The Body Farm, page 17
At the time, I did not understand this phrase. But I do now.
You have been succumbing to Alzheimer’s for the past few years. I have watched it all. The process is something between a disease and a time machine, aging you backward. Like a child, you now wear a diaper. Like a child, you eat greedily, with abandon. You wrinkle up your nose at the greens on your plate, but you can devour an entire pizza single-handed. (A trim woman always, you have begun to gain weight. I don’t have the heart to stop you. Less fat, less salt, your doctor has instructed me. But you do so enjoy them both.) Like a child, you are entranced by pretty things. Costume jewelry. A jangle of music on the radio. A gleam of sunlight caught in a panel of stained glass.
Recently, over lunch, you kept rediscovering the rich red fabric of your blouse.
“Who gave me this shirt?” you said. “It’s lovely.”
I reminded you to eat your broccoli. I had sprinkled cheese over it to make it more appetizing. But you just sighed.
“My hands are sore,” you said. “Right here, at the joint. It’s hard to hold the fork.”
I reminded you that you had arthritis. I reminded you that your doctor had prescribed some pills.
“Oh?” you said, not much interested. Fingering the crimson fold of your collar, you exclaimed again, “Who gave me this shirt? It’s lovely.”
○
James and I drove to visit a nursing home on a wet day in November. Rain pattered the windshield of his car. In the passenger seat, I sat silent. James fiddled with the radio, changing the station every few minutes. He whistled energetically between his teeth.
You were not with us. We had left you at home, not wishing to discombobulate or unsettle you more than necessary. James had brought a friend of his to stay with you, to keep you company in my absence. A lady friend. James never married, but he does not lack for female companionship either. This one was named Madeline. She was blond, with smeary makeup. Her voice was bright and ringing, like a struck gong, and she shouted everything, evidently assuming you were deaf.
“We’ll watch a little TV together,” she roared, smiling.
You flinched.
“The boys will be back before you know it,” Madeline cried.
You turned away.
In the car, I could not get comfortable. Rain streaked the window, obscuring the view. I kept picturing the expression on your face when you realized I was leaving you. Your eyebrows pooling together. Your mouth open.
The drive took over an hour. James kept telling me facts about the facility. He had found it online. He was enchanted with it. He was sure I would like it too. He was glad I was listening to reason at last.
I gritted my teeth. I stayed silent. Eventually, I dozed.
James woke me in the parking lot. I opened my eyes to see a bush that had been sculpted and trimmed into the shape of a heart. There was a placard with the facility’s name: Garden Villas. A fountain played somewhere, the sound carried on the breeze. I blinked, gathering my wits. I saw a massive brick building coated in ivy. A woman with white hair was seated on a nearby bench, either reading or dozing. The rain had stopped, but the sky was still clotted with clouds.
For the next hour, James and I toured the grounds, the lobby, and the cafeteria. We met a few members of the staff—secretary, nurse, nutritionist. James showed me the medical wing. He showed me the pool. There was a patio where a man in a wheelchair was feeding the sparrows. He scattered seeds across the paving stones, and the birds filled the air with raucous song.
James held my arm as he steered me down the long, carpeted halls. His face was alight with optimism. There was a bounce in his stride. He had done his research. He explained that people of all ages and abilities were welcome at Garden Villas. Some residents lived fairly independent lives. Some could no longer drive. Some could no longer walk. Some could no longer feed or bathe themselves.
“You’d be happy here,” James said. “I really believe you would.”
I said nothing. I smiled. I nodded.
After a while, my son found an administrator and disappeared into a side office for a private chat. I let them go with relief. My body ached from the unaccustomed exertion of so much walking. My face hurt from false grins.
Still, I was proud of myself. I was playing the long game.
My plan is simple: I will dupe my son into a false sense of superiority. It takes two flints to make a fire, so I will give James nothing more to spark against. I will be agreeable. I will give my son the hope he so desperately needs. On the drive home, I praised Garden Villas to the skies. I even tucked a brochure for the facility into my pocket. I let James have this battle so that in the end, I could win the war.
