Our leader is coming over. Our leader is leaving the room, he returns with a youngish woman, bleached blond hair, too much makeup. She comes straight over to me.
Dr. White, the woman says. Jennifer. We’re going home now. Shhh. No yelling. No. Please stop. Stop. You’re hurting me. No, don’t call, I can handle this. Jennifer. Come now. That’s right. We’re going home. Shhh. It’s okay. It’s okay. It’s me, look at me. At me, Magdalena. That’s right. We’re going home.
On some days, blessed clarity. Today is one of those days. I walk through the house taking joy in claiming things. My books. My piano, which James played endearingly clumsily. My Calder lithograph, purchased by James for me in London, 1976, its lines as fresh as ever. My artifacts, the seventeenth-century santos and the ex-votos, doubtless stolen from churches, which we bought from roadside peddlers in Jalisco and Monterrey: all the trappings of the devout without the burden of faith. I touch everything, rejoicing in the feel of leather, mahogany, canvas, porcelain, tin.
Magdalena is what I can only describe as sullen. She breaks a plate, curses, sweeps up the pieces, and drops them again while struggling with the lid of the trash can. Her job cannot be fun. I suspect, however, that she needs the money badly. Her car is at least a dozen years old, with dented rear fenders and a cracked windshield.
She dresses simply, in faded blue jeans and a white man’s button-down shirt that hangs over her substantial hips. She bleaches her dark hair, not very competently—you can see the roots. Thick eyeliner and mascara that make her eyes appear small.
Her age: perhaps forty, forty-five. I catch her writing in my notebook. A very good day for Jennifer. A not-so-good day for me. I ask her why, and she shrugs. Her face is haggard, and she has circles under her eyes.
Why should I explain again? she says. You’ll just forget anyhow.
I wonder if she is always this rude. I wonder many things. How long has it been raining? How did my hair get so long? Why does the phone keep ringing, yet never seems to be for me? Magdalena picks it up, and her face closes in secrecy. She whispers into the receiver as if to a secret lover.
I am in the middle of a street. Dirty snow has been pushed to either side, but still treacherous going, I have to tread carefully. There is shouting. Cars everywhere. Horns blaring. Someone grabs my arm, not gently, pulls me faster than my legs want to move, practically hoists me up a curb onto a cement island. I am suddenly surrounded by people. Strangers. From afar a voice calls, a familiar one, and the strangers part like the waters of the Red Sea. Here she comes: bright auburn hair, shivering in a short-sleeved T-shirt that exposes her rattlesnake tattoo.
Wait! I’m her daughter! Please don’t call the police!
She arrives, breathless.
Thank you, thank you. Whoever got her out of the street, thank you. She takes a deep breath. I apologize for the trouble. My mother has dementia. She is forcing out the words, and her thin frame is starting to shiver. It is bitterly cold.
As the crowd begins to disperse, she turns to me.
Mom, please don’t do that! You scared us all.
Where am I?
About two blocks from home. In the middle of one of the busiest intersections in the city.
She pauses. It was my fault, I was putting my bag up in my old bedroom. You know, I’m spending the night again, Magdalena thought it would be nice for you. We got to talking, didn’t notice that you’d wandered off. Where were you going?
To Amanda’s. It’s Friday, isn’t it?
No, actually it’s Wednesday. But I understand. You were trying to find Amanda’s house?
It’s our day.
Yes. I understand. She thinks for a moment, seems to make up her mind. I think we should go to Amanda’s, see if she’s in.
What’s your name?
Fiona. Your daughter.
Yes. Yes, that’s right. I remember now.
Let’s go. Let’s see if we can find Amanda. Look. The light is green now. She is holding my arm and urging me forward with purpose. Although I am at least three inches taller than she is, I have trouble keeping up with her stride. We move past the thrift store, past the El station, around the corner of the church, and suddenly the world tilts into place again. I pause at one house, a brownstone, with a short black iron fence around its yard. A tree stripped of leaves leans over the path to the front steps.
