The endorphin-upping exercise I’d had in mind for my mall outing combined three of my usually successful stimuli: (1) do something you’re scared of, in this case take the bus, a formerly simple task I now dreaded after lately botching it once or twice, (2) engage in a physical activity you like (walk), and (3) stimulate the senses you frequently override with too much thinking (imbibe the murmur of the brook and redolence of wet rocks and plants; ingest the colors and compositions of the store displays).
On this Monday afternoon, however, no amount of nature or commerce succeeded in penetrating my slump. While I traversed the walkways, neither fish ponds nor fountains set my thoughts in free flow; inside the stores, neither fashions nor fads took me to a place beyond words. Unless I were willing to admit defeat and catch the bus home, I would have to exert tougher pressure on those ornery anodyne dispensers. So I devised a plan B: Search for a more definite goal. Stage an opportunity for rapid gratification. Go on a specific quest rather than allowing “God’s water to flow across God’s acre,” as an Afrikaans expression has it.
The goal I settled on was to find something “grown-up” to wear in the mall’s anchor stores, Nordstrom and Macy’s. Something other than the riotously colorful clothing rainbowing my closet. My task did not include having to buy anything. I merely had to locate an object outside the range of my usual eccentric taste, an outfit in which I could blend in a room of smartly dressed people and that I would love to own. For the next two hours, I would be free from price constraints. Also, I would ignore dry-clean-only considerations or such practicalities as whether my life in Utah involved many rooms of smartly dressed people.
An hour or so into my quest, nothing had jumped out at me. Our state’s designer market, at least as interpreted by Nordstrom, appeared to be geared toward classical elegance in the manner of, say, Isabella Rossellini instead of creative dressers like Paloma Picasso.
In Nordstrom, the most promising of my two options, my pace petered into a desultory amble when I finally laid my eyes on an item I desired: a Marc by Marc Jacobs dress in “persian purple,” with a design of saucer-sized red and white tulips coupled with liliaceous leaves in the same colors.
A spurt of endorphins gave my mood a boost. With a lift in my step, I crossed the sky bridge to try my luck at Macy’s as well. Half an hour later, I’d had no luck in the designer or any other clothing section, but I was determined to not let go of the perk the Persian purple dress had given me. I decided to have a quick look at the jewelry downstairs on my way out. My bus home was due soon.
Macy’s designer section is on the second floor. Even though I was in a hurry, I glanced about for stairs rather than opting for the escalator—I had made a habit of expending energy as part of my daily routine rather than counting on going to the gym, which I skipped at every excuse. Amid the many red exit signs on the floor, I spotted a green one at the shoe section. I wandered over, opened the door, and entered the stairwell. Once I reached the ground floor, I saw that I had arrived at a street door rather than one I had expected would let me directly back into the store. Uttering an expletive, I pushed the release bar. It did not budge. I tried a few more times, pushing harder with my hands, and then resorted to a thrust with my hip. All in vain.
I had by now wasted the time I’d had left for the jewelry, so I took the stairs back up to reenter the store by the door through which I had landed in the stairwell. Back at the second-floor landing, my annoyance about missing out on the jewelry changed to panic: there was no door handle. The door through which I had exited was a fire door—once you were in the stairwell you could not go back in.
This place has only three exits, sir: Madness, and Death.
I ran up the stairs to the third floor, just in case that door were different. It was not. I went down again to the landing where I had earlier entered the stairwell and sat down on the steps. I noticed how hot it was. Sweat was beading on my forehead and starting to drip through my eyebrows. The exit into which I had bumbled was apparently in an outside corner of the store and both of the outside walls must have baked in the sun all day.
I felt dehydrated, craved water. I decided to put my bodily discomforts from my mind. I needed every bit of thinking energy to figure my way out. A serenity came over me. I stepped through my options:
1. Bang on the door and shout.
Failure. The door is solid metal and the dull sound from my banging fists does not carry.
