by Kyo Maclear
multi-vitamins, dental floss, hydro, phone, Anita 922–6190, Ellen 304–1211, March 22nd (Jody’s Birthday), Ronchamp (Notre Dame-du-Haut), Kyoto (Ryoanji), Paris (Ste. Chapelle)…
By the time I reached my mid-twenties, my mother was regularly losing things like her watch and datebook and acting genuinely bewildered when they appeared in places she professed never to have left them. Her secret lists multiplied with these slips of short-term memory. The contents of her dresser became a source of preoccupation and constant rediscovery. When something caught her eye it was adopted—like an Expo 67 pin she attached to her tennis visor, or a cosmetics case she carried around with her everywhere for weeks, a pincer grip sliding the zipper back and forth, her other bumpy hand kneading the fabric like pastry dough.
“I never want to be like her.”
Kana made the observation one afternoon a few years back as we sat at the kitchen table, casually observing Ayumi in the other room. It was the harshest thing she had ever said about our mother and I was taken aback by the coolness in her voice.
“It’s so depressing.” She frowned. “All that fussing and tinkering. All her fucking paraphernalia.”
It was a Sunday. Kana was wearing a shoulder-baring alpaca sweater and dark fitted jeans. Her hair was piled in a knot on top of her head. She looked casual and glamorous at the same time. Sometimes she was so beautiful it stupefied me.
Our mother was matching teacups and saucers, carefully dusting each set as she removed it from the glass cabinet and placed it on the dining table. She was concentrating in such a way that I knew everything else was blurring into the background. It was clear that she would be lost for hours.
Kana continued. “I pity her. Imagine having to rely on possessions to tell yourself who you are. Why do women do that? It’s a woman thing, isn’t it?”
I nodded but I felt secretly unsure. My mother had always been a collector. I remember shelves from my childhood lined with thickly glazed bowls and translucent egg cups she had gathered over the years. Painted china cats arranged in order of size. Plates that were never used because they were too beautiful. It was never just “loot.” Her collection rivalled the stock of most antique stores. But more recently her formidable stash had come to include detergent samples, elastic bands, old issues of TV Guide and blister packs of pills.
I wondered if a man in her position would behave the same way. Was it women’s particular dementia—or salvation—to obsessively tend to the order of the material world?
Shortly before my mother moved to Sakura, I went to visit her at home one evening and found her sitting at the top of the stairs with red, tear-filled eyes. She was holding a can of lemon furniture polish in her hands. When she noticed me standing by the banister she stood up and tried her best to fake a cough. I remember she even placed a hand against her forehead as if feeling for a temperature. The onset of the flu, she said. When she passed me, she patted my shoulder in a way that was completely foreign to me.
That same evening I discovered that she had killed her house plants, not by neglect but rather by drowning them with overvigilance, watering them over and over again.
The first few nights at Sakura, my mother told me, she lay awake, listening by habit for the CN trains that used to pass along the tracks near her house. She heard instead someone walking up and down the hall, a patter of footsteps receding then approaching, receding then approaching. Eventually the sound soothed her to sleep.
I stopped by on my way to work the next morning to see how she was settling in. The nurse came by with her medication shortly after I arrived.
“Ohaiyo, Ayumi-san, I’ve brought you your magic pills,” she said, and laughed warmly.
“They’re so tiny.” My mother stared into a small paper cup at two round, buff-coloured pills.
“Dozo, three more,” the nurse said gently, passing another cup with two vitamin E soft gels and a single ibuprofen tablet.
My mother stared into the second cup while I stared at the nurse’s fingernails, each one rounded and perfect. My mother rose to get some water from the bathroom. When she returned, I noticed that the tap was still running and went to turn it off.
There was nothing that could stop the wires from crossing in my mother’s head. Drawers full of mixed-up belongings: winter gloves packed in with pyjamas, undergarments in the vitamin drawer. She continued to misplace her possessions and it continued to upset her—“But it was here just a second ago…” It affected me deeply, until one day I had another meeting with the social worker.
We were sitting in his small windowless office. He had eyes that crinkled at the corners behind round glasses, tufts of greying hair by his temples and a horrid habit of picking at the wax in his ears as he spoke. But he was kind—effortlessly kind. The important thing, he emphasized, was that my mother still cared. She hadn’t given up. She still remembered to put away her clothes every evening, folding then refolding the sleeves, arranging her shoes under the bed. Most important, he continued, she still remembered what belonged to her. (Underwire bras, Clinique moisturizer, digital travel clock…)
Whereas people with advanced Alzheimer’s forgot what was theirs until they had nothing of their own—their lives a mishmash of unfolded clothes, unrecognized children, mouldy refrigerators—my mother’s world was yet governed by orderliness.
“Naiko,” said the social worker, “you must keep in mind that the older we get, the more we have to remember. There’s not an aging person around that hasn’t at some point feared having the circuits of their brain blown out by dementia. If you’re thirty and you lose a second set of keys, it’s a joke: you’re in love, daydreaming. If you’re sixty, it’s a crisis. Everyone around you reaches for the panic button. Generally families can do more to help by remaining calm.”
