“Okay,” he said. “Now I would like you to draw a picture of a clock, with the hands at twenty to four.”
Her image was as good as one of Salvador Dalí’s. She had made an oval, with a few numbers in random places on the clock face and two lines pointing down.
Mom could never draw real well anyway.
“Okay,” the neurologist said to my mother. “You’re fine. You can go.” He turned to me. “Your mom has no signs of dementia.”
“I didn’t bring her to you for dementia,” I said. “She’s always been like this; me, too. I brought her to see you because of her legs. Her legs!” I said. “She came here because her legs hurt her, terribly! And she falls.”
“I don’t know,” he said. “You might want to take her for some other tests.”
“What about the sentence?”
He was looking anxiously out the door, down the hall, to the next patient. “What sentence?”
“The fox jumped over the dog!” I said. “You asked her to listen to it. Aren’t you going to ask her to repeat it now that some time has passed?”
“Oh,” he said. “No.” He looked down the hall once more with eager trepidation. “That’s not why I said that sentence.”
Eventually I took my mom to a nursing home. It was a small place in an old house that only took six residents and where there was a lot of staff. After a week, the owner called. “You have until the end of the month to find a new place for your mom,” she said. “I’m sorry, she requires too much care, much more than we can provide here.”
“Whaaa?” I said. “You said you could look after her! What did my mom do?”
“She falls. She’s angry at her roommate. She might wander out. We have stairs here. She goes in other people’s rooms. Don’t get me wrong, we are all very fond of her.”
This was all very strange to hear, but nonetheless I found another place. The new place was nearer the hospital where my mom had been left tied up in her own waste for six hours, but it was also closer to her house. I wouldn’t be spending an hour each day driving to see her. It was more institutional than the old farmhouse had been, but it was still nice. She had her own room and there were other people there, in bibs and diapers, who hung out in the big room at the front where a nurse’s aide would play “memory games”—questions out of a big book. I took my mom in to participate on one such instance. I sat her on the couch. Dale, another resident, came in. Dale was very agitated. “How are you, Dale?” I said. “Have a seat!”
“Oh, thank you,” said Dale. She sat down heavily, seemingly on top of my mother.
“Who wrote, ‘Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou, Romeo’?” the nurse’s aide said.
No one responded. The aide turned the page for the answer. “It was Paul Revere!” she said. A general malaise flowed on the surface of the river of Alzheimer’s and dementia in the room. I couldn’t contain myself and I squeaked. The nonverbal discomfort escalated.
“Oh, wrong page!” the nurse’s aide said at last, turning back a leaf in the book as she announced, “It was Shakespeare. William Shakespeare.”
THE INMATES CAME AND WENT. Sometimes when you got there, everybody had been herded into the back of the dining room; someone was dead, and they were waiting for the ambulance. There was Dale, she would come into my mom’s room and get in the closet. There was Joan, who followed me around, saying, as she did to everyone: “Ma’am! Ma’am! Can you help me?” But no help could be provided. The people with dementia and Alzheimer’s, they are scary. They grab you, they glare, they touch you, they throw things. If they were babies, and cute, you wouldn’t mind so much and it would seem normal. With the old people, no. Drooling, snot, it’s excusable only in formative years. Otherwise, it is not attractive. Joan followed me into the business office. I was scared. “Ma’am! Ma’am!”
“Joan?”
“Ma’am!”
“Joan?”
“Ma’am!”
The director cut in. “Joan! That’s enough now!”
“Why? You’re spoiling our duet!”
There was a woman who sat silently at a table at every mealtime, not eating, tears streaming down her face. There were people who brought in service dogs, there were a couple of cats who lived there, and there were fish. There were students who came in and played the violin and the piano; there were religious groups who came in to preach. It was a vivid setting, it was overwhelming, you were involved in the daily routine and activities. There were sing-alongs. There was searching for my mom, who would always manage to get in someone else’s room and get into his or her bed for a nap. There was the staff.
There was an aide who was affectionate with Mom, maybe too affectionate; whenever I was there, she was with my mom, playing with her hair, stroking her, telling her, “I’m your other daughter.” She liked to hug me, too. “Where are you going?” she said.
“I have to go shopping.”
“Oh, bring me something!”
I bought her a pie.
“Can we have a spa day together?” I gave her a gift certificate for a massage at the spa. Then they moved the aide away from patients—into the kitchen. I liked her, but it was a relief in a way to not have to see her. She and her husband lived with his parents. I got an e-mail from her saying she had been fired and had no money and her unemployed husband had left her. I didn’t know what to do. These people become your family.
You can’t stand being there. You have to be there, you look at the clock, it’s your mom, you take her out, you go to a restaurant, you can’t get her out of the car, you get her back to the nursing home. You go home, you come back the next day. I walked into the library. There was a family sitting with one of the patients, the beautiful woman who wept at each meal. The man looked familiar. Maybe I had seen him before. I smiled at him but he just scowled at me. What did he think? He acted as if I were trying to get his autograph. It wasn’t a private room, it was the library of ancient National Geographics and large print Reader’s Digests. I left.
