There’s a photograph in the living room that hangs above the piano. It was taken in the hospital, in the hours after I was born. In it, Dad looks like a hirsute, buffer Linus, with his unruly brown beard and enormous plastic glasses. He is wearing a black-and-white patterned T-shirt. You can see the top of his tight red pants. On a previous doctor’s visit, Dad had picked up a pamphlet titled, “What can my new baby see?” Newborns have difficulty focusing, the pamphlet said. It’s impossible to know for certain that they perceive color at all. But in studies they respond to the color red, and to high-contrast patterns.
Next to him, my uncle John is shirtless. Because it’s waist up, he doesn’t appear to be wearing anything at all. When John arrived at the hospital in a red shirt, my father was furious at his brother.
“What’s the idea?” my dad said, but John, of course, didn’t have any idea at all. He hadn’t been scheming. He’s a colorful dresser because bright colors are always on sale. He was wearing his regular clothes. Dad was beside himself with anger. He refused to let John in to see me wearing the shirt. What you see in the photograph is my mother, stunning despite her eighties perm and with this tired but amused look, my father scowling, and Uncle John shirtless, holding baby me, smiling nervously.
One of the floats on TV is a mechanical turtle, made from moss and sunflower seeds. “It’s not the seed parade,” Dad says, in a bad mood. Mom deftly peels an orange. She opens my father’s palm and puts the segments in his pried-open hand.
The bad mood is because last week, Dean Levin called to inform Dad that he would not be teaching this next semester. These past several months, Dad’s missed several classes, insisted on another professor’s parking spot, and wept in the lecture hall without apparent cause. There had been, Levin said, complaints.
Further “inconsistencies,” as he put it, couldn’t be risked. My father could have his job back when he recovered, when he could behave himself again. Levin had said when, but what he really meant—what we all knew he meant—was if.
The floats must be covered in entirely natural materials, the announcer said. Flowers, yes, but also tapioca pearls and cranberries are permitted.
My mother hands us each a B-12 pill, which we wash down with celery juice. B-12 builds myelin, she explains, which our nerves need to fire. Celery, a “brain food,” contains luteolin, which combats inflammation.
The house is virtually snackless. She’s emptied the pantries of foods she’s deemed harmful. Everything is a potential cause of the disease. Cereals and breads contain sugar, and high blood sugar exacerbates the disease. Saturated fats raise the risk of the disease.
In lieu of our regular salt is low-sodium salt. We have bananas on the counter and a packet of turkey where the butter should be, and miscellaneous fruits and vegetables for juicing. We have nuts and we have the last shards of a box of Triscuits.
Something Mom does when she’s frustrated is she adjusts the arm of phantom glasses on her temple. She got her eyes lasered four years ago, but tonight I notice her pushing at invisible glasses, watching a TV that isn’t turned on.
Another reason I know she’s not herself: on Christmas, typically her favorite holiday to cook, we went to a buffet. On top of which, she didn’t take any baked potatoes for the road.
I read: Alois Alzheimer was the senior physician at the Municipal Mental Asylum in Frankfurt when Frau Auguste Deter was admitted. The year was 1901. She was a fifty-one-year-old woman who was anxious and forgetful and, near the end of her life, behaved aggressively and unpredictably. She died five years later.
Cutting Auguste’s brain open, Alois Alzheimer found abnormal protein deposits surrounding her nerve cells. He called them plaques: neuritic or senile plaques. He also found twisted fibers inside the cells: he called those tangles. When plaques and tangles interfere with the normal function of brain cells, that’s what we know as Alzheimer’s.
The neurons are trying to connect—that’s what their function is, that’s what they do—but the plaques and tangles prevent the nerve cells from transmitting their normal messages. The cells aren’t able to communicate with one another because of abnormal protein deposits in the spaces between them. The cells keep trying and trying and trying, but in the end they’re choked off. In the end, they die.
I wish they’d named it “Auguste’s.” Because, “Alzheimer’s”? Really? When she was the one who’d suffered.
January 5
Mom is at book club. Meanwhile it is impossible to get Dad out of his office. Earlier I considered slipping cold cuts under the door. I draw a fingernail on each banana. I rearrange the fruit bowl. Now the lemons are resting on top and the kiwis lurk beneath.
At one point Dad emerges, shirtless, into the kitchen, to brew himself coffee. I get my nipples from him, I realize, alarmed.
In her absence, Mom has given me two twenties to order pizza—our fourth or fifth since Christmas. The sausage topping looks to be spelling HI, like maybe the pizza maker heard the desperation in my voice and wanted to send me an encouraging message.
Mom’s all-ladies book club is reading Anna Karenina. Anna’s newly pregnant, and I’m picturing all the ladies taking the opportunity to share stories about their own pregnancies. My mother, I know, is probably bragging that I ripped her favorite pair of jeans.
In one of Mom’s magazines, there is an article about how to keep your man.
? Never surprise him with short hair.
? Don’t try to change him.
? Play games, but not too many.
I catch a glimpse in the window’s reflection and surprise myself with short hair.
Here’s something I haven’t thought about in forever. Once, on an afternoon in the third grade, Dad was picking me up from school when we noticed, in the parking lot, a dozen or so hysterical pigeons, assembled on the windshield and hood of another car. We got closer and saw why: there were french fries scattered inside the car, on the dashboard. We watched the desperate birds pecking at the glass for a moment, before my father said, “Let’s go.”
He took us to the nearest drive-through. We bought milk shakes and fries and headed back to the parking lot, where we drank the milk shakes and fed those pigeons, a fry at a time.
That’s the memory I used to conjure whenever Linus would telephone to tell me what was going on, whenever Linus said, about our father, He’s a liar, and he’s a drunkard, and he’s a cheat. And I would listen, in silence, and comfort my brother, all the while thinking, No, that’s not possible. No, you’ve got it wrong.
Linus’s deal is that he’s angry with Dad. On account of the five-year age difference between us, things weren’t the same for him. Linus was in the eighth grade when I left for college, and the next year our father was drinking again. What happened was he hadn’t had a drop when we were growing up, and after I left, he did.
In the middle of the night, under the impression I am hearing gunshots, I realize that more likely it’s the television, and it is. Downstairs, Hawaii Five-0 is on TV and Dad is nursing a mug of something steaming. I inquire about it. He’s put Triscuits and hot water together and created a sort of Triscuit gruel.
“Hungry?” he asks.
“Now I am,” I joke.
“Here, take this curved yellow fruit,” he says, unhinging me a banana.
“You mean banana,” I say, trying my best to not sound terrified.