Language Arts (6 page)

The coffee table in his childhood house was two-tiered, glass on top with a lower shelf shaped like a shallow tray. Each week, when a new issue of
Life
arrived, his mother relegated the old
Life
to the tray below. She spritzed the glass top with Windex, wiped it until it was free of fingerprints and the circles left by coffee cups and martini glasses, and then, with precision, placed the new
Life
in its designated position: intriguingly off-kilter, so that its edges did not align with those of the table.

For a while, the cast-off issues of
Life
remained on display in the tray below. They were stacked neatly, in three side-by-side piles, their covers continuing to change, and then at some point they went into the garbage can.

By contrast,
Playboy
magazines were harder to access; they were secreted in the garage in a footlocker that bore Charles's father's initials (GDM) and on occasion was left unlocked.
Playboy
s were interesting in a puzzling way—although the photos of women's breasts were a revelation, making Charles understand why his mother always spoke in such self-derogatory tones about being
flat as a pancake.
The centerfold feature was intriguing from an engineering standpoint, but Charles's curiosity was piqued mainly by a man named Hugh Hefner (in his mind, the first name was pronounced “hug”); he was always wearing a bathrobe and seemed to be married to a lot of women dressed as rabbits. Charles was puzzled as to why
Playboy
warranted such out-of-the-way, secretive placement. The cartoons weren't even
funny.
Nonetheless,
Playboy
exerted enough of an influence on his imagination to inform certain sections of “Flipper Boy”—although not to nearly the same extent as
Life.

Janet Leigh's oddly contrived chapeau—its whimsy clearly intended to provoke delight—had filled Charles with a terrible trepidation for the state of her immortal soul. He interpreted the image as a grave insult; more than that, as a
sin
—for surely that tower of hats was meant to mimic, or perhaps even
mock,
the papal headdress.

Whoever she was, Janet Leigh looked like a nice enough lady. Maybe she didn't know she was being used as Satan's pinup girl.

Now, seeing the photo anew, and at a slightly narcotized remove, thanks to the wine, Charles was able to rouse himself from these morbid reminiscences just a little, enough to recognize that Janet Leigh and the eleven red fezzes resonated differently, reminding him of one of his children's favorite stories:
Caps for Sale.
It must be boxed up somewhere down here as well, along with Cody's and Emmy's other books.

Caps for Sale
was the tale of a solitary peddler who wore his merchandise—an assortment of red, blue, gray, and black caps—balanced in a tall stack atop his head.

Caps!
he proclaimed as he wandered the empty countryside calling out to an unseen clientele.
Caps for sale! Fifty cents a cap!

Hours passed. The peddler found no takers for his wares and, growing weary, decided to lie down under a large tree and have a nap. When he awoke, he discovered that his caps had been filched by a band of mischievous monkeys who taunted him from the lofty sanctuary of the tallest branches.

You monkeys, you!
the peddler cried.
Give me back my caps!

And they did, eventually, once he learned how to trick them.

Cody loved that story. Charles used to read it to him over and over in a variety of ham-handed accents—Russian, German, Scots, Yiddish—and it always made him laugh.

Charles reached for the wine, but the Tears of Christ were all gone. Just as well.

Deciding to take a cue from the country peddler, he lay down on the floor and closed his eyes. The crawlspace was very quiet.

Caps for sale!
an old voice echoed from a great distance.

It was Charles's voice, he realized, the voice of himself as a young father, lulling himself to sleep as if he were his own child.

Fifty cents a cap . . .

The facility known as Madonna's Home is located in North Seattle and situated on a deep, narrow lot. There are many places like it, with more and more of them springing up every day, for the need is great. Some of these facilities have large, noticeable signage that clearly identifies their function; this one does not. Most first-time visitors get lost on the way; even people who have visited on numerous occasions find it difficult to locate.

