Stone Arabia (6 page)

Pastime:
taking walks with my dog Martha

Marital status:
single (!!)

Things you look for in a girl:
quick smile, patience, love of music, patience, hygiene, patience, pretty hands, patience, trust fund, patience, good sense of humor!

Food:
yes [Nik won’t admit it, but he has a weakness for sweets. In an interview with another, unnamed mag (
Melody Maker
), Nik once mentioned how he loves Mars bars. His fans then sent thousands of Mars bars to his studio. More get thrown on stage at every gig. Says Worth, “I appreciate the thought, girls, but please—no more!”]

Gear:
my gorgeous old Gretsch, my Goldtop Gibson, and my bike, a ’65 Triumph Bonneville

Calendar:
Julian, but also Sumerian

Quote to live by:
Orbis Non Sufficient (James Bond)

Building:
The Bailey Case Study House #21 by Pierre Koenig

Book:
Deuteronomy. No, Ecclesiastes.

Biggest frustration:
I can’t hear infrasound

Monoaural or stereophonic:
Quadrasonic

It is easy to fill up the space when you get to make everything up.

My forty-seventh birthday. Ada called me in the morning from New York. She made me promise to look at her blog. She had posted a photo of us, and it said “happy birthday to my mom,” just like that, no caps or anything. Not “happy birthday, mom” but “to my mom” because it was really reportage to some audience beyond me. It wasn’t a personal message to me but a public announcement about me. The picture was from the mid-nineties. We clutch each other in front of a homemade birthday cake. I would guess Will took the photo. No doubt he gave it to us to keep, but I was sure I had never seen the photo before. I could see our house, the lemon sofa, the sliding glass doors. She was so young, maybe eleven? I studied the picture posted on Ada’s blog and felt a surge of hot tears, which I feel all the time over nothing, then sniffed and made myself some coffee. I was wearing my terry-cloth bathrobe, and I felt lumpy and tired. Matronly,
may-tron-lee,
I said out loud, gleefully trying to fuck with myself, but I knew there was more to what I felt than that. I sipped at my coffee. I kept thinking about posting a comment. I should’ve posted a comment, but I couldn’t. I wouldn’t ever post a comment. I knew how, that wasn’t it, I just couldn’t say something spontaneous and pithy and then
have it hang there for all eternity. Those are opposite pulls—eternity and pithy—and if I thought at all about what to say, it was even worse. So I never posted, even though I knew Ada wanted that and expected that. Other people would post. Later I would read “Aww, sweet!” from grl4gravity and “Mom’s hot!” from mitymitch, which would actually please me in a pathetic birthday-malaise kind of way, an elegiac feeling of my former beauty getting its due or something equally tiresome and full of self-pity.

I ignored my phone when it rang and then checked my voice mail. Nik wishing me a happy birthday. Later in the day, Jay would call and I would ignore that, too.

I got dressed and drove to my mother’s apartment. I promised I would stop by on my way to work so she could wish me a happy birthday. I drank more coffee from an insulated travel mug as I drove. Although she lived only one exit south on the 5, I managed to drive right into a thickening hive of slow-moving vehicles. It was mid-morning and I was clumped behind a freeway accident and riding my brakes. I came to a full stop with my exit in sight, a quarter mile of stopped cars between us. Just leave the car and walk. Wouldn’t that feel great? I yawned. I could easily smoke while I was stuck in traffic, but instead decided I would listen to a book. I bought it for myself, for my birthday. Happy birthday to me. It was a self-help book, there is no way around that fact.
MemTech: Using Your Brain’s Technology at Full Capacity,
which I bought because Mom couldn’t remember anything anymore. I told myself I bought it to help her cope with her lapses.

At first she just misplaced her keys. Her wallet. Her glasses.
Minor things. Then repetitions of stories, then repetitions mid-conversation. She seemed more confused than embarrassed about the lapses. She acquired a static but low level of agitation (even actual hand wringing) that made her seem much more unhappy and distraught than she really was, whatever
really was
means. Then we got a diagnosis and I grew accustomed to the idea that things would not improve and at some point I hoped to grow accustomed to the idea that they would not even maintain.

I hadn’t paid attention to the introduction and pressed the back button to start over when the exit ramp finally opened to me.

