With or Without You: A Memoir (19 page)

It was too much to think about. I took the plate from her and snorted my line.

“You know, you can snort it into your mouth, too,” she said.

“What?”

“Mummy does it like this,” she told me. I watched her put the little straw between her lips and suck up what was left.

“Why?”

“I have to do it that way now. But I think it’s better. The thing in between my nostrils—the?”

“Septum?”

“The septum. It’s not there anymore.”

“Oh.”

We forgot about my hair and walked toward campus together. I don’t remember what we talked about. My head was no longer a solid thing but a delicate cloud of gas. I walked slowly, careful of every step. I imagined kicking a rock, the imperceptible spark as the rock skidded across the pavement, and
kaboom
! The wrong word, the faintest breath, could blow up the sky.

I floated away from my mother to my alphabetically assigned seat where immediately I nodded off. An hour or so later, a stranger shook my shoulder. He told me to get up. My name had been called and I had missed it.

HAVING NO BETTER PLACE
to go, I moved to Boston after graduation and took my college boyfriend hostage. I found a temporary job as a clerk in a bookstore, and Dave worked the night shift at an artisanal bakery. He would come home at three in the morning with warm bags of bread—sourdoughs and olive rolls and baguettes. It was all we ate. Our work schedules were misaligned, so that I had to do all the grocery shopping alone, and after the second or third winter blizzard I gave up. There was bread to eat, olive oil and salt to season it, and a liquor store that sold pistachios for protein. I’d line my sneakers with plastic shopping bags and trudge to the liquor store on the corner, where I bought either a bottle of scotch or a six-pack of beer every other day. Many days were so cold that I couldn’t leave the apartment unless I was already drunk.

Dave’s parents, both lawyers, were disconcerted by the downward
economic trajectory their son’s post-college life was taking. My parents wondered out loud what had been the point of a college education. “Kids in high school can ring up sales at a cash register,” Kathi crowed, then wrote me a check for the first and last month’s rent and the security deposit for our apartment. When the rental company rejected her credit report, Dave’s parents co-signed our lease.

“Honey, listen to Mummy,” Kathi told me. “Have Dave’s baby
now
. Before he finds someone better than you.”

While I didn’t get pregnant, an unnatural domestication took place. Kids my age were going to rock shows, getting ironic tattoos, and hopping from one hip romance to another. I was pretending to be a married woman, doing laundry and cooking dinner. Dave balanced the checkbook, got the tires rotated, and fixed leaky faucets. Weekday mornings, as I stood at the kitchen sink rinsing out last night’s beer bottles, I would be seized by the sensation of a hand on my throat. Sometimes I could shake it off with a shot of scotch, which I kept in a crystal decanter on the counter, but the feeling never fully disappeared. It hovered in my apartment, in the grocery store, in the gym, where I killed myself with sit-ups, haunting me with questions I couldn’t answer.

“When is it going to happen?” I would whisper as I washed the dishes. When was
what
going to happen? I had no idea.

When I finally got a real job, I thought, Well,
that
must be it. It wasn’t, but I was distracted for the moment, and earning a bit more money. I was hired as an activities coordinator in the Alzheimer and Dementia unit of a nursing home. For eight hours a day I played the hapless leader to a dozen lost souls, men and women who’d led lives of dignity and now looked to me, a twenty-something-year-old stranger, to remind them who and where they were. I kept them busy with a kindergartenish program of finger painting and sing-alongs. Every day at sundown the old folks went berserk. One woman would put on her hat and coat and sit by the locked door, clutching an empty purse tightly against her chest as she waited for her mother to pick her up.

“What did you do to her?” a man once blurted in the middle of our daily exercise class. He was holding a three-pound hand weight that he was ready to hurl at me. “What did you do to my mother?”

Others had lost their ability to speak and simply howled.

