Her Beautiful Brain Page 5

  But her friends didn’t know what it was like to call her busy daughter, who was doing some kind of freelancing but she could never remember what, and her daughter might be at home but she might not. They didn’t know what it was like to have to say, “I lost the car. Again.” Or “I’m locked out. Again.” They didn’t know what it was like to feel ashamed around her own children.

  And, though she didn’t want to imagine it, she did know, with some part of the brain she still had, she did know that it was going to get worse. And then keep on getting worse. Tonight there will be no morning star. At least her friends who had, say, cancer could let their imaginations take them to a place where they might be cured.

  Instead of to a single room with a single bed, where she has to sit and listen while her daughter tells her what a bad, bad thing she’s done. A thing she can’t even remember doing. And now there would be consequences? What consequences?

  “Why is there something instead of nothing?” The New York Times asked one day in an editorial. Why a universe, instead of oblivion? Why life? The Times wrote that physicists have concluded that “it all comes down to a very slight bias, an asymmetry, in the behavior of a subatomic particle, the neutral B-meson. As it oscillates between its matter and antimatter states, it shows a slight predilection for matter.”

  A very slight bias. An asymmetry, oscillating towards matter. As the stardust that was my mother met the stardust that is my father, they edged toward creating something instead of nothing. A marriage. A family. A whole chain of somethings: My sisters and brothers and me. Our relationships. Our children. Lives and lives and lives.

  And like every human before me, I wonder: what if there had been nothing instead of the something that became us? The flawed, messy, loving something that was us. The something whose beating heart was Mom.

  I was very young when I started wondering too much. Sometimes my brain just floated away from the joys of matter—toes in sand, tongue on soft-serve ice cream—to the gaping void of antimatter. It terrified me. When I was in kindergarten, there were days when my head hurt from thinking. There were times when I strained so hard when I was thinking that I started crying. It happened one September night when the setting sun blazed up in the kitchen window as orange as a campfire and everything inside, including me, including Mom, was suddenly as dark as shadow puppets. She and I were putting dishes in the dishwasher—I was lining up the milk glasses, Flintstone glasses from the gas station—and the sun shot an orange beam right through them, right through Fred and Wilma and Pebbles and I burst into tears and said, “Oh, Mommy, I don’t ever want to die!” and she said, “Oh, Annie,” and wrapped me in a big hug and I wanted her to say more but at least she gave my hurting head a place to rest for a few minutes. A place to close my eyes until the orange went away.

  This is how I remember Mom from the earliest years of my life: always, firmly, pulling me back from darkness, back to the lovely, light-filled asymmetry of the day. Back to putting the glasses in the dishwasher or stretching with Jack LaLanne or watching her iron Dad’s shirts, the hot, heavenly starch scent filling the house. Mom’s bias towards something versus nothing was inviolable. In her world, everything was good and nothing was perfect, and she liked to make a point of that: of the joy that comes with accepting asymmetry, unpredictability, spills, bruises. She thought perfectionist housekeeping was sad and silly. She refused to read women’s magazines. Her reading time was too precious and she still had a lot of classics to get through. Naptime was a sacred island of quiet: if you had graduated from actually napping, you sat quietly with your own book while Mom read hers.

  From the chaos of a failed first marriage and the surprise of a sudden second marriage, she created a something that she encouraged us to feel was different than other families’ somethings: we were a bit of a patch job, but weren’t we lucky to be who we were?

  I don’t think she planned to be Different with a capital “D.” I think she embraced it as the best strategy under the circumstances: being divorced in the mid-1950s marked her, as did moving into Laurelhurst, my childhood neighborhood, where most moms had been sorority girls at the University of Washington and many had even been society girls, actual debutantes—certainly not miners’ daughters from oddball places like Butte, Montana. They set their hair on huge rollers; they wore girdles and skirts and pink lipstick. Mom got a pixie cut and wore black slacks. Our little brick house was on the modest, downhill side of Laurelhurst Playfield. It resembled the seven dwarves’ cottage and was just as crowded. It was by far the most luxurious place my mother had ever lived.

