Her Beautiful Brain Page 10

  I missed the Mom I thought I was going to get so much of during this time in our lives, hanging out with her at her Madrona house.

  Instead I was getting mud pies, nothing green, snow days in June, the swans who died in the Berkeley Pit and 5.2 miles, over and over again.

  And when things started to get scarier—with the falls down the stairs and the lockouts and the burners left on and the word: Alzheimer’s—then I felt so guilty for missing her. For wanting her to be what she could no longer be.

  One Saturday in April 1999, not long after her sixty-eighth birthday, we moved Mom from the Madrona house to an assisted living apartment at the Lakeview retirement community. It was a balletic day: my brothers-in-law Pat and Marty jeté-ing up and down the lake in their pickup trucks; the rest of us loading them up in Madrona, unloading them at the Lakeview, trying not to bump into each other; Mom enjoying her directorial role as we arranged and re-arranged her new home.

  I know she felt lucky to have so many children to help with the move. But how did it feel after we’d all gone, to sit there that first evening on her beloved striped couch, now squeezed into a shoebox of a living room?

  She didn’t have a view of the lake after all: she had a view of the front parking lot. A lakeside apartment would open up soon, we were assured, and Mom would get it. But meanwhile, she had a view of cars, though none of them were hers, because she’d turned in her license. And she had a view of the front door, where people her age came and went, visiting their ninety-year-old parents.

  Maybe it felt a little like our house after Dad left: calmer, but dull and lonely. After he moved out, she had told me that sure, it was nice to have some peace, but she still felt like someone had cut off her arm. I was the kind of preteen girl who wouldn’t watch bloody movies and the vividness of that image stayed with me forever.

  This time, it was she who had been amputated: From her life as she had known it. From the home that had been hers for sixteen years, the longest she ever lived anywhere.

  I walked past the Madrona house a few days ago. I don’t think Mom would like the new olive green paint job with the black trim. But the cherry tree she planted on the steep slope below has grown up. It was putting on quite a blossomy show. Across the street, an old rhododendron was blooming early, its flowers the very palest, pearliest shade of pink, as if it wanted to be a cherry tree too, even if it meant having nothing left at all by May.

  The air was unusually dry, warm for March, more Rocky Mountains than wet Seattle. You could almost imagine the smell of Ponderosa pines. The clarity of that dry, piney scent.

  On that first Montana trip when I was twelve, Mom took me and ten-year-old Lisa horseback riding one afternoon at an old stable outside of Butte. It was the same stable where Mom and her friends used to ride after school: twenty-five cents an hour for a mountain-air break from the smokestacks and sooty streets of Butte.

  Lisa and I had been on a horse maybe twice in our lives. We were still fumbling and panicking and trying to get our reins and stirrups organized when Mom suddenly turned her horse and took off up the trail at a brisk trot.

  “Back in a few minutes,” she called over her shoulder. “You’ll be fine!”

  We were stunned: first, that our mother actually knew how to do this; second, that she was leaving us behind.

  By the time she came back, we still had not made it out of the corral. But we could see that she had been—somewhere. That she had taken a break from us. Gone somewhere that her mind needed and wanted to go in that newly single summer of her life.

  Her face looked different, like she knew what longing was, what aching was—the same kind of longing and aching that I was just beginning to know, at twelve. I understood, for the first time, that her own mind might sometimes be as full to bursting as my own, full of her own daydreams and desires and hopes for the future—but on that afternoon, lucky her, she had been able to relieve the pressure with a ride up the trail under a pine-dry Montana sky.

  At the Lakeview, she was trapped. Madrona had been such a great neighborhood for walking. Now, the only trail she could see from her window was a crosswalk that led from her side of Rainier Avenue to a cluster of businesses on the other. One was a convenience store that bore the name, “Why? Grocery.”

  In those early months in her new home, Mom made many trips to the “Why?” There was nowhere else to go. You’d think there might have been a pleasant path down to the lake, but there wasn’t: the Lakeview had a lake view, but no lake shore.

  Mom began to talk about Montana even more often. She yearned to make one more trip. But it would have been up to one of us to make that happen, and somehow the time just galloped away.

  I look back and I marvel at how I slackened the reins and just wantonly, recklessly allowed the time to gallop. Never slowing down enough to ask the right questions:

  Why no lake path at the Lakeview?

  Why couldn’t I carve out a week, one tiny week of my life, and take Mom to see Butte again?

  And why the “Why? Grocery”?

  The Troubles

  There’s a snapshot I keep in my mind, a moment of being surprised by one of those sudden downpours of pure joy: I am walking, almost running with eagerness, towards the Boiserie Café on the University of Washington campus on an urgently bright summer day and I see my mom, holding my three-month-old son, smiling and waving at me. Both of them are smiling; Nick is still too young to properly wave but as soon as he sees me he does the baby version, wildly wiggling his arms and legs and bottom. Mom, too, in my snapshot-memory, seems to be smiling and waving with her whole self, spilling her smile, her love, all over the outdoor tables full of languorous summer students. And then Mom and I are laughing at Nick’s crazy wiggle as she hands him to me and we sit down at a table under a chestnut tree where I can nurse and we can drink iced mochas and eat a couple of the Boiserie’s amazing raspberry mazurka bars. I was bottomlessly hungry that summer.

