Because the world is backwards, I said to myself. Laws are repealed. Iron rusts. Logic unravels.
“I suggest you don’t overthink the questions, Mr. Cooper. Just try to relax and let the answers come.”
My father poked his glasses back into place. He deliberated on every letter. “D … L … O … R … W?”
She recorded his score. “Now, please repeat the following list of items in the order I read them to you: apple, penny, table.”
Dad cocked his head and thought a minute. “Did I get it right?”
“You haven’t repeated the items yet.”
“Not those,” he says. “World. Did I get it backwards?”
“Ask me at the end of the test.”
“Suppose I forget?”
“We should move on to this next question,” insisted Dr. Montrose. “It’s important to administer the MME as methodically as possible. I don’t want to rush you, Mr. Cooper, but once we’ve established the pace, digressions are only going to interfere with your concentration and skew the results. Now, kindly repeat after me: apple, penny, table.”
“You can’t tell me now?
“Penny, table, apple,” she persisted.
Was it me, I wondered, or did she get the order wrong?
My father probably couldn’t see well enough to read the spines of the books lining the shelves behind the doctor’s head: The Aging Population. Dementia and Its Consequences. The titles would make me nervous if I was trying to prove my mental acuity.
Dr. Montrose waited, with perfectly calibrated neutrality, for my father to recite the list. She’d been schooled in being patient, had practiced it the way one practices the piano, striking every octave of calm, every note of analytic distance.
“Apple,” he said at last. “The rest I forget.” He dismissed his insufficient recall with a wave of his hand, but he looked at me to gauge how he was doing. I smiled noncommittally back.
Next, she asked him to repeat the phrase, “No ifs, ands, or buts.” Without missing a beat, my father drew himself upright, gulped the necessary air, and spit out the words with a force that caused his face to redden like a fanned coal. He pounded his fist in his open palm. He was good at ultimatums. Ultimatums were his forte. No ifs, ands, or buts about it, he was ready to resume.
“Can you tell me what this is?” she asked, holding up her pen.
“A ballpoint,” he said. “Does it have your motto on it?”
Dr. Montrose informed him that men and women in her profession didn’t, as a rule, have mottos. Then she noticed that there were, in fact, words printed along the side of the pen. She held it horizontally and squinted. “Hot Water Management Service,” she read. “Where could this have come from?”
I suspected this question wasn’t part of the test, but it was hard to tell where the Mini-Mental left off and idle curiosity began.
Dad said, “Pens are everywhere these days. People need pens to make lists, what with all the rushing and the doing and the coming and the going. What I’d like to know, though, is what the hell is a Hot Water Management Service?”
He’d posed a blunt yet provocative question, one resistant to statistical norms, to pre-and postmodern theory. Was the need to manage hot water greater than the need to manage cold or lukewarm water? Was it managed through a system of pipes and valves? Was the service a private enterprise, or government run? We hadn’t a single answer among us, not a guess or speculation. The doctor continued to gaze at the pen, holding it at either end and slowly turning it between her fingers as though she might find still other phrases inscribed on its side. Beyond the hospital window, the sky above Oxnard deepened into dusk. A couple of pink clouds glided across the horizon and for a moment it seemed as if the building was revolving while the clouds stood still. As we tried to unpuzzle the message on the pen, the office’s walls and furniture dimmed, our faces growing vague. A clock ticked loudly on the doctor’s desk, and I felt a certainty down to my bones that the three of us, second by second, were drawn toward a vast and eventual forgetting. Nothing we could do or say would stop it. No matter where we turned we couldn’t turn back. One day this room wouldn’t ring a bell for anyone now sitting within it.
* * *
Dr. Montrose explained that my father’s score revealed a mild-to-moderate cognitive impairment. She addressed Dad directly, telling him it would require several more tests, both physical and psychological, to discover whether his condition was temporary.
“You call this a condition?” he asked, moving his arms and legs as if his aspirin-enhanced mobility made further tests unnecessary.
“I think we should schedule an MRI for you later this week.”
“I just took it!” he protested.
