“Yes! The Wilton Book of Birthday Cakes, I totally forgot about that thing. I used to pore over it, plotting my cake months in advance. The Rocketship cake, the Raggedy Ann cake, the Holly Hobby cake.”
“They were complex cakes, you had to bake sheet-pan cakes and then make stencils so you could cut them in the right shapes. Then you had to decorate them properly. According to the instructions.”
“Yes, that must have been so much work. They were great, we loved them.”
“You decided you were too old for funny-shaped birthday cakes, remember? You said that was for babies. But I knew you still wanted a cake, you just couldn’t admit it. So I went in your room and I found a picture on your bulletin board—”
“Aladdin Sane! Of course! How could I have forgotten that? You made me a beautiful Bowie birthday cake! It was amazing, with the frosting lightning bolt across his face. I forgot all about that. That was amazing!”
We both were so thrilled that she remembered something I had forgotten. She beamed at me, nodding. Then she started to laugh, and she looked like my full, young mother for a moment. She reached for my hand and squeezed it. Her hand felt cool. Her skin looked old, but it felt soft and delicate. It wasn’t smooth and fat like a child’s skin, but it was almost softer.
“I have to go to work,” I said. I could hear my voice quake and jerk. Usually I was fine when I was with my mother. Usually I didn’t start to cry until after I left her, when I was in the car, driving. But there I was, hard-swallowing and sniffing. “I’ll be late. Mama, I love you.”
“I love you,” she said, and we hugged. I didn’t let go for an extra second. Pay attention to this. Hug tight, this could be one of the last hugs. I had been making myself think this way since I’d turned forty. My mother was not that old, but she had diabetes. She was overweight. She was not healthy. And even if she didn’t die in the next few years, her mind was rapidly slipping away. Maybe one day soon the hug won’t be with my mother, but with her body and what remains of her. One day she’ll hug me and mistake me for someone else, and so these current, somewhat intact moments were fleeting. I noted that, marked it in my mind. Don’t forget what it was like to embrace her, all of her, and don’t let it be replaced with what will come, soon, a certainly diminished future, or at least a wholly different future, because, as her doctor said without exactly saying, it will only get worse.
I have always been the sort of person who is easily panicked about how quickly time passes, but in the past this was mostly related to Ada. I would remind myself not to get too distracted, because four would soon be five would soon be ten and then her childhood would be gone forever. I remember frantically looking for the dimples on the backs of her chubby hands, convinced I would be so sad the moment I noted their certain replacement by knuckles. I would kiss those dimples—and as much as I missed them, I loved the beautiful hands that emerged. But this current accounting with my mother was so much darker: she would be less and less and then she would be gone. A memory. Ada became an adult with all of her baby brightness intact, fully realized and elaborated. And I wouldn’t have to witness her unwinding and diminishing. That would be her daughter’s burden.
But I knew this was not even true. I knew other horrors awaited. I knew that just as I was starting to fall apart right in front of my mother, just as I knew my mother must note my sad middle-aged visage, I knew I would live long enough to see Ada start to grow old. Already when I see her I notice how she looks more tired in tiny ways. I would live to see her get crow’s-feet and gray hair and hands that showed veins. I would see her feet and her neck change. I would see the perfection of her body be undone by time. I might live to see her lonely, divorced, unhappy, and a hundred other disappointments. What you don’t think about or plan for (as if that helps) is watching your children get old. The privilege of a long life is you live long enough to see your perfect child also submit to time and aging.
So, on my forty-seventh birthday—if that was truly my middle age—what did the second half of my life hold for me? I would watch my mother and her friends and siblings die, one by one, but also all at once, a flurry of funerals, then watch my brother and my friends as they speedily replaced them as failing beings on the way out. Everyone knows that is just how it goes. I’m not the only one, right? And let’s not forget I get to experience my own dwindling vitality, which will surely accelerate and reach critical mass in the next fifteen years.