Yes, this is our house. But we’re going to visit Amanda.
I remember, I say. Three houses down. One, two, three.
That’s right. Here we are. Let’s just knock on the door and see if Amanda’s here. If she’s not, we’ll go home and have a cup of tea and do the crossword puzzle. I brought a new book.
Fiona knocks loudly three times. I press on the doorbell. We wait on the porch, but no one comes. No face appears behind the curtains of the living room window. Not that Amanda would ever peer like that. Despite Peter’s admonitions, she always flings open the door without looking. Always ready to face whatever life brings her.
Fiona has her back to the door. Her eyes are closed. Her body is shaking. Whether it’s from the cold or something else I can’t tell. Let’s go, Mom, she says. No one is home.
Strange, I say. Amanda has never missed one of our Fridays.
Mom, please. Her voice is urgent. She pulls me down the steps, so fast I stumble and nearly fall, and pushes me back down the sidewalk. One. Two Three. We are back in front of the brownstone.
Her hand on the gate, she pauses, looks up. Her face is full of pain, but as she gazes at the house, the pain dissipates into something else. Longing.
How I love this house, she says. I’ll be so sad to see it go.
Why should it go? I ask. Your father and I don’t intend to move. The wind whistles past and both of us are white with cold, but we stand there on the sidewalk in front of the house, not moving. The frigid temperature suits me. It suits the conversation, which strikes me as important.
Fiona’s face is pinched and there are large goosebumps on her arms, but she still doesn’t move. The house before us is solid, it is a fact. The warm red stones, the large protruding rectangular windows, the three stories capped with a flat roof emblematic of other Chicago houses of the era. I find myself yearning for it as desperately as when James and I first saw it, as if it were out of our reach. Yet it is truly ours. Mine. I bullied James into buying it, even though it was beyond our means at the time. It is my home.
Home, she says as if she could read my mind, then shakes her head as if to clear it. She takes me by the elbow, propels me up the steps, into the house, helps me off with my coat, my shoes.
I have something to show you, she says, and takes a small white square out of her pocket, unfolds it. Look at this, she says. Just look.
A photograph. Of my house. No, wait. Not precisely. This house is slightly smaller, fewer and smaller windows, only two stories high. But the same Chicago brownstone, the same small square of yard in front, and, like my house, crowded in from brownstones on either side, one in pristine condition, the other, like this one, slightly shabby. No curtains at the windows. A sold sign in front.
What is this? I ask.
My house. My new house. Can you believe it? I try to take the photograph from her to see more closely, but she has trouble relinquishing it. I have to pull to get it into my own hands. Even so, she leans toward me, as though she can’t bear to let it out of her sight.
It’s in Hyde Park. On Fifty-sixth Street. Right off campus. I can bike to my office.
It’s eerie, I say. The similarity.
Yes, I thought so too. I paid too much for it, of course. It needs tons of work. But these things don’t come on the market very often. I had to act fast.
I keep gazing at the house. It could almost be my own, that could almost be my bedroom window, that could almost be the iron gate to my backyard.
When do you move in?
Well, it’s a little complicated. Closing was delayed. Because of Amanda. She had cosigned the loan for me.
> And why would that be a problem? Did she change her mind?
No. No, of course not.
Well?
Fiona is silent for a moment. Then, I just decided I didn’t want to bother her with it after all.
Why didn’t you ask me? Or your father?
Fiona twists a purple lock around her index finger. I don’t know. Just didn’t want to make you feel obliged. It turned out okay. I was able to come up with enough money.
Well, you know if you ever need help . . .
Yes, I know. You’ve always been very generous.
Mark is a different matter altogether, of course. Your father and I don’t trust his judgment in money matters.
You’re a little hard on him, you know.
Perhaps. Perhaps.
I have forgotten I am still holding the photograph until she reaches out and plucks it from my hand, folds it carefully, and puts it back in her pocket. Then pulls it out and looks at it again, as if checking that it is real, the way I used to pat her little arms and legs when she slept, amazed I had produced this perfect being.