“That was the MME. There are so many acronyms in our profession. It’s confusing, I know.”
“It’s ridiculous, is what it is. It’s alphabet soup.” If my father grasped the ramifications of scoring poorly, if he gleaned from Dr. Montrose’s gentle voice her wish to buffer the news that his faculties might decline over the coming months, he didn’t let on. He was as upset as he would have been had he lost a round of gin rummy, tossing his cards onto the table, ready to try his luck again.
Both my father and I had hoped the results of the examination would be somewhat definitive, if that’s not a contradiction, but the consultation added yet another ambiguity to our already extensive collection. Dr. Montrose implied that my father’s mental acuity could go either way, or any way, or every way at once, which, as my father had said in the waiting room, was something we could have told ourselves.
Night had fallen by the time we left Saint Joseph’s. Arc lights in the parking lot tinted white cars yellow, red cars brown. The world lay before us in a new, deceptive spectrum. We’d both forgotten where I’d parked and we wandered across blacktop still soft from the day’s heat, sure we’d spotted the right make and model, only to discover, once we came closer, that we’d made a mistake.
The central wing of Saint Joseph’s towered above us, a monolith of lit-up windows. On every floor, people waited with a terrible impatience for recovery, visitors, morphine, sleep. My father had narrowly escaped the place, and by the time we finally found the car, I couldn’t get out of the parking lot fast enough to suit him.
After negotiating stop-and-go traffic along the commercial strip, we passed fewer and fewer fast food restaurants and discount designer outlets, until we sailed through the outskirts of town, where distant lights lay scattered across the black landscape. The sky was more of the same, but higher.
I’d come by the trailer park earlier that afternoon to pick up Dad for his appointment and to drop off Brian for a private talk with Betty. The plan was that Brian would ask if we could pay her to continue living with my father until I could find a suitable retirement home or assisted-living facility. In broad day, the Siesta’s trailers had been uniform in shape and painted drab industrial colors, sunspots glaring on their corrugated roofs. Not only were they similar enough to confuse a person with cognitive problems, they were similar enough to induce confusion in a person without cognitive problems.
Before Dad and I drove off to meet with Dr. Montrose, Betty drew me a map of the route between the trailer park and Saint Joseph’s, and now, as my father and I returned after dark, he glanced at it repeatedly and warned me that her directions were wrong.
“They got us to the hospital,” I told him. “They ought to get us back.”
“You’d trust a bunch of chicken scratches?” Whether or not he could have pinpointed the source of his anger—Betty’s refusal to let him borrow her car—it seized him each time he glanced at the map. “That woman couldn’t find her way out of a paper bag.”
“It’s fight, Dad, not find. She couldn’t fight her way out of a paper bag. Or—wait—is it punch?”
Whenever he recommended that I make a turn or continue straight ahead, I grunted in compliance, then followed Betty’s drawing. I was pretty sure we weren’t lost, but between the
charade of obeying my father’s instructions and the endless bolt of open road unfurling in my high beams, we could have been inventing the miles as we drove along.
Siesta Trailer Park was spelled out for passersby above the main gate, the sign’s wooden letters all but invisible against the night sky. No matter how slowly I drove down the property’s unpaved main road, a cloud of dust billowed behind the car. There wasn’t a person in sight, yet every window jittered with light from a television. A raucous pack of dogs materialized in my headlights, their teeth bared, eyes incandescent. Once it became clear that I’d slow the car but wouldn’t stop, they yapped a last, collective protest and bounded away.
“Home again, home again,” said my father as we crept toward his trailer. “Jiggity jig.” He asked if I remembered him reading me The Three Little Pigs when I was a boy. “That,” he explained, “was why you decided to become a writer.”
“So you did hear my acceptance speech?”
“Speech?” he asked, baffled.
I shrugged. “Nothing.”
I put the car in park and told my father that Brian had stayed behind to discuss some important matters with Betty. Through the screen door to his trailer, I could see Brian and Betty seated across from each other at a small dinette table, talking intently. A neon fixture in the kitchen cast a bright, uncompromising light over the entire room. Brian leaned forward at the slant of active listening. Betty held a steaming mug with both hands, a wisp of damp hair clinging to her forehead. The glazed resignation on her face told me she’d grudgingly agreed to our plan, as ready as she’d ever be for the task ahead.