○
That night, you were anxious. You did not remember that I’d been gone, but on some level you were still disturbed by it. You clung to me, leaning hard on my shoulder, causing a cascade of aches throughout my skeleton. I did not complain. I patted your back and reassured you, over and over, that all was well.
I had my own reasons for wanting to see Garden Villas. But I know I will never live there. I will keep you in our own familiar place, with our own habits and routines. I will keep you with me—together, independent, alive.
At home, you navigate with ease. We have lived in our house for decades, long enough that you know instinctively how to get to the bathroom, the kitchen, the sun porch. You will pivot without thought and reach into the silverware drawer. You can’t come up with the word spoon, you can’t articulate what the utensil is for, but your fingers know where to find it nonetheless.
Our house remembers things for you. Your mind is chaos, but there is structure around you—physical, tangible, true. You have forgotten much of your identity, but your fashion sense is there in the contents of the closet. Your artistic streak is present in the knickknacks on the mantelpiece. Your love of nature can be found in the numerous seascapes on our walls. Each piece of furniture was carefully chosen by you—the former you. Each is a kind of external memory. You are constantly confronted with some vital aspect of yourself.
I know I am right. James might not agree. The doctors might not agree. But they don’t know what I know. They don’t know about this kind of love. They don’t know what sixty years of marriage has done to me. What it has done to you. These days, you no longer refer to me by name. I doubt you remember what it is. You no longer think of me as your husband either. Classification of relationships is beyond you.
Instead, you use the word he—“he makes stained glass,” “he can’t abide rainy days”—and you reach for me. You reach for me reflexively, automatically, expecting me to be there at the end of your fingertips. Like an extension of yourself. Your shadow. You no longer remember our wedding day. You do not recognize your old friends in photographs. You have forgotten the purpose of your house keys, your credit card, your phone. But you know me. You always know me. I am closer to you than words. I am closer to you than memory.
○
Lately I have awoken to find coils of ice on the windows. While at work on the sun porch, I have watched a fine mesh of snow falling. The branches are bare now, stark against the sky. I have labored day and night at the willow tree. I have stood at the worktable until my shoulders burn and my ankles swell. I have listened to you laughing in the kitchen. The TV flickers on and off. Sometimes I hear James’s voice in the house. Sometimes I hear nothing at all. Sometimes I lose track of what I have actually done to the lampshade and what I have merely planned to do. Even in my dreams, the pattern appears, looming up beneath my fingers.
The other day I stopped by the antique store and found the perfect base: wrought iron, sturdy, with the suggestion of a tree trunk in its round, grooved stem. Each morning, I arrange a few more gleaming shards. I wield the soldering iron with a certain amount of urgency. I know my time is limited. Sometimes it seems as though the process of making the willow tree is the process of getting ready to die. I am getting my affairs in order. I am finishing my last gift to you.
I will die first. Caregivers usually do. The stress and strain will have their way with me. It might be a heart attack; it might be a stroke. I am hoping for something sudden and painless. Here one moment, gone the next.
When I am in the ground, James will take charge. You will be bundled into a nursing home. Garden Villas—a nice place. I am glad to have seen it. You will enjoy the craft room. The cafeteria. The patio, ringed by evergreen trees.
When I am gone, you will forget me. That is my hope, anyway. I can picture you, settled in. You will spend your days at the window, watching the clouds billow past, listening to the radio play. A few of our old things will be placed strategically around the room. This will liven up the impersonal space, adding a dash of color and comfort. The rug from our den. Your favorite painting of a seascape. Now and then, your gaze will stray to the willow tree lampshade, set in pride of place.
By this point, the disease will have finished its work. You will be childish. You will have lost the last vestiges of your adult mind. You will think the way children do. A world in which everything is still wondrous, yet to be discovered. A world too new for the possibility of memory. A world too safe for the possibility of loss. Staring at the willow tree, you will say, “Who gave that to me?” And again, softly: “Who gave it to me? It’s lovely.”
