I reflexively poke back at her with my own stick of words. “Well, if I were having memory problems, you’ve placed me in a poor position,” I say. “If I tell you I don’t have memory problems, you’ll think I’ve for… um… forgotten that I forget things. If I tell you I do have… memory, you know, problems with forgetting things, I will have taken away your pleasure of testing me this morning.”
I smile over the clever logic of my argument. Dr. Ellison returns my smile and nods.
“You make a valid point, Mrs. Glidden, and I’m sure you’re totally fine. But it’s always wise to keep a good watch on our health, especially as we approach our older, more fragile years,” she says. Her voice is soft, but her words are sharp and pointy. They hurt.
I’m about to ask if she’s yet out of her training bra, but Bryan’s astringent look from under his eyebrows changes my mind. I sigh.
“Of course, these old, fragile years,” I say, sliding on a half-smile for the benefit of Bryan.
“Great! Let’s get started. I have just a few questions and I promise to be quick.” The doctor opens her manila folder. The sudden movement reminds me of a bird opening its wings in startled flight. Something snags deep in my throat.
“Okay, Mrs. Glidden,” Dr. Ellison begins. “I’m going to say three words that I’d like you to remember. I’ll ask you to recall these words for me in a few minutes.”
I nod my head, but I’m still stuck on the image of bird wings splayed open. I look down to my lap and realize my fingers are spread open like wings, ready for their own flight, if not for the fact that they’re clutched tightly to my legs.
“Okay, I’d like you to remember these three words. House. Lake. Shoe. I’ll ask you to repeat them back to me in a few minutes. But first, I’d like you to close your eyes. I’m going to place an object in your hand and I want you to tell me what it is without looking at it.”
I hold out my hand. My lids flutter together and then I feel an object, cool as ice, placed on my palm. I close my hand and roll my fingers over the thing. It puzzles me and before I can stop my eyes, they slide open, narrow windows of curiosity.
A key!
I slam my eyes shut, but not quickly enough. I’m caught. Embarrassment fills my throat and exits as small laughter. “Oops,” I say. “I didn’t mean to peek.”
“That’s normal, let’s try again,” the doctor says. “This time, try to keep your eyes closed.” She places another object in my hand and, with the gesture, I think of Ma, her hands feeling every little object around her as a circle of blackness widened inside her eyes. The thing I hold is as cold and round as the circle of dark that invaded Ma’s eyes.
I recognize the object. I know the answer. “Oh, it’s money,” I say, pleasure filling my mouth.
“Very good.”
I’m beginning to like this doctor in spite of our earlier go-round. She pulls a piece of blank paper from the folder and hands me a pencil. “I’d like you to draw a regular clock, put in all the numbers and indicate the time as ten past eleven.”
I draw a circle and then wish I had a sticky to remind me of the time. “What time did you say again?”
“Ten past eleven.”
I’m dismayed. “I’m not much of an artist,” I say, stalling for time to gather my thoughts.
“Mom, it’s not an art contest,” Bryan says. “Just do the clock.”
I sigh and look at the piece of blank paper. “Of course.”
Then I notice a clock on the far wall. With the devious half-smile of one who’s found a way around the system, I copy the clock, my eyes flitting back and forth between my drawing and my model. I worry over my pencil, spilling my breath upon the paper in little puffs of concentration.
I draw my clock.
Even with cheating, I know my drawing is more than pitiful. I’m aware something is terribly wrong, but like everything else these days, I can’t figure out how I could be so mistaken. I reach out for another piece of paper.
“No… really, this is very good. You did just fine.”
Dr. Ellison takes the paper with my clock and my breath captured upon it and places it on the table. I look at Bryan and notice him looking from my drawing to the face of his watch. His mouth turns slim and rigid.
Dr. Ellison tucks my sad drawing into a pocket in the manila folder and softly folds it closed.
She looks up and fixes her face into a smile. “Next, I’d like you to count backwards from one hundred by sevens,” she says, her voice inappropriately animated for what she has just asked of me.