As soon as I walked into her apartment, she started to insist that I take the boxes of used clothes she had in storage to the Salvation Army.

“And get a receipt for your taxes,” she said. I could have just said yes, sure. But I had already taken the stuff weeks ago. And we seemed stuck in replaying this same conversation. It always felt tactless to point out the repetitions, but I did because it felt too condescending not to.

“I did it already, don’t worry,” I said.

“Did you get the receipt?” She had become focused on receipts and paperwork. Our whole life growing up, I don’t remember her saying that word one single time,
receipt
. I doubt she ever itemized her taxes even once. But what do I know about her, really? Maybe she always kept meticulous paperwork when we were growing up and she just protected us from all of it. Maybe this was a hidden side of her always there and now leaking out. I doubted it. Now she was interested in coupons, receipts, bills, instructions, warranties, paper trails of any kind.

She kept things to show me. As she grew anxious, the receipts proved something of a comfort to her, a concrete thing she could hold that wouldn’t fade like the things she was constantly trying to recall. She nodded and walked into her bedroom. Then she came back to where I was.

She stood in the center of the living room, brows furrowed, eyes darting back to the doorway she had just passed through as though her thoughts might be right behind her, left there.

“What, Ma?”

“I don’t remember why I came in here.”

“To talk to me?”

“No!” But it was really more like “No!?”

“To find the receipts?”

“No, there was something else …” and she looked worried. How could it not be worrying? It could be anything, even something really crucial, couldn’t it?

“It doesn’t matter. It will come to you if it was important,” I said, which was not at all true. She frowned at me. She didn’t enjoy this, and it grew harder all the time. But at a certain point she couldn’t be aware of things worsening, because that required remembering how they were yesterday or last week or last month. Maybe she read it off me, off the anxiety in my face.

“Do I look older? It’s my birthday, Mama. Today. I’m forty-seven—I’m middle-aged.” I loved to tell people I was in middle age. It was so terrifying to me that I was middle-aged, it was so deeply impossible, that I wanted to say it all the time.

“Oh, happy birthday, sweetheart. You look just lovely.” She sat next to me on the couch. The blankness and anxiety left her face.

“You and Nicky got to pick your cakes. Do you remember? I had this booklet of fancy-shaped birthday cakes and how to make them? The
Wilton Book of Birthday Cakes.
” She just pulled that title out of some pristine cerebral crevasse.

“Yes! The
Wilton Book of Birthday Cakes,
I totally forgot about that thing. I used to pore over it, plotting my cake months in advance. The Rocketship cake, the Raggedy Ann cake, the Holly Hobby cake.”

“They were complex cakes, you had to bake sheet-pan cakes and then make stencils so you could cut them in the right shapes. Then you had to decorate them properly. According to the instructions.”

“Yes, that must have been so much work. They were great, we loved them.”

“You decided you were too old for funny-shaped birthday cakes, remember? You said that was for babies. But I knew you still wanted a cake, you just couldn’t admit it. So I went in your room and I found a picture on your bulletin board—”

“
Aladdin Sane
! Of course! How could I have forgotten that? You made me a beautiful Bowie birthday cake! It was amazing, with the frosting lightning bolt across his face. I forgot all about that. That was amazing!”

We both were so thrilled that she remembered something I had forgotten. She beamed at me, nodding. Then she started to laugh, and she looked like my full, young mother for a moment. She reached for my hand and squeezed it. Her hand felt cool. Her skin looked old, but it felt soft and delicate. It wasn’t smooth and fat like a child’s skin, but it was almost softer.

“I have to go to work,” I said. I could hear my voice quake
and jerk. Usually I was fine when I was with my mother. Usually I didn’t start to cry until after I left her, when I was in the car, driving. But there I was, hard-swallowing and sniffing. “I’ll be late. Mama, I love you.”

“I love you,” she said, and we hugged. I didn’t let go for an extra second. Pay attention to this. Hug tight, this could be one of the last hugs. I had been making myself think this way since I’d turned forty. My mother was not that old, but she had diabetes. She was overweight. She was not healthy. And even if she didn’t die in the next few years, her mind was rapidly slipping away. Maybe one day soon the hug won’t be with my mother, but with her body and what remains of her. One day she’ll hug me and mistake me for someone else, and so these current, somewhat intact moments were fleeting. I noted that, marked it in my mind. Don’t forget what it was like to embrace her, all of her, and don’t let it be replaced with what will come, soon, a certainly diminished future, or at least a wholly different future, because, as her doctor said without exactly saying, it will only get worse.