  And yet she exuded confidence. Not hubristically or loudly, but matter-of-factly. As if there was simply no reason not to.

  We woke up in the morning knowing that she would be in the kitchen, pouring juice into six plastic glasses, ready for each one of us with a hug and a smile: not an inane, fake, Stepford-smile, but a real one, the kind that says, Call me nuts but I love being your mom. And yours and yours and yours. I love all six of you, I will never play favorites and you will never lack for breakfast, lunch, dinner, hugs and kisses.

  Whatever worries she had about stretching the family budget she carried lightly, at least in front of us. Whatever other mysterious grownup stresses she felt—about cars or plumbing or the constant clashes between Dad and my big brother Johnny—she treated as annoyances that had to be dealt with: pesky, minor, not at all what really mattered.

  What really mattered was making sure the youngest of us got a song and a story at bedtime. Weekly trips to the library. After-school graham crackers and milk. Clean piles of laundry, to be folded not by her but by us according to our weekly “jobs” schedule (never chores, she disliked the word chores).

  And what mattered most of all was sitting down to dinner together. If you’d pressed me, at ten, I would have said that dinner at our house is noisy and happy and yeah, we bicker but we also have these indescribably silly moments and surprising moments and I don’t know why but it’s not like that at a lot of my friends’ houses. I don’t know why, but we’re different.

  It certainly had nothing to do with the food. Mom’s meals were anything but astonishing. The mania for Julia Child passed her right by. She had six children and a hungry young husband and her repertoire was all about filling us up with foods from each of the four groups. She came up with combos she liked and she stuck to them: chicken went with biscuits and frozen peas, hamburgers with canned peaches and cottage cheese.

  Dinnertime was chaotic—there were battles over the last biscuit; there were dramas over hated vegetables—and there was always talk, talk, talk. Family news, school news, news of the day—we skated through it quickly, colloquially, the dense layers deftly covered in a constantly evolving family shorthand. There was the week spent debating what to name Caroline, who had arrived a few weeks early and who we were calling “Baby” until we made up our minds. There was Johnny telling us about the colleges he wanted to go to: I remember thinking, There’s a college named Harvey Mudd? There was teenaged Kristie explaining her clothing chart, which made it possible for her never to repeat the same outfit in any three-week period. There was Dad announcing that Lisa and I were now old enough to ski and would be coming along on the next trip. And, always, there was Mom, the calm conductor, moving us along when one topic got too heated, paying attention to who was and was not eating their broccoli, decreeing who would get the last drumstick.

  I know that she marveled at this something she and Dad had created. That she took pride in not allowing herself to pine for what other somethings—college, career—she may have given up. It’s easy, now, to look back and say, Aha! Surely it could not have been good for her brain to ban all pining, to repress so much!

  But Mom was like that subatomic particle, always oscillating towards matter. Towards what was: her children, her husband, the laundry, what to cook for dinner. To oscillate the other way, to ever favor nothing over her own something, was unthinkable.

  As unthinkable as a di
sease whose modus operandi is just that: to smother all the somethings that fill our brains, that make us who we are. To smother them right back to nothing. Matter to antimatter. Asymmetry to oblivion.

  I feel pretty, oh so pretty, that the city should give me its key … I think I was ten when I finally got to see West Side Story on the screen. It is one of the movies that made me want to make movies, although I did not know that the first time I saw it. I had listened to the record all my life, knew all the words to all the songs, loved to stand at the top of the laundry chute and listen to Mom sing them, her voice ringing in the concrete basement: See the pretty girl in that mirror, there!

  I know I saw it before I was eleven because eleven was the year I stopped being a little kid: my parents began their long and ugly break up, Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy were killed, my older brother Johnny was starting to yell a lot at the dinner table about the Vietnam War and the draft and what he would do if he drew a low number. But the night I saw West Side Story was before all of that. I was still just a girl who was thrilled to be going to the movies with my mom and big sister, especially, finally, to see West Side Story, the movie I knew Mom loved more than any other.

