The Accidentals Read online

  Back in the day, I was quick on the page, my mind a busy runway of sentences taking off zoom, zoom, zoom like clockwork. Sometimes now, like this afternoon, I have the sensation of stumbling through a dark woods, lost and alone. Some days I simply stop cold in my tracks, and the words don’t arrive, upright and reliable, to lead me out of these thickets. Lately, when I’m teaching a class, I’ll stop in midsentence, having lost the word I need, no idea of what I’ve been talking about. At a dinner I hosted one night I couldn’t think of the word container. “Put the potatoes in the plastic . . .” I said to my younger colleague, who looked at me quizzically. After a moment or two, with her standing there with the bowl of potatoes waiting, not looking squarely at me but eyeing the floor, a hint of a smirk playing at her lips (how I wanted to slap her!), I got up from the table and pulled the Tupperware container out of the kitchen cabinet, an ugly orange bowl, one June had lent me a zillion years ago and I’d never returned.

  Last week I went to the Harvard-educated neurologist at the university hospital memory clinic, a Dr. Roe, a young woman who looked about fourteen. Dr. Roe’s first name was Heidi, and she looked so much like the blond girl in pigtails on the cover of the book June and I had shared when we were girls that I half expected her to start yodeling.

  When I told Dr. Roe that my brain had gone on the lam, she looked at me oddly, then started talking so fast I could only understand every third or fourth word. She gave me some oral tests, quickly stated lists of things (she talked so terribly fast): something like elephant, cat, woman, house, elevator, profession, zebra, money, lion, desk, capsule, giraffe, and a zillion others. Then she asked me to repeat them. Good grief, I could only remember giraffe and capsule, which Dr. Roe said, with a Heidi-like lilt to her voice, was a surprisingly poor result for such a high-functioning person as myself.

  I wondered whether the doctor had talked too fast on purpose. I suspected Dr. Roe needed research subjects.

  Given my dismal failure with the list, I was remanded to the basement of the hospital for an MRI. “Just think of it as going back into the womb,” said the technician as he got me up onto the platform that would slide me into what appeared to be a plastic tunnel.

  I chewed my bottom lip as the platform gave a lurch and then began to glide. The way the whole device slid me in, its silent resolve, made me think, unfortunately, of how a funeral home would slide a body into the crematorium. June says she wants to be cremated. After that time I’d locked her in the basement when we were girls, she hated the idea of rotting away underground; she said she’d rather go in one glorious blinding flash, she’d rather explode in flames. June had been in Florida the day the Challenger had exploded. Noel had been in college by then, so she’d taken a special assignment to cover the space launch. She’d called me that night, sobbing. The terrible thing, she’d said, her voice muffled by a bad connection, was that it was so beautiful. It was the prettiest thing I ever saw, like fireworks on the Fourth of July.

  The platform shifted slightly and something grazed my cheek. A quickening, a folding and unfolding of wings. I jumped.

  June? I wondered, but then rejected the idea. Of course it wouldn’t be June. When I was a girl, especially after Mama died, I used to feel my sister’s touch even when June wasn’t nearby, as if each of us were one half of a whole person. Even when I went on the lam after the baby, she’d stayed close. I’d be cleaning the mirror in the elevator or lying in my single bed at Elsa’s, and there’d be that brush of something soft against the face or arm, velvety and friendly. Over the years, though, since I had walked out of Landon Higginsworth’s office and picked up the first phone I could find and told my sister she’d killed Daniel Baker, I’d lost the feeling of June’s thereness. It was as if part of myself had gone up in smoke.

  And yet, I still have a strange feeling of someone peering over my shoulder, watching and waiting and wanting. Who?

  NOW, THE PLATFORM stopped silently, and I halfway opened one eye. There it was: the ceiling of the tunnel, two, three inches from my nose. Little Laika in her space capsule. I began to gasp for breath and squeezed the panic ball without thinking.

  “Are you okay?” the technician asked from the glass booth across the room. His voice crashed and boomed all around me, despite the earplugs. I shuddered, clenched my teeth.

  “Get me out of here.”

  I’d traveled the whole world. I’d wanted to have such a large life.

  “Are you sure? It’s going to mess up the pictures.”

