Amy Tan - The Opposite of Fate

Months later, I asked whether she had finished reading the book. “No time,” she said. Even later, her excuse was this: “Why I need finish? That’s my story. I already know the ending.”

I saw more things that she could not finish: Half-knit sweaters. Bills she opened but had not paid. Food she had defrosted but had not cooked. Her apartment was becoming untidy, not just cluttered in the way it had always been, but dirty. She forgot to lock her door and the security elevator. She forgot how to go in reverse and dented her car backing out of her garage. She later bashed it again, running into the back of a truck. And even stranger, she didn’t seem very concerned that her car was full of dings.

I also noticed that my once fastidious mother was looking disheveled. She wore the same clothes every day, a purple sweater, a pair of black stretch pants. She was not bathing. Her hair was dirty and it smelled. One day when I suggested she wash her hair before we went to a dressy event, she commented that the shower knobs were broken.

I went to the bathroom to check. They were fine. It occurred to me that she did not know how to adjust them. As someone who goes on book tours and stays in a different hotel every night, I know how disconcerting it is to figure out how the water works without getting either scalded or doused with cold water. I turned on the water, adjusted the temperature, and ran a bath for my mother. Then I noticed that she was missing soap, shampoo, toothpaste. Why had she not bothered to buy these things? I made a mental note to do some shopping for her.

Sometime later, our family was gathered around the dining table for a Thanksgiving different from the disastrous one of a few years before. We were with my husband’s family. The conversation touched on sports, the weather, politics, and then eventually on O. J. Simpson’s acquittal. My mother had a comment to make there. “Oh, that man kill his wife,” she said with great authority. “I there. I see it.”

“You mean you saw it on television,” I corrected.

“No!” my mother insisted. “I there. He hide in bush, jump out, cut the knife on that girl’s throat. So much blood, you cannot believe so much. Awful.”

My mother’s English often left seeming gaps in logic. I frequently served as her interpreter, even in childhood, when I wrote my own letters to the principal, excusing my absence from school. I now attempted to clarify for the others what she meant: “Oh, you saw a documentary on what the lawyers said happened.”

“Maybe you see documentary,” my mother replied. “I see everything. I there.”

“What do you mean?” I said. Lou put his hand on my arm. Those around us had grown quiet, sipping wine or chewing turkey in embarrassment. But I couldn’t stop. I had to know what was going on. Did my mother think she had astrally projected herself?

She was oblivious of everyone’s discomfort. “I hide in bush too.”

“You saw him get in his car and go home?”

My mother nodded. “I follow.”

“How? How did you get to Los Angeles?”

I couldn’t shake her illogic. “I don’t remember. Must be I drive.”

“And you were in his bedroom when he cleaned up?”

She nodded confidently.

“You watched him get undressed?” I challenged, desperate to make her realize how crazy her line of thinking was.

“Oh, no!” she answered quickly. “I turn my eyes away.”

That was the moment I could no longer deny to myself that something was terribly wrong. She was certainly at an age when Alzheimer’s could be a possibility. On the way home, Lou and I agreed we needed to take her to the doctor.

To get her there would require subterfuge. I told her we were going for a checkup.

“I already checkup this year,” she said.

“We need another one,” I said, and then I took the plunge: “I think we should check out this problem with your memory.”

“What problem?” my mother said.

“Well, sometimes you forget things … It could be due to depression.”

And my mother shot back: “Nothing wrong my memory. Depress ’cause can not forget.” Then she started to recount the tragedies of losing her mother, my brother, my father. She was right. Nothing was wrong with her memory.

“Well, let’s just go to the doctor to check your blood pressure. Last time it was high. You don’t want to have a stroke, do you?”

A week later, we were in her internist’s office. He asked her a few questions. “How old are you?”

“Oh, I already almost eighty-one.”

The doctor glanced at my mother’s chart. “She might mean her Chinese age,” I said. The doctor waved away my explanation. What I wanted to tell him, of course, was the problem with her age, how it had always been a source of massive confusion and exasperation in our family. Her age was no easy answer. Even a person with all her wits about her would have had a hard time answering a question that sounded as simple as “How old are you?” But then I realized I was trying to protect my mother—or perhaps myself—from hearing the diagnosis.

The doctor posed another question: “How many children do you have?”

“Three,” she said.

I puzzled over her answer. The doctor, of course, had no idea what the correct answer was, but neither did I, unless I knew what context my mother was using. Maybe the three referred to the children she had had with my father: two sons, one daughter, though one son had died in 1967.

“What about Lijun, Jindo, and Yuhang?” I gently prodded, reminding her of her daughters from her first marriage to the bad man. She had been separated from them from 1949 until 1978, so in some ways they had been lost to her as children. When they reappeared in her life, they were “old ladies” by her estimation, not children.

My mother recalculated her answer. “Five children,” she decided.

And this was correct in one sense. There were five living children, three from her first marriage and two from her second. The doctor went on: “I want you to count backward from one hundred and keep subtracting seven.”

My mother began. “Ninety-three.”

“And seven from that?” the doctor asked.

My mother paused and thought hard. “Ninety-three.”

I remember feeling bad that my mother, the one who scolded me for anything less than straight A’s, was now failing miserably. While I knew she had a problem, I was not prepared to see how bad it truly was.

“Who’s the president of the United States?” the doctor posed.

My mother snorted. That was easy. “Clinton.”

“And who was the president before that?”

My mother crinkled her brow, before she answered, “Still Clinton.” She was obviously referring to the previous year, not the previous president.

The doctor did a brief physical, testing my mother’s reflexes, tapping her tiny knees, running his stethoscope over her doll-like body. The test was almost over, when the doctor made an innocuous remark, which I can no longer recall. Perhaps he apologized to my mother for putting her through so many questions, as if she were on trial. Whatever it was, my mother began to talk about O. J. Simpson’s trial and how she knew he was guilty because she had been right there when he killed his wife. And in her mind, she again was right there, as she had been at the Thanksgiving table. She reenacted the scene: how she hid in the bushes, how she saw the blood “spurt all over the place.”

The doctor gave me his diagnosis that day, although I did not really need to hear it to know it.

Some months later, I decided to throw a black-tie dinner in a nightclub for my mother’s eightieth birthday. I invited family and all her friends. I hired a professional ballroom dancer because my mother adored dancing. In the invitation, I wrote a note about my mother’s diagnosis. I explained what difficulties she might have, what changes might be noticed in the future. I said the best present anyone could give her was continued friendship.