Her Beautiful Brain Page 9

  Ten years before the June day in 1997 when Dr. Forsythe gave her the deliberately not quite definitive diagnosis—because it never is, with Alzheimer’s disease, not until after death—she had started to talk about those moments in front of the classroom. For ten years—a decade that included her retirement, three of her children’s weddings, the births of eight of her fourteen grandkids—she had been aware that her brain was slipping in a way that she guessed, correctly, was much more serious than the little moments her friends were starting to report. Yet until that summer afternoon in 1997, she could still hope that it was something chronic, something annoying, something to be lived with, that these memory lapses were her concession to aging, like the tennis elbow or arthritis that plagued some of her peers.

  I can picture her after the appointment, after Kristie and I have dropped her off. She’s alone again, walking into her quiet, modern house with its walls of east-facing windows, hanging her jacket and silk scarf in the hall closet and going into the kitchen for … tea? Or wine?

  She’s disappointed that Kristie and I can’t stop in, that we have kids to pick up and work to get back to. Or maybe she’s glad to be alone.

  She reaches for a glass and opens the fridge and uncorks the white wine and says to herself, Oh, why not.

  She sits down at the kitchen table and takes that first cold sip and looks out at the lake where, far below, a cluster of tiny sailboats is careening around in a strong wind.

  She suddenly feels—expendable.

  Expendable, she says to herself. That’s a word Dr. Forsythe would like to hear me use. “See, Arlene? With a vocabulary like that, you’re way ahead in this battle!”

  Was she plucky like that, when she was by herself? That’s how she was with us. If we had been there, she would have joked about how it was too bad she preferred white wine, since red was supposed to be good for your brain. She would have pointed out the boats, and reached for her camera to take a picture of them.

  It’s hard to imagine her thinking of suicide. She wasn’t the type. She prided herself on her sisu, the secret toughness possessed only by the Finnish people. Strength. Honesty. Determination.

  But, in that moment, did the thought cross her mind?

  The sailboats are bumping into each other, a beginner’s class. Mt. Rainier is in the clouds one minute, dramatically visible the next. Maybe the sailors are distracted by the mountain.

  How would she have done it? Pills?

  No. Because she couldn’t control who would discover her, and what if it was me and Claire and Nick were with me? What if it was Caroline or James or Lisa, whose children were even younger than mine?

  That cold wine tastes good. She pours herself another glass. After all, who’s there to see her, to watch her brain wasting away?

  The smartest girl in Butte High School. She used to tell us that, proudly; now she says it to herself wistfully. Her comeuppance at last: Alzheimer’s.

  The phone rings.

  She considers not answering it. But then she thinks, No, I better. I hate to think the kids are going to worry even more now.

  “Hello? Caroline! Hi, sweetie. I’m fine. Oh, that. Well, it’s not the greatest news, is it, but at least now we all know why I’ve been so batty. A group? What sort of a group? Oh honey, you know I’m not a joiner. Oh, I see, it’s more of a class. Well yes, let’s do that then. OK then. Yes, I’m putting it on my calendar now. OK, talk to you soon.”

  She hangs up the phone and reaches for a pen, but the sun is just breaking over the top of one of the clouds and she has to watch it, it’s too beautiful, it’s like a Tiepolo ceiling, and by the time she reaches for her date book she’s forgotten when the class is.

  It’s OK. Caroline will call and remind her. Even though she doesn’t really see why she should take a class and hear all about Alzheimer’s when she’s the one who has it and already knows more about it than she wants to know. But Caroline seems to really want her to do it, so she’ll do it. If it will make her kids feel better, she’ll do these things for them.

  That’s it, really, she thinks. She’s got to show that sisu. For her kids and grandkids.

  But in the meantime, why not just drink a little more wine and take in the mountain and the clouds and the lake for about five more minutes. Five more minutes.

  Those crazy little sailboats. She never really did understand the appeal of trying to make a boat go where you want it to by pulling this rope or that rope and hoping you’ll catch the right breeze at the right moment. Paddling a canoe, rowing a rowboat—that was more her style. Off you go, under your own steam, enjoying the view along the way instead of wrapping yourself up in a big tangle of ropes.

