Us Against Alzheimer's

by Marita Golden

  Halfway up the narrow path, at the base of an old oak tree, is a yellow Tonka toy truck, weathered with age. Conor and I used to play with it. The wheels are now off; the plastic toy truck has been parked by the tree in solitude for close to twenty years. Dad put it there as a memory of our childhood, not far from what he calls “Christmas Tree Heaven,” a patch of woodland on our property piled with the bones of family Christmas trees from all these years of our childhood. My father is a sap, excuse the pun.

  The yellow truck, angels, and the color yellow are driving forces in his life; they give my father great comfort. It brings him back in faith to an innocent time, to childhood, and to his own young fatherhood. On his way to the office, he religiously touches the top of the toy truck and says a prayer, as if to reassure himself that he has a past. We often quietly witness the exchange from behind the sliding door of the family room.

  In Baltimore, which I now call home, my husband, Matt, and I discovered a little more than a year ago that “we” were pregnant. I was carrying the baby; and Matt was carrying me. I had always wanted to be a mom; it’s been something I’ve looked forward to my entire life. But as I sat on the floor with our new yellow baby lab, Crosby, awaiting the test results, a crushing feeling of anxiety swept over me: I was anxious about having to leave my six-year-old students a third of the way through the school year; I was anxious about being a good-enough mother; I was anxious about giving my students, my husband, my child, and our new puppy all of me. How does one even do that? I was far more fearful about passing the Alzheimer’s gene on to our child. I was scared that if I had the gene, like my dad, I’d leave my baby too soon.

  I woke up early one Saturday morning a few weeks later, then almost twelve weeks pregnant, and decided to go for a run—a route I’ve been running since we moved to our neighborhood in Baltimore.

  There is a house on my route where three young kids live. They’re always outside playing with chalk or games in the yard, and when I’m running by or walking Crosby, they love to say hi. When I ran by the house early that morning, no one was awake yet, but something caught my eye. By the big tree on the front lawn was a yellow Tonka truck—just like the one we grew up with. I stopped, held my hand over it, and felt a rush of calm. Faith told me everything was going to be right in God’s plan.

  This past Christmas Eve, I introduced my healthy baby girl, Adeline, to my father, a moment I never knew I would have. He held my angel tightly, and they danced slowly, grandfather and granddaughter. All was good in that moment. While we do not know what the future holds for all of us, I’ve come to understand that we can have faith in God’s plan. No matter what you choose to believe in, a personal choice for all, I’ve learned in this trial that one needs to have faith in something.

  I have renewed faith today in angels, and in yellow Tonka trucks.

  THE ECHO OF LOSS

  CLEYVIS NATERA

  “Spirits wandered. . . . They stayed with their descendants to guide them through life, to comfort them, sometimes to scare them into waking from their fog of unloving, unliving.”

  —Yaa Gyasi, Homegoing

  When the picture frame fell and shattered, I knew my dead father had come to pay me a visit. Pacing around my living room, I’d been staring at my Fitbit as it counted my steps all wrong. One step lost for every three it counted. When the picture frame arrived in my house a week earlier, my cousin handed it to me with great ceremony and said it was a gift for my fortieth birthday. I stared at my father, jaw unhinged. I hadn’t seen a photograph of him in two decades. I hadn’t seen him in the flesh in nearly three. I purposefully stuck the frame on the highest shelf, finding the wood planks too small, I forced it in, reassured by the snug fit. My littlest one, only three years old, liked to climb, grab, throw. My bigger one, five years old, like to draw, paint, then scrunch any kind of paper into a ball. But no way they’d get to Papi that high up.

  My older sister, Shany, was doing my daughter’s hair. When the picture frame fell off the shelf and the glass shattered, her hands hovered above those two gorgeous hair puffs.

  “He’s here,” she said.

  “I know.”

  She went back to the hair, avoiding my eyes. “For you or for me?”

  “He’s definitely here for me.”