It is my home, she says, so softly I can barely make out the words. And she smiles.
From my notebook:
I watched David Letterman last night. So, in homage:
TOP 10 SIGNS YOU HAVE ALZHEIMER’S
10. Your husband starts introducing himself as your “caregiver.”
9. You find an hourly activity schedule taped up on your refrigerator that includes “walks,” “crocheting,” and “yoga.”
8. Everyone starts giving you crossword puzzle books.
7. Strangers are suddenly very affectionate.
6. The doors are all locked from the outside.
5. You ask your grandson to take you to the junior prom.
4. Your right hand doesn’t know what your left hand has done.
3. Girl Scouts come over and force you to decorate flower pots with them.
2. You keep discovering new rooms in your house.
And the No. 1 sign you have Alzheimer’s is . . . It’s somehow slipped your mind.
If I could see through this fog. Break through this heaviness of limbs and extremities. Every inhalation stabs. My hands limp in my lap. Pale and impotent, they used to wield shiny sharp things, lovely things with heft and weight that bestowed power.
People would lie down and bare their naked flesh. Invite me to dismember them. And if thy hand off end thee, cut it off: it is better for thee to enter into life maimed, than having two hands to go into hell, into the fire that never shall be quenched.
Write about yourself, Magdalena urges. If it helps, write in the third person. Tell me a story about a woman who happens to be named Jennifer White.
She is a reserved person. Some would say cold. Yet others welcomed that quality, saw it as a form of integrity. She thought either was a fair assessment. Both could be attributed to her training. Surgery requires precision, objectivity.
You don’t get emotional over a hand. A hand is a collection of facts. The eight bones of the carpus, the five bones of the metacarpus, and the fourteen phalanges. The flexor and extensor tendons that maneuver the digits. The muscles of the forearm. The opposable thumb. All intertwined. Multiple interconnections. All necessary to the balance of motion that separates humans from other species.
But Amanda. She thinks of Amanda’s metacarpus, minus four sets of phalanges. A mutilated starfish. Does she cry? No. She writes it in her notebook. Amanda died. Fingerless. But the details won’t stick.
I stop, put my pen down. I ask Magdalena, Which neighbor was suspected in Amanda’s death? but she will not answer. Perhaps because I have asked and she has answered the question many times. Perhaps because she knows I will forget my question if she ignores it.
But I rarely forget that a question has been asked. When Magdalena ignores me, unfinished business lies heavy between us, disrupts our routine, hangs over us as we drink our tea. In this case, it pollutes the very air. For something is terribly wrong.
My notebook again. Fiona’s handwriting:
Came over today to find you uncharacteristically subdued. Anger we see a lot of. Bewilderment. And a surprising degree of intelligent acceptance. But rarely this resigned passivity.
You were slumped at the table, your face flat down, your hands hanging at your sides. I crouched down and put my arm around your shoulders, but you didn’t move or say anything. Wouldn’t answer any questions or give any sign you knew I was there.
Eventually you sat up, pushed back the chair, and slowly went up the stairs to bed. I didn’t dare follow you. Didn’t dare ask any more questions for fear of what you would reveal about the dark place you were residing in.
I had never been afraid like that. I wasn’t always sure what you were thinking, but I could always ask, and sometimes you would even tell me. If the truth had the power to hurt, you made it palatable by your calm acceptance of it.
You don’t really like me very much, do you? I asked you when I was fifteen. No, you said, and you don’t like me very much either right now.
But we’ll find each other again. And we did. If I’d known that within a decade I would lose both you and Dad, would I have acted differently back then? Probably not. I probably would have gone out and gotten another tattoo.
That tattoo. You keep asking about it, Mom, so I’ll write it down here. It’s a pretty good story. I already had two tattoos. There was the one I got with Eric when I was fourteen. You didn’t know about that one. It’s very discreet—on my left buttock. A tiny Tinker Bell. Well, I was fourteen.