“Count backwards? From a hundred? I can try,” I say, speaking slowly, while silently screaming to heaven for help on this one teensy request. “One hundred… ninety… umm.” I roll my eyes and look toward the ceiling; heaven is clearly deaf. I begin to feel a prickle of embarrassment in my stomach.
“Oh, dear,” I say. “I’m afraid I’m not very good at this. Actually, I’m really awful. That’s what those… those little things that make numbers are for. You know those little things that do this, uh, whatever you call it. Um, math! Subtraction! That’s it… minus. Minus. Minus.” I realize I’ve slumped in my chair and try to straighten my shoulders. “I’ve always been terrible with math. But really, I’m very good at finding words.”
“That’s right, you were a writer,” the doctor says. “Many people aren’t very good with numbers… so, let’s switch to words, then. Do you recall the three items I asked you to remember when we first started?”
“Three items?”
“Yes. I asked you to remember three items.”
“Of course. Yes. Three items. One was a… oh, I know this. It was a shoe, right? And another was, ahhh… was it a tree? You said there were three words? Oh my, I guess I really wasn’t paying attention. Can you give me another three words? Shouldn’t we try this again?”
“No, that’s fine, Mrs. Glidden. You did just fine. Just fine.” The doctor pats my arm; I know she’s using her hand as a sad offering of consolation.
I also know I’m in trouble.
Failure has rented space in my brain and the payment I receive in exchange is a condescending pat on the arm, followed by a conversation that suddenly turns into talk about me as if I’m no longer in the room. I watch my son as the outer corners of his eyes dip downward and his lips disappear into the landscape of his face like he’s beginning to fold inside-out.
YOU TAKE. You take the news with surprising calm. Rather than screaming into the caverns inside your head, you sit like a lady, your hands folded on your lap. People talk around you like you’re invisible, but it doesn’t matter what anyone says. You look at your hands while you calmly listen to their words. Words like, “Evidence of mild cognitive impairment.” Then, “Your mother is relatively young, perhaps early-onset Alzheimer’s disease.” And, “We’ll obviously need to do a full assessment and complete workup before we can venture a definitive diagnosis or treatment plan.” You expect to hear the sound of your heart splitting, fracturing into shards and falling to the floor of your soul, but your heart stays in place. Surprisingly, with such a terrifying diagnosis rattling deep within the bones of your head, the most disturbing thing—the thing that hurts most—is how your son’s eyes fill with tears and how his chin trembles in a way you haven’t seen since he was twelve years old. When the doctor is done with you, she gently ushers you from the room with her patting hand, the manila folder tucked back under her arm. You make an appointment for more testing and then you do the only thing you can on a hot August day filled with bad news and poorly drawn clocks. You take your son out for ice cream.
When we’re done with ice cream and bad news and we’ve again found our brave and stalwart chins, Bryan drives me home.
“You gonna be okay?” he asks. I assume he’s anxious to get back to work with its ordinariness of contracts and endless verbiage regarding the movement of water through aqueducts or canals, or whatever it is my beautiful son does for a living.
“Of course. I’m f
ine,” I say. “Go do your water lawyer stuff. That’s what you do, right? Are you still a lawyer?”
“Yes, Mom, I’m still a lawyer. But, are you sure? I can stick around if you need me. I could at least make you some tea before I go.”
“No. No. Really, I’m fine.” I wave my arm as if waving one’s arm through the air clears away any lingering words of disease or imperfect and troubled mothers. “Why don’t you and Allison come for dinner tomorrow? We can barbeque something large and lovely on the patio and drink enough wine to forget all about this doctor nonsense.”
“Good grief, Mom. Maybe you’re not well enough for that right now.” Bryan’s eyes threaten to cloud up once more.
“I’m quite well. Now get out of here and leave an old woman to her bonbons and Oprah.”
