“Oh, this is my dinner,” Diane said. “I am too dizzy to fix myself something.” I had some meat pie left from our dinner, so I took it over. From then onward, we have taken over dinner every day—she says it’s enough for her for breakfast and lunch, too. Because of my upcoming trip to South Africa for my fiftieth Matric reunion, though, I worried that she would not manage when I was gone. With Diane’s permission, I called Meals on Wheels and she was signed up. It starts only three days after I have left, however, but David and Lynda, who live next door to her, are going to take food over until Meals on Wheels kicks in. Peter, too, will check in every day.
The VA hospice reports that Bob’s main daily activity is walking from window to window and door to door, looking to escape. When he gets tired, he gets into the nearest bed and pets the person already in it.
It is going on two weeks now since Bob and Diane have last seen each other. She asked me to help her call her doctor to prescribe a portable oxygen tank. She wants to be ready when Bobbie has time to take her to see Bob.
Doña Quixote: Where are you going, Gertjie?
Willeman: There are no street signs. The birds have eaten your bread crumbs.
Doña Quixote: Willeman had his dogs.
Gerda: I have Peter.
At our red front door, Doña Quixote stops. She is not yet allowed to enter. I alone cross the threshold, look for my dear, naughty little sweetheart. I find him in his half of our his-and-her chair. His computer lies closed on the coffee table. He has turned on his side, his head drooping toward the arm rest. His snore is rhythmic and loud. I have known him since I was seventeen and he nineteen; we met in physics class. I know what he will say, voice blurry with tenderness, when I tell him about the statistically meaningful downward migration of my IQ on the bell curve: “A table, a meat pie, a glass of wine, a hand to hold: what else does a man need to be happy?”
I let myself down gently, lever up the footrest, spoon up beside him. His shoulder pushes up a wave of his mother’s crotchet blanket, and that is where I rest my head. He grunts, pets my leg. I think of the belugas’ dissonant chatter as they follow the Moskva home, clots of sound overscored by the strings and winds of the orchestra. I think of the trills of their kin on the Voyager traversing the profound silence beyond the star that gave them life. How strange to the beings of those globular worlds the glissandos of the humpback whales.
Chapter Seven
Makeovers in Extremis
ON AUGUST 16, 2012, Marikana, the village near the farm where I grew up, garnered international infamy when the South African Police fired live ammunition on mineworkers striking for better pay. The action was carried out under the direction of the ruling ANC political party, the entity that had overthrown apartheid and now governs the country. The confrontation would be identified as “the deadliest security operation since apartheid was abolished.” It would become known as the Marikana massacre.
The playing field on that spring day was far from level. As the miners congregated on the side of a hill amid the greening tufts of sweetgrass studded with pink patches of cosmos, a sangoma, or witchdoctor, anointed some of them with muti, or magical potions, “to protect them from police and make them immune to bullets.” Other demonstrators carried knobkerries (clubs), pangas (machete-like knives), spears, and sticks. As the crowd of protesters grew, “hundreds of police backed by helicopters, armored vehicles and mounted units” started surrounding the assembled strikers with coils of barbed wire “with the aim of containing them to… disarm them more easily.” Fearing that all escape routes would soon be cut off, a group of protesters broke away and rushed a police line. The police opened fire with automatic weapons. When the shooting stopped, thirty-four protesters lay dead and seventy-eight wounded. The police would later claim that they had been attacked with firearms. When all was over, police gathered five pistols and a truckload of “traditional weapons” from among the dead and immobilized.
When talking with American friends about the massacre, I found myself vacillating between two interlocking narratives, one depicting the idyllic time before the intrusion of unsettling politico-socioeconomic forces and the other directed to the recent eruption of violence. The longer I spoke, the more it became apparent to me that the seeds of today’s violence were already, during my childhood, sprouting beneath the façade of apartheid-enforced peace.
Marikana, situated about seven miles from our farm, is where we obtained our library books; bought our groceries, vegetables, and newspapers; and, on certain Fridays when the delicacy was trucked in on smoking dry ice, ice cream. Marikana’s main source of groceries and clothing was Katzenellenbogen Algemene Handelaars, the general store. Its owners were a Jewish family who did not live in the platteland, or country, but drove in every day from the larger town of Rustenburg. The store was known by all as die Jood, or the Jew. By the same logic, the Indian trader around the corner whose fabric store almost exclusively catered to black people, was known as die Koelie, or the Coolie. My cousin told me that when you walked by a Coolie, you should say, “Mohammed ate a pig.” When I repeated this wisdom in front of my parents, they explained why the remark was an insult and forbade me to repeat it. When we did once go to die Koelie to buy fabric for saris to wear to our church women’s international dinner, my mother greeted the owner with a handshake. It was the first time I had seen a handshake between a white and a dark-skinned person.