Then I went to my mom’s room. I thought, That was John Lithgow, the actor. My life had become very sad indeed. If I was going to hallucinate a movie star at this nursing home, did I really have to hallucinate John Lithgow? I was alone too much. My daughter was living with me, but she had a boyfriend and she was busy with after-school activities, and now I had sunk so low that I was inventing visiting movie stars at the home, but not sexy or hot movie stars or ones that I liked, just a scowling, irritated John Lithgow. “I’m going to move in here,” I told my mom. “As soon as a room opens up.”
“You can have my bed,” my mom said.
It turned out it was John Lithgow, though. He came a couple of times a year to visit his mother, who was the weeping woman. Then she died, so I didn’t have those hallucinations anymore.
My mom lasted a year this time before they told me I had to get her into somewhere with an even higher level of care. By now she couldn’t walk at all. Her legs did not support her, not even to get up out of bed. Her doctor told me here as well, “But there’s nothing wrong with her.”
I found her a new nursing home. I did the paperwork, I got her into the car, I got her to that new place. If I had taken notes, this kind of thing would be an entire book. You don’t want to remember. You don’t want to dwell.
During this entire debacle, I still went into that supermarket to get her the candy she liked.
Let’s recount this again. Let’s say you want a bun. You would go to the aisle that says “Bread.” You would not start looking for the “Bun” aisle. No. You might as well put crunchy peanut butter in a different aisle than creamy. WHY DO I KEEP GOING BACK TO THAT SUPERMARKET? I’m sick, that’s why.
DAY AFTER DAY, VISITING MY MOM. It was so sad. I wanted my mom. My mom was vanishing. Parts of her mind disappeared. Then, the next day, something would be back. It was like trying to call someone internationally, someone up on Mount Everest, with a bad connection. You could hear a word, you could hear two, you got excited, you were g
oing to speak. Then the wind got too strong.
Now, most days when I went to see her, she was further away. She was lying on her bed every time I went there, kind of contorted, and she couldn’t seem to look at me. Even I was starting to realize, the holes in her brain were getting bigger. The Swiss cheese up there was melting.
“Hi Mom! How are you?”
“I am looking for my box.”
“Your box?”
“I am looking for my lockbox.”
“Your . . . lockbox?”
“My lox box. A flying lox box.”
“Huh?”
“Where is my box? Where is my lox box? Where is my flying lox box?”
I could join in with her, sometimes, for a little bit. We could riff on lockboxes and lox boxes and flying lox. It was better than not connecting at all.
As different areas of the mind got eaten away there would be a brief burst as a different part took over. For a while, if you could get on that level, you could almost have a conversation. Actually, she did make sense in a certain Alice in Wonderland wordplay kind of way, and I knew her humor.
Sometimes, we could both just jump on the same page—like, the phone was ringing and she said, “What is that sound?”
“The telephone.”
“The telephone? What’s it doing?”
“It’s ringing, Mom.”
“Who is it?”
“How would I know who’s on the other end? It’s ringing.”
“That’s not a telephone.”
“That’s the telephone. It was invented by Alexander Graham Bell.”
“No, he did not invent the phone.”
“Yes, he did. He said, ‘Watson, can you hear me?’ ”
“Who was Watson?”
“The guy on the other end!”
“The other end of what?”
“On the other end of the phone.”
“How did he know to pick it up?”
“Good point. I don’t know . . . I guess . . . it was ringing?”
“And so he picked it up and said, ‘Hello’?”
“I don’t know. I guess.”
“How would he know what to do, unless it was ringing?”
“Right.”
“So why did Bell call him?”
“I mean, there was nobody else to call! There was only one other phone!”
“If there was only one other phone, why would Bell need to call him?”
“To say hello?”
“What number was it that he called, then?”
“One. It was number one.”
It could go on like this for quite some time. It was a “oneness” of nonsense. And both of us would laugh, a lot, but whether or not for the same reason I don’t know.
how to inspire rage
Meanwhile, every time I got back to my mom’s house from visiting her in the nursing home every day, I was scared of Adult Protective Services. Despite the psychiatrist’s words, I still thought they might show up again. There was the neighbor, and the freezing cold house falling apart that I kept trying to get fixed up. My mom had been so scared of being broke that she had never had anything fixed there in thirty years. It was falling down. The police showed up when my dogs barked, even though there were plenty of other barking dogs around, including the neighbor’s.
I was used to people’s anger, however. There are some people on this planet who irritate others. It wasn’t intentional, but I was one of them.
example one
Once there was a television producer and his wife, who was a very well-known romance writer, who had an idea for a brilliant television series and thought I should write it. The television producer called me up, right after I started publishing stories in The New Yorker, and asked if I would be interested in writing the bible—and more—for this television series based on his wife’s idea.
“What’s a bible?”
“A bible for a TV series,” he explained. I still didn’t know. He sighed. “It’s a book of chapters on each of the people in this TV series, who they are, where they grew up, their natures and personalities. It would contain everything you can think of regarding these characters and their lives. Your job would be to write the bible, and then come up with the episodes, the plots, the stories, the dialogue, first write the initial pilot for the series, and then write maybe twenty or thirty episodes.”
