ALL OF US AT THE SAME TIME
©Jo Dereske 2014Chapter 5
Yellow Stickies
“Do you like to talk when you first get up?” Louise asked me after seeing me in her kitchen every morning when she rose, coffee ready to pour, some tidbit of conversation I thought might cheer her. She was bleary-eyed, wrapped in a blue robe that had obviously been a long-time favorite.
“No,” I admitted. “That’s why I get up before Kipling. I have to sit alone and drink coffee until I’m ready to face the world.”
“Me, too,” she said and then after a perfect pause, “There’s nothing worse than being greeted by a grinning face first thing in the morning.” She gazed at me for a long moment before lifting her coffee cup.
There was no mistaking her comment was aimed at me. But, but . . . Shouldn’t I be there to greet them in the morning? What if something happened during the night? What if they were confused by my not being there?
After sulking that I wasn’t the ray of sunshine I believed I was, the next morning I began a new regimen. I let myself into their house while they were still asleep, making the coffee and pouring it into the insulated carafe they were accustomed to seeing on the table, muffins or cereal beside it. My return to their house wouldn’t be until I’d seen movement through their windows, although I often skulked on the little house’s glassed-in porch like a spy, as anxious as a mother.
Ray and Barbara had left “yellow stickies” for Mike while Louise was in the hospital and I reinstated the practice, every morning adhering yellow Post-its to Louse and Mike’s placemats. Each note was topped by the day of the week, the date and year, plus a few words if anything unusual was happening. “Patsy is coming for a bath today.” “Doctor’s appointment at 10:00.”
“Isn’t today Sunday?” Louise asked several times a day. For some reason, Sunday had developed into a touchstone. When I’d told her no, it’s Monday or Thursday, etc., she’d proclaim forlornly, “I’m all mixed up then.” But one day a week when she asked, “Isn’t today Sunday?” we could say with great relief, “You’re right, it’s Sunday,” and she’d smile and say smugly, “Well, at least I know what day it is.”
With the advent of the notes, I explained over and over, trying to sound fresh, as if it were the first time I’d said it, “If you ever wonder what day it is, Aunt Louise, just look at your note. I’ll always write the day of the week at the top.”
It would be weeks and hundreds of questions later before she began to look at the note on her own, but gradually it became a habit to reach for her note when she was confused, at least most of the time.
“Today’s news,” she called the yellow stickies, and frequently not trusting that she and Mike had identical news, she’d take his and stick it next to her own on her placemat.
1929 Bill said he loves me and wants to marry me and that he’s going to buy me a diamond ring! I think I’m beginning to understand what real love is. But I want a sign(?) that this is really “it.”
Mrs. B. said I owe her for cleaning the blanket Bill and I took to the park last night to lay on. It’s not even dirty. A beautiful moon tonight, silver and shimmery.
The differences between Louise and Mike’s dementia became more distinct. Mike’s world was fading, as if a gauzy curtain was descending over it. Occasionally that curtain would rise, permitting him to see and comment with perfect clarity. Other times it was as if his gauze curtain had been layered over by velvet drapery, closing him inside, away from us.
Louise saw the world too clearly. Each experience was icily distinct, fleeting past, deeply experienced, and poof! Gone. What she could hang onto, though, gripped her by the throat until she burned up with obsession over it: where were her car keys? Did the neighbors ever find their dog? I didn’t eat lunch; I know I didn’t eat lunch.
For me, her forgetting was preferable to watching her agitated bewilderment as she was consumed by her fixations.
She lived in a continually renewing world. She could reread the same newspaper every day and find the news fresh. One day she picked up a paper tucked into the magazine rack.
“It says here: ‘Major snowstorm struck area fifty years ago today.’ Do you remember that, Mike?”
“No,” answered Mike.
“Of course not. You weren’t born yet. Or were you? How old are you?”
“Well, how old are you?” Uncle Mike asked, shifting uncomfortably on the couch.
“You tell me how old you are, then I’ll know how old I am.”
“I’m not going to tell you how old I am,” Uncle Mike answered indignantly.
“Then I’m not going to tell you how old I am, either,” she said, and angrily shook the newspaper before disappearing behind it.
