“There’s probably enough,” I said. “I think, anyway.”
We nodded, both of us. Enough wood was important. Enough to feed the stove all the way through the bitter cold of January, the bitter winds of February and the bitter snows of March. There could never be enough wood, in Tamar’s world. She squeezed my hands.
“Boyfriend.”
“I don’t have a boyfriend.”
“Boyfriend.”
“Ma.”
There it was, that tone in my voice. Had it always been there? Was it only now that I saw its effect on her? Because look, she was shrinking. The air around her was drawing itself in and her shoulders were narrowing and her head tilted down. Choose your words with care, Clara. Don’t correct. Don’t criticize.
“I’ve been thinking about him lately,” was what I said. That was the right thing to say. She nodded.
“He died,” she said.
—–—–
—–—–
—–—–
That was me breathing. Making myself wait. Making myself be calm. Making myself not use the word remember. Because that was what she was doing, wasn’t it? Remembering Asa.
“He did die,” I said.
“It broke my daughter’s heart,” she said.
She nodded, and I was back in time sitting on a chair in the kitchen of the Treehouse in the Florida Panhandle, waiting for a pot of boiling water to turn the shrimp pink, listening to her voice on the other end of the phone. Clara. Clara, Asa died yesterday morning. He died in an explosion in Afghanistan. Those words had never left me. They came back to me sometimes, the sound of her voice over all those miles, the way I sat there with the phone clutched in my hands, the way the boiling water boiled itself dry, the shrimp turned to scorched rubber at the bottom of the ruined pot.
“Help her,” my mother said. Her hands were still pressed against her heart.
“Maybe nothing could have helped her,” I said. “Maybe she just had to get through it however she could.”
“No!” my mother said. The sound in her voice was the sound of agitation. Of exclamation marks. Of breaking dishes and crashing pans. They had warned me about that too. “No!”
Follow her. Meet her where she is. But she met me instead.
“I couldn’t help her,” she said.
Oh, Ma.
My heart jumpstarted itself. It was happening again. Again and again, it kept happening. Too thin too dehydrated too stressed. Two of the toos, except these days it was all three of the toos. She sat quietly on the couch next to me the whole time, neither of us talking. It took an hour for my heart to go back to its normal rhythm.
* * *
Blue Mountain had come sidling back into the quilt room after the rest of his class had been Pied-Pipered into the arts and crafts room. By then it was just me, lying flat on the floor beneath the ghostly white quilt on the wall, waiting for my heart to stop its hammering. He came trudging back to where I lay staring up at the peaked roof of the exhibition hall. He didn’t seem fazed. He didn’t ask why I was lying there on the floor.
There had been space around him in the room while I was talking. An untouchable few inches that the other children didn’t have. They had kept an instinctive slight distance from him, no jostling or pushing or reaching out to touch his flyaway hair or tickle his feet or hold his hand, the way children of that age do.
“I have a question,” he said.
“Go ahead.”
“Is your mother proud of you?”
I could have deflected, said, “That’s an interesting question. Why do you ask?” or “Is your mother proud of you?” or I could have not said anything.
“I don’t know,” was what I said.
He nodded. So little, he was.
Did Blue Mountain feel alone in this world? Did he walk through it wondering where his place was? Why had he asked me that question, and why had he asked it when he knew that no one else would hear him ask it, he who returned when everyone else had left?
Unanswerable questions, all of them.
Children like Blue Mountain brought Asa back to me. Blue Mountain was the kind of child that Asa would look out for at the summer camp where he worked. Asa would watch over a child like Blue Mountain, protect and defend him by helping him learn how to do things he was afraid of. The monkey bars, maybe, or double Dutch. Or even the unicycle, his own unicycle, which he brought to camp and kept in reserve for the most tender children. The most fragile.
Asa had taught himself to ride the unicycle. Once, on the way to his house, I came upon him in the middle of a clearing off one of the trails through the woods. He turned slowly, around and around, with his hands off the handlebars and the sun glinting down through the pines onto his hair. When I thought about the way Asa looked on that afternoon when I watched from behind the birches on a nearby trail but never told him I was watching, how that day and that image and that memory was burned into my heart, sometimes it felt as if I might float off the edge of the world and never come back.
Too bad there wasn’t an early-warning system for moments like that, moments you could never forget even if you wanted to. Only after the fact did you realize that a certain time in your life was over, and you would never get it back. You once had been whole, and now you weren’t.
This was why the little, cute children were so hard to look at. The youngest ones were the ones most likely not to know that they were still whole. They walked around in their soft skins, with their backpacks and their messy hair and their clompy Velcro shoes. They scratched their mosquito bites or sucked a strand of hair, they gazed around the room with their enormous eyes. Moments like that, I wanted to put my arms around them, all of them, and tell them to watch out. A fifth grade bully or a nasty teacher or a bad priest, oh God the whole damn world was going to get them, one of these days, and they didn’t even know it.
They were nearly skinless, these tiny children.
The skinless walked among us.