While die Koelie and the café had only one entrance for all races, die Jood had a separate entrance for blacks. The village library was for whites only. These details occurred to me only later in life. For a five-year-old white child, as for most white people in the farming district, apartheid was a presence so naturalized that one would be as likely to think about it as one’s own breathing. Only through the lens of subsequent history did I come to understand that the village of my childhood must have been seething with black—not to mention Indian—anger. As a child, though, I accepted the blacks’ obsequious lifting of hats and averted-eye greetings of “Môre, nonnie,” or “Good morning, little Miss,” as an ordinary part of life. The Setswana greeting that our house maid taught me often garnered me a broad smile and an enthusiastic response from people who suddenly looked like individuals rather than the interchangeable actors of my childhood.
“Dumela,” I’d say. Good day.
“O kaai?” the object of my showing off would query. How are you?
“Ke teng. Wena okaai?” I am well. How are you?
“Ke teng.”
“Sala sentle,” I’d say, preparing to walk away. Stay well.
“Tsmaya sentle,” my gracious responder would say. Go well.
While the Marikana massacre has, for now, defamiliarized the landscape I knew so intimately as a child, before too long dementia will likely have eroded that recently implanted memory and eased me back into the unspoiled idyll of a naïve child on an African farm. Like any childhood, though, mine was not without its own incursions of external eruptive forces, albeit of the not necessarily visible kind.
One week when I was about five years old, I was for some reason the only one of my family’s then three siblings to accompany my mother to die Jood for grocery shopping. The minute my mother and I entered the store, Mrs. Katzenellenbogen abandoned the people she was serving at the black end of the counter—a “courtesy” she would have extended to any white customer—and came over to greet us. Or, rather, she greeted my mother. “And where is the pretty one today?” she asked.
I immediately understood that she was referring to my sister, Lana. While I do not subscribe to Freud’s notion that childhood trauma necessarily becomes the central pivot of one’s psychic makeup, I do admit that being marked as “not pretty” at the age of five could have had a dramatic impact on a child’s self-image. However, I do not recall being scarred to the extent that I imagine my daughter or granddaughter would be under similar circumstances. On our way home, my mother did raise the issue. “What a stupid woman,” she said. “You are a
very pretty girl.” And that was all there was to it.
Today it seems unlikely to me that my mother’s reassurance on its own would have been sufficient to erase a major psychic impact. Maybe it was because prettiness was not a value mentioned in our family other than as it related to landscapes, flowers, or clothes. The only mirror we had was hung at lipstick-application and shaving height in our one bathroom. Or maybe my father’s love might have had something to do with my ego’s apparent robustness. Whatever the reason, I did not cry or sulk or otherwise feel that my life had been ruined. If I felt put out about anything, it would more likely have been because, in the shop, my mother did not bring up the news that I had been transferred to grade two after only six months in grade one.
The real reason I survived the supposed psychic wound was probably far simpler: in an attempt to make up for her gaffe, Mrs. Katzenellenbogen had given me a lollipop.
It does not take forty-five years of marriage before one sees his or her partner in states of physical and/or psychic dishabillement that once seemed impossible in the rosy sepia of first love. The first instance of extreme discomposure happened for Peter and me—as I imagine it does for couples the world over—when our children were born. Not only does the birth itself entail the incursion of strangers into the most private parts of the woman’s person with her lover looking on, but it also entails the insertion of an utterly dependent and exceedingly self-centered bundle of need into the fabric of their daily lives. And then there is the emotional depletion. Gone is the pre-baby niceness-in-the-face-of-difficulties that a couple in a harmonious relationship would usually have developed. With baby looking on, niceness gave way to eruptions of the id.
While our marriage did not lack the slinging of brutal “truths” during times of exceptional stress, Peter and I have always been able to reconnect at the core in times of crisis. I documented an example that took place during Marissa’s birth in an article published in a South African women’s magazine, Fairlady. After a first stage labor that went from sunrise to sunset on March 26, 1977,
my doctor judged the birth to be at least six hours off and went into town to see a play—he left his seat number with Peter. He had probably not even been ushered to his seat when I entered the transition stage—unfortunately with the full menu of classic manifestations, vomiting, shivering, a detached feeling, and the urge to push. From that time on, I could hear only Peter’s voice. Through him, I relayed messages to the sister in attendance.
At 7 p.m. my waters broke. I was taken to the labour ward and my doctor’s partner summoned. I’d never seen him before and rudely asked who he was. I refused to talk to him. Communication again took place through Peter, who at this stage also had to demonstrate the required breathing to me for each contraction.
For me, childbirth and parenting function as a schema of Peter’s ability to keep loving me when matter gets the upper hand over mind. Most recently, he kept his cool during my theatre of the absurd performance after I underwent a surgical “readjustment” to non-cancer-related colon surgery that I had undergone two years earlier in 2012. Five days after the procedure, when the pain had already subsided and the incision in my nether parts was supposed to almost have healed, I was taking a shower when what I estimated to be a cup of blood suddenly gushed out. Shocked but calm, I cleaned myself up while trying to figure out how I was going to get Peter’s attention. It was a Saturday morning and he was puttering in the garage about fifteen yards from where I was in the upstairs bathroom near the back door. Normally I would just yell out the window, but on that day I had no voice at all after a bout of the flu. I decided to summon him with a decorative dinner bell we keep on a kitchen counter. Stemming the blood with a wad of paper towel, I hunchbacked toward the bell, shuffled to the back door, and jangled the bell with my free hand. And so it came that a totally unsuspecting Peter walked out of the garage to see his naked wife framed in the door, one hand clutching a bloody wad of paper held to her crotch. Once we’d arrived at the emergency room, the surgeon replaced the stitches that had apparently come undone. Seven hours later Peter took me home and provided the TLC I needed until I was back to a less weak and pale version of my former self.