1929 Bill gave me a diamond ring! I’m engaged!! He wants to get married right away but I want to wait. What for? I don’t know. He showed me pictures of his family in Holland. They look like royalty: furs, feather hats, medals. I celebrated my engagement by buying a beautiful green dress for fifteen dollars. Wow. I want so many things I can’t afford.
I felt so happy and tough that I called Vince and told him to meet me at Rialto. I want my money back. $100. Not chicken scratch.
I met V. and I looked like a million bucks. Boy, wasn’t he sorry! But I don’t care. I despise him. He said he can’t pay me back my $100. Hah! Jimmy saved Vince from a thrashing – by me! “You want the cops to come?” Jimmy asked me. But what else do you do to a thief?
The Lake
On a brilliant winter morning I pulled my eyes away from my computer screen and raised them to the sky. Puffy white clouds banded lumpily along the horizon and momentarily forgetting where I was, I thought with pleasure, “The mountains are out,” and immediately suffered a stab of longing for the Northwest. I switched back to reality and glanced at the main house. Louise sat gazing out of the living room window, frowning. She’d been resistant to everything I’d offered that morning: coffee, breakfast, a trip to town, help with a bath, finally asking me, “Don’t you have work to do somewhere else?” I dreaded talking to her again, but I crossed the driveway, steeling myself to hear what was upsetting her this time.
“Do you think the Lake is frozen?” she asked as soon as I walked in the door. She meant Lake Michigan and I knew it was.
“Let’s go see,” I suggested and she beelined for the closet to pull out her coat and boots, calling out “Mikey! Hurry up or you’ll be left behind.”
In the flurry and excitement of a sudden holiday, the four or us headed due west toward the lakeshore in Ludington. The roads were bare, the fields sparkling in the sunshine, tree shadows flung cobalt across the snow.
The park was closed, crisscrossed by snow fences but the City plowed the parking lot at the boat launch, snowbanks thoughtfully pushed aside not to block the view. It was a winter without ferry service and the harbor had been allowed to freeze, the ice breaker gone elsewhere.
High winds and sub-freezing temperatures had upended gargantuan blocks of ice, reshaping the harbor into a broken landscape of icebergs and craters. In the sunlight, the underbellies flashed blue. Farther out, sudden sprays of water exploded between the shattered ice. It was a treacherous place. At the end of the ice-sheeted breakwall, the white lighthouse brooded over the harbor entrance, its rotating light dark.
The Lake, which was always in motion, throbbing with waves and sound, was now hidden beneath its frozen crust, absolutely silent.
“It’s eerie,” Louise said, marveling at the humped and broken white.
“It’s Lake Michigan,” Mike corrected, “not Erie.”
We sat in the car for a half hour, intermittently starting the car for warmth, just watching.
Louise sighed. “I’ll never forget this,” she said, her voice warm with content.
1929 Dog tired. Out with Bill until two AM. He gave me $20 for a new dress. I bought a hat and a dress (with a feather!) for $27.50. He feels bad about Vince taking my money and says I’ll never have to worry about giving HIM money.
Other men keep calling even though I’m engaged. I’m true blue to Billy.
The cold weather brought a small wild creature into the attic of the little house.
We heard it scurrying, racing from one end of the ceiling to the other, up and down the walls, startling us when it scampered over our heads or chewed in the walls beside the bed in the middle of the night.
“It has to go,” Kipling said.
He decided not to set one of the wooden spring traps we stored on the back porch and baited for mice that invaded the house. “It might not really be a mouse,” he explained.
I couldn’t think of anything else but a mouse that might scurry through the walls.
At the hardware store Kipling inquired about a small live trap. “A live trap?” the clerk asked. “What for?”
“We might have a mouse in our attic.”
The clerk raised his eyebrows. “You want a live trap for a mouse?”
Kipling nodded. “It could be some other animal. Smallish.”
“I’ll show you what I have,” the clerk said and stepped to the back of the store, returning with a bag of the same spring mousetraps that we had at home.
Next, Kipling tried to out-think the small creature. He pulled a ladder out of the barn and propped it against the house so he could reach the attic vent where he spent an hour in the cold rigging up a trap of sorts from wire and wood that would allow the animal to exit but not return. He filled a jar lid with sunflower seeds.
