by Rachel Khong
“I don’t know if that’s a good idea,” I say.
“I understand,” she says. “But—”
“Look, I’m his daughter,” I say.
“He doesn’t remember me,” she says quietly.
“What doesn’t he remember?” I say, and Joan gets very quiet.
“It’s the short-term memory,” Lung had said, that’s the first to go.
May 19
Now she has the nerve to give me a note for him. She’s left it in the mailbox, addressed to me, but inside my envelope there’s a sealed envelope for him.
Which of course I throw away.
May 21
Today Mom announces that some students of my father’s are coming over and hands me a grocery list. When I get home, Joan is there and so is Theo and they’re arranging crackers on a platter.
“Ruth!” Joan says, and hugs me.
I pull out the Brie—misshapen because it was bagged, unwisely, at the bottom—and Theo helps to reshape it.
Who invited her? and Why is this happening? are questions I am dying to ask him, but I don’t have a chance to. He seems grateful to be in my father’s company—eager to be forgiven.
Dinner is take-out Thai. The curries have been transferred to bowls, the papaya salad to a platter, and there are place mats and forks and knives and napkins: Joan sits across from Linus, who has no idea who she is besides a student, or what she means; I’m across from Theo; my parents are at the table ends.
Dinner proceeds as though Joan and Theo are a girlfriend and boyfriend Linus and I have brought home from college and introduced. My parents ask about their upbringings. My parents tell them stories about Linus and me as kids, for their benefit. Joan and Theo laugh appropriately, because how cute those people were, who were us and who are not us, and now they know about the time Linus and I were in the bathtub together, and a piece of poo floated to the surface, and each of us pointed to the other, and to this day they haven’t gotten a straight answer about who’s to blame. We’ll never tell. I’m watching my father, to see where he’s looking, but it’s normal. He’s not paying any particular attention to her; he’s looking at whoever’s doing the talking. Meanwhile, I can feel Theo’s eyes on me. I can’t bring myself to meet them.
They leave together. After Linus hastily loads the dishwasher and retreats upstairs—to watch TV on his laptop, we can hear it—Dad retires for the night, and it is finally just my mother and I who remain in the kitchen, wordlessly drying the dishes. She’s drying a large white platter, making circles on its surface with a white dishrag. Holding the platter, she looks so small. When she says something finally, it’s to call Joan lovely, as in, “She was lovely.”
“Damn it, Mom,” I say, unable to help it—the anger that’s rising.
“Damn what, Ruth?” she says, quietly, and already I regret what I’ve said—what I’m about to say.
“What,” I say, “are you trying to accomplish here?”
She puts the platter down. It seems as though she might smash it, but instead she takes a glass from the table and begins polishing that.
“I don’t appreciate that tone, Ruth,” she says, very calmly, the way she always used to say it.
“She doesn’t mean anything to him anymore,” I say.
“And what,” she says very flatly, “could you know?”
“I know you don’t deserve this shit,” I say. “Things are over between her and Dad. Whatever the things were. None of this is your fault.”
Mom doesn’t respond. She looks only a little ruffled, as though someone has unexpectedly handed her a warm water balloon.
“He doesn’t. Even. Remember,” I say.
She says nothing. I know this means: But I do.
She ignores my question. What she says, instead, is: “You have no right.”
And it shouldn’t surprise me—this asserting of herself—but it does.
“Why couldn’t you visit, Ruth?” she asks, quietly. “Why couldn’t you manage to visit?”
This, I don’t know how to answer.
Truthfully? I didn’t want to see you suffering. I didn’t want my fears confirmed. It was less terrifying this way: not helping you, not saving you, just leaving you all alone.
And then quietly, she adds, “This wasn’t how I thought it would be.”
“It?” I say.
“Having a daughter,” she says.
She removes her gloves and hands them to me, all without saying a word. “It’s fine,” she says, quietly, leaving me to finish the dishes.
May 22
Today, home from work, she skips dinner and retreats to the master bedroom. She’s put a comforter on the couch in the study, for my father. No pillow, so I give him one from my bed. He seems genuinely confused.
May 23
She leaves the house for work and gets home after dinner.
I ask where she’s been and she says only, “Swimming,” and locks the bedroom door behind her.
May 24
Night three and my dad bangs on the door and shouts, “ANNIE, I LOVE YOU,” like it’s a dorm building, and he’s nineteen and declaring his affection dramatically. But it doesn’t open.
We think maybe she’s crawled out the window.
It’s always this: someone on one side of a door, someone on the other.
I remember one late night in college, I was in the dining commons, bracing myself for the long night of studying ahead, putting a tea bag in the mug of hot water to steep. Outside it was snowing, which was a marvel for that first year of college—having just moved from California—and tedious for the other two and a half. I was watching the snow.
Linus had called, upset, because my father wasn’t coming home, and my mother was being her usual self, too patient and too forgiving, and Linus thought she was being unreasonable—being unreasonably patient—and Linus really, truly wanted to do something about it, but he didn’t know what he could do, and neither did I.
“It’s like she thinks she deserves it,” Linus had said, “or something.”