Its overall appearance is indeterminate. It seems somehow adrift, transient. Whereas navigating to most destinations is a mindless process (one need only announce
SCHOOL
or
HOME
or
DRY CLEANER'S
or
GROCERY STORE
to the brain, and the autopilot function is engaged), getting to Madonna's Home requires a sustained exertion of consciousness and will. It is never quite where one remembers.

Consisting of two colorless, architecturally bland structures—one street-side, shadowed by an aged Douglas fir and a weeping birch, the other shoved to the back of the lot at a distance of about a hundred feet—the site offers few overt clues as to its purpose.

In the middle of the grassy expanse separating the buildings is a courtyard with a concrete patio. Rain mixed with city grime pools in the recesses of plastic chairs and umbrella-topped tables; wooden picnic tables are covered with amorphous patches of bilious-green moss.

There is no apparent interest in projecting what real estate agents refer to as
street appeal.
The prospect of hospitality within is called into doubt by two kinds of fences: protecting the front of the property is a battalion of black, wrought-iron bars with spiked finials; on the other three sides, wide cedar planks form a ten-foot-tall privacy screen.

Globular silver doorknobs extrude from the front gate entrance at a peculiar height, and a complicated system of chains, steel rings, lockboxes, keypads, and bolts gives rise to several questions, all worrisome:

Is this place a frequent target of thieves? The urban compound of a religious cult? The domicile of a conspiracy theorist?

Abutting single-family residences (small, mostly shabby-looking prefabricated post–WWII houses) on the north and commercially zoned apartment complexes and businesses on the south, Madonna's Home perfectly exemplifies the ideal marriage of form and function: a temporary, aggressively secured storage facility for people who are neither here nor there.

Only when standing on the sidewalk outside the iron fence is one able to read a small metal placard affixed to the gate:
CAUTION! VISITORS PLEASE TAKE NOTE:
THIS IS A RESIDENCE FOR PEOPLE WITH DEMENTIA AND THEREFORE THE GATE
MUST
BE LOCKED AT ALL TIMES.

Inside the facility is ample evidence of
elder-proofing
(the bookend to childproofing), various kinds of safeguards with specific names that are relatively new arrivals in the lexicon of dementia care:
kill switches
on the stoves to prevent residents from starting fires;
traveler's locks
on windows, doors, cabinets, and closets, intended to keep patients from venturing into unsafe areas like stairwells or simply to direct them to where they are expected to go. Outlets are fitted with
tamper-resistant electrical receptacles.
Walls are decorated with
faux windows,
posters that simulate real views into worlds to which residents no longer have access.

Nonetheless, there remain doors that cannot be secured, forms of travel that cannot be restricted, conduits that are yet unhindered. There is still some recourse for these souls, trapped as they are in what Shakespeare called “second childishness and mere oblivion.”

For within the mind, of course, travelers are free—movement continues, unencumbered; views remain panoramic; all destinations are possible. We can tell ourselves whatever stories we choose.

In the back seat of a van that has just pulled up to the curb is one such teller of tales, Sister Giorgia Maria Fiducia D'Amati. The van driver and the front-seat passenger, unaccustomed to city driving and befuddled by the absence of signage, consult a Seattle street map to make sure that this is indeed where their appointment is to take place.

Which story will Giorgia tell today? Will it be a variation on one of the old ones? “A Love Like Salt”? “The Sunflower Bride”? “Life Among the Changelings”? Or will it be—at long last!—a
new
story, one of reunion, with her family, her students, her son?

She does not yet know. She can only wait in silence and stillness until the details become clearer and the characters begin to appear.

•♦•

Gaaaaah,
Cody says to whatever might be listening, his voice little more than a whisper.
Gaaaaaah . . .

On the other side of his eyelids, light.

On the other side of his closed bedroom door, sounds:

The soft, measured shufflings of slippered not-Cody feet; the muffled suction-y sound of the refrigerator door as it opens and then the pillowy thump when it shuts; quiet low-pitched not-Cody voices; the first gurglings of the machine that makes the hot black drink, the thick rich smell getting stronger until the machine sputters to a stop.