That night, the attic was silent. “See?” Kipling said. “No reason to kill it.”
I was doubtful and sure enough on the following night the creature returned, sounding as if it had enlisted friends. Scampering and chewing and rustling kept us awake most of the night. I burrowed under my pillow; it was like trying to sleep with one mosquito buzzing and divebombing your head.
Finally Kipling admitted defeat and reluctantly brought in Mike’s step ladder. He slid back the attic door in the ceiling and set a spring trap baited with peanut butter. Within an hour we heard the definitive snap. Kipling climbed back up to open the attic door.
“Look at this,” he sadly said, holding out the trap.
It held a tiny gray mouse with a soft white underbelly and cannily knuckled feet, like hands. We’d caught plain brown mice beneath the kitchen sink, but nothing like the silvery mouse from the attic.
“Upstairs, downstairs,” Kipling commented, and indeed the little upstairs mouse seemed a higher class mouse than our scruffy kitchen mice.
Such a tiny animal had made all that racket, yet after the demise of the wee gray creature, our walls and attic were appropriately silent.
1929 A letter from J. Osborne. Said he loves me and wants to marry me! Huh? I haven’t even been out with him for two months.
I worry Billy cares too much for me. We went to a movie at United Artists. What should I do? I feel blue when I’m not with him.
An aide came once a week and assisted Louise with personal care and also reported her vital signs and condition back to the nurse. I’d originally planned to provide personal care to Louise but she was offended by the idea. “Absolutely not. You’re my niece.”
The aide’s name was Patsy. She was solidly into her fifties, curly-haired, with a laugh deepened from smoking. When Louise told Patsy, “It’s too cold for a bath,” Patsy agreed, saying, “Winter sure is hanging on,” yet somehow coaxed her into the tub without another murmur of protest.
Louise welcomed Patsy’s visits. I left the house or stayed away when Patsy arrived, giving the two women privacy – and a break for myself. But suddenly there was another of the unexplained shifts.
Patsy pulled into the driveway on Monday afternoon. Only a couple of minutes later she drove away. When I investigated I found both Louise and Mike sitting quietly in the living room. “She never came in here,” Louise said innocently when I asked about Patsy.
Patsy rescheduled her visit for the next day but Mike refused to let her in. “Louise is sleeping,” he said and closed and locked the door in her face before I could intervene. And when Patsy gamely returned on Friday Louise flat out refused a bath.
Barbara and I had a talk with Louise and Mike. Explaining anything could be a futile exercise but we were determined to keep it simple and firm.
“Oh, we’d never not let Patsy in,” Aunt Louise assured us, tsk-tsking as if shocked we’d ever suspected her of being so recalcitrant.
Patsy phoned the evening before the next visit. “The nurse needs to be sure Louise wants me,” she said. I could hear a faint or else in her voice.
“She does,” I assured her. “We’ve talked to her. She understands and she knows she needs a bath.”
That was true. For the past several days Louise had been complaining five and ten times a day how desperately she needed a bath. It had grown into a low-level but pervasive obsession. When I tried to help her she refused. “I’ll wait for that woman,” she said.
Louise had just risen from bed when Patsy arrived. “It’s too cold,” she complained when she spotted Patsy removing her jacket in the kitchen, and began to shake in exaggerated shivers.
“I’ll turn up the heat,” I offered and turned the thermostat to 82 degrees. No matter. Louise pounded the table with her hands as if her shivering was uncontrollable.
“You’re part of Social Services, correct?” she asked Patsy in a clearly put-on shaky voice.
“Yes I am.”
“Just as I thought: the SS.” She shook so much she couldn’t pick up her coffee cup. When Patsy and I looked away, she stopped, and when we turned back to her she trembled worse.
“Should we do it?” Patsy asked me too softly for Louise to hear.
I’d thought this through. If Louise didn’t have a bath, she’d be yearning for one and angry she didn’t get it. “Yes,” I said.
From the bathroom I heard Patsy murmuring and Aunt Louise sobbing. “This is the cruelest thing that’s ever happened to me,” she cried. “I’ll refuse another bath for ten years.”