I realized that the moment my mother showed indifference when everything she once owned was gone from her memory, I would know that the end was coming. The more sick she became, the less she would carry in her purse.
“Andrei, what am I going to do? She’s lost her wallet again.”
“There are worse things to lose,” he said.
“Of course there are, but…”
“We lose things all the time.”
He was carefully extracting a rolled-up diploma from a slender cardboard tube. He examined the silver seal and continued, “Most people can’t remember what happened last week, let alone a few months ago. Tell me. Do you remember what you ate for breakfast yesterday, or the face of the person who sat beside you on the bus to work?”
“No—but…”
“How about your first kiss? Do you remember that?”
“Yes, of course. But, Andrei, I don’t see how this relates to my mother losing her wallet.”
Andrei had a theory that the ability to adapt to losing things was one of the reasons very old people had such peaceful faces. They accepted it as part of aging, he said. But I could see nothing positive about my mother’s illness. There was no tranquility. The ease with which she used to open a door, talk on the phone, pick up a pen, search through her purse—all gone.
“She has been losing things for eight years. You might think it’s perfectly normal, but I still can’t get used to it.” I knew there was an edge to my voice.
Andrei nodded slowly, his guard dropped, and he said quietly: “I’m sorry. It’s just that…” He shrugged. “I think we worry a lot about our mothers. And maybe it doesn’t help…any of us.”
I changed the subject. “You know, she’s started taking watercolour classes. She’s actually very good. She knows how to capture trees, flowers, water, all that landscape stuff.”
“That’s wonderful. To have a grasp of nature.”
Andrei had experienced his own battles against forgetting, which made his seemingly casual attitude to my mother all the more puzzling.
A few weeks after he started working at the Undeliverable Mail Office, he developed a sudden spell of insomnia. He came to the office dishevelled and exhausted. Hi
s face suddenly seemed to be composed of sharp planes and dramatic shadows. His eyes became dark and grieffilled. As he later explained it: “One morning I woke up from a bad sleep and I couldn’t remember any of the shop names or streets signs of my childhood. I tried to remember the name of my favourite gradeschool teacher but that was gone too. Was it Mr. Giurescu? Georgescu? I tried to picture the animal that appeared on our school badge. That little slice of moon, the tree. Was the tree an elm? Was the animal an owl? For nights I lay awake, fearing sleep, fearing that my dreams would swallow up other things.”
He called it his “memory flu.” In bed, he stared for hours at the stuccoed ceiling, making connect-the-dot shapes in his mind. Tree. Hammer. Cloud. By daybreak, with the sky lightening, he found himself drifting in a state of half sleep, rehearsing the Romanian words for willow, carpenter, thunderstorm. A kind of pre-emptive rescue mission. Was it his way of not forgetting the world of Nicolae?
Images of the Carpathians sat on one shelf of his mind, the words to “Awaken, Thee, Romanian!” sat on another, waiting to be retrieved whenever someone mentioned Romanian mountains or anthems.
But no one did.
Toward the end of the second week, Andrei was on the verge of collapse. He would awaken to the morning sun piercing the bedroom window, then, sleep-deprived, drowse during the day. He dropped and spilled things at work. He developed a pulsing tic in his right eye. His pride took a plunge along with his blood sugar. Eroding his sanity, heightening his sense of fragility, was the feeling he was utterly alone. That’s when he reached out to me.
The Undeliverable Mail Office is where all the lonely hearts end up. It was destiny, I believe, that he started working here when he did. Maybe I had a sympathetic face, high eyebrows that made me look perpetually interested. Maybe he had a nose for a good listener.
Together, we resurrected his past, and eventually Andrei began to sleep again. He laid claim to his memories as doggedly as he recovered misdirected mail.
For my part, I was grateful to be able to help him. Most of my mother’s memories were already unreachable.
The other night I was lying in bed wondering about the mischievous nature of recollection. Why our minds stop at some things and skip over others. It started with a stray childhood image of me standing at the end of a tall diving board in a red bathing suit, the board sloping slightly under my weight, my hands folded between my legs, hot pee trickling through my fingers. Why did that forgotten image flash into my head when it did? Where had it been kept all that time?
One cannot predict what portions of the past will be carried into the future. I work in a place where there are no guarantees of delivery. Letters or parcels sent to easy destinations arrive damaged or in tatters, while other mail, perhaps subjected to wars or hurricanes, arrives in near-perfect condition.
A few days ago something special happened at the Undeliverable Mail Office. A birthday card turned up that had been sent from Brighton, England, in 1896. It had arrived in Canada, in an official postmaster’s envelope, having spent nearly a century lost in the British Royal Mail. A long-ago, offhand greeting had become a symbol of imperishability. I looked at the handwritten script, the curlicue accents, the quaint image on the card of a Victorian child holding a butterfly net and playing in a summery meadow.
Maybe in the torrent of the new, old memories get swept away to some corner of the mind that is custodian of the future, until years later they mysteriously reappear, pristine in their innocence.