  The Madrona House

  Mom had never lived in a house that didn’t come with all the baggage of a man attached to it.

  But the Madrona house was different. This house was hers. She chose it. She paid for it. Only she lived in it. It was just the right size and you could see the lake and the mountains and it was on a steep hillside so no one walking on the street below could see her, sitting in bed with her cereal and her crossword. And it was in the perfect neighborhood: Madrona, a cluster of old bungalows and brick Tudors and boxy Queen Annes settled like moss on a steep Seattle hill thirty blocks due east of downtown and just above Lake Washington. Tucked here and there were a few modestly modern, sixties-era cliff-hangers built to blend in, not stand out. The house she bought was one of those.

  This home would hold no memories of dying husbands, ex-husbands, her father’s hacking miner’s cough. This house would be hers to paint in buttery colors and to furnish with graceful pieces: a striped couch stretched out in a long, clean arabesque; a highly polished table like a bare, spotlit stage. It would be hers to fill with a whole wall of bookshelves and an easel and an exercise bike downstairs and no bookshelves, no clutter, upstairs. Hers to arrange with no regard for the needs of messy children and careless men. Her front door to open when she wished.

  She was fifty-two years old when she bought the Madrona house. She had been raising children since she was just out of her teens. Ron’s children were heartbroken and angry when she sold their father’s baronial home—but Mom was a schoolteacher, she couldn’t afford to keep it up, and they all lived far from Seattle and showed no signs of coming back any time soon. She gave them what she thought was a fair settlement. She saw her far more humble new house, with its nearly identical view of the mountains and the lake, as an homage to the life she had briefly shared with their father, though they didn’t see it that way. How could they?

  And now I am fifty-three. And in all my adult life—no, in all my whole life—I have lived alone for no more than a few months at a time. There was my junior year in college, when I had a single dorm room; there were the seven or so months I spent in a studio apartment after I left Dick and before Rus moved in with me.

  I could pretend that I have had more control over where I’ve lived than Mom did: I am a working partner, wife, mother; I waited until I was thirty-two to have children. But Dick and I lived together not just because we were young and in love but because we were too poor to live apart. And Rus moved in with me after we got back from Haiti so that we could save money for a long honeymoon.

  So when I think of Mom, at fifty-two, finally giving up on caretaking a house that was never hers, that was a museum of grief for her dead husband and his elegant first wife—finally giving it up for a house that was plain and sunny and all hers—I can well imagine the relief and freedom and joy she must have felt. And when I think of her sixteen years later being told by her uppity children that she had to, had to move out, I can imagine her sorrow and rage.

  She knew that Alzheimer’s disease was eating her memory. She had known it, on some level, since before she went to Haiti. But, she tried to reason with us, with all the reason she still had: wouldn’t leaving this house she loved and had lived alone in for—well, who cares exactly how many years, she would say, but way more than ten—wouldn’t that just m
ake it harder for her? She acknowledged the falls down the stairs—the “little slips” as she called them, even though they left bruises like ugly thunderclouds—the burner left on that turned the copper tea kettle coal black, the garage door left open like a gaping mouth. But she tried to persuade us that these incidents were not dangerous but silly, just bumps in the road of her daily life, just like all of our childhood skinned knees and stepped-on nails and bee stings and broken bones. The stairs, the burner, forgetting the keys—they’re just dumb stuff, she would say, the things that everyone does whether or not they have Alzheimer’s. No more dangerous than crossing the street.

  And, she might add, what about holidays? Where would we gather on Christmas Day, Thanksgiving, Easter, if there were no Madrona house?

  We have homes now, Mom, we would say. We’re not in apartments and dorms any more. And besides—but this part we said only to each other—watching Mom try to orchestrate the holiday meal was becoming more nerve-wracking than doing it ourselves. Even if we brought almost everything and did almost everything, her moment-to-moment inability to remember gave our holidays a sort of manic, surrealist theatre flavor:

  “Let’s see, how about the gravy?”

  “Done, Mom, it’s on the table.”

  “OK, great. Now how about the gravy?”