  I picked up the broken frame, relieved the picture was unharmed. On the floor, pieces of glass, both small and large, waited for my attention. Each piece touched had my fingerprint, and the lines formed a map of sorts, I didn’t know to where.

  * * *

  The first few months after we arrived in New York City, I thought constantly about Papi. He’d moved out of our house on Valentine’s Day, a day before we left the Dominican Republic, and I had no idea where he lived. I wanted to imagine his life without us and couldn’t. All four of us left at once: any, Shany, the oldest of us, was fourteen, Linda was twelve, was ten, and Evelyn, my little sister, was eight. The thought of our absence from his life was inconceivable. As though he must not truly exist, not without us. Much in the way our new life seemed surreal, leaving the heat of the tropics that February day to be greeted a few hours later by the frigid cold of Manhattan. Where had the heat gone? The anticipation of this new life had been a shadow cast over all the years since Mami left. Soon, she’d said year over year, we’d be with her. None of us realized it’d always meant without Papi.

  In 1988, people like us made international calls by going to a calling center. Charged by the minute, the calls had to be brief. Weeks after we’d gotten settled with family, when we finally made our way in to call Papi, we found a space about the size of the average corner bodega. The line stretched out the door, half way down the block—people had come far to reach home. Up until then, everyone around us looked different but mostly the same, sounded different but spoke the same. Here we were, staring at people whose skin was shades lighter or darker, who looked past us as the cold made their hips dance from side to side, palms rubbed palms, sounds coming out of their mouths unintelligible. Even those who spoke Spanish were hard to understand; accents alien to us still belied the longing we ourselves felt. That day, awed, I thought about all the words that existed on the planet, how they could cleave: bringing people together or apart.

  Mami was working her twenty-four-hour job as a home attendant in the Bronx. My aunt Miriam, a teenager at the time, had volunteered to take us, and as her eyes scanned the block, intent on finding her boyfriend, I realized everyone yearned.

  Inside, each wall was lined with small, tempered-glass phone booths. We made our way to ours. On the way, the expressions of the people around varied. Concern, elation, sadness, even joy on the faces of those clutching phones. Regardless of squinting eyes or pressed lips, all the people I saw that day had one thing in common, bodies perched forward, listening intently when they stopped speaking, hands outstretched, touching glass.

  That first time I spoke to Papi, I was too shy to say much of anything. We’d only been gone a few weeks. When I last held a phone in my hand, the situation had been reversed. Whenever Mami called us, no matter what we were doing, everything stopped. That last time, we’d run to the nearby neighbor’s who’d summoned us to hear Mami’s voice. That last time, it had been blindingly hot, a drought weeks in, the dirt ground split open like the cracked heel of a foot. That last time, he gently pushed my shoulder, urging me to speak to her, to tell her what I’d learned in school. Now it was his turn to be on the phone, oblivious to the distraction surrounding us, no one on this side gently pushing us to make conversation. Three of us squeezed into the booth that time.

  The phone in my hand was heavy. It smelled like someone’s dried spit. Struggling to say something, anything, I focused on the things I couldn’t say.

  The four of us had been separated. Evelyn and Lindo were down on 139th street with aunts who lived in adjacent apartments. Shany and I were living in our grandmother’s apartment, sharing the top bunk in a room that housed three other people. Mami had decided we wouldn’t go to school
until September, even though we’d arrived in mid-February. Each gray day longer than the day before. We saw Mami maybe once a week, most weeks not at all. I’d been nagged by a terrible thought as we made our way to the call center:—we might have been better off if we never left.

  My tongue was dormant. The hot, stinky phone pressed against my ear. Everyone stared. I’d been left to go last.

  “What did it feel like when you first walked outside?” he said.

  “The trees are naked,” I blurted. “The branches look like my arms.”

  He laughed loudly, from the bottom of his belly.

  “Now all I can imagine is a tree made up of arms,” he said. “Your imagination . . . I will have nightmares tonight.”