He said he would pay me twenty grand if I did it.
I was very excited. Not just that I would get paid twenty thousand dollars, but that someone knew I existed and wanted to hire me for a job. [Now it is many years later and I am still looking for a job. I wish at the time I had taken that job. That’s not the point.] So I said, “Wow! Thanks for thinking of me! What is the idea?”
And he said he would have his secretary send it to me if I would sign a nondisclosure secrecy policy.
And I said that was fine. But then I had a slight panic. What if I was sent the idea and I just couldn’t write it? What would happen to me? I would be in trouble. So I told Mr. Krantz (that was his name), “I will read your idea with pleasure. But if I don’t think I can write your television bible and pilot and series, is it okay if I just say no?”
“Of course!” he assured me. “There is no obligation. We would love you to do it, that’s all, so just sign the nondisclosure secrecy statement, read it, and get back to me. I am going to give you my direct number, so you can call me directly.”
A few days later I got the packet in the mail.
I opened the envelope. There was a twenty-page nondisclosure statement and the idea itself. The idea was: there are some women working on a magazine in New York City.
All they needed from me was the previously mentioned bible, plot, episodes, etc.
I thought for a long time and then it occurred to me: I don’t want to write for television! I want to write novels and stories! I want to learn how to be a novelist and not a television writer! Also I was unable to do this job.
Not one idea based on his idea came into my head. I tried, for many days, but there was nothing I could think of. So I called him back on the direct number he had given me and his secretary put me through right away.
“Hi there!” he said. “You got the idea! You are all set!”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “It is a good one, but I cannot do this project.”
“What? What did you just say?”
“I can’t!”
“You can’t write this? Are you kidding me? I call you up, I give you this great opportunity and you say ‘No’? Who do you think you are, anyway? Just who do you think you are talking to!?” It took him a long time to explain to me.
I was so scared. I started to cry. That’s when Mr. Krantz told me that he personally would make sure I would never, ever write for television, and that I would never amount to anything or be anything. He had an extremely forceful way of explaining this to me and I was a very timid person.
I felt that my life was ruined, that he was right when he said I was a nothing, but I just could not think of anything about these women who worked on a magazine in New York City and led these glamorous lives.
Did they live in a basement so dark and damp that every time it rained mushrooms grew around the bottom of the toilet bowl?
example two
I always try to obey the law. One time, I was carrying my two-pound poodle to her vet appointment. She was in a pink snowsuit and I had her in a bag. I had to change from the express to the local train, and since I was running and didn’t want her to be jostled, I took her out of the bag and held her in my arms while I ran across the platform and got onto the local train and sat down. The policeman entered the subway car and told me to step out. I got out. My dog was back in the bag.
“I have to issue you a ticket,” he said. “It is illegal for dogs to be on the subway unless they are in a carrier.”
“Oh, I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t want to jostle her. We are on the way to the veterinarian. She is blind and needs an emergency oper
ation to have the eye removed. I did not want to be late.”
“Don’t worry,” he said. “The train will be held in the station while I write you this ticket. What’s your name?”
He wrote very slowly. The passengers on the local train began staring out at the policeman, who had been joined by two more cops, and at me, the perpetrator. The passengers looked restless.
There was a recorded audio announcement over the crackling speakers. “Due to a police investigation, this train is being held momentarily in the station!”
Now more passengers came to the windows.
“What is your address?” the cop asked me. He was very methodical and repeated the information. The announcement was repeated. Soon the passengers who were stuck began to appear hostile. “Don’t worry,” the cop said. “This train will leave but another will soon be here, in time to take you and your dog to the vet.”
The train left. I got a ticket for twenty-five dollars, or if I preferred I could go to court.
I have seen many things on the subway. People spitting and eating and urinating. I have not seen tickets or summonses issued. I had broken the law by having a handheld poodle.
example three
When I was a kid, maybe ten, after my parents’ divorce, I came up to my dad’s house to assist him and his wife in organizing a splendid pig roast. I worked for days helping them get ready. When it was time for the party, guests began to arrive—children, adults, all ages of people. “Okay, you’d better go home now,” Dad said.
“What?”
“You’re not invited.”
Apparently I was quite upset.
Years later someone posted about how difficult as a child I had been. The author had been a child who arrived at this pig roast and witnessed me having some sort of breakdown and being sent home. The author suggested that I was some sort of juvenile drama queen.
example four
When Willow was a baby, I took her to the bathroom to change her diaper. She was less than a couple of years old. In the lavatory a woman started to chat with me, asking me endless questions about the baby. When I got back to the table a man came over. He said he was an author and he wanted me to read his book. I suggested he mail it to me. That would not be necessary, he said. He wanted me to take the manuscript right then and there. It was a large, bulky manuscript. I was in the middle of the meal, chatting with my friends, trying to enjoy my food. I took his manuscript, but I don’t know what happened to it; we might have gone elsewhere that night, it might have gotten lost, I might have put it down at home and forgotten about it.
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