I stood in my mother’s doorway and scanned the room. Soon she would have to move from this apartment—it went in-home aide to assisted living to a full-care facility to a hospice. I was just waiting for the thing to reach the next level. Whenever I visited, I was vigilant in looking for signs of new deterioration. Was she wearing pajamas in the afternoon? Did she smell clean? I expected to find rotten food in the refrigerator, a carton of old milk congealing in the cupboard. But her routine—and I made sure it was always the same for her—could stay intact for the moment. I checked in with her most mornings, and her home health aide came in the afternoon to help her with dinner. Once a week we went shopping and had lunch together. She appeared to hold at this point, but I couldn’t stay where she was—I waited and watched for what came next.
I think on some level I always imagined Nik would never make it into old age, how could he? He didn’t make those kinds of mistakes. I knew he would die of cigarettes and drinking long before I would finally die. I just got to witness and witness and stupidly survive. The second half of my life was just the bill due for the pleasures of the first half. And Nik would get to escape payment.
I left her apartment, sniffling and congested with my little birthday pirouettes around mortality. A fitting birthday disposition, but then I began to fixate on how I had managed to forget that birthday cake. I realized I couldn’t actually locate it in my memory. I could remember only the photograph we took of the cake. Not the feel of the pink-and-white frosting in my mouth, not the gulp of cold milk I no doubt drank after a few bites. Oh sure, I could conjure a sweet cake-taste memory, but that was a generic substitute, a little made-up game. All that remains is a photo of that cake, somewhere, in some album. It does not help, having a photo. I believe—I know—that photos have destroyed our memories. Every time we take a photograph, we forget to embed things in our minds, in our actual brain cells. The taking of the photograph gets us off the hook, in a way, from trying to remember. I’ll take a photo so I can remember this moment. But what you are really doing is leaving it out of your brain’s jurisdiction and relying on Polaroids, Kodak paper, little disintegrating squares glued in albums. Easily lost or neglected in a box in your waterlogged garage. Or you bury it in some huge digital file, waiting to be clicked open. All you have done is postponed the looking, and so the actual engaging, until all you are left with is this second-generation memory, a memory of an event that is truly only a memory of a photograph of the event. It is not a real, deep memory. It is a fake, fleeting one, and your mind can’t even tell the difference.
These very ordinary memory failings gathered weight and had grown into a quiet but desperate obsession over the last few months. I started to take note of them right after we finally got my mother’s official diagnosis.
The official diagnosis:
Her doctor said she had age-related cognitive decline, also called mild cognitive impairment, very common for a person in her seventies, and that this was no longer called senility, which really just means oldness. Eventually it would probably become mild dementia and then full-blown dementia, which is a kind of scary-sounding word that simply means the mind is going away. So you have to specify age-related dementia instead of, say, drug-induced dementia. My mother exhibited significant early symptoms of age-related dementia including but not limited to advancing episodic memory impairment and disorientation. Very commonplace, he said, which was supposed to be a comfort. When pressed, he also remarked that her decline was most certainly progressive. But everything was progressive, clearly. Did we actually think our memory h
ad any stasis? That it wasn’t constantly melting away?
After that, I began to find her troubling to be around for all the obvious, emotional reasons. But I also had a growing worry that her lapses were somehow contagious. I had no rational basis for this anxiety—clearly her brain was distinct from my own brain. I also knew I was probably avoiding a more frightening mortal anxiety by substituting a slightly more manageable one. But.
The traffic was gone now. I still had a forty-five-minute commute to work. I didn’t have the heart to listen to the memory book, the self-help book. I pretended I had bought the stupid book to help my mother, but I knew I was really buying it to appease my paranoia about my own mental deterioration. Maybe just owning it would be enough and I wouldn’t actually have to listen to it.
Then, out of nowhere, randomly, I had a memory crisis, a mental meltdown over a seemingly insignificant piece of information that I tried to recall. I don’t know what led me to try and retrieve this particular piece of trivia (because I don’t remember!), but there I was, floundering as I drove, sweating even, chewing hard on a herbal, soon-to-be-flavorless piece of gum. This sort of memory slip was all too typical of my brain these days.