  My shyness didn’t last long. Within weeks, I learned to prepare. In the silence that followed one conversation, a quiet space that preceded the next, experiences took on a certain weight. Electrical currents that never left? = light, light. Drinking cold water with abandon? = mass measureless in volume. I once turned the faucet in the bathroom and watched it run. Time a tub filling with water. Until small waves lapped over the lip, trickled down the sides to claw feet, to floor. Not until that wetness slipped under the doorframe, traveled to the hallway, did someone think to check on me. Oh, the endlessness. Oh, the abundance! The pressure from the toilet water alone, when I pulled that lever, sounded like the cascading water of La Toma, the local river in our town. If you kept pulling at the lever of that toilet and held your face in close proximity to the bowl, it sprayed. You’re so nasty, my aunt Miriam said when she caught my face so close to it. Those things though, they were not heavy enough to share. Back home, electrical outages were a constant. Cold water, a luxury. Water at all, a privilege.

  One day, while on an errand with my other aunt, Suni, we heard a rumbling under our feet.

  “Have you seen the train?” she said.

  I shook my head “no.”

  She held my hand hard and pushed-pulled me down the stairs to the 145th Street train station. Back then, there was a 1 and a 9. The silver metal was moving too fast to register much more than the wind that swirled, the deafening noise a beat that repeated, relentless.

  That feeling carried me for weeks, and I replayed my surprise at how huge the noise, how light ricocheted from the metal in motion, too many senses activated at once. I practiced talking to Papi, how I would describe it, anticipated what he would say.

  When we next spoke, I said it reminded me of the ocean.

  “Because of the noise?” he said.

  “No,” I said. “My heart felt so big.”

  On the other end, silence. I could sense his smile, his approval.

  In those early months, it was his absence between the calls that made me pay attention. I saved each meaningful experience like a fragile thing inside a plantain tree leaf, the kind that grew in our backyard back in the place we used to call home; yes, leaves big enough to cover my small frame. Now I was the leaf. I kept the memories warm until I spoke them aloud.

  Mami did it! She got an apartment in the Bronx and one of her sisters agreed to live with us, since she’d only be able to afford it as long as she kept working twenty-four hours a day, all seven days of the week. The toll on her was formidable. She seemed gone even when she was sitting right next to us, absent as she gently caressed our faces. The weight on her had already curved her neck down.

  Months passed. By then, what felt like losing two parents was less jarring, not so dissonant. When we finally got to school, there was no bilingual classroom. We were assigned to a regular English-speaking class. Each night, I went to bed and prayed I would wake up able to speak English. Rays of sun found me kneeling on the bed, shouting garbled sounds I hoped were words, while in my heart knew they were not. Noche tras noche tras noche. Noches turned into weeks turned into months, and still words uttered into the illuminated dust particles of dawn were nonsense. Heartbroken, I didn’t share that with Papi. Too heavy, I thought. Until one phone call I couldn’t keep it in. I told him about my prayers and how despite the prayers each morning my tongue refused to speak English. I was learning nothing, no matter how hard I tried.

  “You’ll learn English,” he said. “You’re my most intelligent.”

  I snorted. It wasn’t true. I certainly wasn’t his smartest kid. But the way he said it, I could tell he believed I would. He lied to me so I would believe I could.

  Silence created a space hollow enough to be filled with whatever I chose to put in it. I learned that words mattered, that preparing to tell a story was one way to keep him with me, and when I finally got to share it a piece of me got to stay with him. His responses were always a comfort. Around our town everyone called him Licenciado, Ingeniero, terms meant to show respect for an educated person though he’d never gone to school past 8th grade. He’d earned the title because he was a mechanic at an engineering plant specializing in heavy machinery. Papi was responsible for fixing the vehicles charged with charting new roads in San Cristobál, our town, and beyond it, vehicles that ensured the earth stayed in place with a coating of asphalt, or cement, or concrete.

