The Alzheimer’s books give you conflicting instructions. “Go with his fantasy.” “Ignore his imaginings; change the subject.” “Get him to elaborate on the fantasy.” The books may tell you different things to do, but they’re unanimous in calling the patient him, even though most old people are women. Sometimes I do it one way, sometimes another.
“Let’s go for a walk,” I suggest now.
And I put my arms around him, trying to straighten him up. He feels funny, like my father but different, skinny and wiry, a pipe-cleaner man with little ribs poking out from beneath his vest.
“So,” I ask again, “a walk?” He says yes and feels along the edge of the bed for his shoes.
Of course, Aunt Crystal consulted me about Daddy’s money, but I was busy at Habitat for Humanity doing good for people who weren’t related to me, and I just told her, “Go ahead, spend it, put him in that place. Who cares about money?”
I used to imagine Daddy would come live with me some day, but I didn’t think he’d crumble so suddenly, and I wasn’t counting on my own life getting that confused.
I stop and put my arms around a fat palm tree. “So where is my harp of gold,” I ask the air, “if this is my beanstalk.” Meanwhile telling myself, you total lunatic; you’re crazy, too, it runs in the family. How could your poor parent not be confused? The palm tree has crystal fog droplets trembling at the ends of its fronds.
In a minute a lady joins us at the tree, a small question-mark lady, bent sideways over her walker. I know this person, whose name is Mrs. Dexter; she’s one of Daddy’s three-person fan club. That is, three ladies, all old and in different ways attractive and interesting, who like to eat with him when he goes to the dining room. I think that they eat with him because they see that he is also still attractive and interesting, although somewhat damaged in transit.
Mrs. Dexter bump-clunks down the path toward us and stops to stare up at the palm tree. “There are monarch butterflies living in that tree,” she says. “Hello, Carla, hello, Ed, how are you?” And she reaches out and grabs a butterfly and holds it, upright wings together, under my father’s nose.
Her white hair is smashed into even, accented waves, and her pink face stares sideways at the sun. She tucks the butterfly back in its palm tree cleft.
“They sleep all winter, a butterfly doesn’t dream.” She adds, “It doesn’t have the nerves.”
“They stand for the soul, of course,” Daddy says. “Like . . .” He had straightened up cheerfully when Mrs. Dexter first arrived, but now his body contracts. “There was a woman on the beach. They seized her soul. Three people. With a fishing net.”
Mrs. Dexter looks over at him, her flat, heavy face creased. “Perhaps it just looked that way, Ed.”
“No. No, Miss . . .” Names are hard for him.
“Dexter.” She touches his arm briefly. “It’s easy to misinterpret.” She’s firm in proposing this. “Things change in a certain light. Or if events happen quickly it can be confusing.”
“I did nothing,” my father says. “I simply was there. I didn’t act. That’s a sin. The Negative Confession pledges: I did not cause to weep. I was not deaf to the words of truth.” He touches his hand to his cheek as if he’s feeling a sore place.
“Daddy,” I put an arm around him, “let’s go look at the mermaid.”
This mermaid statue glimmers down at the end of the path, a bronze copy of the one the travel brochures show in the Copenhagen harbor. She has a plaque on her pedestal that says she’s a memorial to somebody’s parents. Unlike the original mermaid in Copenhagen, this one has blonde hair. Or reddish-blonde. The sculptor did something to the bronze to make it that color. My father is fond of her.
The mermaid statue area is also a local hangout for the long-legged hares who frequent this garden, inquiring noses quivering, ears aloft. My father likes them, too. “They look like former President Coolidge,” he says.
“I’ll examine the mermaid alone.” He rejects me with a shoulder movement and plods away down the path.
Mrs. Dexter leans on her walker to watch. He’s still agile and moves all right, but his back looks stiff and unhappy. “What a pity,” she says.
“He’s worse,” I suggest.
She inclines her head.
“How long?” I ask.
She shrugs, which is difficult for her, bent over the walker and not in a good position for shrugging. “One week? Two?”
I say, “The books all talk about plateaus. The person goes along fine for a while and then crashes for a while.”