Mike sat in the living room, rocking back and forth in agitation. “If they hurt Weezie. . . ” he said, making fists.
As if he’d heard the fuss, Kipling arrived. Taking in the situation, he asked Mike, “Can you show me how to start that pump in the garage?”
Mike couldn’t resist a plea for assistance. There was no pump in the garage, but that didn’t matter, because Mike would forget the details of the request and be content in Kipling’s company. I watched the two men amble off companionably toward the garage, leaving the bath-time chaos behind.
When Louise finally emerged from the bathroom, clean and smelling of Keri-Lotion, her face was pink and beaming. She stood taller, preened a little. Patsy entered the kitchen behind her, disheveled and exhausted and looking in need of a long hot soak herself.
1929 I warned Mrs. B. that I might be getting married soon and would be quitting. “After all I’ve done for you?” she said. Bill was over for a while and I showed my temper in the worse form, he still says he loves me. Sometimes I can’t help it, or, I CAN help it, I just DON’T.
By mid-February a foot-high stack of seed catalogs had arrived in Louise and Mike’s mailbox. Kipling’s eyes gleamed as if a treasure chest had been delivered into his hands. He intended to engage Mike in planning a garden. We all hoped that gardening still remained as Mike’s true passion, but Kipling longed to try his own hand at gardening, too. “It would be fun to eat food I’ve grown myself,” he said dreamily and I knew he was gazing into a summer vision of himself and Mike presiding over a garden of legend – raising vegetables identical to those pictured in the seed catalogs: “Corn higher than your head! Tomatoes the size of baseballs.”
Kipling gathered the catalogs and sat down at the table with Mike. “Which vegetables do you grow in your garden?” he asked, opening a catalog in front of Mike to a colorful illustration of glossy tomatoes.
“Well, I don’t know,” Mike said, gazing blankly at the succulent fruit.
“Do you want to grow tomatoes, Uncle Mike?” I leaned over and put in, and Mike began clasping his hands in agitation, unable to answer my question.
Kipling cast me a considering look that made me blanch, and Louise jumped to Mike’s defense. “He’ll grow whatever he wants, won’t you, Mikey? You can’t tell him what to grow.”
“What can you do?” Mike said, shrugging, withdrawing.
Kipling let the subject drop for the time being, and I swore to myself I’d stay out of all future garden discussions. He left a stack of seed catalogs beside Mike’s chair, hoping Mike would pick one up, and brought the others home to the little house.
Kipling pored over the catalogs, circling exotic vegetables, folding over page corners, making notes. He drew diagrams based on gardening books and the track of the sun across the garden space, studying, redrawing, and reading more.
“Green beans, for sure,” I heard him mutter, then peer out at the dirty snow.
Words
I’d kept a diary since I was twelve, early on discovering the pleasure and relief of spewing forth my young woes. But the diaries also transformed my past into a weight, a burden that was usually meaningless – often foolish – when viewed from the present.
So every few years I destroyed all of them in a mix of horror and relief. All my words – gone. Seeing a garbage bag stuffed with shredded paper or curling pages on a bonfire was a wickedly delicious release. Well, that’s over. I’d begin a new diary in a lighthearted mood until a few years later when I’d repeat the cycle.
As the days on the farm passed and the tensions increased, my diary took up more time and more space. I might sit down and write three, four, five entries a day, chronicling my frustrations, the tragedies and small triumphs. I began carrying a small spiral notebook with yellow paper to jot down thoughts or ideas and record conversations. I found a spiral Audubon calendar divided into weeks. In each day’s space, I recorded in minuscule writing medical details, who stopped by, appointments, menus of meals I’d prepared, general health and weather. I abbreviated and truncated to fit more into the rectangular spaces. Louise became AL, Mike UM, each day summarized as “bad “or “good” and all its variations.
I was mad to make sense of what we were experiencing, to get it down on paper – and out of my head.
“Am I being as obsessive as Aunt Louise?” I asked Kipling one day as I squinted over the Audubon calendar.
“Well, you are her niece.”
1929 Do I love Bill? He called me and I wondered if he loved me too much and then he didn’t call me for two days and why? I called him but he was out. It won’t happen again, like V.
Next Tuesday, Chapter 6: Tiptoeing through Food Read More