Every morning I would sit them down at the activities table with mugs of decaf. Even though I knew how all twelve of them took their coffee, I went through the ritual of asking them again. It always made them feel good to remember a simple script like “Cream, no sugar.” Sometimes we played bingo. I would pluck out numbers from a rotating wire basket as the old folks peered at their cards without making a move. Because they loved bingo, and always perked up when I started a game, I had to memorize twelve different bingo cards, which I dealt to the same people each week, and play all twelve games in my head simultaneously while calling numbers.

Is it possible to have nostalgia for a time in which you never lived? I’m sure there is a word for this phenomenon in German—beautiful, absurd, and twenty letters long. I felt more at home playing bingo and listening to Artie Shaw records with a bunch of white-haired old wraiths than I ever did with my high-school or college friends. Here was the generation I belonged to: they loved to clip coupons for food they would never buy and complain about the exorbitant price of shoes. They could sit for hours listening to stories read out loud, and they’d learned the canon of American poetry by heart. Every once in a while, when we were sitting at the activities table for our tenth coffee break of the day, I would offer a single line:

“The woods are lovely, dark, and deep.…”

Like a pebble tossed in the still water of a koi pond, memories rippled out of them in concentric circles.

“And I have promises to keep.”

“And miles to go before I sleep.”

“And miles to go before I sleep.”

I didn’t play with poetry often, because it always made me cry, and tears are contagious in a nursing home. The residents mimicked whatever mood I was in. If I laughed, they laughed whether or not
they got the joke, and if I started crying, a box of Kleenex worked its way around the table.

“Your job is so sad,” Dave would say when I told him how my day went. “I don’t know how you do it.”

I drank, that’s how. Two to three liters of scotch a week, usually alone, as Dave wasn’t much of a drinker. To slow myself down I’d buy a six-pack of beer, the logic being that since I didn’t really like beer this would force me to drink less. I wasn’t an alcoholic. I had a job, a boyfriend, and a college diploma. It was medicinal drinking, something classy people do in
New Yorker
stories.
It’s not my fault
, I would say defensively to no one but myself. Some people couldn’t open their eyes before drinking a pot of coffee. I hated caffeine. I just needed one, at most two, shots of scotch to face the day. And, besides, I worked hard. Didn’t I have a right to drink?

Sad as my day job was, I loved it. I felt completely at home in that place, where life was stripped down to the barest elements. Emotions in the dementia ward rose up, exploded, and cooled like the same forces of nature that formed the universe. People screamed when they were angry. They cried when they were sad. The laughter in those rooms was made of a hard, indestructible material, something mined from the deepest recesses of the human heart. We laughed a lot. Even an aphasic could tell a good joke. One woman named Leah swiped a pickle from a man’s plate at lunch and regarded it curiously for a moment. She then looked at me, held the pickle at her crotch, and swung it around. Leah was seventy-two years old and had lost the ability to form a sentence, but she knew one thing instinctually:

Leah was shorter than I was and wore unintentionally hip polyester pantsuits. I loved her to pieces. But my favorite person in the ward was a ninety-seven-year-old man named Saul. He was a hunchback with a shock of milky white hair and large blue eyes that still glimmered with understanding. Once the head of surgery at a famous
New York hospital, Saul had enjoyed decades of comfortable retirement before finding himself stranded in our unit. He spent most of his days hiding behind a
New York Times
that he would snatch from the nursing home’s library. Staff and residents from the main unit were constantly asking me about this.

“Did that man steal the paper again?”

“Who, Saul?” I would say. “Impossible. He’s been with me all morning.”

Saul didn’t have Alzheimer’s, as far as I could tell. He was able to recall in startling detail a time when the Bronx was a hamlet that brushed up against wilderness, when traveling a relatively short distance was unthinkable if you didn’t own a horse. He knew that there was a war going on in the Middle East, that it was suspiciously similar to another war we’d fought there not long before, and that war was a terrible thing even when it seemed just. Yet there were certain facts of his personal life that he had blocked out. His wife of sixty years had died a few years earlier; his healthy forty-year-old daughter had died very suddenly not long after his wife; his only surviving child had left him there to live the last of his days among strangers. When quizzed by specialists at the nursing home about these events, Saul would draw a blank, become very confused, and change the subject.