  “Out! Get me out!” I bit the side of my mouth, tasted blood. Then I couldn’t help it, I started kicking my feet, my knees banging against the top of the tunnel, squeezing the panic ball on and off, on and off.

  Just when I opened my mouth to scream, the platform shuddered and began its glide.

  The next day I was back, limp with Valium and terror. This time I had a technician who’d been instructed as to my claustrophobia. She handed me not one but two washcloths and told me to put them over my eyes. “Open them before you go in to make sure you can’t see,” she said. “Take deep breaths and think about something nice. Think about the best meal you ever ate.”

  June’s first effort at cooking, that bloody chicken drenched in Dad’s awful cherry bounce: what a joke and how it melted in our mouths like manna from heaven. The thought of it brought tears to my eyes, which, despite the washcloths, ran down the sides of my face into the folds of my ears.

  A week later Dr. Heidi Roe came into the examining room bearing a laptop and a box of Kleenex. When she showed me the picture of my own skull, I gasped. Olivia! My own mother, long gone: yet there she was, in the curve of my skull, in the shape of the jaw and teeth, in the laps and folds of my brain. I saw suddenly how my mother had just parked herself there, inside my own head, like she owned the place. How odd, how disconcerting, to be so inhabited and not know it.

  Then Dr. Roe reached over and touched my arm. “Do you have any family nearby, Grace? Anyone you’d like to call? We could do Skype, if you’d like.” She moved closer as she spoke, and I shrank, gripping the cold metallic edges of the examining table where I was perched.

  “Just tell me,” I said.

  Dr. Roe moved closer still. Her breath smelled like curry. “I’m sorry but it appears you’re in the early stages of Alzheimer’s. We can’t be a hundred percent sure of this, but I’m ninety-nine percent sure in your case.” She spoke so softly and quickly that I could barely make out the words.

  “How can you be sure?” I asked.

  She looked down at her feet. “Only an autopsy would allow a definitive diagnosis.” She slurred the word autopsy so that it sounded innocuous, like the topsy in topsy-turvy. “The good news is that there are new treatments coming out that can help. This is a research hospital; we have several trials ongoing. You’d be a good subject for one I’m doing if you want to be included.”

  My scalp tingled.

  “Show me. I want to see.” I’d read somewhere that the brain has the consistency of hard Jell-O.

  The doctor gave me the laptop, and I looked closer at Olivia’s skull. How beautiful it was! How alive!

  The doctor pointed to the base of my brain. “See that area with the different texture? Those are the plaques in the neuron forest. They’re sticky protein fragments that come from tangles within the cells. They interfere with the neuron impulses. Then the neurons don’t function anymore and the neuron forest begins to decline.”

  “Neuron forest?”

  “We call it that because the neurons develop in clusters. See?”

  I peered at the shaded area. The blob of plaques floated right above the place where my mother used to put up her hair in a quick bun when she cleaned house. I had read my AARP magazine. I knew the plaques and tangles would reach out like kudzu and take hold here, there, and, eventually, everywhere. I was reminded of that little dog of June’s, the one she found at that truck stop in the middle of nowhere, how it liked to shred toilet paper, loved to carry an unraveling rol
l around the house. My Jell-O brain would soon be littered like that.

  As I stepped from the doctor’s office out into the cold cloudy March afternoon, I had a sudden vision of myself becoming lost and disoriented in a forest covered in kudzu. I pictured it hungry and greedy, slithering up the towering oaks through the delicate underbrush of my neuron forest, covering everything in its path. What should I do now? Retire? I couldn’t quite imagine it, the endless days without form or structure, that stretch of brittle sun on winter afternoons. In the winter, I always made sure to hold office hours around four until dark, for the company. What if there were no classes, no office hours, nowhere to go at four o’clock? What if all I had to do was watch the sun’s rays snake across the floor?

  Back in my car, I pulled down the sun visor and looked in the mirror. My face was lined and—how to say it?—colorless? no, pallid, that’s it; colorless won’t suffice. I reached into my purse and took out my lipstick and put it on. My lips were shriveled; I looked closer and noticed for the first time that the left side of my upper lip was higher than the right, giving me a bit of a—what’s the opposite of smile?—sneer. I tried to erase it by wiping a bit of color off the top. I ran my fingers through my hair to fluff it and it stood straight out from my head, wiry and wild the way the boys used to like it. Now I looked better, now I could think straight. I decided not to tell anyone, not even June. If I told, it would take shape, it would be real.