“That makes no sense,” I’d said. Outside, kids I recognized from my dorm were patting snow into giant men: snow people engaged in erotic acts.
It doesn’t matter who remembers what, I guess, so long as somebody remembers something.
May 28
Today you asked me what “Dick” meant, and while I was deciding what direction I should take, you said, “Mom said you were one.”
Today you put on your mother’s earrings inside your ears, and we had to shake them out.
Today you asked me, “What are nerds?” And when I said, “They’re people who are smart, and really interested in studying a subject,” you said that your mother had told you there were no nerds in your elbow, and that’s why it didn’t hurt when you pinched there. Nerves! I thought, but didn’t correct you.
I rip up the page. I mean to throw the pieces away but can’t. I put the pieces into my pocket to throw away later, or to forget to take out of my pocket and have destroyed by the washing machine.
It’s all so messed up. I think what it is, is that when I was young, my mother was her best version of herself. And here I am, now, a shitty grown-up, and messing it all up, and a disappointment.
What imperfect carriers of love we are, and what imperfect givers. That the reasons we can care for one another can have nothing to do with the person cared for. That it has only to do with who we were around that person—what we felt about that person.
Here’s the fear: she gave to us, and we took from her, until she disappeared.
May 29
At four this morning, there is loud knocking at the door, and someone shouting, “POLICE!” From the top of the stairs I see my mother and Linus, squinting at the cops—there was a woman, a man—shining their flashlights and asking if this is Howard Young’s house. Mom says it is.
“He was two streets over, sitting on a porch,” they say. “We got a phone call. The neighbors were worried.” And there is Dad, behind the
m, in only boxers.
“Well, it looks like your clothes are here,” says the man cop. The pants and shirt are spread across the couch—they look as though they’ve been laid there. The cop reaches into his pants pocket. “Seems like your wallet is here, too.”
Dad looks stunned. He sits down. Mom thanks the police, and when they are gone, she sits beside my father, who starts to cry. Still wordlessly she wraps her arms around him, kisses him on the side of his face, and repeats, very softly, “Stupid, stupid, stupid,” and kisses him some more. This is how we leave them.
May 30
Sometimes what I wonder is if it counts, I hope, for anything. All that time with Joel, I mean. There was the day, for example, we went fishing, and used chicken nuggets as bait. What I remember is the day itself—brisk with a breeze—and what the sun looked like, and how we laughed. In the end, we threw back all the mullet we caught.
“Christ, these fish eat chicken,” was what I had said.
“Christ, these fish eat nuggets,” Joel said.
Then he ushered me into Tommy’s, where we drank pitcher after pitcher of sangria until the sugar became too much to bear.
That was a good night. But here I’m conceding it wasn’t anything.
What I want to know is what counted for something and what counted not at all. Now I feel like a shit for spending that time—that’s the word it’s convention to use: spending—on what turns out not to matter, and neglecting the things that did, and do.
After Joel and after Franklin, there was, very briefly, a painter named Adam who used to say, “Bore goo,” and it took me a long time to realize he meant bourgeois. But I forgave it, because who am I to judge? For a long time I thought touché meant touchy, and also that homely meant resembling home.
After the breakup, which was nasty, an envelope came in the mail, from Adam. There was no note, only a piece of string. I couldn’t figure it out. I kept it laid out on my desk until I realized what it was: string cut to the length of the circumference of his penis.
David, the attorney, took me on three dates—each of them to steak houses. Always, it seemed, he would eat and drink less than I did. It caused me this private anguish. The second date, at a different steak house, over another top sirloin, he said, “I’d like to do this again,” and as he said it, I knew that I didn’t.
Patrick was a policeman. He was mild and kind and he looked all right.
Late one night, at somebody’s housewarming party, he turned to me and held my right hand in both of his, as though he had something important to say.
“What is it?” I said.
“I was thinking,” he said. He wasn’t very bright, and really looked like he had been.
“You know the rescue dogs, after 9/11?” he said. “The ones who would look for survivors in the rubble? Something I heard, the other day, is that, during the searches, they would grow depressed, going long stretches of time without finding anybody. The relief workers would take turns hiding in the rubble so the dogs could find them and have the strength to carry on.”
“You’re calling me a dog? That’s what you’re doing?” I said, drinking my beer, which was by now warm. I had been struggling to identify the taste while Patrick was talking and now I realized what it was: tortillas. This beer tasted like tortillas. Listening to Patrick, I’d been hoping—against hope, that much was clear—he had something to say that could change my mind.
“No, what I’m saying is, I could be the relief worker,” Patrick said. “I could surprise you. It could give you strength to go on.”
“Look, I’m sorry, Patrick,” I said. “It just doesn’t work,” I said, “if you tell me how it’s supposed to go.”
There was a pause then.
“I’m sorry, too,” was what he said, finally.
The other day, talking with Bonnie, I said something about Joel. Something reminded me of Joel and I mentioned it, offhandedly. We fell into a silence.
“If I were you, I’d forget about Joel,” she said.
“I didn’t mean anything.”
“I know you didn’t. I’m just saying, if I were you, I’d forget about him.”
If I were you is something I’ve never really understood. Why say, “If I were you”? Why say, “If I were you,” when the problem is you’re not me? I wish people would say, “Since I am me,” followed by whatever advice it is they have.