2. Lie down on the floor to shout through the quarter-inch crack where the door meets the floor.
Con, floor covered in oily-looking grime. Worse, if someone suddenly opened the door, it would smash into my face. Too dangerous to try.
3. Phone mall security.
Not possible—I don’t have a smart phone (too complex to operate with my memory) to Google the number.
4. Call Peter.
Con, one of my afternoon’s goals was to spare him the chauffeuring that he has been doing since I gave up driving. Try to avoid this one.
5. Marissa and Adam?
M takes after me and doesn’t lightly answer her cell phone unless she is away from Dante; A usually answers. Possibility.
6. Newton or Cheryl?
Usually answer, but live half-hour away.
7. 911?
Seems overly dramatic.
I opted for calling Peter. “I’m really in trouble,” I said. I told him the story. His response was that he was going to jump in the car and come let me out. I suggested that he instead call the Macy’s office and ask that security rescue me. He ostensibly agreed. I described my location, he phoned, and about five minutes later I received a call from a security guard. He was on his way.
By the time the guard—a young man named Junior who had the shape of a bodybuilder—found me, I had been in the stairwell for about twenty minutes. I felt light-headed from the heat and asked for water. I also asked to see the store manager. Junior delivered me to the management office. While I waited for the manager, an apparently second-in-charge administrator, Todd, offered me lots of water and a half-hearted apology. By the time I’d had two bottles of water Peter walked in. He was very concerned and hugged me several times to make sure I was okay. The store manager, Wendy, showed up, demonstrating solicitude and offering apologies with an HR workshop-honed competence. She sent Todd and Junior to investigate how I got stuck behind an emergency door to the street that was supposed to remain open at all times and listened to my concerns.
When the investigators returned, their first news was apologetic. Someone had neglected to arm the door, which would have turned the red light red and set off an alarm when I used it. Their next words, though not an accusation, underhandedly turned the blame back on me. There was a warning on the door, they said, informing customers not to use it and stating that an alarm would go off if the door were opened. I could not argue that. I had seen those warnings many times before. Peter and I later checked that it had indeed been in place. In my hurry to see the jewelry, though, I had not noticed it at all.
I could forgive myself my failure to read the notice. When I had looked for an exit, the large green LED sign above the door had trumped the small black letters of the notice in vying for my attention. The next part of Todd’s account, however, floored me. The street door had not been locked, he said, “you just have to push a bit hard.”
Though Peter later told me that he thought their story was a butt-covering ploy, I right away believed it possible that I had not pushed the door hard enough or in the right place. Hadn’t I experienced failures to take note of relevant sensory information for months? Weren’t my Dementia Field Notes blotted with accounts of me not noticing that the toilet lid was closed until I had peed all over it? Or needed Peter’s help to find my radio, which was in its usual place on the kitchen windowsill? I have learned the truth of the idea that one sees with your brain, not your eyes.
As is often the case in situations where different observers have different accounts, the matter of whether the doo
r had actually been secured—against homeless wanderers, entering through the store, looking for shelter?—with a pin that could be pulled out in an emergency by Macy’s cognoscenti (as Peter suspected) or whether it had been just a bit hard to open (as the employees reported and I feared) was never resolved.
That night I called my friend Kirstin to bewail the ignominy of having been swallowed whole by a stairwell.
“You poor thing,” she said. “You are trapped in a metaphor.”
My good laugh, coming after the adrenalin-doling drama of the Macy’s lockup, distracted me from my deep blue blahs for a few hours into the night. The fog, which murked my mood again the next morning, only lifted after I gave in and visited my doctor, who adjusted my medication.
For my birthday a month later, Kirstin gave me a Macy’s gift certificate with a drawing on the envelope of me in a locked stairwell. I was not alone. I was companionably surrounded by her and her family. My mind swerved. The vehicle of the metaphor was no longer a barren trap, but had metamorphosed into a congenial cocoon, like a station wagon traveling across the country with a family belting out road trip songs all along the way.