I have always been the sort of person who is easily panicked about how quickly time passes, but in the past this was mostly related to Ada. I would remind myself not to get too distracted, because four would soon be five would soon be ten and then her childhood would be gone forever. I remember frantically looking for the dimples on the backs of her chubby hands, convinced I would be so sad the moment I noted their certain replacement by knuckles. I would kiss those dimples—and as much as I missed them, I loved the beautiful hands that emerged. But this current accounting with my mother was so
much darker: she would be less and less and then she would be gone. A memory. Ada became an adult with all of her baby brightness intact, fully realized and elaborated. And I wouldn’t have to witness her unwinding and diminishing. That would be her daughter’s burden.

But I knew this was not even true. I knew other horrors awaited. I knew that just as I was starting to fall apart right in front of my mother, just as I knew my mother must note my sad middle-aged visage, I knew I would live long enough to see Ada start to grow old. Already when I see her I notice how she looks more tired in tiny ways. I would live to see her get crow’s-feet and gray hair and hands that showed veins. I would see her feet and her neck change. I would see the perfection of her body be undone by time. I might live to see her lonely, divorced, unhappy, and a hundred other disappointments. What you don’t think about or plan for (as if that helps) is watching your children get old. The privilege of a long life is you live long enough to see your perfect child also submit to time and aging.

So, on my forty-seventh birthday—if that was truly my middle age—what did the second half of my life hold for me? I would watch my mother and her friends and siblings die, one by one, but also all at once, a flurry of funerals, then watch my brother and my friends as they speedily replaced them as failing beings on the way out. Everyone knows that is just how it goes. I’m not the only one, right? And let’s not forget I get to experience my own dwindling vitality, which will surely accelerate and reach critical mass in the next fifteen years.

I stood in my mother’s doorway and scanned the room. Soon she would have to move from this apartment—it went in-home
aide to assisted living to a full-care facility to a hospice. I was just waiting for the thing to reach the next level. Whenever I visited, I was vigilant in looking for signs of new deterioration. Was she wearing pajamas in the afternoon? Did she smell clean? I expected to find rotten food in the refrigerator, a carton of old milk congealing in the cupboard. But her routine—and I made sure it was always the same for her—could stay intact for the moment. I checked in with her most mornings, and her home health aide came in the afternoon to help her with dinner. Once a week we went shopping and had lunch together. She appeared to hold at this point, but I couldn’t stay where she was—I waited and watched for what came next.

I think on some level I always imagined Nik would never make it into old age, how could he? He didn’t make those kinds of mistakes. I knew he would die of cigarettes and drinking long before I would finally die. I just got to witness and witness and stupidly survive. The second half of my life was just the bill due for the pleasures of the first half. And Nik would get to escape payment.

I left her apartment, sniffling and congested with my little birthday pirouettes around mortality. A fitting birthday disposition, but then I began to fixate on how I had managed to forget that birthday cake. I realized I couldn’t actually locate it in my memory. I could remember only the photograph we took of the cake. Not the feel of the pink-and-white frosting in my mouth, not the gulp of cold milk I no doubt drank after a few bites. Oh sure, I could conjure a sweet cake-taste memory, but that was a generic substitute, a little made-up game. All that remains is a photo of that cake, somewhere,
in some album. It does not help, having a photo. I believe—I know—that photos have destroyed our memories. Every time we take a photograph, we forget to embed things in our minds, in our actual brain cells. The taking of the photograph gets us off the hook, in a way, from trying to remember. I’ll take a photo so I can remember this moment. But what you are really doing is leaving it out of your brain’s jurisdiction and relying on Polaroids, Kodak paper, little disintegrating squares glued in albums. Easily lost or neglected in a box in your waterlogged garage. Or you bury it in some huge digital file, waiting to be clicked open. All you have done is postponed the looking, and so the actual engaging, until all you are left with is this second-generation memory, a memory of an event that is truly only a memory of a photograph of the event. It is not a real, deep memory. It is a fake, fleeting one, and your mind can’t even tell the difference.