  It was July of 1992 and Mom had just retired from teaching. She was taking an oil painting class on campus; I was taking African Art History because there was a chance that Rus and I might be doing a documentary on the Seattle Art Museum’s unusual African collection. Two days a week, our classes lined up so that Mom could watch Nick during mine and then I could take over in time for her to head to the painting studio.

  We were both drunk with love for the same things that summer: for baby Nick, mainly, but also for art and for the sudden bestowing of time—her retirement, my maternity leave—and for summer itself, Seattle’s benign, breezy, green season of days that are more like perfect spring days in any other city.

  Eighteen years later, that portrait of smiling Mom and smiling Nick now seems the embodiment of all innocence: both of them so full of everyday, small-“j” joy; neither of them knowing that Nick would be the last baby to be trusted, without hesitation, to her care and love.

  Of course, you’re thinking. Alzheimer’s disease. Yes. It breaks my heart to see Mom in my mind, then, and to know what the next five years, ten years, fourteen years in all would be like for her.

  But there was another heartbreak waiting, and this one was mine.

  In the gallows-humor retelling of this story, I sometimes start right off by laying the blame on Tonya Harding. Maybe you’ve forgotten Tonya: she was the bad-girl ice skater from the wrong side of the tracks—charm-challenged Clackamas County, Oregon, just upriver from charming Portland—whose boyfriend kneecapped her good-girl rival, Nancy Kerrigan. Tonya entered my life, our lives, when Rus got a call from CBS to go to Portland and cover her court hearing.

  “You’ll be home tonight,” the L.A. bureau chief said.

  Thirty-five days later, thirty-five straight days in union talk, Rus had made more than $30,000 and Nick, Claire, and I had made two weekend visits to Portland on the CBS dime because the bureau chief couldn’t let Rus leave in case Tonya did one more nutty thing. Connie Chung had flown out to Portland and kissed Rus and his sound man Pat after her interview w
ith Tonya for 48 Hours. I had bought a stack of short story collections from Powell’s bookstore because I was now taking an evening series of creative writing classes. The story I was working on was about a young mom who runs away from home. And Rus, during his many days of standing around in courtroom hallways, had come up with an idea of what to do with the Tonya Harding windfall.

  “I’m going to make a movie,” he said to me over Thai crab cakes in our Portland hotel suite. “A short feature. I have a script I’ve been working on. And I can use the Tonya money to hire a real crew and shoot in sixteen-millimeter.”

  My own bourgeois mind had already imagined that $30,000 as a down payment on a house in my mom’s neighborhood. Or if not that, then maybe we could remodel our concrete tomb of a basement. But I was in a new marital position: financially powerless. I made a few thousand dollars a year doing freelance PR, mostly for art museums. Rus had just made $30,000 in a little over a month. And even though it was supposed to be our money—his travel for CBS made possible by my willingness to stay home—we both knew it wasn’t.

  Besides, his CBS work made it possible for me to take writing classes and pursue my creative dream. What right did I have to object to Rus pursuing his? For a decade, he had been shooting news and dreaming of making a real movie.

  And so Tonya Harding financed his film, as he later wrote in a column for a movie magazine. And in so doing, Tonya launched a period of our marriage we now refer to as The Troubles, in the endless Northern Irish civil-conflict sense of the phrase.

  Looking back, I could cast myself as a sort of innocent Nancy Kerrigan: playing by the rules, playing my role, never guessing that I was about to be smashed in the knee by a real-life Tonya I’ll call … Tami.

  Tami—in a truly Tonya-like detail of this story—was married to the guy who cut and foiled my hair. I’ll call him Josh. When Josh heard that Rus was making a movie and that the main character was a desperate single mother who had turned to armed robbery, he urged Tami to audition. Josh and Tami were about to split up—they still loved each other, Josh said, but since the kids had come along they fought all the time and just couldn’t seem to live together—and he thought this would be a great morale-booster for her. She’d been really supportive of his new band and he wanted to be equally supportive of her creative dream, which was acting.

  Rus auditioned at least a dozen women for the role in what he was now calling Spree. Tami, with her gritty voice and velvet-brown curls, was the standout.

  If you can see where this story is going, you’re way ahead of where I was, vision-wise, at the time. It was now the spring of 1994 and my story about a mom who runs away had grown into a messy novel whose main character was a truck stop whore. My plan was to take a road trip to scout some of the locations in my book after Rus was done shooting Spree. The documentary about African art had long since been abandoned (lots of people thought it was a good idea but no one wanted to fund it), as had much of my low-paying freelance work. We were focused on Spree, on Nick and Claire, on my writing, and on making sure Rus did just enough network news shoots to pay the bills.

  It still amazes me, sometimes, to think of all the changes we had not simply checked off the list the way young couples do, but run towards, arms open, in our first seven years together. We had started off by quitting our TV news jobs—good jobs in the country’s number-twelve market at a time when TV news still had a few shreds of dignity, a little of the old Ed Murrow tradition in the air—to travel around the world for ten months. To us, quitting when we did made all the sense in the world, or at least it made the kind of sense things make when you’re in love and the love itself feels so recklessly new, so fresh, that you want all of life to feel that way.