She makes an explosive noise, “Poo,” or some similar sound; I had never heard anyone actually say, poo. “Books. You don’t need books, Carla. It’s this place.”
I had been thinking something like this, but now I argue. “Hey. It’s a silly place. Pretentious. Overstuffed and phony. But not that bad.”
“The place is weird.” Mrs. Dexter relishes this word as if she’s just thought it up. “There’s a tense atmosphere. People go around looking pursued.”
“Pursued?”
“Afraid to look behind them.”
I resist asking her if she’d been watching X Files.
“Someone fell out of a window,” she says.
That’s a stopper. I gawk. “You’re kidding.”
“I am not, as you put it, kidding. She is all right, but she might not have been. She might have died. It was a floor-to-ceiling window, one with a door; those doors are supposed to be nailed shut, but someone got the door open and left it that way.”
I think of practical questions that I’ll pose later: Was the maintenance crew painting? Repairing something? Putting in a new TV line? “And she just fell out?” I ask.
“We don’t know exactly. She has a bad sense of balance. The new chef caught her.”
Down the path my father is bent over, reading the sign on the mermaid’s pedestal. I start walking toward him. “Daddy has a very good sense of balance,” I say.
Mrs. Dexter clunks along behind me. “There have been other things. Also fairly serious. A fire in the beauty parlor. And a gas fireplace unit that leaked. Management says these are accidents, but we residents know they aren’t.”
“Of course they’re investigating,” I say.
“I am investigating,” Mrs. Dexter’s voice, normally a nice contralto, grows sharper. “I have been listening. If you’re old, they don’t pay attention to you, and you can listen. You’d be surprised. You can come up behind, and no one notices you. You’re a cipher, a nonentity. You can learn things.”
We’ve almost reached Daddy now. I have a silly impulse to hold on to him when Mrs. Dexter talks like this. What a shame, I think, Mrs. D. is starting to go, too, and I was counting on her to be sensible. If she and the other residents are sensible and the Manor itself stays stable in spite of being pretentious and overdone, then maybe my father can quiet down. For a while, anyway.
That’s what you ask for with Alzheimer’s. A while.
“Do you know,” he says, “the modeling on the scales of this tail is quite good.” He seems perfectly okay for the moment. Early-stage Alzheimer’s is like that, one minute you’re vague about your own last name and an hour later you’re delivering lectures on the Chaos Theory.
“Perhaps we should start off toward dinner,” Mrs. Dexter gets cheerful at this thought. “Dinner is one of the better things here. Did you know that we will have oysters tonight? Many older people do not like oysters. I, personally, love them.”
The dining hall has an arched oak entryway and a circular front lawn where the management is always running the sprinkler. You can hear the sea; it seems to be inside your skull. Sometimes, with an extra-long breaker, you can feel it there, too. The ocean surges back and forth just beyond our reach, a quarter mile away.
We go through the beveled doors and stand in the lobby, which is high-ceilinged and has a dark red carpet. The wall is also dark red with a pattern of braided gold rope crisscrossing against the scarlet background. There ar
e lots of heavy gold-framed pictures stationed in relays up to the ceiling. Some of these contain Renoir-type women in blue tunics, and some show sad Victorian dogs beseeching up at an invisible master. The double doors to the inner eating area are closed.
Mrs. Dexter wants to talk some more about Green Beach Manor. “The atmosphere in this place—” she stops her sentence to gesture menacingly at the art gallery with her square baby’s chin. “Carla, no wonder he’s reacting. They, here, are so cheerful and glossy, and underneath that the atmosphere is tense—know what I mean?”
Sure, you already told me about it, on X Files where the woman agent whispers, “Watch it,” to the man agent, and the computerized music synthesizes away in the background, and the TV screen glows darkly film-noir. Poor Mrs. Dexter. I smile down at her.
“And I’ve listened,” she goes on, “and I’ve learned.”
“All of us can learn,” my father says reasonably. “Did you say oysters, Miss . . .”
Mrs. Dexter tells him Dexter, and he says, “Oysters,” and I excuse myself and go off toward the restroom.