There are things that happen here the same way every day, so he knows—

Soon, someone will come.

He stays very still, like a small creature in the underbrush: a rabbit.

But not Foolish Rabbit, the one in
Animal Tales from Around the World,
Foolish Rabbit who cries out
Eagle! Eagle! I am so afraid of you! Do not eat me!
so loudly that he gives his hiding place away and Eagle comes at once and eats him.

No; Cody is Wise Rabbit, who stays still and silent and hides until it is safe to come out, and who never gets eaten.

He squints his eyelids apart, slowly, as if they are unoiled doors that might squeak if opened too abruptly or carelessly.

Likewise, he has a trick of keeping his eyes unfocused at first, so that everything is indistinct, shapeless, colors without definition.

He needs to make sure that everything is as it should be, that his room is exactly the way it was before he went to sleep. He looks around and sees:

First, the blurred colors of his bedspread—blue, yellow, brown, red, white.

Next, on the table by his bed—the hazy shape of his cowboy lamp, still turned on; his picture book, closed.

Then, curtains—blue.

Finally, walls—mostly white, but with a fuzzy patch of color across from him, and now he slowly brings his vision into focus to look at the picture of wild ponies. The ponies are purple. Behind them are orange and gold and lavender mountains and a sky full of stars and a big round moon like the
o
in his name.

No people. Just ponies.

Like the real ponies he visits some days.

Is today one of those days?

There are footsteps approaching his door. Not the footsteps of his mother (who is often the first person to say
Good morning, Cody
) or his father (who is never the first person to say
Good morning, Cody
); they are the footsteps of one of the others.

Cody closes his eyes again, tight, as he hears his door being opened.

Good morning, Cody!

He knows this voice, this person: Esther.

No playing possum now, mister. I know you're awake in there!

Once again, he opens his eyes the tiniest bit, ever so slowly allowing the outside world in, the not-Cody world.

His door is wide open. Esther stands there, a dark shape against the brightness of the big room beyond.

Well, hello there, big brown eyes. How we doin' so far?

Her shape changes as she turns and tapes a sheet of paper to his door—

Oh boy, a new day, a new chance for Cody to earn lots of stickers . . .

—and then she comes into his room and starts moving around, opening the curtains and letting in more light, patting the covers over his feet—just once—as she passes the bed, turning off his lamp, going to his closet.

Cody, unmoving, continues to stare at the ponies.

Come on now, Cody, time to get up. Here's your bathrobe and your slippers. Sit up. Sit
up,
Cody. I just know you wanna get your first sticker today, so let's get your bathrobe and slippers on and go to the bathroom and see how you did last night . . .

Cody sits up.

All right, good job . . .

Cody slides his feet into his slippers. Esther helps him stand up and get into his bathrobe. He is allowed to wear his bathrobe and pajamas while he is eating breakfast, but then he has to put on his day clothes and wear those until after dinner. Even if he has a big accident, he has to put day clothes back on.

Sometimes if he is having a
bad
time he is allowed to put his bathrobe on over his day clothes but he's never allowed to be in his pajamas during the day unless he is sick, and then he has to stay in his room with the door open.

If he has been
good
he is allowed to wear his pajamas and bathrobe while he watches TV and has a snack before
Good night, Cody.

Cody does not like changing clothes. But if he doesn't take off his pajamas and his bathrobe he won't get his changing-into-day-clothes sticker.

Let's go to the bathroom and see how you did. I sure do hope you get a sticker!

Esther takes him by his arm and leads him out of his room and down the hall, and now he is aware of the others in the house making sounds and moving around: Raisa, Big Mal, and Robbie-Myles-Felix-Angie-Melody.

In the bathroom, Esther changes his old diaper—
Darn, you've got a wet one so no sticker, but at least there's no number two
—and puts on a new one.