  I was electrified by the opening aerial sweep into New York, by the brilliant purples and reds of the dance in the gym, by Tony singing “Something’s Coming.” And then—I was undone, devastated, overwhelmed by his death. I hated death because I couldn’t grasp it, I couldn’t understand it, it made no sense, especially when two people were in love the way Tony and Maria were in love—surely theirs was the kind of love that would triumph over death, not be destroyed by it. Watching my mom and big sister cry and cry, as Maria picked up the gun and shouted to the Jets and the Sharks gathered around her, gangsters who were really just kids, just pencil-legged teens like Johnny—“Did you leave a bullet for me, Chino?”—I couldn’t believe anything could ever be so sad. I almost wished I hadn’t seen it. But this was long before VCRs. You didn’t take your kids to the movies and then leave before the tragic part.

  I remember feeling so old. Not in a proud way, like I’m really growing up now—more like, I’m ten but I feel like I’m a hundred. Now I know, I thought, now I know what getting old is: It’s knowing stuff you wish you didn’t know. It’s knowing that love is not just happy; it’s horrible. It’s knowing what tragedy is.

  The grinding tragedy of Alzheimer’s is that the horrible part of the movie can last a dozen years, or more. And you can’t turn it off. Not in the physical sense: there is no Death with Dignity option for people with Alzheimer’s, because they can’t fully participate in such a decision, even if you live in a place where it might be actually legal. And of course there’s no clear line—whoa, here comes the awful part, eject that tape. Because how do you measure quality of life? Does a single moment—tasting chocolate, for example, long after you remember the word “chocolate,” long after you could independently get a square of it into your own mouth—does that moment of pleasure on your tongue mean you can still experience “quality of life”? Does responding to touch, warm skin on warm skin, mean you’re remembering love?

  What I loved about West Side Story and what I grew to love about making documentaries is that good movies use all the tools of all the arts: Music, color, line, composition. Dance and movement. Words, sung and spoken. When we were making Quick Brown Fox, our film about Mom and Alzheimer’s, we found some very old strips of Super-8 that my grandfather had shot. One was from Mom’s tenth birthday in 1941. She smiles and then leans in and blows out the candles on her cake. Other reels were dated from when Mom was in her early twenties and my older brother and sister were babies. Rus put this film in a little hand-crank viewer. He surrounded the viewer with photos, set up his tripod, and filmed this tableau while he cranked the viewer. Then he used some music from an old music box that played a sort of mournful organ tune, and he edited the segment to some narration that I wrote:

  I woke up one recent morning thinking about Mom and Butte and her life and her Alzheimer’s disease and how our lives really are like our own personal movies that we play, rewind, edit, watch without ceasing. But life is not quite the right word. Consciousness, maybe, or soul or self—our sense of who we are—that’s the movie. Which means our neurons are the actual film stock, the raw material on which the movie that is each one of us is recorded in our brain. So what happens when the film is damaged? Or the projector starts gobbling it up? What happens if that was the one and only print?

  Endless night, is that what happens?

  I still don’t understand death. I do pray; I do believe, most days, that there’s a God; and I long to believe that we don’t all just end in endless night. That there is more to who we are than our bodies or our brains.

  In the end, Mom’s brain was as useless as an old sponge. But I can’t bear to think that her soul, her self, had already been thrown away.

  The Tennis Club

  There are women who just can’t help the fact that they make men weak in the knees. There are women who have this power whether or not they have a bad head cold or a large pimple on their nose or a baby spit-up stain on their shoulder. I am not one of those women. When I was younger, this truth felt unfair, a shameful disability, a life-altering sorrow. But over the decades, I’ve learned, albeit reluctantly, the upside of invisibility, of blending in, of being Doris Day instead of Marilyn Monroe, middle-sized, of middle coloring, and for many years now, middle-aged. If a man does listen to me, I know it’s because he’s actually interested in what I’m saying. If a man does find me beautiful, I know it’s a personal, real feeling about the real me, and not a sort of objectified Barbie doll kind of appreciation. And I love feeling beautiful, oh I love it, the way a woman who is beautiful every minute of every day probably can’t even imagine. Once, years ago, I listened to a former model describe how hard it was to again and again be appreciated only ornamentally, and at the time, I thought I felt no sympathy at all—yet here I am, years later, still remembering that conversation, still marveling at what a different sort of burden that would be.

