Alice LaPlante - Turn of Mind

I keep gazing at the house. It could almost be my own, that could almost be my bedroom window, that could almost be the iron gate to my backyard.

When do you move in?

Well, it’s a little complicated. Closing was delayed. Because of Amanda. She had cosigned the loan for me.

And why would that be a problem? Did she change her mind?

No. No, of course not.

Well?

Fiona is silent for a moment. Then, I just decided I didn’t want to bother her with it after all.

Why didn’t you ask me? Or your father?

Fiona twists a purple lock around her index finger. I don’t know. Just didn’t want to make you feel obliged. It turned out okay. I was able to come up with enough money.

Well, you know if you ever need help . . .

Yes, I know. You’ve always been very generous.

Mark is a different matter altogether, of course. Your father and I don’t trust his judgment in money matters.

You’re a little hard on him, you know.

Perhaps. Perhaps.

I have forgotten I am still holding the photograph until she reaches out and plucks it from my hand, folds it carefully, and puts it back in her pocket. Then pulls it out and looks at it again, as if checking that it is real, the way I used to pat her little arms and legs when she slept, amazed I had produced this perfect being.

It is my home, she says, so softly I can barely make out the words. And she smiles.

From my notebook:

I watched David Letterman last night. So, in homage:

TOP 10 SIGNS YOU HAVE ALZHEIMER’S 10. Your husband starts introducing himself as your “caregiver.”9. You find an hourly activity schedule taped up on your refrigerator that includes “walks,” “crocheting,” and “yoga.”8. Everyone starts giving you crossword puzzle books.7. Strangers are suddenly very affectionate.6. The doors are all locked from the outside.5. You ask your grandson to take you to the junior prom.4. Your right hand doesn’t know what your left hand has done.3. Girl Scouts come over and force you to decorate flower pots with them.2. You keep discovering new rooms in your house.And the No. 1 sign you have Alzheimer’s is . . . It’s somehow slipped your mind.

If I could see through this fog. Break through this heaviness of limbs and extremities. Every inhalation stabs. My hands limp in my lap. Pale and impotent, they used to wield shiny sharp things, lovely things with heft and weight that bestowed power.

People would lie down and bare their naked flesh. Invite me to dismember them. And if thy hand off end thee, cut it off: it is better for thee to enter into life maimed, than having two hands to go into hell, into the fire that never shall be quenched.

Write about yourself, Magdalena urges. If it helps, write in the third person. Tell me a story about a woman who happens to be named Jennifer White.

She is a reserved person. Some would say cold. Yet others welcomed that quality, saw it as a form of integrity. She thought either was a fair assessment. Both could be attributed to her training. Surgery requires precision, objectivity.

You don’t get emotional over a hand. A hand is a collection of facts. The eight bones of the carpus, the five bones of the metacarpus, and the fourteen phalanges. The flexor and extensor tendons that maneuver the digits. The muscles of the forearm. The opposable thumb. All intertwined. Multiple interconnections. All necessary to the balance of motion that separates humans from other species.

But Amanda. She thinks of Amanda’s metacarpus, minus four sets of phalanges. A mutilated starfish. Does she cry? No. She writes it in her notebook. Amanda died. Fingerless . But the details won’t stick.

I stop, put my pen down. I ask Magdalena, Which neighbor was suspected in Amanda’s death? but she will not answer. Perhaps because I have asked and she has answered the question many times. Perhaps because she knows I will forget my question if she ignores it.

But I rarely forget that a question has been asked. When Magdalena ignores me, unfinished business lies heavy between us, disrupts our routine, hangs over us as we drink our tea. In this case, it pollutes the very air. For something is terribly wrong.

My notebook again. Fiona’s handwriting:

Came over today to find you uncharacteristically subdued. Anger we see a lot of. Bewilderment. And a surprising degree of intelligent acceptance. But rarely this resigned passivity.

You were slumped at the table, your face flat down, your hands hanging at your sides. I crouched down and put my arm around your shoulders, but you didn’t move or say anything. Wouldn’t answer any questions or give any sign you knew I was there.

Eventually you sat up, pushed back the chair, and slowly went up the stairs to bed. I didn’t dare follow you. Didn’t dare ask any more questions for fear of what you would reveal about the dark place you were residing in.

I had never been afraid like that. I wasn’t always sure what you were thinking, but I could always ask, and sometimes you would even tell me. If the truth had the power to hurt, you made it palatable by your calm acceptance of it.

You don’t really like me very much, do you? I asked you when I was fifteen. No, you said, and you don’t like me very much either right now.

But we’ll find each other again. And we did. If I’d known that within a decade I would lose both you and Dad, would I have acted differently back then? Probably not. I probably would have gone out and gotten another tattoo.

That tattoo. You keep asking about it, Mom, so I’ll write it down here. It’s a pretty good story. I already had two tattoos. There was the one I got with Eric when I was fourteen. You didn’t know about that one. It’s very discreet—on my left buttock. A tiny Tinker Bell. Well, I was fourteen.

Then when I was sixteen, the youngest freshman in my class at Stanford, I got another one, this time on my ankle. A cannabis sativa plant. Yes, you can guess why a kid really too young to be away from home would think that was cool.

But the rattlesnake. That was my junior year. I’d done okay the first two years, better than I’d done in high school socially, actually made some friends, did the things you’d expect. Drank too much. Slept around.

But in my junior year, things fell apart. My best friend had a sort of breakdown and went home to West Virginia. He wrote a couple times, made jokes about the skinny dogs and the ugly women, and that was that. Two of my other friends started dating each other, retreated into their own private world, put up a barrier against others. It felt oddly personal.

At that point, I was living off campus in a room rented from this Silicon Valley marketing type. She wasn’t there half the time, either traveling or staying up in the city with her boyfriend. The house was up in the redwoods, high above the university.

When people came up to visit they’d sit in the hot tub and ooh and aah, but I never got used to the place. The quiet disturbed me, as did the fact that the sun went behind the hills at two in the afternoon and suddenly the day was over.

Coyotes trotted boldly through the yard, rats scratched under the floors and in the woodwork, and even the deer spooked me. They’d come right up to the house to forage, and since there were no curtains on the windows—the house was on three acres of redwoods, so there was no need—I’d woken up several times to deer faces pressed against the glass, solemnly observing me as they chewed.