With the gift card I bought myself a pair of jeans the color of crushed blueberries. They have skinny legs and an overall fit snugger than what most Utah women my age who aspire to dress well would wear in public. Nothing grown-up about them.
I am increasingly aware that my vanity about my clothing style is something that I will probably have to give up when I can no longer get dressed or—horrors!—even select an outfit without help. That moment is much on my mind every time I stare at my closet trying to construct what clothes and jewelry I had combined before. I’m afraid my projects of writing down and/or photographing my outfits have, for the moment, come to an end. It takes me so long to write and just take care of myself that I have not been able to keep up my mnemonic system. That I cannot even manage that at the moment forces me to ask, “Once I need even more help to live in the world than I do now, would it be reasonable to expect someone else to pursue my fashion quirks on behalf of a no-longer-existing Gerda-self?” Isn’t letting go of the things of the world part of the transformation I must undergo as I enter zombiehood? How can I put the burden of replicating an aesthetic that I have cultivated over the years—and which, moreover, I regularly adapt to my constantly changing sense of self—on someone already spending their lumpen time on me?
Would one of my family members like the task of dolling up a Senior Citizen Barbie?
Kanye doesn’t seem to care much about how he dresses other than that his clothes are not to hamper his wildly athletic activities in any way. Dante, however, even though he is only three, is showing a promising exactitude about doing everything according to the rules he has figured out for himself. Shoes are his specialty. Even when he could barely walk, he would dutifully match abandoned shoes with their owners and repeat “Tjoo, tjoo,” until the laggard had put them back on. Most promising, though, is his Sex and the City–style adoration of his red Elmo slip-ons.
Of the three grandkids, Aliya is so far showing the most interest in developing her own Mardi Gras style of dress. When she was only two, she used to sneak her mom’s bra to wear under her dress whenever she had the chance. When she was almost three and Christmas rolled around, I came upon the tiniest, flattest starter bra I had ever seen, on sale for a dollar. I checked with Newton and Cheryl and they said it was okay to buy it: I bought the only two left, one pink, the other dove-gray.
Not able to let go of a good thing when it gets me ouma points, this past Christmas I bought her two new bras: a yellow one with pink binding and straps and a purple one with touches of green. Aliya, though, has moved on.
Like me, my granddaughter focuses her attention now on what immediately strikes the eye. She specializes in unusual clothing and accessories: nonmatching socks, even nonmatching shoes, tights of every stripe, hair styles that involve sparkly clips and bows and flower finishes—when I do her hair we go for fresh flowers—and glittery skirts that go over dresses, tights, her ballet costume, her winter coat, a pair of jeans, and so on. I believe I have found a willing receiver for my clothing Olympics. For now, we are still running side-by-side in the passing zone. Far be it from me, while I am still rational, to issue an edict that hapless family members attend Doña Quixote’s toilette “for a considerable portion of each day” in order to deck her out in a royal robe and diadem. Unless it gives him or her pleasure.
Until, as will eventually happen for all of us, personal pleasure comes to an end.
Ecclesiastes 3:19: For that which befalleth the sons of men befalleth beasts; even one thing befalleth them: as the one dieth, so dieth the other; yea, they have all one breath; so that a man hath no preeminence above a beast: for all is vanity.
Mrs. Katzenellenbogen: And where is the pretty one today?
Doña Quixote: I have nothing to wear.
Jane Austen: Vanity working on a weak head produces every sort of mischief.
According to a fable alive among Greek seamen today, a solitary mermaid would grasp a ship’s prow during a storm and ask the captain, “Is Megalexandros alive?” The person the mermaid is enquiring about is Alexander the Great, of course. Given the historical datum that the Greek general died over two thousand years ago, it is not surprising that the uninitiated might come back with the literal truth, “No.” Upon hearing this answer, the mermaid would turn into a raging Gorgon with a corona of writhing snakes and a visage so dreadful that her beholder, together with all other hands on board, would turn to stone. The unintended ballast would cause the ship to sink to the bottom of the ocean.
