MARCH 2004
Alice popped open the Monday lid of her plastic days-of-the-week pill dispenser and poured the seven little tablets into her cupped hand. John marched into the kitchen with purpose, but seeing what she held, he spun on his heels and left the room, as if he’d walked in on his mother naked. He refused to watch her take her medications. He could be midsentence, midconversation, but if she got out her plastic days-of-the-week pill dispenser, he left the room. Conversation over.
She swallowed the pills with three gulps of very hot tea and burned her throat. The experience wasn’t exactly pleasant for her either. She sat down at the kitchen table, blew on her tea, and listened to John stomping through the bedroom above her.
“What are you looking for?” she yelled.
“Nothing,” he hollered.
Probably his glasses. In the month since their visit to the genetic counselor, he’d stopped asking her for help finding his glasses and keys, even though she knew he still struggled to keep track of them.
He entered the kitchen with quick, impatient steps.
“Can I help?” she asked.
“No, I’m good.”
She wondered about the source of this newfound stubborn independence. Was he trying to spare her the mental burden of tracking his own misplaced things? Was he practicing for his future without her? Was he just too embarrassed to ask for help from an Alzheimer’s patient? She sipped her tea, engrossed in a painting of an apple and a pear that had been on the wall for at least a decade, and listened to him sift through the mail and papers on the counter behind her.
He walked past her into the front hallway. She heard the hall closet door open. She heard the hall closet door shut. She heard the drawers in the hall table open and close.
“You ready?” he called.
She finished her tea and met him in the hallway. He had his coat on, glasses perched on his ruffled hair, and his keys in his hand.
“Yes,” said Alice, and she followed him outside.
The beginning of spring in Cambridge was an untrustworthy and ugly liar. There were no buds yet on the trees, no tulips brave or stupid enough to have emerged through the now month-old layer of crusted snow, and no spring peeper audio track playing in the background. The streets remained narrowed by blackened, polluted snowbanks. Any melting that occurred during the relative warmth of midday froze with the plummeting temperatures of late afternoon, turning the paths in Harvard Yard and the sidewalks of the city into treacherous lanes of black ice. The date on the calendar only made everyone feel offended or cheated, aware that it was already spring elsewhere, and there people wore short-sleeve shirts and awoke to the sounds of robins chirping. Here, the cold and misery showed no signs of relenting, and the only birds Alice heard as they walked to campus were crows.
John had agreed to walk with her to Harvard every morning. She’d told him she didn’t want to risk getting lost. In truth, she simply wanted that time back with him, to rekindle their former morning tradition. Unfortunately, having deemed the risk of being run over by a car less than that of being injured from slipping on the icy sidewalks, they walked single file in the street, and they didn’t talk.
Gravel kicked up into her right boot. She debated whether to stop in the road to empty it out or wait until they reached Jerri’s. To empty it, she’d have to balance in the road on one foot while exposing the other to the frigid air. She decided to endure the discomfort for the remaining two blocks.
Located on Mass Ave about halfway between Porter and Harvard squares, Jerri’s had become a Cambridge institution for the chronically caffeinated long before the invasion of Starbucks. The menu of coffee, tea, pastries, and sandwiches written in chalk capital lettering on the board behind the counter had remained unaltered since Alice’s graduate student days. Only the prices next to the items showed signs of recent attention, outlined with chalk dust in the shape of a rectangular school eraser and printed in a penmanship belonging to someone other than the author of the offerings to their left. Alice studied the board, perplexed.
“Good morning, Jess, a coffee and a cinnamon scone, please,” said John.
“I’ll have the same,” said Alice.
“You don’t like coffee,” said John.
“Yes, I do.”
“No, you don’t. She’ll have a tea with lemon.”
“I want a coffee and a scone.”
Jess looked to John to see if there would be a return, but the volley was dead.
“Okay, two coffees and two scones,” said Jess.
Outside, Alice took a sip. It tasted acrid and unpleasant and poorly reflected its delicious smell.
“So how’s your coffee?” asked John.
“Wonderful.”
As they walked to campus, Alice drank the coffee she hated to spite him. She couldn’t wait to be alone in her office, where she could throw away what was left of the wretched beverage. Plus, she desperately wanted to empty the gravel out of her boot.
BOOTS OFF AND COFFEE IN the trash, she tackled her inbox first. She opened an email from Anna.
Hi Mom,
We’d love to go to dinner, but this week is kind of tough with Charlie’s trial. How about next week? What days are good for you and Dad? We’re free any night but Thursday and Friday.
Anna
She stared down the tauntingly ready, blinking cursor on her computer screen and tried to imagine the words she wanted to use in her reply. The conversion of her thoughts to voice, pen, or computer keys often required conscious effort and calm coaxing. And she held little confidence in the spelling of words she’d long ago been rewarded for her mastery of with gold stars and teachers’ praise.
The phone rang.
“Hi, Mom.”
“Oh good, I was just about to return your email.”
“I didn’t send you an email.”
Unsure of herself, Alice reread the message on her screen.
“I just read it. Charlie has a trial this week—”
“Mom, this is Lydia.”
“Oh, what are you doing up so early?”
“I’m always up now. I wanted to call you and Dad last night, but it was too late your time. I just got an incredible part in a play called The Memory of Water. It’s with this phenomenal director, and it’s going up for six shows in May. I think it’s going to be really good, and with this director it should get a lot of attention. I was hoping maybe you and Dad could come out to see me in it?”
Cued by the hanging rise in her inflection and the silence that followed, Alice knew it was her turn to speak but was still catching up to all that Lydia had just said. Without the aid of the visual cues of the person she talked to, conversations on the phone often baffled her. Words sometimes ran together, abrupt changes in topic were difficult for her to anticipate and follow, and her comprehension suffered. Although writing presented its own set of problems, she could keep them hidden from discovery because she wasn’t restricted to real-time responding.
“If you don’t want to, you can just say it,” said Lydia.
“No, I do, but—”
“Or you’re too busy, whatever. I knew I should’ve called Dad.”