Since my microvascular disease diagnosis, I am only too aware that my mind is already buckling under the vagaries of matter. What worries me every day is the dishabillement of spirit that I visit upon my stalwart husband. While childbirth or a wound is temporary, my mental decline will be endless. As Peter and I already experience, my day-by-day drifts of attention are hard on both of us. I can only guess at the stress that the utterly dependent and exceedingly self-centered bundle of need that dementia will turn me into will provoke in him as my primary caretaker.
I do not doubt that Peter’s heart is capacious enough to encompass the entire “rut of birth, love, pain, and death that crop[s] up unchanged for centuries.” Our forty-eight-year relationship is testament to that. However, sometimes “nothing has time to gather meaning, and too many things are occurring for even a big heart to hold.” When that time comes, our love must—will—be big enough to let go.
When we lived on our farm by Marikana, we were very poor. My mother would occasionally buy fabric from die Jood to make new dresses for herself, Lana, and me. For Christmas, my father’s mother, Ouma Hansie, would buy a bolt of white cloth and give dress lengths to all the girl cousins so that their mothers could sew them matching dresses. My mother, ever creative, was always coming up with a collar or a sleeve or a flounce that none of the other cousins had. I would later have her eclecticism to thank for my own disregard for age-appropriateness when it comes to pattern or style.
Gerda (age 4) and her sister Lana (age 3) in Cape Town, South Africa, just before the family moved to the family farm, 1953. Susanna made the dresses.
I acquired my first “bought” dress when Ouma Hansie’s cousin from Rustenburg gave us some hand-me-downs. My first proper store-bought dress was occasioned by my confirmation during my standard nine or junior year of high school. It was navy blue with white piping, the colors making it suitable to be worn as a winter church dress at my boarding school after its debut at the farm church. Despite the practical constraints of its second purpose, it was a lovely dress that showed off my then adolescent-skinny figure. I wore it with a white pillbox hat for my confirmation. After its stint as my school church dress, it served a third term at university for my nice dress—this time without any headgear.
Once I had my first job, I finally was able to buy my own fabric—if rather sparingly, since my vacation salary had to pay for all my books plus school year needs beyond accommodation and food. During these student years, I sewed a number of dresses for class, work, and occasionally for dances. I emulated my mother’s propensity to add a feature to those shown in the pattern—or subtract one, in the case of a shiny, long, pink body-fitting dance number, for which I omitted the left side seam to create a split up to my thigh. All the while I still incorporated hand-me-downs whenever they came my way.
After university, I experienced the luxury of now and then being able to buy a ready-made dress to supplement my still mostly homemade wardrobe. For my twenty-first birthday party, I acquired a macro-mini in a reflective silver fabric. I so treasured it that I stored it as a keepsake after minis had had their day. When Marissa was about five, I hauled it from its box and gave it to her. It hung down to her feet. She wore it until it had crept up her leg to mid-calf and loops of snagged silver threads hung down like tassels.
Dementia Field Notes
8-6-2013
I got dressed all the way to my shoes and earrings before I noticed that I had not put on a crucial piece of underwear.
8-17-2013
I’ve been having some clothing trouble. The other day I had to try about six times before I got my apron strings tied behind my back. And inside-out problems with underwear. Also some back-to-front issues with tops. When putting my pullover back on after having taken it off earlier in the day and leaving the arms in
side out, I could not, as usual, get it back on.
“We might not all read Vogue, but we still get dressed in the morning.” So says Shira Tarrant and Marjorie Jolles in Fashion Talks: Undressing the Power of Style, a collection of essays that grew out of presentations at conferences of the National Women’s Studies Association and the Cultural Studies Association.
Living in an increasingly visually mediated and commodified world means that having one’s own style is compulsory. It is a core component of self-expression and self-realization. We need to look no further than our TVs for contemporary mythologies about identity, expression, and transformation as evidence of their cultural sway. Makeover shows of every type abound, whether the focus is on styling the corporeal body (What Not to Wear)… [or] the home (Extreme Makeover: Home Edition).
After raising the possibility of fashioning one’s own style as “a core component of self-expression and self-realization,” though, Tarrant and Jolles shatter the notion that one’s self-presentation can ever be “true” to the wearer’s own vision, since she does not have control over the “meaning” of her style of dress. “What fashion means depends on context, but also on whose interests it serves, what its audiences and practitioners bring to their engagement with it and how it protects and transforms social divisions.”
Dementia Field Notes
6-11-2013
Since I started having trouble remembering which items go with what when I pick something to wear for the day, I have started now and then writing down the components of the outfit I wear.
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