Percival Everett - Erasure

I watched her turn the corner into her room, then checked the pistol to find it loaded.

I took Mother to the doctor. He x-rayed her chest and told me that she did not have any kind of lung infection. He did a CAT scan and told me that she had not had a stroke and that he could see no brain shrinkage. She did not have a vitamin B-12 deficiency. He did say there was a presence of tangled nerve fibers. He talked to her, waited and then had the same conversation with her a second time, to which she responded, “Why are we going over this again?”

When we were alone, the doctor stared at me.

“Yes?”

“You’re probably seeing the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease. It could be due to a hardening of her arteries, poor circulation, any number of things. We just don’t know. But all that is really beside the point, because there’s nothing anyone can do to stop it if that’s what it is.”

“What about slowing it down?”

He shook his head.

“So, what do you recommend?”

“Right now things are not so bad. But everything could change overnight. The fact that she didn’t recognize you suggests that the disease is progressing somewhat rapidly. Finally, you’ll have to institutionalize her.”

“I can’t care for her at home?”

“It’s going to be awfully difficult. She really shouldn’t be left alone. She might wander away. She could hurt herself. Falls or other accidents. She could hurt somebody else. Fires, unlocked doors.”

The memory of her holding the pistol flashed in my mind.

“In the later stages, moving will be difficult for her. Her personality will disappear. She’ll lose her abilities to think, perceive and speak. At the very least you’ll have to hire a full-time nurse then.” He stared at me again, then said, “I’m telling you what will eventually come. This might be several years away. I can’t say.”

“Or it might be next week?”

“Unlikely, but possible.” I thanked the doctor, collected Mother and left.

Lorraine was putting Mother to bed. I was in the garage, staring at the nearly finished bedside stand. I looked at the edges and imagined Mother’s thigh bruising upon walking into one. I began to take off the point of one of the corners, finding that as I sawed the wood away I was making two points. I shaved and cut and tore away wood until the top of the table was nearly round and now too small to be practical. The rectangular, tapered legs were not only wrong for the round top but were stuck out beyond the area of the surface. I haphazardly fastened three of the legs to the top, then sat on it. It wobbled a bit, but I didn’t care. It was something to feel in my hollow stupor.

I was about twelve. Father was down to the beach for the weekend as usual. We had gone as a family in the boat to the city dock in Annapolis and bought sandwiches at the open air market. I had my favorite, soft-shelled crab on a hard roll. The day was not too hot. There was a breeze. Everything felt perfect.

Bill waved to a couple of buddies near the shops and seemed to want to go with them, but stayed. Father became cool when he saw the wave.

Lisa was sitting on the long seat in the back of the boat, reading, and I was sitting on the dock, my feet on our boat, eating my sandwich and telling her how I was going to be a writer some day.

“But I’m not going to write stuff like that,” I said. “I’m going to write serious things.”

Lisa laughed. “Yeah, like what?”

“I don’t know yet, but it won’t be crap like that,” I said.

“Monksie, your language,” Mother said.

“All I said was crap,” I said.

“That’s enough, Monk,” from Father.

“This is not crap,” my sister said.

Mother sighed.

“Is too. I want to write books like Crime and Punishment.”

Lisa laughed. “He reads one book and he thinks he’s literary.”

“If Monk says he’ll do it, he’ll do it,” Father said. Then he made one of his pronouncements, the one that did come true. “Lisa, you and Bill will be doctors. But Monk will be an artist. He’s not like us.”

I felt both celebrated and ostracized at the same time. The looks from my siblings were both resentful and mocking. But Lisa loved hearing that she would be a doctor and she turned the attention to herself.

“What kind of doctor will I be, Father?”

“A good one,” he said, as he had every other time she’d asked and it satisfied her.

“And what about Bill?” I asked.

To which Father replied, “I don’t know.”

We ate on in silence.

I was sitting in the study, contemplating the notion of a public and its relationship to the health of art when I looked across the room at the gray box. The box, the contents of which my father deemed so private he’d asked my mother to burn it. But also the contents must have been important enough to him that he failed to burn it all the years he had the chance. My father’s private papers. Somehow I had never imagined any existing beyond deeds and contracts and standard legal documents, but I knew that box contained none of those.

“Father?” I was ten. I had walked into my father’s study on a cold night near Christmas.

“Yes, Monk?” He turned to face me in his swiveling chair, the one he had requested that I not spin around on “like a top.” “It’s late.”

“Sorry.”

“Say, I’m sorry, not sorry.”

“I’m sorry.”

“You’re sorry about what?”

“About it being so late,” I said.

“You can’t change what time it is.”

Then I realized he was having fun with me and I laughed.

“What is it, Monk?”

“I have a question. If somebody tells you something and they tell you it’s a secret, can you ever tell?”

“You can, but I take it your question is should one tell.” He turned his head and looked briefly out the window. “No, you should not betray a confidence.”

“But what if it’s—”

He stopped me. “Never betray a confidence.” When I tried again to speak, he said, “I can tell you’re troubled, but I can also tell that soon you’re going to tell me the secret you’re carrying. If you don’t want a secret, don’t accept it.”

“Okay.” I started out of the room.

“Monk?” When I turned to him, he asked without looking at me, “Does this have anything to do with Bill?”

“No, Father,” I said, telling the truth, but also realizing with him that no could be my only answer to his question. Years later I would wonder if I had unknowingly and accidentally shaded my father’s perception of my older brother.

The box was not large, not terribly deep, and not very full, but these were in it:2 February 1955Dr. Benjamin Ellison

1329 T Street NW

Washington, D.C., USADear Benjamin,I cannot begin to tell you how surprised and of course thrilled I was to find your letter, however brief, in the box this morning. When you told me that you would write, I had my doubts. Not about the sincerity of your feelings certainly, but about your being able to collect time in the midst of your busy professional and family lives.I have just now returned from Southampton. My mother is very ill. It seems she has suffered a stroke. The doctors say it was a minor stroke and that we should see little or no physical manifestation of it. To my perception she appears greatly altered, however subtly. Perhaps it is merely age. She is of course less sharp as we must all become less sharp.What has it been, darling? Six months since we said goodbye? I hope you returned to find your family well and in good shape. I say again, to assure you, that I harbor no ill will toward your wife. She must be a wonderful woman to have you. Are your boy and girl big and rambunctious?I do have some rather good news. I’ll be visiting America in September. I’ll be spending a week of holiday with my sister and her husband in New York. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we could somehow manage a sighting of each other? I am a dreamer, I know.Well, darling, I must sign off now. It’s late and thinking of you is, frankly, a bittersweet exercise. Remember that I love you.