Starlike
Somewhere in the woods, an owl is screaming. The cry recurs at irregular intervals, ragged and breathless. The sky is a chalkboard slate, the moon a pastel smudge directly overhead, offering no directional guidance. I have finally admitted to myself that I am lost in the wilds of Tennessee.
In the distance, a brook babbles unseen. I move with caution, peering through the gloom for fallen logs and mud slicks. I am forty, too old to be trailblazing at midnight. But I needed a break—from my husband’s brothers, and from my husband.
There is a pale beech stump, roughly the size of a man, that I have passed at least five times, scaring the life out of me on each reappearance. I have gone beyond concern, beyond panic, into a kind of quiet resignation. My body will be found days from now, tumbled in the ivy, scavenged by black vultures, and pearled with mushrooms.
I am a planetary geologist, which seems like it should be helpful in this situation. I know about the helium rain, laced with neon, that falls on Jupiter. I know that a day on Venus lasts longer than a year. I know about the alluvial plains of Tennessee and the loess-covered river terraces that surround the city of Dyersburg. But I do not know the way back to my brother-in-law’s house.
At the crest of a slope, the ground tips beneath me. I skid helplessly downward, grabbing a tree branch to steady myself and wrenching my wrist. It might be sprained. When I get my bearings, the brook has grown louder. There is a flash of silver in the gloom and a damp, earthy musk. I have reached the water’s edge.
And there, in the distance, is the house, the porch light glinting between the leaves. I break into an ecstatic jog, stumbling through the underbrush. Deep in the woods, the owl shrieks like a murder victim. Clutching the stitch in my side, almost sobbing with relief, I tug open the front door.
There is a body on the couch, still and silent. Another curled in a basket chair in the corner. They are all here, of course—all four of my husband’s brothers, out cold, one in the armchair, another laid out on the floor, filling the air with their snoring and the collective fume of alcohol leaching from their pores.
Baylor and I have been in Dyersburg for fifty-six hours. In that time, we have never been alone. His brothers have occupied every minute, roughhousing, fishing, singing the fight song from high school, playing darts, eating fried things, and swimming in an ocean of liquor.
I creep down the hall to the guest bedroom. Baylor is tumbled in a heap of sheets, his breath a sour vapor. I climb into bed beside him. It seems like years since we left Boston. The journey here might as well have been our final passage to hell: taxi and plane and taxi again, ill-fitting chairs, enclosed spaces, no privacy, canned air, noise and bustle, waiting and waiting to end up somewhere I did not want to be.
○
When I first met Baylor, fifteen years ago, he was not an alcoholic. We were both in grad school then, and he rarely drank at all. Sometimes he smoked marijuana, but who didn’t? Occasionally he took pain pills too. It wasn’t hard to get his hands on a prescription for codeine or OxyContin; he’d hurt his back playing football in his teens and could always feign a painful flare-up. During the crush of final exams, he would pop a handful each evening, playfully mixing his meds, going a little over the line of an acceptable dosage. Then he would quit, just before I began to worry.
Sometimes it was speed instead. Diet pills, ADD medication, even cocaine. Baylor would binge for week, eschewing sleep, studying with supernatural vibrancy. He would snort a line in the men’s bathroom with his fellow MBA students, all of them glimmering like dragonflies. He would keep me up at night talking and talking and talking. My head would spin as I tried to follow his theories on climate change and the South after the Civil War and the male libido—all of which were connected, in that moment, in his mind. Then he would quit, just before I began to worry.
At that time, I did not perceive the pattern. Baylor had a thousand justifications for his actions. The diet pills kept him alert. The painkillers helped him relax after a tough exam. The cocaine intensified our lovemaking. The marijuana helped him cope with the dead air in between semesters. He would be sober for a month, even two or three. He would take up a new substance and put it down again, treating each as an isolated incident.
I believed him every time he quit. I did not know any better.