It made sense to me. There are some things that we have to forget about in order to get through the day.

Saul could be forgetful about other, less dramatic facts, too, but for him this seemed to be more of a lifestyle choice. He refused to remember the names of the other residents, for example, but that was because he didn’t like them. They were a band of lunatics, he told me one afternoon. “I mean, they’ve really lost their minds!”

When certain old women in our ward got upset, they could be soothed almost instantly by being given a lifelike baby doll to hold. These dolls and all their blankets and bibs were stored in a plastic box in my office. I felt that the dolls, like Valium, should be dispensed only in an emergency. The women would swaddle the babies
and hold them expertly against their breasts. Their voices would become very soft and tender as they stared into the painted, unchanging faces. Saul was horrified by these scenes.

“Are these women soft?” he asked me. “Those aren’t real babies! They’re dolls—am I right?”

I agreed that it was one of the creepier activities going on in our unit. I usually asked one of the nurses’ aides to distribute the dolls for me, because I couldn’t bring myself to pretend that the babies were real. It was too much, a line I wouldn’t cross. Until a particularly bad day, when all the residents were belligerent and wailing as though possessed by a wild, bewitching moon. I treated myself to a couple of cocktails at lunch—Bloody Marys, because they counted as a serving of vegetables. When I got back to work, the residents were still raging. I surrendered and decided to open the box myself. Holding a doll in my arms, I approached a group of women who were staring blankly at their coffee mugs.

“Oh, wookit da baby!” I cried. “Ooochie cooochie coo.”

The women looked at the doll and their faces lit up with sheepish glee. Just then I felt a tap on my shoulder. Saul was standing behind me. He lifted a gnarled and shaky finger up to my face. His skin was very pale and flooded with thick veins.

“Et tu, Brute?” he said.

I could not have loved anyone more.

I’d been working at the nursing home for more than a year when Saul went into the hospital with pneumonia. A few days after Christmas, I was reviewing the logbook at the beginning of my shift and read, “On December —, the ——— family reported that Saul has expired.”
Expired?
Beneath this were the usual reports of what the other residents had eaten and what their bowel movements had been like. I was furious. His family hadn’t felt it necessary to tell us, the nursing-home staff who’d spent all day and night with him, until after his body had been taken to New York for burial. If there was any kind of memorial service, we weren’t invited.

I stormed down the hall to Saul’s bedroom. The door was unlocked, and I went inside. The blinds were shut but sunlight poured
in at the edges and crawled around the windowsill in stubborn, shattered rays. Everything was neat and orderly, just as Saul kept it. There were his spare set of glasses on the dresser, his pile of annotated newspapers and magazines, a little mangled by his shaky hands but neatly stacked on a chair by his bed. Beneath them lay an atlas he had borrowed, permanently, from the library, bookmarked with little scraps of paper to the pages he’d been studying, mostly of Asia and the Middle East.

I wanted something of his to keep. I felt that I deserved it. If Saul had known that he was leaving, he would have given me a token himself. (My God, I realized, we never even said goodbye.) I knew that I couldn’t take anything of value. His family would be coming to clean out his room, and accusations of stealing were common whenever anything got lost. My heart thumped audibly in my chest. I didn’t have much time before someone noticed that I was gone, or came in and saw me, and there would be no way to explain. I opened the top drawer of his dresser, and there it was—the spiral-bound three-by-five-inch index cards that Saul had kept in his shirt pocket to scribble his questions and notes of the days’ events. I slipped it inside my sleeve, quietly closed the drawer, and squirreled the cards away to my office.

I took my lunch break early that day and sat alone at a Mexican restaurant to read Saul’s notes. As I read the scraggly script on each card, I realized that this tiny notebook had become a journal of Saul’s disintegrating mind. There were pages of questions about the geography of Iraq, as well as the answers he’d found in the atlas. (“The newspaper is
not
incorrect,” he wrote. “Iraq has a Q divorced from its customary U … not a misspelling?”) He’d recorded what was served for lunch on a random day. The name of his doctor appeared several times, as well as her phone number. I flipped to the next card.