Mrs. Dexter’s paranoia bothers me. I stand in the rococo marble and gilt bathroom with my hands on the edge of the washbasin and scowl at the mirror.
My ex-boyfriend, the one that ran Habitat for Humanity in Baker’s Landing, told me an only child always thinks well of herself. He didn’t mean it as a compliment, but I decided to remember it that way. I am tall and have reddish hair that gets brighter when the sun hits it, and I look younger than my age. The Habitat boyfriend used to say I looked radiant and lusty; Susie’s son Robbie just said I was pretty. Today I’m wearing blue jeans and a black T-shirt and a black jacket on top of that for respectability. I stick my tongue out at my reflection. That seems a corrective gesture and I’m imitating the faucet handles, which are shaped like those medieval decorations high up on the cathedral, the ones with griffin heads or lion heads and long, lolling tongues.
When I get back to the dining room, Daddy and Mrs. Dexter are sitting at a table in the corner. The walker rests beside the table; Mrs. Dexter has hung her pocketbook on it. She and my father are talking about the food.
“Oysters are interesting to eat,” she is saying. “My uncle, long ago, taught me.” She demonstrates with an imaginary shellfish, holding it by its edge and slurping. “It seemed barbaric at first, and then it seemed the height of sophistication. Did they have oysters in ancient Egypt, Ed?”
I think, oh, Jesus, now he’ll start again about fishing nets; that’s his phobia for today, but he doesn’t. He answers perfectly rationally, describing a search he once made among Egyptian banquet paintings for “not oysters exactly,” he says, “but shellfish. And I didn’t find any! Perhaps the shells were too small to look good in a tomb painting.” He sounds exactly like his old self, Edward Day, Professor of Egyptology, Head, Department of Near Eastern Studies. Thank you, Mrs. Dexter, for treating him like a real person.
“But I won’t have oysters today,” Daddy says. “They’re special, aren’t they? I’ll sit here and admire yours.”
I also don’t want oysters. They were a favorite with my mother, Constancia, and I don’t want to think about Constancia just now.
So Daddy and I are involved in spearing bits of salad lettuce and aren’t watching when Mrs. Dexter begins making the noises.
She holds an oyster out in the air and coughs out the half-choked, half-explosive sounds that go with having something stuck in your throat. Then she drops the oyster and puts a hand to her collarbone and leans forward. Her face screws up, her eyes bulge.
And liquid begins to run down her chin. A juice that looks red, almost like blood, at first runs in a narrow glaze below her lip, then in two angry rivulets, one from each corner of her mouth. And yes, it is blood. Definitely.
She puts a hand to her collarbone and leans forward, eyes bulging.
A red puddle drips from her chin onto the oysters that still sit in front of her.
I stand up and run around the table, knocking my chair over. I’m trying to remember the details of the Heimlich maneuver. And saying to myself, No, not Heimlich, she’s bleeding . And then telling myself, Yes, but something’s stuck there. So what I finally do is part Heimlich and part invention.
I pick her up and shift her around. It’s almost like handling a child, a child with scrawny shoulders and a projecting ribcage. I think, Oh, my God, I hope I don’t break anything; her bones are bird bones only; here is a tiny frail rib, like a chicken rib; here is a knobbed curve of backbone. And the blood; blood coming down her face and into the creases in my wrists.
I turn her partly upside-down, concentrating hard, staring at the jug of flowers in the middle of the table. “Don’t swallow now,” I say, and move my hands into position on her diaphragm and lift her into the air, half upside-down, squeezing.
Behind me the dining room gets silent. Maybe my ears have clogged up, but the room seems to get totally still, and then there is the explosion of a lot of chair-scraping and feet coming our way. But I can’t pay attention to that. Mrs. Dexter pats the air; her little rump presses into my chest; the rest of her body hangs rigid and tensed, black-shod feet pointing outward, everything hanging from my squeezing hands. But finally she coughs, an awful, painful noise, wrenching, as if some part of her throat is coming up. It sounds final, as if she can never do that again. I turn her around and lay her on her back.
A couple of waitresses have materialized nervously behind me. I feel them but don’t even look up at them; I’m busy.
