She heard the front door open. Oh good, John’s home early.
“John, why did you do this to the kitchen?” she hollered.
“Alice, what are you doing?”
The woman’s voice startled her.
“Oh, Lauren, you scared me.”
It was her neighbor who lived across the street. Lauren didn’t say anything.
“I’m sorry, would you like to sit down? I was about to make some tea.”
“Alice, this isn’t your kitchen.”
What? She looked around the room—black granite countertops, birch cabinets, white tile floor, window over the sink, dishwasher to the right of the sink, double oven. Wait, she didn’t have a double oven, did she? Then, for the first time, she noticed the refrigerator. The smoking gun. The collage of pictures stuck with magnets to its door were of Lauren and Lauren’s husband and Lauren’s cat and babies Alice didn’t recognize.
“Oh, Lauren, look what I did to your kitchen. I’ll help you put everything back.”
“That’s okay, Alice. Are you all right?”
“No, not really.”
She wanted to run home to her own kitchen. Couldn’t they just forget this happened? Did she really have to have the I-have-Alzheimer’s-disease conversation right now? She hated the I-have-Alzheimer’s-disease conversation.
Alice tried to read Lauren’s face. She looked baffled and scared. Her face was thinking, Alice might be crazy. Alice closed her eyes and took a deep breath.
“I have Alzheimer’s disease.”
She opened her eyes. The look on Lauren’s face didn’t change.
NOW, EVERY TIME SHE ENTERED the kitchen, she checked the refrigerator, just to be sure. No pictures of Lauren. She was in the right house. In case that didn’t remove all doubt, John had written a note in big black letters and stuck it with a magnet to the refrigerator door.
ALICE,
DO NOT GO RUNNING WITHOUT ME.
MY CELL: 617-555-1122
ANNA: 617-555-1123
TOM: 617-555-1124
John had made her promise not to go running without him. She’d sworn she wouldn’t and crossed her heart. Of course, she might forget.
Her ankle could probably use the time off anyway. She’d rolled it stepping off a curb last week. Her spatial perception was a bit off. Objects sometimes appeared closer or farther or generally somewhere other than where they actually were. She’d had her eyes checked. Her vision was fine. She had the eyes of a twenty-year-old. The problem wasn’t with her corneas, lenses, or retinas. The glitch was somewhere in the processing of visual information, somewhere in her occipital cortex, said John. Apparently, she had the eyes of a college student and the occipital cortex of an octogenarian.
No running without John. She might get lost or hurt. But lately there was no running with John either. He’d been traveling a lot, and when he wasn’t out of town, he left the house for Harvard early and worked late. By the time he got home, he was always too tired. She hated depending on him to go running, especially since he wasn’t dependable.
She picked up the phone and dialed the number on the refrigerator.
“Hello?”
“Are we going for a run today?” she asked.
“I don’t know, maybe, I’m in a meeting. I’ll call you later,” said John.
“I really need to go for a run.”
“I’ll call you later.”
“When?”
“When I can.”
“Fine.”
She hung up the phone, looked out the window and then down at the running shoes on her feet. She peeled them off and threw them at the wall.
She tried to be understanding. He needed to work. But why didn’t he understand that she needed to run? If something as simple as regular exercise really did counter the progression of this disease, then she should be running as often as she could. Each time he told her “Not today,” she might be losing more neurons that she could have saved. Dying needlessly faster. John was killing her.
She picked up the phone again.
“Yes?” asked John, hushed and annoyed.
“I want you to promise that we’ll run today.”
“Excuse me for a minute,” he said to someone else. “Please, Alice, let me call you after I get out of this meeting.”
“I need to run today.”
“I don’t know yet when my day’s going to end.”
“So?”
“This is why I think we should get you a treadmill.”
“Oh, fuck you,” she said, hanging up.
She supposed that wasn’t very understanding. She flashed to anger a lot lately. Whether this was a symptom of her disease advancing or a justified response, she couldn’t say. She didn’t want a treadmill. She wanted him. Maybe she shouldn’t be so stubborn. Maybe she was killing herself, too.
She could always walk somewhere without him. Of course, this somewhere had to be somewhere “safe.” She could walk to her office. But she didn’t want to go to her office. She felt bored, ignored, and alienated in her office. She felt ridiculous there. She didn’t belong there anymore. In all the expansive grandeur that was Harvard, there wasn’t room there for a cognitive psychology professor with a broken cognitive psyche.
She sat in her living room armchair and tried to think of what to do. Nothing meaningful enough came to her. She tried to imagine tomorrow, next week, the coming winter. Nothing meaningful enough came to her. She felt bored, ignored, and alienated in her living room armchair. The late afternoon sun cast strange, Tim Burton shadows that slithered and undulated across the floor and up the walls. She watched the shadows dissolve and the room dim. She closed her eyes and fell asleep.
ALICE STOOD IN THEIR BEDROOM, naked but for a pair of ankle socks and her Safe Return bracelet, wrestling and growling at an article of clothing stretched around her head. Like a Martha Graham dance, her battle against the fabric shrouding her head looked like a physical and poetic expression of anguish. She let out a long scream.
“What’s happening?” asked John, running in.
She looked at him with one panicked eye through a round hole in the twisted garment.
“I can’t do this! I can’t figure out how to put on this fucking sports bra. I can’t remember how to put on a bra, John! I can’t put on my own bra!”
He went to her and examined her head.
“That’s not a bra, Ali, it’s a pair of underwear.”
She burst into laughter.
“It’s not funny,” said John.
She laughed harder.
“Stop it, it’s not funny. Look, if you want to go running, you have to hurry up and get dressed. I don’t have a lot of time.”
He left the room, unable to watch her standing there, naked with her underwear on her head, laughing at her own absurd madness.
ALICE KNEW THAT THE YOUNG woman sitting across from her was her daughter, but she had a disturbing lack of confidence in this knowledge. She knew that she had a daughter named Lydia, but when she looked at the young woman sitting across from her, knowing that she was her daughter Lydia was more academic knowledge than implicit understanding, a fact she agreed to, information she’d been given and accepted as true.
She looked at Tom and Anna, also sitting at the table, and she could automatically connect them with the memories she had of her oldest child and her son. She could picture Anna in her wedding gown, in her law school, college, and high school graduation gowns, and in the Snow White nightgown she’d insisted on wearing every day when she was three. She could remember Tom in his cap and gown, in a cast when he broke his leg skiing, in braces, in his Little League uniform, and in her arms when he was an infant.
She could see Lydia’s history as well, but somehow this woman sitting across from her wasn’t inextricably connected to her memories of her youngest child. This made her uneasy and painfully aware that she was declining, her past becoming unhinged from her present. And how strange that she had no problem identifying the man next to Anna as Anna’s husband, Charlie, who had entered their lives only a couple of years ago. She pictured her Alzheimer’s as a demon in her head, tearing a reckless and illogical path of destruction, ripping apart the wiring from “Lydia now” to “Lydia then,” leaving all the “Charlie” connections unscathed.