* * *
On Tuesdays twice a month, Asa used to drive up to the Fairchild Continuing Care Center and sing to the residents, which was what the people who lived there were called. Never patients, never old people, never senior citizens. Residents. He took me with him a few times. The difference between Asa and me could be summarized in the way we entered the Fairchild. Asa bounded up the walkway and spread his arms wide, pushed both double doors open at the same time and was already past the reception desk before he turned to see where I was. Still by the car, usually. He would pinwheel his arms in a Come on, Clara! motion, and my feet would begin the trudge.
Once inside, I would be overwhelmed by the smell, the smell that only places like the Fairchild Continuing Care Center had. The smell of oldness, yes, and cleaning supplies, and cafeteria food, but so much else. Memories. Longings. So much stored up inside, never to be let out. I smelled it every time I walked into the place where my mother lived now, and every time, my heart beat faster. Let them out. Let them out. That was the feeling that filled me, and whether it was the wanting to leave or the wanting of all the stories trapped inside to be let out, I couldn’t say. I didn’t know. They were linked in my mind and in my heart.
Not so for Asa. Asa was light and I was not. Asa was there to sing to the residents, and sing he did. They lit up when he walked into the Fairchild community room. The music stand would already be set up for him, for the hymnal or sheet music he had brought with him or not brought with him. Asa didn’t need sheet music. Those songs came pouring out of him: “Amazing Grace,” “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God,” “I Danced in the Morning.”
How? Where had he learned all those hymns?
“Nobody learns those hymns, Clara. And nobody calls them hymns either. They’re just songs. They’re everywhere. You know them too.”
And he was right. I did. The day came, not long after I had stopped going to the Fairchild with him—I was not Asa, I could not bound in and bound out the way he did, I could not stand in front of the residents and f
ill them with light and music the way he could—when I heard myself singing “Amazing Grace.” Standing there at the kitchen sink, washing dishes, singing. The way Asa did, and the way my mother did.
Asa sang to me too. Songs from Oklahoma!, that old musical, when we were driving around. He would open all the windows and spread his arms wide, steering with his knees, and sing about a place where the wind came sweeping down the plain. He sang other times too, soft songs when my heart kicked into high gear and I had to lie down. He would curl himself around me and stroke my hair and sing to me, meandering songs that he made up as he went along because that was the kind of thing Asa could do. He could make up songs that were songs, real and true, and the sound of his singing voice would weave itself into my dreams.
It still did, sometimes.
* * *
There were only seven stages of Alzheimer’s and my mother was already in Stage 5 when she moved herself out of our house. Half a year later she had progressed to Stage 6b.
“How did she get that far without anyone noticing?”
That was one of the first questions the Life Care Committee asked me. A reasonable one too. How did most people end up in a doctor’s office talking about Alzheimer’s? Because someone close to them had observed any one or more of the following:
Trouble paying bills on time.
Wearing the same clothes day after day.
Trouble making meals for guests.
Difficulty going grocery shopping.
Difficulty remembering the right date when writing checks.
Difficulty recalling current address.
Difficulty recalling recent major events.
They had leveled their gazes at me, as if to size me up, the daughter who hadn’t noticed her mother’s decline. But they didn’t know the particulars of my mother’s life. The house had been paid up long ago, the electric bill came automatically out of her bank account, there was no gas or oil bill because she heated the place with wood. There were almost no checks to write because there were few bills to pay; she was a cash woman for the most part. As for clothes, she had always worn the same clothes anyway: jeans and a T-shirt and a sweatshirt or her lumber jacket or a parka, depending on the time of year. Keds or winter boots, again depending. She didn’t make meals to begin with, for either herself or guests. She didn’t have any guests, beyond Annabelle Lee once in a while. As for current address, Sterns, New York, was good enough. No house numbers, no street names, no apartment or condo unit or suite to remember.
As for recent major events, what would qualify? Putting the orange juice away in the cupboard instead of the refrigerator? Getting pulled over for erratic driving on Starr Hill?
Yes. Those events were, in fact, the major events that precipitated the slow topple of all the dominoes that followed.
My mother was a woman of simplicity. It took the disease a long time to complicate that simplicity. Now the complications were evident every time I looked at her. An aide helped her in the bathroom, for example. And she didn’t go on the field trips anymore. No more museum. No more mall. No more library. No more Erie Canal Village, no more Dairy Queen, no more strolls around the campus of Utica College.
The day came when she looked at me and asked how she knew me.
The minute she asked me that question I tried to banish it from my mind, tried to shoo it away, because How do I know you again? was not a question you expected ever to hear from your mother. But too late, it was already burned into my brain. I stood there frozen in the doorway of her room, my book offering of the week in my hands.
That was the first but there had been many more since. “Daphne,” she had called me, and “Mama,” she had called me, and once she had called me by her grandmother’s name: “Helena.” By the time she called me Helena I was not surprised. I did not laugh or startle or ask who Helena was. What I did was smile and say, “Hi, Ma.” Because that was what you did when you were riding the wave with your mother. You followed her.