  I remembered I needed bread and decaf from the grocery, a good sign! I cranked the car, turned on the radio, and headed in the direction of the store, whose name I’d suddenly forgotten.

  NOW, A MONTH later, here I am, drudging along at my desk this Sunday afternoon, the tangles and plaques running amuck in my neuron forest, still mired in this infernal essay. (Honestly, who gives a rat’s ass about the site of memory in classical poetics?) Now, as I turn back to my work, a piece of color snags my eye, then another. Red? Green, maybe blue? A fleck of yellow? I lift my head. Have the finches molted already? It’s only early April. I peer out the window at my thistle stocking, but no, the birds are still winter brown, not a single yellow one among the four clinging to the sides of the stocking, pecking away companionably. I turn back to the computer screen, start a new paragraph, and am reminded of some lines from Sappho. They seem important to the project, something about the moon and the salt sea and fields deep in flowers, something about memory and beauty and regret. It’s a passage I know like the back of my hand, but it eludes me. I get up and go over to the bookshelf.

  I’m picking my way back across the room, book in hand, when I see him out of the corner of my eye. He’s sitting on a branch in the big water oak out front, fooling around with an acorn in his curved beak, taking it in and out of his mouth (I can actually see his tongue, which is the color of ash), knocking it against a branch. When I turn to look at him head-on, my eyes widen. This one’s a brilliant mishmash, certainly a male: orange head, yellow neck, green body, his face strangely reminding me of my sister’s. Some sort of parrot, the size and shape of a large dove, except longer tail feathers, much longer, really quite remarkable tail feathers, green with slivers of blue that glisten in the sun. Maybe he hitched a ride on a freighter from Brazil? Maybe he’s an escaped macaw from somebody’s house or a zoo? You have to keep their wings clipped.

  I head into the kitchen where I keep—what do you call them? Bio-specs? Goggles? No, that’s not right—the glasses that let you watch birds? Damn! I have my mother’s, which are good as new, and I snatch them up, and tiptoe back. But now the bird is gone, vanished into thin air. I wonder at this point whether I dreamed this exotic creature. Are visual apparitions a characteristic of Alzheimer’s? The day, this ordinary Sunday afternoon in early spring, has turned strange.

  When I walk out into the front yard, the finches flit away. I’m still in my pajamas, haven’t combed my hair today or washed it since Thursday morning when I last went in to teach. I look up and down the street. Nobody’s around to see me in this state of despair, I mean disrepair. I don’t worry about the Purvises across the street from my house; they’re in their late eighties, nearsighted and sometimes not all there (though I’m not one to throw stones). Mrs. Purvis’s outdoor activity involves hanging Mr. Purvis’s socks and yellowed boxer shorts on a rickety clothesline in their side yard. His project, which he pursues year round, is to rake the needles from his towering pine trees to the street, scraping his sloping yard to bare dirt, which erodes with every rain and runs over the curb and into the street in muddy gullies. Except for the weeds and that magnificent stand of giant pines, his lot reminds me of the bare yards of country women, who use brooms to sweep them clean and make designs in the dirt, except their designs are pretty, artful. Once I suggested to Mr. Purvis that people pay good money for pine mulch, just leave it where it fell, it was good for his trees. “Damn them trees,” he’d said, then peered at me suspiciously through his cockeyed glasses and kept on raking.

  I put my bio-specs to my eyes and scan the branches of the water oak and overlapping trees. Nothing there now, nothing at all except a squirrel who peeks out from behind a tree and eyes me hopefully, awaiting its share of the deer’s corn. I know I shouldn’t feed the deer, my very nice neighbors who have gardens have asked me not to. The neighborhood association has sent out carefully phrased notices about “some of our kindhearted neighbors who are contributing to the serious overpopulation problem, which in turn leads to tick-borne disease.” So now I do my feedings on the sly, before dawn and after dusk so no one will see, dropping the kernels surreptitiously from a pocket in Mama’s old apron, now frayed and faded and stained beyond recognition. I rather enjoy the secrecy of it, my own sneakiness. There’s a thrill to it that reminds me of how I’d hop out my bedroom window on those hot summer nights and run across the street to the boys through thickets of honeysuckle and night jasmine. How I brushed my hair a hundred strokes and put Vaseline on my lips and eyelids so I’d shine for them.