Sometimes basic words of familiar vocabulary hid behind missing letters. I would run through the alphabet, hoping I would get the right sound by process of elimination. More often, a name I knew refused to come to me. I constantly had the sense of information on the verge, precision at the margin, vision just beyond the frame. Not like Mom, not not remembering what I was trying to remember, this was not remembering what I sort of nearly recalled. It was like a glitch, like a scratch on a record. I even hit my head occasionally to get the needle to jump to the next place. I knew, somehow, moving forward was often the best way to remember what came before. Looking at a thing directly didn’t work. I also knew trying so hard just caused surges of stress-induced cortisol to shut down my hippocampus, sealing off access to my long-term memory. Still.
This time I was trying to think of a movie actress’s name. I came up with Mamie Van Doren. And I knew that was not who I was trying to think of. I was trying to think of another blond actress, one much more famous than Mamie Van Doren. I thought about her, this actress with the out-of-reach name, and how she was decapitated in a tragic Cadillac accident. I thought of her famous custom-made heart-shaped swimming pool. Yes, anyone would have it now, but not me. Marilyn Monroe was at the other end of the bombshell spectrum, this actress was ersatz Marilyn, and Mamie Van Doren was ersatz her, ersatz ———. I saw her face, her little nose, her chalky pink lips, her enormous breasts. (Enormous in the old way, fleshy mounds that attached to the whole chest, Anita Ekberg oceanic flesh that might drown a man, instead of the modern-style augmented, separate, too-high globes with the huge lonely valley between them, carved breasts that seem to exist almost in a different world from the body they are attached to. But how could I assess the pertinent advantages of real versus fake enormous breasts? Maybe men like that hard valley, maybe they like the delineated order of the implanted, artificial breast.) I could not think of her name.
My mother would get that vague, anxious look as she realized she was searching for something that wasn’t there, and then she would forget it, the forgetting, and move on. She just let things go without a fight, and then she was on to the next thing waiting to be forgotten. I could not let go. I started to talk out loud, I shouted, What the hell is her name? sending the now flavorless gum flying out of my mouth. I retrieved the gum with a tissue as I tried not to swerve the car. And then I began to recite the outlines of the memory as if I were pleading a case to the dementia police—I can’t be losing my memory because I can think of Mamie Van Doren, I can think of the breasts of this poor unnamed actress, I can think of her method of death, for God’s sake, I can think of a stupid movie she was in with Tom Ewell. I can think of Tom Ewell. I have, clearly, an excellent memory, it was merely a glitch. Then I tried to do some lateral move, to think of something else. But really, moving on when you were more or less still assigning a portion of your brain to this elusive memory task, it fooled no one. Ada would say, Just look it up, Mom. But that was easy for her and her young, elastic, fearless brain. I wouldn’t, I wouldn’t look it up on the Internet Movie Database or Wikipedia or anywhere else.
Ada doesn’t understand why I need to remember every random piece of nonsense—it is almost as if she believes the internet will be her memory. I want to warn her: I’ve been through this with photographs, it just isn’t the same as actually remembering. I see her point about cluttering your brain with easily looked-up trivia, but there are other things I need to remember. Things not found on Wikipedia. I want to remember my mother before she was sick. I want to remember what Ada smelled like when she was a baby, and I want to remember when I began to suspect things weren’t okay with Nik. I want some accounting for my own behavior, and I want the future to have some clarity. I need my memory for all of that to occur. That is why incidents like this one were so critical. If I couldn’t think, on my own, of this actress’s name, I had no hope for any of the rest of it. So I used Calm Focus (memory technique #5). I inhaled and exhaled. I was so close, I felt it, it was almost there. It was like a brain orgasm, the anticipatory sensation I was feeling, a kind of building. Then I got Anna Nicole Smith, and I couldn’t stop thinking of her hard little eyes and her little doll nose and the same chalky pink lipstick, but it wasn’t Anna Nicole Smith, of course, and now I was stuck again, the closeness receding. I had a name, Mamie Van Doren, and a face, the pudgy pretty face of Anna Nicole Smith, but I was further than ever from my actress. In fact I had to keep pushing these other people off my mind. The only way out of this very frustrating trap was to look it up. Defeat, yes, but peace. I took another deep breath. Damn it. Okay, one last recap: Tom Ewell. Cadillac, decapitated. Pool, lips, breasts. Then I saw it, the book with the black-and-white photos, yes, the picture of her and her breasts, yes, closer, yes, no Mamie, no Marilyn, no Anna, no, but Man, yes, yes, Man, Icouldevenseethecoveredstretcherinthephotoas shewastakenfromthesceneof—
Jayne Mansfield! Jayne Mansfield! Jayne goddamn Mansfield!! Yes, yes. Yes.