  We got married in Scotland and lingered for three months in Europe, staying in pensions with sagging beds and concrete floors so that we could afford to fatten up on tapas and wine and pasta before we started really ripping through our flip-books of Air India tickets: $1500 per person to fly all the way around the world.

  We consumed whole new countries eagerly, like kindergartners running out onto new playgrounds: India, Nepal, Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, Australia. We stopped to rest in oases like Goa, Koh Samui, and Java, where we could stay cheaply for a few weeks, read and write travel stories, a half dozen of which were published by the Seattle Times, including an account of our ragtag wedding in Scotland that was printed on Valentine’s Day.

  In that pre-email era, it was Mom who sent our story clippings and other forwarded mail to American Express offices around the world. She also managed our bank account. She did these chores for Caroline, too, during Caroline’s Peace Corps stint and post–Peace Corps travel. She did it all while teaching full time. And as she began to wonder what was going on with her brain.

  We came home flat broke but got snapped up right away for election-season gigs at our old station. Then—about five minutes after deciding to ditch birth control—I was pregnant. And I was offered a completely different kind of job, doing public relations for the Seattle Art Museum. And we took out a loan to buy an expensive camera so Rus could freelance for the networks.

  Three years later, with a second baby on the way, I left the museum job because my salary would have barely covered daycare for two and it just didn’t make sense. So I was doing freelance work, both PR and TV, as much as I could manage with my patched-together childcare combo: Rus when he was available, Mom a few days a week with Nick, and preschool for Claire.

  In five years, I’d gone from the frenetic hothouse of a city newsroom to the solitude of being at home with a baby and a toddler. And home was no longer an apartment a mile up Queen Anne Hill from the Space Needle: it was a house in Seward Park, a quiet lakeside neighborhood where there were many old-growth trees and, in the mid-1990s, even fewer cafés or shops than the few we have now. When Rus was in town, life was, mostly, what I had always hoped our life together would be: time to work, time with our children, time with each other, in proportions that yinned and yanged all over the place but usually felt right. When he was out of town, the time to work shrank and the time with Nick and Claire grew, and it was still mostly sweet, though I missed sharing it with Rus. And sometimes of course it wasn’t sweet at all; it was exasperating, like life with toddlers just is, and at those times I felt a little crazy, like new mothers just do, especially a new mom like me who happened not to have very many other new-mom friends and whose husband happened to travel a lot on short notice, or no notice. And whose mother was starting to do things like lose her car or forget everything you just told her (“Rus is gone for how many days?”).

  The surprise gift in all of this was that the creative writer in me—the writer of stories who had never quite figured out how to co-exist with the TV journalist—saw her opening and grabbed it. There was something about all the physical work and play of solo motherhood that unlatched my creative mind. When you’re building a tower of blocks with a one-year-old and knocking it down, over and over again, your mind can go places. You can grab a crayon and make a few notes. When he’s sleeping, you can get down a page on the computer.

  It’s hard to describe how important this felt to me. It was a little like getting your appetite back after seasickness or the flu: that joy of feeling a good, sharp hunger pang and knowing you’re going to eat again and it’s going to taste good. I had been a prolific writer as a little girl. I kept writing as a teenager and college student, even though my confidence was often shaky. I won the fiction prize at Wellesley. Then in my twenties, I just sort of stopped. I blamed work. I blamed my first husband’s depression and his cynicism about all things literary after getting turned down by the English Lit PhD program on which he’d staked his future. I also beat up on myself a lot, imagining alternate lives in which I had not married Dick and had not become a TV news writer but instead had been gutsy enough to go live in a garret, support myself waitressing, and become a real writer, producing stories and novels instead of the five-o’clock report.

&nbs
p; But now, here I was spending hours per day pushing a stroller, mixing playdough, finger painting, sidewalk-chalking, reading picture books, turning dishtowels into capes and scarves into princess costumes—and sure, part of me missed ripping news stories off the AP teletype but another part of my brain was stirring and stretching and coming out of hibernation.

  I needed some guidance and camaraderie, so I started taking evening writing classes at the UW Extension. By the time Rus was getting ready to shoot Spree, I was in my third quarter with Rebecca Brown, who was very good at being simultaneously tough and encouraging. My story about the mom who ran away wouldn’t stop growing, though it kept changing protagonists: first it was focused on Runaway Mom (who was not unlike me in 1994: college-educated, underemployed, two young kids), then on a thirteen-year-old girl that Runaway Mom picked up hitchhiking (a girl who just happened to be a lot like me at thirteen: shy, dreamy, a bookworm). Then my focus shifted to that girl’s mother, who had become a truck stop whore after running away from home at sixteen (back in the seventies when I was sixteen) and had since cleaned up her act and married a truck driver. Rus and I had personally known or known of a few people whose lives had provided some inspiration for my characters, but mostly I had no idea, from one day to the next, where it was all coming from.