“What’s to discuss?” asked my father. He squinted through the windshield, through the cloud of dust stirred up by our arrival, and waited for my answer. No sentence I’d written up till then had called for such treacherous, measured phrasings. I looked away so my face wouldn’t betray me. Your thoughts are no longer dependable. Plans you cannot change have been made. The insolvability of it all must have made me thickheaded because it took me a moment to realize that my father hadn’t just opened his door to get some air but had slipped out of his seat and was headed toward the trailer. He hoisted himself up the steps of a front porch that looked like a big aluminum stepping stool. I dashed from the car and caught the screen door an instant before it sprang shut behind him. Neon tubes leeched color from the room, and even now I remember the scene in black-and-white, like one of the images Brian had described from the Thematic Apperception Test, a picture whose story is imminent yet fixed. My hand forever reaches out but never touches my father’s shoulder. I’ll never restrain or calm him down. Wrenched from solemn conversation, Brian and Betty turn their heads, not knowing for a moment who’s barged through the door. My father stands within a glaring room and ceaselessly reads two startled faces: Who are you, they demand. Where did you come from? What do you want?
This Side Up
When I gripped my father’s shoulder, our misunderstanding, like a rusty machine, shuddered and started up again. He spun around at the touch of my hand.
“Betty is going to stay here with you, Dad.”
“That’s nice,” he said warily. “Why wouldn’t she?”
“Why wouldn’t I,” echoed Betty. “I’m his nurse.” She carried her mug into the kitchen and rinsed it under the blasting tap. A pair of headlights swept past the windows, the raucous dog pack giving chase.
“In the meantime,” I said, “we can start looking for a place where …”
“Did you offer Brian a cup of tea?” he asked Betty.
“No,” she said curtly. “I offered him soda.” She grabbed a bottle from the refrigerator and refilled Brian’s glass. A head of foam hissed toward the rim. Brian chugged soda before it overflowed, coughing his thanks.
“And one for my son?”
“Maybe later,” I said.
Betty glared at my father, then marched back into the kitchen and opened a cupboard door with enough force to send a vehement little breeze across the room.
“This place is certainly compact!” exclaimed Brian.
“You’d never know to look at it,” remarked my father, eager to resume his role as the man of the house, “but there’s storage galore.”
“Built-ins,” added Betty, handing me a glass. “The mess is hidden.”
I couldn’t blame her for mocking my father’s expectation that we’d carry on as normal, though it wasn’t clear if he wanted to avoid a confrontation with Betty until after Brian and I left, or if he had succumbed to what further tests would determine was dementia. For now, however, none of us could come up with a better plan than complicity.
“How ’bout a tour?” Dad asked no one in particular. Brian and I made enthusiastic noises and stood at the ready.
“I think I’ll sit this one out,” said Betty. She settled into her seat at the dinette table, but the trailer was so small that she essentially joined us without having to move an inch.
It seemed logical, I suppose, to start the tour with a few interesting facts about the dinette set since it was right there in front of us, waiting for explication. My father informed us that it was made of Formica and chrome and purchased by Betty at the Furniture Barn’s liquidation sale. Betty shifted in her chair and gave us a perfunctory wave, as if she were on display in some absurd museum.
The tour resumed with a slow pivot around the room. Dad said, “That open space between the kitchen and the dining area is called a … a …”
“A pass-though,” said Betty.
“Due to the fact that you can pass food and other items through it, on a plate or what have you, without walking all the way from the kitchen to … well, to over here.” He paused. “It seemed like a selling point at the time. The agent called this floor plan …” He deferred to Betty. “A what did he call it?”
“A step saver.”
My father snorted. “Not that your old man has many steps left!”