“Now don’t bite me, for God’s sake,” I say, kneeling over her. And winch and wangle her mouth open. She is good about the way I maul her; it’s hard not to gag when someone does this to you.
A lot of blood has puddled under her soft palate. I feel something—a sudden triangular wedge of sharpness. I get a finger underneath and catch the sharp thing; she gags, but I’ve pulled this little sharp bit forward. Then I turn her over onto her face, and she spits the sharp object out, along with a gush of blood and oyster and moaning.
A lot of people are standing around us now, including a waitress who says, “Oh, my God, oh, my God,” over and over.
I reach for Mrs. Dexter’s napkin and wipe her face. “Oh,” she’s saying, “oh, oh,” drawing in a harsh, bubbling breath each time.
“You were wonderful, wonderful,” I tell her, “Jesus X that must have hurt. Oh, poor Mrs. D.” I bend over and kiss her on her poor quivering blood-smeared cheek.
I’m not sure what makes me pick that fragment of sharpness out of the blood and oyster mess on the floor and put it in my pocket. I tell myself something like, If the infirmary wants to see it, I’ll show them, but meanwhile I’m taking charge. I thought at first it must be a piece of oyster shell, but now, as I feel in my pocket, it seems more like a piece of glass.
People are around us in a circle. Someone is saying, “Call the infirmary,” and someone else, “Doctor, get the doctor.” Poor Mrs. Dexter will hate this, being on display.
I get up to go to my father, whose voice I hear threaded through the other babble; he’s saying, “If she lies there, they will come for her. When you lie down like that is when they grab you.”
Chapter 2
I spend a bedraggled night churning across a Manor guest-room bed and staring up into a fluted ceiling. What’s going to happen to my poor confused father? And to gallant, paranoid Mrs. Dexter? And what’s with that piece of glass? Because it is glass; it sits now, wrapped in toilet paper, in the front pocket of my backpack, looking like a sliver of that microwave-safe milky stuff they use to make baking dishes.
I don’t want to believe that Mrs. Dexter’s dramatic warnings are fact-based. Four A.M. flickers across the motel-type clock before I turn out the light.
But the next morning I get up feeling okay and go off to find Daddy, who seems moderately glued to reality, although he wants to talk too much about Horus’s Eye, which is a hieroglyph of an eye with stylized markings below it. We have breakfast se
nt to the room, and he cracks the top of his egg and worries about the eye: “It represents eternal renewal, did you remember? An image of hope, of course.” Snap, off comes the top of the egg. “You know, I think I am in danger.”
“Surely not, Daddy.” This has to be more of Mrs. Dexter’s paranoia. “The Manor,” I enthuse, “such a safe place.” I gesture at his small-paned, mullioned window, elegantly old-fashioned.
“Hmmm,” says my father. “They may send me somewhere to keep me safe.”
I don’t like this talk one bit, but I decide the way to handle it is to ignore it. I kiss him and position him in his easy chair in front of the TV, and by the time I leave for my appointment with Manor administration he seems perfectly all right, clucking over the timber construction of the prairie mansion in This Old House.
They want to send him off to Hope House, and I want them not to. It seems to me that he has paid for the luxury of residence in the good parts of the Manor, and he should have that for a long while more.
Manor administration is a lady named Mrs. Sisal, who has an asymmetrical haircut and is wearing a long-waisted black suit. She focuses on me in her lozenge-shaped glasses and lets me know that I am famous. “Excellent thinking last night,” she says. “Admirable.” She sounds as if it hurts to say these things. “We are going to have to give Mrs. Dexter medication lessons,” she adds right away, being the kind of administrator who needs to balance any nice thing she accidentally does with a mean one.
I ask, “Medication lessons?” and she agrees, “Yes, of course,” and goes on to explain: “We have had many clients—the people we work with here are not patients, Miss Day, but clients—we’ve had many clients who did that. Forgot. Tried to swallow a pill inside its aluminum casing.”
I’m lost here. “A pill in an aluminum casing?”
Mrs. Sisal moves her head irritatedly. “Some of the medications are arranged on an aluminum-covered card. You have to separate the sections, which are sharp. And after that, you must pry the pill out.”
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