s sake.
It might appear that this clarity could open a door for other flashes of recall but I wasn’t about to take a chance by asking her if she remembered that I was her daughter. I loved more the ambiguity of our relationship.
I pushed aside any diagnoses or medical theories and scooped two big mounds of the butter pecan into the bowl and handed it to my mother. Somewhere in that cold, creamy substance, the thieving neighbors and their nighttime activities were aborted for the night.
[ Familiar memories rely more on the brain’s cortex, its outer layer, while short-term memories rely more
on a structure called the hippocampus. The hippocampus is typically affected at the start of late-life dementias.]
We finished the butter pecan, got up and placed the sticky bowls on the counter. I decided to make coffee as Violet calmly walked back to the sofa. She sat down on its edge and pointed the remote control to the television while pressing down on the red button. The room filled with a bright iridescent light, the kind of light you would expect from a tiny space ship if it landed in your living room.
"Oh good, MetLife is on."
"Matlock, Mom. It's Matlock not MetLife." I tried to never correct my mother or the dementias but the MetLife-Matlock thing was making me crazy.
31.
BILLY THE VISITING NURSE
A nurse's aide came to the house twice a week. She took the vitals, chatted a bit and wrote long cursive messages on a thick yellow pad. Her notes curled their edges.
P O I N T O F R E F E R E N C E [ Visiting Nurses provide services to homed patients. They monitor vital signs, such as blood pressure, heart rate, temperature and report
to the doctor the patient’s status and any health changes.] "How yaw doin' today Miss Violet? Do you 'member who I am and why I'm heah?"
The aide was a woman in her mid-thirties who recently moved to Chicago from Dallas. She had a heavy accent and a heavy smile to match, both overdone like a full bottle of cheap cologne on a used car salesman, cologne that tickled Violet's nose and made her squish her nostrils shut. The aide's eyes jumped from place to place looking for land mines to extinguish. She appeared professionally plump and armed. An official identification badge with the name 'Billy' was clipped to the collar of her white coat. Under the coat Billy wore a cotton blue surgical top with matching pressed blue pants. Her shoes were whitewashed of all color. She carried with her a black case stuffed with papers ripe to escape from their f
olders. Violet's folder was in there someplace.
My mother was nervous that day. She had the full jitters. Her feet were particularly loud and unruly. They moved around like rowdy hooligans arguing on the front porch of her wheelchair. And her fingers pounded out the William Tell Overture around her legs as if there was an ivory keyboard sitting on her lap and tucked under her thighs. Her purse bounced in the back row. Memories that were jammed loosely in the side pouches, slid out of their order.
"Miss Violet...Miss Violet, How yaw doin' today? Do you 'member who I am and why I'm vis'tin yaw?"
I hated when people who knew my mother, who visited often, started their conversations with fixed smiles and a 'who-am-I' series of questions. I thought it condescending. Those were questions clinically reserved for halfwits walking around the cuckoo-nests in bleak institutions.
“I second that.” said Kitty. All the airheads waved in agreement. Seven or maybe there were eight that day in full view behind my mother. A reasonable amount I thought to validate some attention. Look up for God’s sake. I wanted to scream… Look up.
"How yaw doin' today Miss Violet? It's a beautiful day. Do you 'member who I am? Do you know wha' day 'tis? Talk to me darling, who – is – the – president? Do you know?"
I watched my mother's unresponsive attitude sink. She squirmed around and moved closer back into her wheelchair. The jitters tempted her to slip away into an empty hiding place where she could stand tippy-toed on her dementias and lasso herself to the moons and stars in the sky. I watched her temporarily disappear and thought of my mother flying away to exotic places until plump arms coming from oceans away, pulled her back into the room.
I tightened my jaw and bit down hard to stop any regretting words from slipping out. My mouth was stuffed with some of the greatest pungent, sarcastic lines that in different circumstances would have been applauded, Emmy'ed, Oscar'ed or maybe even Cleo'ed in a more appropriate and accepting setting - a gift I inherited from my father.
Dora, Betty and the Elmo twins caught in the draft, leaned over as if they were trying to help my mother. “She's fine, you're Billy and it's a weekday - not sure which one but we got mail and Judge Judy just finished slapping around some poor schmuck's defense because he spoke while the judge's mouth was still moving. She only does that on weekdays.”
Billy couldn't wait for Violet's answer.
She was pudgy with nursing book knowledge she learned in Dallas. All kinds of diagnoses jammed up inside of her, ready to nose-dive off her tongue.
Looking past my mother and toward me, she left her friendly self and jumped straight into her medical-ness.
"Looks like she'z got a bit of agitation in'er today and she'z not respondin' to simple queschuns." You mean stupid questions…I thought.
Billy was excited about her prognosis and equally proud of her diagnostic and her nursie-protected opinion. She stuffed her papers and her medical-ness into her briefcase and reapplied her smile.
The visit ended.
"I'll give the doctors my repor'. They'll send'ya a prescripshun over to the house. It'll keep her quiet and calm'er down. I'll check in with ya'll tomorra."
Billy had a tailored rigid adherence to all the medical guidelines. In her visits, she offered no fresh illusions to a medical establishment that supplied more pills and clichés than answers. Like a good soldier, she fought off all invasions of external suggestions. I eventually crossed the conventional boundaries of papered prescriptions and declare war on this southern little lady. It was inevitable. Maybe not today, but it was coming.