Eleven
There are seventeen days until Andrei’s rent expires. And Christmas is coming.
Kana has called to tell me that she won’t be coming home for a while. The general strike in Prague has led to the resignation of the president and a demand for democratic elections. They are calling it the Velvet Revolution and it is being led by Václav Havel, a dissident playwright who was still in jail only three months ago. They adoringly refer to him as the Lennon-loving—as opposed to Lenin-loving—champion of Prague.
At the end of November I had received an excited letter from her.
Dear Nai-chan,
The past week’s events have been incredible. Students have taken over the streets calling for democratic reform. Families march through the city and jangle their keys—a symbol that means it is time for a change in leadership. The other night there was a standoff near Wenceslas Square in which the students offered flowers to the riot police. The police began beating the young demonstrators with night sticks, bringing out dogs and water hoses. It has angered everyone I speak with. They are expecting an even bigger demonstration next week at Letna Park. There are even rumours of a general strike.
I just spoke with Mummy on the telephone. It was very discouraging. She seems to be getting worse—more absent-minded every time I call. Have you noticed? She keeps repeating the same stories. Tonight she told me (twice!) that you have been bringing someone other than Paolo to see her. She didn’t mention his name but she says he speaks English well, but with a heavy accent. What’s going on? Is she making all this up? If things settle down here I am determined to come home for Christmas, but I’ll call as soon as my plans are confirmed. Let’s talk then.
XOXO
K-chan
p.s. Is everything okay between you and Paolo?! Have you come to any decision about living together?
This evening when I arrived at Sakura after speaking with Kana on the phone, there was a handwritten sign taped to the main door: Because of a small fire all residents had been temporarily relocated to Grace Church. The sprinkler system had been set off in the morning. Water had spouted out in circles, drenching the corridors and the bedrooms of several residents. Fumes of melted plastic permeated the air. There was so much smoke that the white tiles of the mainfloor washroom had turned grey. Shortly before I arrived, the residents had been escorted to the simple red-brick United Church building one street over. A firefighter pointed me in the direction of its squat, cross-topped steeple and I walked there against a lashing early winter wind. Grace Church, a strange building that butted up against a real estate office on one side and a video store on the other, boasted a giant stained-glass window of the Resurrection. It would have been no surprise to find a singing choir or a minister reading a sermon, but when I opened the door and peered inside, there was only a balding middle-aged man holding two fold-up chairs. He gestured for me to follow him.
Inside the church, the evacuated residents were resting in a large basement room. There was a peaceful after-supper feel to the place. Roasted chicken legs, dinner rolls and the remains of a shredded-carrot-and-raisin salad sat on a rectangular banquet table next to a stack of unused paper plates. An aroma of greasy meat lurked in the air. Roy Nakano sat on a chair eating a piece of Black Forest cake, a tissue stuffed up one of his nostrils. The darkening spots from an earlier nosebleed matched the dark red cake filling. I stopped to say hello.
The woman to his right, Grace Shimura, was wearing a red cowboy bandana as a head scarf. She had a wonderful, happy face, and seemed, along with a few of the others, genuinely thrilled by the day’s events.
“You poor thing, you look absolutely frozen,” she said.
I pulled the collar of my jacket closed and nodded. “The wind just picked up. I didn’t realize it would be so cold when I left for work this morning.”
She smiled. The bandana gave her a scatty appearance. By way of apology she adjusted it.
“I know this is a peculiar thing, but Roy, now, he tells me when he doesn’t like the way I fix my hair. And today, with all the commotion, I didn’t have a chance to pretty myself.”
Grace rested her hand on Roy’s leg, patted it lightly. Roy scraped the icing on his plate and piped in: “They’re still trying to figure out what started the sprinklers. The goddamn system went haywire. I had to throw plastic bags over my trees so they wouldn’t get flooded. What a mess!”
His gaunt face puffed up in excitement, an emphatic plastic fork poked the air.
Across from G
race, a woman bleated, “Hidoi yo… it’s just terrible…”
My mother was sitting in a corner holding an orange drink box, drawing short sips through the straw, a lonesome plastic chair beside her. She was wearing most of her costume jewellery, strings of coloured glass beads and silver pendants around her neck. Her hair was held in a bun by handfuls of black bobby pins. She looked more uncertain than usual, and even after I arrived she kept nervously watching the door. When I sat down, she leaned close and took my hand, holding it tightly.
She whispered, “They can’t find Gloria.”
She let go of my hand and twisted a garnet ring around her baby finger.
I sat silently with my mother for an hour, and watched Roy Ishii (another Roy) pacing back and forth with a down jacket around his shoulders. Whenever he passed a window, he would stop for a moment to peer up at the sky. A layer of curdled cloud spread as far as the eye could see.
I liked Roy. He was probably the most solid, unwavering person I had ever met. When he was a kid in Vancouver, he decided he wanted to be a weatherman. He dreamt of being a master of the elements. While forecasting the weather didn’t mean you could transform it, and while there would always be days that you’d get it wrong, he said that learning how to interpret the skies and gauge the winds gave him a feeling of confidence he had never had before.