With his hands on my shoulders, as if holding me that way might somehow keep me from unraveling, Bryan bends to kiss my forehead.
“Love you.” His chin and his eyes barely maintain their decorum.
“Love you more,” I say.
“I’ll call to check on you tonight,” Bryan says.
I wave my arm again, but he’s already gone.
The house is dappled with afternoon light that, in spite of my wishes, rudely pushes its way through the partially open blinds. The news of the day has decided to settle into my lungs, making it hard to breathe through the room’s watery light. I try to catch onto the air as it leaves my mouth. I think of other, earlier days and I fumble my way to my cedar box. I drift through letters and papers and pull out something written across a creamy, thick, white notepaper that I hope will clear my lungs and strengthen my trembling fingers.
My dearest children:
I wish we’d had a Southern porch when you were young. You should have grown up with a porch—the kind that wraps around the front of the house, with a simple railing and unpretentious stairs leading to a sun-dappled lawn. Magic happens on a Southern porch; I wish to heaven you could have grown up with that simple truth. I wish you could have known the weightlessness of a child’s body when it hurls itself from the top step all the way to an explanation of how it got “those awful grass stains” on its knees. I wish you could have heard the music made by fingers pulling the strings of a banjo and I wish you could have sat and fanned your face with folded construction paper on a hot and humid summer night.
One never forgets their porch days, with the sound of fresh vine beans or snap peas crackling in the women’s hands, while the shoes of men tap out the songs of Riley Puckett and Fiddlin’ John Carson. A Southern porch brings the happy chatter of neighbors from up the road; it serves up plates of fried chicken and fresh-baked blackberry pie. It also holds the wild imagination of a girl on a swing, her Ma’s arm curled like a question mark around her shoulders, a book shared between their laps.
Yes, a porch allows for grand laughter and raucous music, as well as countless hours for dithering away a rainy day unfit for anything other than rocking and reading, while the fierceness of clouds pass overhead.
I wish you could have sat on the porch with your MeeMaw as she rocked in her chair, holding a thin book to her breasts, swaying back and forth, as if holding that book and swaying would give her eyes something to think about other than their gathering blindness.
I wish you could have known her audacity.
I’ll never forget one day—a rain-promised summer day when the humidity hung over our shoulders like sacks of damp laundry and great thunderclouds filled our lungs with moisture and effort. Your MeeMaw insisted I sit with her on the porch to fan our faces and read her beloved Milton. Specifically, she wanted to hear his poem On His Blindness.
She sat plucking snap peas from a bowl, pinching off the stem end and pulling away each pod’s tough membrane with one swift movement. Ma’s cat (which she naturally named John Milton) lolled at her feet. I sat on the swing, a glass of lemonade sweating onto the floor at my feet, wishing for something, anything, other than John Milton’s old duddy poetry.
I remember your MeeMaw asking me to repeat the last line of the poem. “Read that last line again,” she said, her voice thick with clouds and coming rain.
“The last line?”
“Yes. Say the last line for me.”
“They also serve who only stand and wait.”
“Read it again,” Ma said.
“Again?”
“Yes. Yes, Lillie Claire. Read it again.” Tears began to form in her eyes.
“They also serve who only stand and wait.”
Suddenly, she jumped upright from her chair, flinging the bowl of peas across the porch, causing John Milton the Cat to run off, squalling in displeasure. Her arms flailed in front of her, her blind eyes sprung wide open as if something bright and wild had exploded deep within them.
“I’m standin’ and waitin’,” she cried. “Oh, dear sweet baby Lord Jesus, I’m standin’ and waitin’!”
Your dear MeeMaw pleaded for healing and redemption, the strength of her voice informing heaven that she would not accept her fate with a simple, shrugging sigh. Her moment of truth was dressed in the last line of a Milton sonnet and she cried to God to fix her. She smacked at her eyes with still-young hands wilted from years of scrubbing floors and making pies.