I was uncomfortable, uneasy with most drug medications. Papered prescriptions overriding other papered prescriptions. Drugs followed by other drugs for the side effects, followed by more drugs needed to repair the damage from taking drugs. Violet was not good with most medications. No one in the family had much of a tolerance to drugs. We had our own medical concoctions and recipes for curing everything bad.
Billy ended her visit and stood over my mother. "Good – bye – Violet.” A change in her tone and direction, she addressed me… “I'll check in with ya'll tomorra.” Final head turn back to Violet. “Now – you – be – good – an – stay – otta' – trouble."
* I was protective of my mother. But maybe in truth, I was defending my own forgetful ways and craziness. I loved crazy. All artists love crazy - painters for sure. Crazy smears itself on thirsty canvases hungry for involvement with the beautiful, the brilliant and the unattainable. Crazy talks to me on buses and loosens old thoughts that had been stuck in my head for years. Crazy slaps my thinking silly, wakes me up and more than often pries open my closed eyes. They are my ah-ha moments - those times when the gods had turned my head 180 degrees and inside out to look at life differently.
Between reality and fantasy, past and present, the palpable and the mysterious, I found living with my mother, with the dementias and the crazies, the gypsies and the saints, the airheads and the unknown, rather enjoyable in a crazy way.
* Violet glanced sideways out of her eyes at the moon’s sun. She watched its line of light under the blinds. When she thought the moon was tired, her eyes would close inside themselves like a shutter in a camera about to take a picture. Waiting.
Skeeter did come back that night and returned nearly every night after that. He found a way to crawl into Violet's head and lure her away like a lovesick schoolboy taunting his sweetheart in meeting him outside her bedroom window.
Good evening my sweet Violet. I know this is short notice but I want you to come with me to a party. Everyone you cannot remember will be there. You must come. I will not take ‘no’ for an answer.
Violet tried to play the game of resistance and teased her new lover in defense of surrendering everything to him. She twirled around on unframed memories as she seductively danced for him and for everyone.
Skeeter's boyishness unlocked a hunger inside of her. Their secret affair pulled Violet closer into herself.
They talked and laughed through the night and traveled through time. He took her everywhere and danced with her in the mirror of gods and goddesses. He lavished her with gifts of silk and blest moonstones loosely strung on fine linen threads.
* A skinny man from Walgreens stood outside the front door. He pushed his eyes closer into a side window looking for any signs of life. When he saw me on the other side, he raised the small white bag up to his shoulders and shook it back and forth, up and down like a baby’s rattle.
The Calvary was here to save the jitters. I opened the door. The temperature dropped 40 degrees. I signed for the rattling Calvary and led the bag with the pills to Dementialand, specifically to the counter where the other medical prescriptions argued with each other. The over-the-counter meds stacked themselves neatly armed for battle.
On the wall above the counter, a worn picture hung. The wedding couple inside the frame stared out at their future. They did not see a Suzka, a Sovina nor any gypsies, airheads or saints. They held their eyes still. Their clothes remained forever buttoned. A white bouquet of Calla Lilies released tiny fragrances to only the dreamers and believers that happened to pass by the framed picture.
32.
DEMENTIA’S NIGHTTIME DEMONS It was close to midnight. It hadn't been a very good day, which left no reason for me to expect the night to be any better. Everything was off. In its morning, the sun was late and came rushing in, barely squeezing into the day before the night closed its door. Billy's visit sat in my head like bad cheese in a bad dream fouling my sleep. Sovina was upstairs with my mother.
The night screamed from above and woke me. I walked up the steps to check on my mother. The sundowning gypsies danced around her bed like they do every night but tonight the air for dancing was fast and cunningly vicious.
The airheads with their black eyes and painted smiles, squeezed against each other as if they feared being slashed to inflation. They fluttered and scooted into a huddle. All the saints of Michael and Christopher throughout the house wiggled out of their statue
’ness and rushed into Violet's room for battle.
Something was horribly wrong.
"Oh my God Sovina... what's happening? Why is mom acting like that?" My mother looked mad in her craziness. Her feet scratched the sheets like the desperate feet of trapped chickens.
"Mrs. Violet is very nervous. I've never seen her this upset."
"What brought this on?"
"I... I think it could be those new pills Billy sent over. The ones to calm her fidgetiness and help her to sleep." She swayed her body from side to side and shook her
head hard trying to push out the induced hallucinations
from her head. Her face squished and distorted its
fleshy-waxed skin in some clamoring determination as
she moaned and mumbled absurdities.
Sovina wiped Violet's head with a cold damp rag. The room sweated with worry for my mother. I saw patches of her skull gleaming like the inside of an oyster shell. Buttons slipped open on her bed jacket in the struggle.
"Jesus. How many of those pills did she take?" "Just two. Exactly what it said on the bottle. Only two, I swear." My mother grabbed the rails on the side of her bed with both hands and held on tightly. Her body jerked back and forth. Her grip was secure. She grunted and tightened her thighs together. An odor stuffed the room; battleground sweat and adrenalin.
Someone took over my mother. Some THING filled the room.
I ran around useless shutting the windows with no reason in my head as to why. Sovina cradled my mother's shoulders as a mother would when her baby had a bad dream. She stroked my mother's head and talked softly calling "Miss Violet… Miss Violet wake up. Please wake up. You are safe. No one is going to hurt you."
It was as if a chilling and diabolical visitor came into our night and filled the room.
The moon peeked through the slits of the dark sky. When it got a glimpse of our hideous visitor, its face cringed and ran behind the closest night cloud.
Wonders In Dementialand: Dementialand Page 20