So there, happy birthday, it was in there somewhere, all of it. Memory of a photo of a woman and, indexed in synapses and dendrites, a name.
FEBRUARY 10
The day after birthday night. I spent the evening with my sort-of boyfriend, Jay. He came by after I got home from work, bringing take-out food and a movie. After we ate, he handed me a box neatly wrapped in red paper.
“Gee, what can it be, I wonder?” I said, as I knew what was coming. I unwrapped the package. It was a Thomas Kinkade Painter of Light™ Lamplight Brooke Music Box. The music box was in the shape of a vaguely nineteenth-century streetlamp. A transparent snowy night scene aglow with a sickening preternatually golden light lined the inside of the glass lamp. I laughed—it was impossible not to.
“It’s hideous, wow,” I said.
“Wait, play the music,” Jay said. I turned it over and wound the key. The music started, and the snowy scene was further illuminated from a bulb within. The music, I realized, was “What the World Needs Now.” Of course. This music lamp was not the first Kinkade item Jay had given me. We had been seeing each other only a few months, and I think he had already given me six Kinkade pieces: the Thomas Kinkade Painter of Light™ Hideaway Coffee Mugs (Hideaway being one of the collections—it referred, apparently, to the fatly pastoral cottage engraved into the porcelain), the Thomas Kinkade Painter of Light™ Holiday Lights Animal Holiday Village, the Thomas Kinkade Painter of Light™ Lighthouse Light, several limited-edition picture plates, and one print “painting,” also limited edition, that featured golden highlights actually painted on the print (not, I would guess, by Thomas Kinkade Painter of Light™ himself, but by little indentured gnomes and elves). Jay gave me the first one about a week after our first date. He just gave me the package with no explanation. I unwrapped it and opened the box to reveal this deeply hideous object.
He didn’t laugh at all. He pointed out the Certificate of Authenticity. For some reason I loved it. I don’t even particularly like kitschy stuff. Having grown up in a dilapidated house in Hollywood, I liked actual solidly beautiful things. But Jay taught art history at Wake School, an ultra-elite private arts high school in Westwood. And Jay was British. So somehow he became obsessed with Kinkade. When I asked him why Thomas Kinkade, he just said, “Well, he is America’s most successful artist. And a native Californian as well.” Or he would say, “His name has a trademark—see?” and he would point to the subscript that appeared after his name. He was a brand, Thomas Kinkade Painter of Light™. And I remembered how Nik would always carefully draw his copyright symbol on the hand-made labels of his records. Whatever publishing company name he had for that group and that record would never fail to have that rights-designation insignia. Jay’s arbitrary fixation amused me, and his focus and repetition impressed me. Even the stupidest joke can become funny with enough pointed repetition. Even the most pointless obsession can yield a certain kind of depth if it is pursued unfailingly. Jay was unrelenting in his obsession. He didn’t veer off subject and suddenly start collecting Ronald Reagan Lobby Cards or vintage Mammy Salt Shakers or mint-in-box Dawn Dolls. He brought only Thomas Kinkade Painter of Light™, and it wasn’t entirely a joke, he really was fascinated by these objects. It actually isn’t arbitrary, is it, a true obsession, although it may appear that way to an outsider. It may even be mysterious to the obsessed person why something grips him so, and that mystery must feed the obsession, increase the profound hold. (Ask someone who is truly obsessed why they feel that way. They will sputter, they will feel you are interrogating their private world, they may spout a list of reasons, but ultimately they can’t fully explain it. Obsession has an irrational or subrational heart. It is a bit like falling in love, I imagine.) And I believe few things are as despicable and dishonest as faking an obsession. The world is full of the lightly obsessed, the faintly committed, the inch-deep dilettantes. All those contrived and affected and presented passions. Jay was authentic; Jay had depth.
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