Everything progressed. Everything kept moving on down the highway, including my mother. She fidgeted, she paced, she wandered the endless hallways.
Early-onset.
Alzheimer’s disease.
Fifty-percent chance of genetic mutation.
Frontotemporal dementia.
Memory care.
Assisted living.
Independent ambulation.
Increased rigidity.
Neurological reflex changes.
Power of attorney.
AD.
eFAD.
FTD.
DH.
DW.
LO.
All the medical terminology on the official websites. All the shorthand on the caregiver forums, all the uppercase abbreviations that stood in for dear husband, dear wife, loved one. Every one of them an acronym that masked the face of a loved someone. Sometimes, in the middle of the night, when sleep eluded me, the acronyms came calling. They gathered together like bees to the hive, and I was the hive and they crawled on top of me and inside me and burrowed deep, humming and buzzing. You, they hummed, you, you, you, you too? You too? You too? Maybe the day would come when I found myself behind the wheel of an unfamiliar car, driving around a bend I couldn’t recall, on my way to see someone I didn’t remember. Fifty-fifty. Five-oh. Maybe the bees were already living within me.
* * *
Follow her.
That was what the doctor and the Life Care specialist told me to do. Follow your mother wherever she goes. Meet her where she is, not where you think she should be. She was unsteady these days, her balance off. They had given her a walker but she was “not fond of using it.” She had entered a stage, “not unusual, apparently, in our experience,” where she kept wandering the halls looking for something. “In your mother’s case, her daughter. You, apparently.”
There was that word again, their favorite word: apparently.
“Her daughter?” I had said, at the last Life Care meeting. “But it used to be keys. Remember? It was always keys.”
They nodded. They were patient. Keys, daughter—what was the difference?
“We know it’s unsettling,” they said, “those times when you’re sitting right next to her on the couch but she doesn’t recognize you as her daughter. We get that”—which was another thing they kept saying, we get that—“but it doesn’t mean that she doesn’t appreciate your presence.”
“Okay,” I said. We were in this together, all of us: the doctor, the Life Care specialist, Sylvia and the aide and me and even the director, who liked to drop in once in a while to keep her “finger on the pulse.”
“You’re a writer,” the doctor said, encouragingly. He pointed at the book I had brought for her that week, Little House in the Big Woods, as if to prove his point. “This assignment might not be as hard for you as it is for other people, to follow your mother wherever she goes. Writers have good imaginations, right? Isn’t it part of the job description?”
The aide, Sylvia, the Life Care specialist and the director all pursed their lips and nodded. They sat in a row, all four of them, pursing and nodding as if this were community theater and they were the Greek chorus.
“It is,” I said. “It’s part of the job description.”
At that, they nodded and pursed even harder, quickening their pace. Wind-up Greek chorus dolls that someone had just snuck up behind and cranked up a notch.
“Oh, yes,” Sylvia said. “You’ll be great at that, Clara.”
She smiled at me. It was a real smile, a smile that said she knew I was worried about not doing a good job. As if I were a child getting ready to head to Syracuse to the state spelling bee, a child who had practiced for weeks, asking anyone—meaning Tamar—to read out the words from the practice book and use each in a sentence if necessary. As if I were my former self, Sterns Elementary spelling champ, and my mother were her former self too, Tamar Winter, the tough-as-nails mother of the champ.
* * *
“Autochthonous.”
&
nbsp; “Could you please use it in a sentence?”
That was what I used to say to Tamar, back in my elementary school spelling bee champion days. Asking to use the spelling word in a sentence was a ploy, a stall. If you didn’t know how to spell a word, staring into space while the word was used in a sentence as your brain sifted through a thousand possibilities to find the right one was an excellent strategy. I used to ask in a polite, distant, measured tone of voice, as if Tamar were an official state spelling bee judge.
“No, Clara, I can’t use this word in a sentence, because I don’t know what the hell this word means. I don’t even know how to pronounce this goddamn word.”
That was her usual response. A Tamar remark. But the few seconds it took her to go through the rant was usually enough time for me to take a stab at how to spell the word.
“Autochthonous. A. U. T. O. C. H. T. H. O. N. O. U. S.”
“Correct. Do you have any idea what it means?”
“No. How the hell would I?”
“Don’t curse.”
“You curse.”
“Do as I say, not as I do. I’m your mother.”
“Who cares what it means, Ma? Why does that matter? All that matters is spelling it right. Onward.”
That was a lie, though. I cared. Even back then, I cared.
“Hi, Ma. It’s Clara.”
I always told her who I was these days, just in case. I put my hand on the walker handle, next to hers but not touching. Tamar was never big on touching. She was pushing her walker up and down the hall outside the dining room. The hallway was decorated with removable decals: blocky branched trees with stylized birds fluttering up into the fluorescent-ceiling sky. Flowers drooping on stems. Apples and pears and cherries. Every decal was a replication of something that lived and thrived only outside.
“Hello, Clara.”
“Where are you going today, Ma?”
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