The mahogany breakfront so prominent in the former living room had been replaced by a hutch containing Betty’s collection of religious figurines, including a sculpture of praying hands. Plugged into an outlet, the hands emanated a pious light thanks to the Oxnard Department of Water and Power, which, according to my father, routinely sent “nuts” out to the trailer park to read the tenant’s meters. And the meter for their particular trailer, my father insisted, was always “on the fritz.” This explained the ominous pile of unopened bills I’d noticed on the kitchen counter, several from the DWP.
“And over here,” he said, pointing to three cardboard boxes stacked against the wall, “you’ll see the moving boxes we haven’t unpacked.” Various destinations—bath, bedroom, storage—had been scrawled across them. Emphatic black arrows indicated which end was up. Somebody (I hoped my father) had stacked the boxes in such a way that each arrow was aligned in the correct, ascending direction, like a child’s blocks balanced one atop the other. Never had that simple injunction—This Side Up—seemed to me as meaningful. Is there anything more important than being oriented, in complete accord with the compass points, your feet firmly planted on the ground? Is there any knowledge sweeter than knowing whether you’re coming or going?
The tour continued as my father guided us a few steps here, a few steps there, stopping to identify the trailer’s standard features with an enthusiasm the average tour guide usually reserves for suspension bridges and natural rock formations.
Here is the linen closet.
The medicine cabinet’s salves and tablets.
Here is the light switch.
The thermostat.
Up there you’ll see the smoke detector.
Behold the phone jack.
We squeezed into a hallway that was really more of a vestibule with exits. My father opened the door to his “office” and stood at the portal, barring our way. Brian and I peered over his shoulders. The hidden mess Betty had spoken of was not, as I had first thought, metaphoric, but a Dumpster’s worth of genuine refuse. The depositions and memos and
old manila folders that had been gathered into stacks and piles at the former house now blanketed the floor, ankle-deep, sorted according to alphabet soup. A small wooden desk broke through the clutter like an island rising from a paper sea. On the last Friday of every December, at five o’clock sharp, people who worked downtown celebrated the new year by opening their windows and flinging outdated calendar pages onto the streets below, and my father, judging from the state of his office, had decided to continue this tradition indoors. The drawback to his version of the ritual was that he didn’t rid himself of clerical excess but trapped himself within it, like a bird who gathers twigs and grasses to build a nest it can’t fly out of.
Brian had always been able to discern, in a crowded public place and from a considerable distance, those seemingly ordinary people who turned out to be mad ranters, prisoners to tics and repetition, obeyers of demanding imaginary voices, and he’d developed a subtle grunt to warn me if one of them was headed our way. He made that sound now, and I leaned against him—I could hardly avoid it in those cramped quarters—for the solace of his body heat.
Dad stepped back and quickly shut the door. “Been busy,” he said. “Swamped. Retirement is a full-time job.”
At the threshold to the master bedroom, he again blocked our way, though this room was inaccessible for a different reason. Whereas entering the office would have meant tramping over layers of paperwork, the bedroom was almost entirely occupied by his old California king, the mahogany headboard blocking the lower half of the only window. I say the room was “occupied” by the bed but it would be more accurate to say that the bed “consumed” the room, which was cushioned like a playpen and yet as abject as a padded cell. It amazed me that he’d decided to take the bed with him to Oxnard, and I wondered what feats of strength and engineering had been necessary for the movers to cram so large a mattress through so small a door. A narrow, very narrow aisle ran along two sides of the bed, just wide enough for Betty and my father to sidle along it like people trapped on a window ledge. The door from the hall swung open less than halfway before it struck the edge of the mattress with a muffled thud. Bedtime preparations must have culminated with my father and Betty sucking in their stomachs and drawing themselves upright in order to squeeze the sleepy bulk of themselves through the door, inadvertently polishing the doorknob with the chamois of their pajamas. If the bedroom closet hadn’t been accessible through sliding doors, their clothes would have hung there, as Betty might have said, till kingdom come. Not surprisingly, the bed was unmade, since one of them would have had to crawl across it to tuck the sheets in along the two sides flush with the walls, and then crawl back to dismount the mattress, leaving a trail of self-defeating wrinkles. No, for the two people who shared this room, neatness was a pretense best abandoned.
The Bill from My Father Page 18