  And of course I know it’s not about looks, not completely. It’s that whole mysterious business of confidence, the kind that is supposed to grow as you grow, as it has been so filmily described in hundreds of seventh grade “Now You’re a Woman” filmstrips. My confidence just didn’t kick in at all until I was about twenty and, like a malnourished infant, it never really grew properly.

  Which is maybe not an entirely accurate way to describe what happened, because as a baby and as a little girl, I was well-nourished, confidence-wise, by that first and most important romantic figure in a girl’s life: Dad. He swooped me up and twirled me around; he dabbed shaving cream on my nose and sang a silly song about Annabelle Brown. He loved my funny, deep voice. My malapropisms became part of his vocabulary: Mazagine. Yew Nork. Unicle Brunce instead of Uncle Bruce. He spent a whole summer standing in a pool, his fair skin frying, moving further and further from the edge, coaxing me until I could swim all the way across.

  It was sometime between that summer and the seventh-grade filmstrip that I started to starve. Grownups were so bad at divorce back then. No one knew what to say or do and so they counseled each other to say little, especially to the children. I get that now. I no longer blame my dad for leaving in exactly the same year that I got a mouthful of braces, a stretchy training bra that came in a box and a terribly wrong pair of glasses, pointy when everyone else had just switched to ovals or hexagons. I no longer blame him for teaching me, without really meaning to, that I was now invisible. For not even trying to explain to his children that we shouldn’t listen to what people said; he wasn’t really trading Mom in for a woman who was a few years younger and played better tennis, much as it might look that way. I was a terrible tennis player. I was now the oldest of his three daughters, gone from funny and cute to mute and awkward in what felt like a few weeks. Where did that leave me?

  A more confident girl, a more beautiful girl, might have put u
p a fight. Waged a campaign to stay visible. But—encumbered now with the glasses and the braces—I was sure I didn’t stand a chance. My dad had made it clear what he wanted. He had cast his vote for the Tennis Club world, a world of suntanned women in white tennis dresses, a world of jewel-toned lipstick and jangling bracelets and jingling ice cubes in glasses full of gold: iced tea at three, Chablis at six, bourbon at seven. It was a pretty world. Up until the divorce, I enjoyed visiting it. There was a time when it had even seemed welcoming, reassuring in its routine: the long summer days that started with swim team in the morning and sometimes included the tension of a dreaded tennis lesson but then at last unspooled into the lazy afternoon salvation of the lake and the beach and soft-serve ice cream cones.

  It was the summer of 1969 when my mother gave up chauffeuring us across town to the Tennis Club. She was a student now. No more packing the six of us and our hand-me-down swim team suits and our stained tennis shorts and our sorry wooden tennis rackets into the station wagon. Now, she waved goodbye in the morning and bicycled up the hill to the University of Washington campus. Kristie and Johnny were teenagers with summer jobs. That left twelve-year-old me in charge: of Lisa, nearly ten; James, almost six; and Caroline, who had just turned four. Most mornings, I let them watch cartoons in their pajamas, eating Cap’n Crunch out of the box, and then tried to make up for it by playing school or pioneers or walking everyone down the hill to the drugstore for candy or up the hill to the swing set in the park.

  In the evenings, I read and re-read Cheaper by the Dozen and Mr. Popper’s Penguins and The Family Nobody Wanted, a book about a mom and a dad who loved being parents so much that they just kept adopting more children. I rode my bike as far as I dared and came home as late as I dared. I wrote poems in secret steno notebooks.

  A year ago, I went on a search mission through the boxes in our basement and found those notebooks. I put them in a bin and brought them up two flights of stairs and set them on a shelf near my desk. I peeked inside and caught a few words—candles flickering, cathedral woods, a daisy growing in a sidewalk crack—but I couldn’t quite allow myself to keep reading. Later, I thought.