  Our children remember the Madrona house differently. It was the house where they opened Christmas presents, hunted for Easter eggs, played with their cousins: games like Pig Pile on Matthew (the oldest cousin), or Sardines (like Hide ’n Seek except only one person hides and everyone else seeks and when you find the hider, you crawl in too), or the game of seeing who could untie the most grownups’ shoes under the table before getting caught. When they were shooed out of the dining room, they went downstairs and cycled away on Grandma’s exercycle, tossed around our beat-up old toys—sad stuffed animals and dingy ABC blocks—or watched one of Grandma’s half dozen movies: Annie, West Side Story, Fiddler on the Roof, the old Mary Martin TV version of Peter Pan. For them, it was the center of the family universe.

  And in the decade since Mom left the Madrona house, we haven’t had a center. There are too many of us, and we’re too conscientious about taking turns.

  As we slowly coaxed her into looking at retirement complexes, my sisters and I grumbled to each other about Mom’s rejection of all apartments with views inferior to the view from the Madrona house. But we knew it was much more than that. We knew it was about leaving the one place she had ever lived that was truly hers. We knew it was about having started life in a dozen different Finntown tenement flats in Butte, Montana, each one smaller than the one before, until finally, with every penny gone, no work in sight, and the Depression at its worst, Grandpa had to go to his sour, arrogant brother-in-law and beg for shelter for his wife and little girls. Mom had friends in apartments and condos but she always swore she would never live stacked up with other people again.

  And now we were asking her to live stacked up with what looked and felt, to all of us, like a lot of people twenty years older than her.

  “They all use those THINGS!” she said, the word “walker” eluding her.

  The Finntown tenements: by the time I saw them on my first trip to Butte when I was twelve, most of them were gone and the ones that were left were half-empty. But they looked just as Mom had described them, with their criss-crossing, rickety back stairs and the long hallways tunneling through the buildings just like the mine shafts that went right under the neighborhood. Mom’s cranky old landlord, Uncle Albert, was long gone, but her sweet Auntie Helen still lived there and still wore the same button-down print dresses and black lace shoes that she wore in all the old photo albums.

  Mom used to tell us that she moved so many times as a child she lost count. Often, it wasn’t called “moving.” Her parents would say, “We’re going to visit Grandma for a while.” Or, “We’re going to visit Auntie Helen.” Or, “We’re going to go camping for the whole summer and eat fried trout and cornmeal mush every day!”

  Those were the kinds of memories Mom always said she wanted to write down. She started to, in some of the classes she took when she went back to college. I know about Uncle Albert, who died before I was born, because she wrote a scathing character sketch of him, sitting in the same chair all day in his one-piece union suit and overalls, spitting tobacco in a can, while Helen waited on him and his tenants brought him their rents or their excuses. She also wrote a story about going out on her first blind date at forty and debating whether to tell the man, whom she described as a “Swedish shipping magnate,” that she had six children. Her professors wrote comments on her papers like, “Great start, Arlene, but I feel you rushed to the finish line,” which I’m sure she did, with all of us underfoot and the rest of her homework to do.

  And then, in the Madrona house, when at last she wasn’t rushing anymore—it was suddenly too late to write it all down. The finish line and the starting line too had gotten lost in the big, knotted-up net of her brain.

  But she could still tell her stories, and a few became trusted conversational friends that she pulled out when Alzheimer’s left her high and dry.

  “People think you can’t remember anything,” she would quip. “That’s not true. I remember all kinds of things. Just never in the right order or at the right time!” And then she would go on about how she could remember making mud pies with her sister in Butte, Montana like it was yesterday, explaining that they had to play in the dirt because there was no grass in Butte: not a blade, at least not in Finntown. Nothing grew there. It may have been the richest hill on earth but to a little girl, it was dirt and soot and, three times a day, streets filled with great crowds of men, half of them covered in dirt and the other half clean.

  Then she would remind us how lucky we were, having grown up surrounded by green, how growing up in Butte, green was not a color she missed because it was a color she didn’t think of as part of her everyday life. It was a color she visited: at the Columbia Gardens on Sundays. Or in the summertime when she went camping with her family or with the Girl Scouts.