“Jesus, come put your healing mud on these eyes and make them see again,” she cried out. “I’m standin’ and waitin’ for you. Can’t you see me, Jesus? Here I am. I’m right here! Standin’ and waitin’. Standin’ and wait—”
Oh, I can’t go on. I only know that what happens on a Southern woman’s porch is sometimes magical and sometimes horrid. But whatever occurs, it must be dealt with sensitively, courteously—and always with a fluttering fan in one’s hand. Please try to remember that one thing if you should ever have a porch where you can sit, sipping lemonade, while allowing your gaze to wander over poetry that will scare the living daylights from your soul.
If you ever have a porch, do make sure you hold a proper fan.
Be brave,
Love, Mother
P. S. I’m still selecting words for my sonnet for you. It’s difficult, but thanks to the heavenly stars, you love me in spite of my recent shortcomings.
I fold the letter and put it back in the box. I had hoped to find a different piece, a thing of cedar-scented comfort rather than a reminder of heat-sodden lungs and blind eyes and the hell of John Milton. I consider pulling a different letter, something that might make me laugh, but instead close the box and find what contentment there is in the simple mystery of chance.
Somewhere in the world it must be time for a glass of wine.
I place the box back on the shelf and stand in the dim closet, not really anxious to leave the dear space that wraps around me like Ma’s arms.
I place my fingers over my eyelids and feel each round hardness beneath. I press sharply into them until I see star-pointed sparkles of light.
With my fingers pressed tightly to my eyes, I pray that what I see—sparkles of bright and dark together—will be etched into the slate rock of my mind and that I will not forget this moment.
My eyes are good.
What they see is good too. I spread a prayer across the walls of the closet. God, if you’re out there somewhere, you probably know that something is taking my mind. But still—please—let me remember this one small thing. Help me to always remember the generosity of good eyes. Oh, and a Southern porch. Please don’t forget the Southern porch, because I probably will.
I leave the closet and go to the kitchen, where I open a bottle of Cabernet that grips my palate with thankfulness that I still remember how to work a corkscrew.
Chapter Seven
Now here I am, my mind crisp and crackling, words springing easily to my lips. I am invincible today.
Yes. The day is brilliant and the joy of it washes over me like a warm summer rain. I feel as if I’ve circled back from the dark side of the moon and now I fiddle with the bright side of everything.
This is a moment of good.
Allison and I are sprawled across my bed like teenagers at a sleepover. Her hair smells of fruit and flowers and I swoon beneath its scent. I’m mesmerized by the simplicity of her deep green eyes.
“Bryan tells me you’ve come down with some sort of disease,” she says. “But maybe you just need a nice vacation. So, listen to this. I’ve decided to forget fishing in Canada and now I’m thinking of a couple of weeks lolling on some beach in Maui. How does that strike you? Grass skirts, little umbrellas in some tall, rummy-yummy cocktail. Bare-chested men.”
“Oh, well… I—”
There it is—the bad moment! Suddenly, thoughts fidget in my mind. Doors slam in my face—one by one—shutting out content, meaning and distinction, closing off the soft nooks and crannies of all my delicious words. All that remains are the hard and ragged edges of a dark and empty mind. Entire syllables, usage, syntax and pronunciation are suddenly locked away. Unavailable.
I’m aware that I’m a sudden wild-eyed mute; I hate these moments that come and go like storms on a November Sacramento night.
Thankfully, Allison chatters on, unaware of the clattering chaos in my head. Perhaps the angels that live in my words have flown to some other woman’s mouth. I know what Allison is saying, but for the life of me, I can’t seem to initiate a sentence of my own. I can only manage puny responsive sounds. Simple yeses, noes. Little sighs and shrugs. Words that should accompany these gestures are simply missing.
I’m swimming through an expanse of mud.
Finally, I stumble across a few small snippets of misdirected thoughts lying on the floor of my brain. This gives me hope. I manage to string together a small daisy chain of words.
All the Dancing Birds Page 5