  * * *

  Once, my little sister and I tried to count Papi’s children with our fingers. My right hand counted the four of us, plus the first one born dead. I figured the dead counted, too. We kept each finger stretched stiff when they became people, and used the tip of our nose to count the others. Three quarters of the way we ran out of names to count but knew there were more children left. A hand’s worth more? In New York City, he had a contingent of children who once tried to convince him to travel abroad. Papi had been clear in his disdain. He would never leave his land. The majority of his kids were in Santo Domingo, a twenty-minute drive from where we grew up. Close enough we could have had a relationship, but all the mothers refused.

  Mami readily admits when she decided on him, a man twenty years her senior, it was first out of the necessity to leave Abuelita’s house, last out of affection.

  See, in true Dominican fashion, Papi had been a world-class womanizer. The thumb of my left hand was my half-sister J, who lived in our same town, who was only months older than Shany. Papi wasn’t faithful, even to Mami (at least not at the start). It’s possible Mami didn’t get a life partner much different than the other mothers got. But we got a different father than the other children got. I know this for sure.

  It was evident in how he cared for us, cooked for us, cleaned the house when the maid Mami hired to make up for her absence was off. It was evident when Papi took us to visit Condesa, his last common-law wife (the one right before Mami).

  The house sat on a quiet, narrow street in Santo Domingo, painted the deep green of a royal palm tree. The front porch was lined with rocking chairs, and the four of us quickly took over the space. Within moments of arrival, we complained that we were hungry, thirsty, bored. One of my half-sisters, whose grown children were older than us, got fed up enough to scream at him that day. There must have been something in his attentiveness, traveling alone with four kids and no wife, probably requesting we be fed and be given water to pacify the whine. Maybe it was how he let us climb over his long body, sit on his lap, pull his thick, black hair. Most likely it was how happy he was with us, how happy we were with him. Whatever it was, her anger, resentment overlapped, and soon she couldn’t contain it.

  “One day,” she told Papi, “when you’re old and need your ass wiped, none of them will be here to do it. We’re the ones who are going to have to do it.”

  I have no memory of his response. I was so taken by her anger, her bitterness.

  I wish I’d turned my gaze to witness his thoughts, an accusation so fraught it must have drawn a reaction. Because by the time he turned into what she thought was the best version of a father, one she’d obviously never had, his offering was wasted on children destined to leave him. All while her hand remained outstretched for alms. Her words of course, were a kind of curse, a prophecy that came true.

  * * *

&nbs
p; I only saw Papi once between the time we left him and the time he died. Mami could hardly afford the trip when we found out he’d had a stroke. Un derrame cerebral, everyone said, a phrase that literally means cascade in the brain but sounded instead like a great surge, an awesome spill. We found him in a small house, thin and shrunken. The girl who was looking after him that day stood away from us, staring curiously at me from a door frame.

  “You are sisters,” Mami said.

  I could tell. We had the same face. We looked like him.

  I stole glances at her too. Obviously older than me but by how much? I was fourteen years old, she looked to be no older than fifteen, maybe sixteen. Exactly how long did it take Papi to change his ways? Did he ever?

  Papi spoke slowly and was mostly out of it for the few days we were there. His thick head of hair was mostly white by then, as he was nearing seventy years old. His strong, lean body had become wiry, fragile. But his eyelashes curved thick and black, the bridge of his nose was as prominent as ever. By the last day, he could stand on his own, and as we walked away from the small house, he stood in the doorway, body slumped against it, watching us go. There was such sadness in his face I kept looking back to make sure it was true until I bumped into whoever was ahead of me. Now I realize he must have known. He must have known that was the last time he’d see us.

  After that visit, the calls became less frequent on our end, and when we did call we were told he was sleeping or tired or unable to come to the phone. But I needed to hear Papi’s voice. When I had had enough, I made Mami walk with me to the call center. I wanted answers. Her steps were tentative and so slow. I stopped in the middle of the street, in front of the fish place next to the call center.

  “What’s going on?” I said.

  “He isn’t well,” Mami told me.