Those who know better would not dare give a response other than “He is alive and well and rules the world!” Gentled by the correct answer, the mermaid would vanish and the storm dissipate, leaving “only mild and lulling airs to refresh the souls of men.”
Chapter Eight
The Exit That Dare Not Say Its Name
This place has only three exits, sir: Madness, and Death.
—RENÉ DAUMAL
WHEN OUR FAMILY FIRST arrived in Utah in August 1984 we lived in a cheap furnished motel with a kitchenette. Our “suite” opened onto a piece of property that has since been developed into a commercial building, but at the time was a field covered in switchgrass and weeds where our children, seven-year-old Marissa and four-year-old Newton, spent the month of August catching Mormon crickets. As soon as Peter got home from work, we would meet a real estate agent and go house hunting. We had decided to sink all of the money we were able to bring from South Africa—the amount was restricted, we had been allowed less than half of our life earnings until then—into a house. It was barely enough for the down payment. Just before the start of school, we found a neglected but spacious house (to accommodate all the visitors from South Africa we were hoping for) in the Wasatch foothills, in a suburb about half an hour south of the city center. Our street was called Supernal Way.
Despite the fact that our furniture and other household goods were still en route, we moved in right away so the children could start school at Cottonwood Elementary. Before we had time to purchase even a few basic household items, though, the neighbors discovered our minimalist living status. Not surprisingly, our intention to “camp out” in our house struck them as refugee-like—we were, after all, from Africa! By day’s end, our kindly new acquaintances had loaned us sleeping bags, a standing lamp for the living room, a coffee table, and a few other items. After carrying a picnic table from the deck into the kitchen, buying a microwave, and stocking up on paper plates, we were ready to start our life in America—far better equipped than the pioneers who crossed the prairie with handcarts about whom our kids would soon start learning in school.
Our camp-out, which we had not expected to go on for more than a few weeks, stretched into months—the shipping container bearing our material possessions from South Africa had mistakenly been dispatched on a European grand tour. It finally caught up with us just b
efore Thanksgiving. When we got word that “our medium-sized dry goods” had finally arrived on American soil, we were ecstatic. As soon as our furniture was delivered and lugged to the assigned places, we tackled the most crucial boxes. The familiar objects we unearthed took on the luster of long-lost treasure. Overnight, they turned our encampment into home.
Our children, too, were “out of their skins,” as we say in Afrikaans, about at last being surrounded with their familiar bedroom furniture, books, clothes, and toys. An unexpected consequence, though, was that they finally internalized the fact that our move to the United States was permanent. It sank in that their cousins and friends and oumas, with whom they had played amid the same furniture and with the same toys, would be absent from their daily lives for a long time. They would not be with them for birthdays, Christmases, or sleepovers. Newton went to bed night after night clutching a piece of Lego and crying, “I just want to play with Craig,” his over-the-fence neighbor from Parktown North. Marissa, being older and more likely to stew out emotions in her head before talking, did not show her distress with the same abandonment. Sometime before Christmas, the gears that had been churning in her brain produced a question of the kind no parent likes to answer: “Who will look after me and Newton if you and Daddy die, not when you’re very old and we are grown up, but now?”
Fortunately, her question came out when we were having dinner. Newton, who had turned five the first week in November, joined his sister with a questioning look. In as matter-of-fact a tone as we could muster, and with frequent mutual interruptions and rephrasings, Peter and I reminded them that their godparents, my sister Lana and her husband, Buzz, would take care of them if we died, though we would probably not die for a long, long time. We explained that even though we were here and Tannie Lana and Uncle Buzz over there, they would come and get them and take them back to South Africa, where all their aunts and uncles as well as their two grandmothers, Ouma Raaitjie and Ouma Susan, would help look after them. With more brio than we felt, we invoked their same-age cousins, Lana and Buzz’s children John and Julia, and told them they would live together and be able to play every day.
Memory's Last Breath Page 20