I have always felt bad about the year of friendship that Bonnie and I lost: the year I left college to be with Joel in Connecticut, Bonnie and I fell out of touch. She kept asking if being with him—leaving college to do that—was a good idea and I, not wanting to entertain the possibility that it might not be, stopped returning her calls.
When I finally answered one, two months later, she didn’t bother to pussyfoot.
“This is a dumb idea,” she said. “You’re not thinking this through.”
“You went to art school,” I said, meaning: That doesn’t even count as college.
“I’m trying to help,” she said before hanging up, “and you’re being a bitch.”
She’s since told me that, that year we didn’t speak, she had an Afro.
What a thing to have missed.
On the Alzheimer’s message board, I introduce myself and write:
I don’t know if I’m cut out for this.
This job is for someone purer of heart.
And the responses come:
No one here has never not thought that.
Your heart is in the right place. Or close enough.
Your heart has nothing to do with this.
You know what the origin of that phrase is, “cut out”? It’s from tailors. Having their cloth cut out for them.
Things that take up room in my brain that I wish didn’t:
• 3.14159265
• The names of all the world’s major and minor straits
• The entire screenplay of Mrs. Doubtfire
• How to turn an unwritable VHS tape into a writable one (tape over the little square in the lower right-hand corner)
• “We Didn’t Start the Fire”
• Ditto “Gangsta’s Paradise”
• The catalog of movies Joel has seen, at least up until last year
• Parakeet diseases
• Various taxonomic ranks
• The knowledge that the king of hearts, in a deck of cards, has no mustache, while the kings of spades, clubs, and diamonds do
Dad’s study is a mess. It’s my fault, for not checking it out sooner. The smell, when I open the door, is awful. There are half-eaten sandwiches in the drawers, and there’s mold on the bread. It looks like Dad has ripped pages from books and is assembling the disparate pages. There’s one stack of pages he’s rebound with craft glue and construction paper, as though he’s building a better book, compiling a book of separate books, a book that would improve upon the originals.
There is a bedsheet draped over the fish tank, and who knows how long it’s been there. The fish are still swimming, but their bodies seem drained of gold. They’re small ghost fish.
I call the pet store, and it’s Bill who answers. He says not to worry: goldfish cells produce pigment in response to light. Leave a goldfish in the dark, he says, and in time it will turn completely white.
Downstairs, my father has peeled a clementine, and now he’s sitting at the table, looking at this skin that’s fallen from the fruit in the shape of two perfect lungs.
Here, now, I’m wishing things were different. The other day I read that patients in later stages of the disease will eat the entire banana or orange. They will fail to recognize the peel.
It’s a terminal disease, all the literature keeps saying.
“But isn’t everything terminal?” is what I say to nobody, out loud.
June 1
And then, somehow, it gets better.
Dad, Linus, and I go for morning walks, and on our walks we notice bicyclists having a good time. We tell ourselves we’ll dust our bikes off and b
ike around ourselves, and another day we follow through: we ride our bikes past the community pool, and vow to bring our swimsuits back for a swim, which we do. We stop at the grocery store for cruciferous vegetables. Linus borrows DVDs from the library—movies we’ve never heard of, and mostly they’re bad, but still.
June 2
We’re at the store looking for capers and can’t find them.
“Can I help you?” the employee asks.
“We’re looking for capers,” Dad says.
“That’s a kind of fish, right?”
“It’s like a tiny olive,” I say.
Somehow she leads us straight to them.
June 3
I’ve bookmarked a recipe I want to try: patati con agnello scappato, potatoes with escaped lamb. There is no lamb. From now on I’m going to make macaroni and cheese “with escaped beef” and rice pilaf “with escaped pig.”
Linus is in the guest room, supposedly writing. I can hear Dad singing in the bathroom, revising Smokey Robinson: Though she might be cute, she’s just a prostitute, you’re my permanent one.
Mom joins me in the kitchen, not saying anything. She picks up a peeler and starts to peel potatoes. It’s her first time in the kitchen in who knows how long. I’m too surprised to comment. Out the window, our new neighbors Rollerblade by, the woman in her sports bra, the man wearing knee pads, obviously mad at each other but unwilling to neglect their exercise regimen—skating angrily.
From across the kitchen, Mom tosses a peeled potato into the stockpot. I try and miss; it lands in the carafe of coffee, splashing coffee everywhere. Mom shoots another one perfectly into the stockpot. Mine flies out the window. Mom laughs and laughs.
“There’s a potato in my coffee,” Linus remarks later.
“Potato?” Mom and I say innocently, at the exact same time. We crack right back up.
June 5
Mom isn’t in the mood for driving so I drive her to the doctor’s office for her regular physical. I nearly hit a stopped car, looking at the reflection of her pretty, just graying hair in the windshield. This is a fact: my mother is beautiful. When she was nineteen she broke her back and, after it healed, got a tattoo over the damaged vertebra. As a teenager, she chipped her front tooth on a jam seed. Her eyes have always made me think of pitted olives, the way they remind you—in case you’ve forgotten—that pupils are empty.