○
I wake up and have no idea where I am. A blazing window. Cork paneling. A deer head hangs on the wall, glaring at me in an accusatory manner. Beside me, Baylor is flung across the mattress, every limb akimbo. He looks like a man dropped from a great height, falling not to his death but into sleep. I decide not to wake him. I will let the liquor simmer in his blood, boiling away like stock in a stew.
My morning routine has a clockwork consistency. A control freak, Baylor says, but I prefer to think of myself as precise, like a fine Swiss watch. A series of stretches. Twelve-step skin care. A brief meditation, aided by an app on my phone.
Down the hall, a clamor indicates that Baylor’s brothers are awake too. I have no desire for conversation. Clutching a blanket around my shoulders, I step onto the side porch. The air is soupy and cold. Moss coats the trees. The sun is not yet visible between the branches, though the eastern sky is soaked with glow.
Baylor grew up in a trailer park on the outskirts of Dyersburg. His brothers all settled within a few miles of the double-wide where his parents still live—except Baylor, the outlier, who moved to the mysterious North with me. The father is a shy mumbler, the mother a wine-addled cipher, but somehow they managed to generate five huge, loud, charismatic sons. Tall and barrel-chested, Baylor and his brothers all have the same raucous, head-thrown-back laugh. The same galloping stride. The same broad, capable hands. All of them, like Baylor, have begun to manifest the telltale gut of an alcoholic in middle age. The differences between them (a beard, a tattoo, a limp left over from a motorcycle accident) are minor compared to their astonishing similarities. The oldest is Emil, then Jimmy Lee, then the “Irish twins,” Cade and Hank, and finally Baylor, the baby.
They do not, however, go by their given names. The monikers that fly around when they get together are impossible to track. Baylor is both Lil Boy and Big Daddy. When he has done something annoying, he is Baylor Richard Murphy. When he has done something hilarious, he is Captain Jump Up Sit Down Underdog Willie. And, of course, he is often Bo, for short.
Over the years, I have given up trying to keep the brothers’ lives straight. I am aware that one of them recently had a cancer scare that turned out to be nothing. One of them breeds hunting dogs. One of them can’t hold down a job. Two of them own an auto repair shop together. None of them have kids, though a few are married and might be on the verge. Baylor tries to keep me updated on their lives, but it’s hard to parse the family code. “Hankie thinks that Jujube is doing better,” Baylor might tell me, or, “You’ll never believe it—E-dog says that Sammy Boy has been hiding money from his wife.” By the time I figure out who Hankie, Jujube, E-dog, and Sammy Boy are (Hank, Cade, Emil, and Jimmy Lee, respectively), the point of the story is lost.
Now the door bangs open behind me, and a figure strides onto the porch—Cade, our current host, dressed in boxer shorts and an undershirt, a cup of coffee in hand. He nods to me. I settle on the porch swing, leaving room for him, but he elects to remain standing. On closer inspection, his boxers are covered with cartoon bunnies having sex in a trillion different positions. The odor of cigarettes hangs about his person.
“Good morning,” I say.
“Is Bebop still sleeping?”
“What?”
His grin fades. “Baylor. Is Baylor still sleeping?”
Mentally I add Bebop to the list of my husband’s nicknames. In the distance, a group of wild turkeys begins to sing, hooting and burbling. The sun is rising behind the trees. Cade lives on forty acres of thick forest that blocks any view of the neighbors. He shifts his weight, the boards creaking. I wish he would put on some pants.
“Are you having a rough time?” he says.
“I beg your pardon?” I say, startled. I was not prepared for emotional honesty. Not now. Not here.
He takes a step toward me. “Is it hard being with us? Being in Tennessee?”
“Yes,” I say. “It really is.”
“I know you ran away last night. I saw you heading into the woods after Baylor and the others passed out. I wondered if you were planning to hitchhike home to Boston.”
I manage a laugh, which comes out shaky.
“Glad you found your way back,” he says. “Poor thing! We try our best with you. We do.”
For a moment, I see my husband in Cade’s eyes. There is Baylor’s solidity, a touchstone of frank openness. An instant later, however, the spell is broken.