  I scan the water oak again, just to make sure I haven’t missed anything, though the bright stranger would be impossible to miss. Still the bare branch. The yard had come alive as it did every spring, the early-bird dogwoods now opening their greenish white blossoms alongside the nandinas’ red berries from winter, bare branches of my forsythia flecked in yellow. A flock of about fifty robins lands and starts pecking away in the moss. Looking out over it all, I vow to make myself happy and content in the time remaining: blissful even. I’d travel to exotic places. Take a plunge, call June and try to talk her into going on a safari to Africa. Africa, that was the ticket! I had savings, I’d foot the bill. I could just see it: the two of us spotting lions and elephants and giraffes, galloping giraffes; paddling a canoe down the Nile, well maybe something a bit more substantial than a canoe, something with a motor; sitting around a blazing fire, camping. I’d never been camping in my life but I’d heard the really nice safaris were like staying in a luxury hotel, just outdoors in tents with bathrooms attached—and no walking after dark! The idea of prowling lions right outside my tent gave me a delicious shiver. June would love it.

  It was only when I got into the house that I remembered my sister’s cancer. It was as if a ghost had laid a cold hand on my back and pushed. I walked through the door from the carport and fell, slam-bam, face forward, to the kitchen floor.

  It was cooler inside than out; the tile on the floor icy. I shivered, then pulled myself up on the kitchen table. I’d cushioned my fall with my right hand and my wrist throbbed. But nothing seemed broken. I looked at the clock on the microwave. A few minutes before four. The house was in semidarkness from the surrounding trees, my corner lot crowded with them: towering oaks and sweet gum and pines, smaller dogwood and redbud and a tree that bloomed pink puffy flowers in the spring, nut trees of all sorts. Each spring, before the copperheads woke up and the mosquitoes hatched, I would walk around the yard and check my trees for rot and dead branches. Most of them grew to astonishing heights, their trunks grown spindly in t
heir stretch to meet the light. I spent a fortune on removing dead branches, though I winced when the electric saws sprang into action and insisted on supervising even the smallest prunings. I always called in a registered—what do you call a tree person? Starts with an a. When a storm came and the wind whipped up, I’d sit on the porch steps, folded up like a grasshopper, and watch the Purvises’ queenly pines gyrate across the street. Sometimes a limb would come crashing down. I thrilled to that cracking sound, then the boom. Once, in a storm, a whole tree fell from my yard across the street, taking out the Purvises’ electric line. They’d come running out into the rain, quaking and crying with fright. I took them into the house, the first company I’d had in months, and gave them towels to dry themselves and some hot tea.

  When we were little, June and I would have loved this forest of a neighborhood with its overarching canopies. We would have played hide-and-seek until we dropped, one of us tweaking the branches to confuse the other, giggling and touching. On long summer evenings, our mother would have her drinks on the porch, clinking the ice in her glass and chewing on her lime, not calling us in until after nine. Sometimes I imagined us out there shrieking with delight and confusion as the giant trees murmured in one voice, like another child, a wild forest creature, invisible and mischievous.

  Then my mother would call her perfect children, my sister and me, in from the growing dark.

  NOW, SO MANY years later, it’s already Monday morning and I still haven’t finished that infernal essay. The sky is pinking up and I’m out in the yard feeding the deer when I hear a squawk from high up in the trees, then a full-throated chatter. I drop the corn in a pile and race back into the house to get my bio-specs. I scan the trees. Nothing there. I have only a couple of hours before heading off to teach my graduate seminar, so I run upstairs and jump in the shower and throw on my school clothes, the serviceable dark slacks, white blouse, and jacket (unlike my mother, I’ve never had a shred of fashion sense). I glance at myself in the mirror and am reminded of Frances, which stops me dead in my tracks and makes me reach for the Gap Fresh Scent that I bought myself on my last birthday. Even when I’m showered and presentable, I worry I’ve acquired the Lady Schoolteacher Smell.