Then when I was sixteen, the youngest freshman in my class at Stanford, I got another one, this time on my ankle. A cannabis sativa plant. Yes, you can guess why a kid really too young to be away from home would think that was cool.
But the rattlesnake. That was my junior year. I’d done okay the first two years, better than I’d done in high school socially, actually made some friends, did the things you’d expect. Drank too much. Slept around.
But in my junior year, things fell apart. My best friend had a sort of breakdown and went home to West Virginia. He wrote a couple times, made jokes about the skinny dogs and the ugly women, and that was that. Two of my other friends started dating each other, retreated into their own private world, put up a barrier against others. It felt oddly personal.
At that point, I was living off campus in a room rented from this Silicon Valley marketing type. She wasn’t there half the time, either traveling or staying up in the city with her boyfriend. The house was up in the redwoods, high above the university.
When people came up to visit they’d sit in the hot tub and ooh and aah, but I never got used to the place. The quiet disturbed me, as did the fact that the sun went behind the hills at two in the afternoon and suddenly the day was over.
Coyotes trotted boldly through the yard, rats scratched under the floors and in the woodwork, and even the deer spooked me. They’d come right up to the house to forage, and since there were no curtains on the windows—the house was on three acres of redwoods, so there was no need—I’d woken up several times to deer faces pressed against the glass, solemnly observing me as they chewed.
So I took to spending a lot of my time down on the flats, in Palo Alto. There was one coffeehouse I liked, and I’d sit there for hours, drinking cup after cup of black coffee and studying. By then I was taking grad classes, and my professors were telling me I had a career in academia if I wanted one. Because I wanted one, badly, you could find me at that coffeehouse working pretty much every night.
I was there one Friday night as usual, hyped up on coffee and lonely as hell, and not wanting to go back up the hill to that house without curtains. I had resigned myself to doing just that, however, when a nice-looking young woman—just a little older than myself, I’d guess—came up to me. She had a question about what I was studying—was it math? Sort of, I said, and we fell into a conversation about what economics was and why it mattered.
After a w
hile she motioned to a young man sitting at another table and said, We’re going to a party in Santa Cruz, you want to come? I thought,Well, this is strange. And, I’m not sure I like these people. There was something too eager about them. The woman’s teeth were too large for her mouth when she smiled. And then, recklessly, Why the hell not?
They told me not to bother with my car, that they’d bring me back when the party was over. That should have alerted me. But I got in the car, and the first thing that happened was they started going up the hill toward where I lived.
I said, Wait a minute, this isn’t the way to Santa Cruz, and they told me it was a back way, a really pretty one. Since I’d had enough of that kind of pretty and was beginning to think I’d done a very foolish thing, I asked them to just drop me off at my house—we were passing right by my street—and said that I’d pick up my car in the morning.
But they refused. Said, No, you’re coming with us. And I was both very angry and very frightened. I had a kind of a crazy idea that I would wait until the car slowed to go around a corner and then jump out, but when I tried to open the door I found they’d put the child-safety locks on. So I just folded into myself and waited to see what happened.
We got to this old ranch house up in the Santa Cruz mountains—where, I’m still not sure—and there was another poor soul like me who they’d picked up in Santa Clara. We were all in this room and this man came out and welcomed me and this other girl to what he called “the family.” Said we shouldn’t be alarmed. Said we could go home whenever we wanted, we just had to give them a chance. Keep an open mind.
At that point, I got up and left the room. Didn’t run, didn’t hurry, just walked right out of that house and down the long driveway and into the road. Astonishingly, no one followed me.
Later, maybe a half mile down the road, I found my hands clenched into fists. I kept walking, it was pitch-black, and I had no idea where I was, but had a vague idea of getting to the nearest house and calling the police. And then I saw headlights. I stuck out my thumb, and a truck with two sixteen-year-old kids from Ben Lomond stopped.
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