  “But,” she would continue, “We sure knew the color white back in Butte. You don’t know what snow is here in Seattle!” She and her sister had loved how the snow made the Butte streets magic and beautiful, at least for a few hours, before the trolleys and cars and miners’ footsteps mucked it up. Once it snowed in June and the city shut down for a day because all the plows had been put away.

  “Imagine that,” Mom would say, “we schoolkids had a snow day in June. We threw snowballs in June!”

  She loved the story of the snow day in June. But often it made her wistful and led right into the Berkeley Pit story. “Now all anyone can see in Butte is the Pit,” she would say with a sigh. “The Berkeley Pit, the biggest open-pit mine in America. Maybe you’ve heard of it. It’s where all those migrating swans landed and died a couple years ago, because they drank the water and it was full of poison.”

  She could keep it going, during the Madrona house years. And I would ache because they were good stories, but I’d heard them all. And maybe I’d been alone with my tiny children all weekend, maybe Rus was out of town and I was dying to talk, to have a conversation, but listening to Mom’s old stories wasn’t a conversation.

  Or maybe I wasn’t dying to talk at all, I wanted to get home and get some work or writing or reading done but I was trapped by the mud pie story or the snow day in June story and I felt miserable and hateful and guilty because Mom had just given me some precious babysitting time and I didn’t have the patience to sit still, again, for her stories.

  I became obsessed, during those years when she did a lot of babysitting for me, with the distance between her house and mine: 5.2 miles. Five point two miles up the lake and up the hill, from my jumbled neighborhood of weirdly remodeled ranch houses and Cape Cods to lovely, mossy Madrona. It took about fifteen minutes to drive it. That would be thirty round-trip. But time was so scarce, with young children and freelance work, tha
t I fantasized about how much more time I would have if only I lived in Mom’s neighborhood and wasn’t always driving back and forth. But we couldn’t afford her neighborhood and I felt like a materialistic pig for even wishing we could, just like I felt like an impatient baby for not wanting to listen to her same old stories. And yet I also felt trapped by the whole arrangement. I didn’t make enough money to justify finding and paying for daycare closer to home. Besides, how do you fire your mom? And Rus thought I was being ridiculous, complaining about the drive. He loved our house for many good reasons, including the fact that it was fifteen minutes closer to the airport than Mom’s. He was freelancing for CBS and flying a lot.

  So up and down the lake I drove: taking Claire to preschool, dropping Nick at Mom’s, coming home for two or three or four hours, depending on what day it was, and then turning around and doing it all again.

  Looking back, it’s clear to me now that the problem was not the drive. The problem was that I was achingly lonely, especially when Rus was out of town. I missed him, I missed working with him, I missed having a real job with real work friends, I missed my grownup self and my grownup mind. I felt like I couldn’t befriend other stay-at-home moms because I had my freelance work to do and my writing and so little time.

  I felt guilty in every possible way: guilty for not making friends with the preschool moms, who probably, rightfully, thought I was arrogant and standoffish; guilty that I wished I could bond with them, that my two children weren’t enough; guilty for not being more grateful to Rus for his willingness to earn most of our income; guilty for not being more grateful that I had a Mom who wanted to babysit.

  But that was the other big part of my loneliness, though I don’t think I quite got this until many years later: I missed Mom. I missed the Mom we’d seen in Haiti, despite that one strange evening.

  I missed the Mom who, seven months later, had skipped a week of school and come all the way to Scotland to attend our humble wedding and wish us well as we set off with our backpacks and round-the-world plane tickets on an extended honeymoon that most of our other relatives didn’t know what to make of (They’re leaving their good jobs? To do what?), but Mom understood, she got it, she knew that traveling together would make us rich in a way that a year’s worth of paychecks never could. I missed the Mom who threw us a big party at the Madrona house for our first anniversary and laughed harder than anyone when one of our friends, who didn’t know her neighborhood, bushwhacked up the steep hill below her house, burst into the living room via the deck, his shoes covered with mud, and promptly belted out “Danny Boy” in our honor. I missed the Mom who could never quite understand why I didn’t love a good crossword like she did but was always happy to play me at Scrabble and, more often than not, beat me.