OCTOBER 2004
She sat up in bed and wondered what to do. It was dark, still middle of the night. She wasn’t confused. She knew she should be sleeping. John lay on his back next to her, snoring. But she couldn’t fall asleep. She’d been having a lot of trouble sleeping through the night lately, probably because she was napping a lot during the day. Or was she napping a lot during the day because she wasn’t sleeping well at night? She was caught in a vicious cycle, a positive feedback loop, a dizzying ride that she didn’t know how to step off. Maybe, if she fought through the urge to nap during the day, she’d sleep through the night and break the pattern. But every day, she felt so exhausted by late afternoon that she always succumbed to a rest on the couch. And the rest always seduced her to sleep.
She remembered facing a similar dilemma when her children were around two years old. Without an afternoon nap, they turned miserable and uncooperative by the evening. With a nap, they stayed wide awake hours past their usual bedtime. She couldn’t remember the solution.
With all the pills I’m taking, you’d think at least one would have drowsiness as a side effect. Oh, wait. I have that sleeping pill prescription.
She got out of bed and walked downstairs. Although fairly confident it wasn’t in there, she emptied her baby blue bag first. Wallet, BlackBerry, cell phone, keys. She opened her wallet. Credit card, bank card, license, Harvard ID, health insurance card, twenty dollars, a handful of change.
She rifled through the white mushroom bowl where they kept the mail. Light bill, gas bill, phone bill, mortgage statement, something from Harvard, receipts.
She opened and emptied the contents of the drawers to the desk and file cabinet in the study. She emptied the magazines and catalogs out of the baskets in the living room. She read a couple of pages from The Week magazine and dog-eared a page in the J. Jill catalog with a cute sweater. She liked it in sea-foam blue.
She opened the junk drawer. Batteries, a screwdriver, Scotch tape, blue tape, glue, keys, a number of chargers, matches, and so much more. This drawer probably hadn’t been organized in years. She pulled the drawer completely off its tracks and dumped the entirety of its contents onto the kitchen table.
“Ali, what are you doing?” asked John.
Startled, she looked up at his bewildered hair and squinting eyes.
“I’m looking for…”
She looked down at the items jumbled before her on the table. Batteries, a sewing kit, glue, a tape measurer, several chargers, a screwdriver.
“I’m looking for something.”
“Ali, it’s after three. You’re making a racket down here. Can you look for it in the morning?”
His voice sounded impatient. He didn’t like having his sleep disrupted.
“Okay.”
She lay in bed and tried to remember what she’d been looking for. It was dark, still middle of the night. She knew she should be sleeping. John had fallen back to sleep without ceremony and was already snoring. He was a fast sleeper. She used to be, too. But she couldn’t fall asleep. She’d been having a lot of trouble sleeping through the night lately, probably because she was napping a lot during the day. Or was she napping a lot during the day because she wasn’t sleeping well at night? She was caught in a vicious cycle, a positive feedback loop, a dizzying ride that she didn’t know how to step off.
Oh, wait. I have a way to get to sleep. I have those pills from Dr. Moyer. Where did I put them?
She got out of bed and walked downstairs.
THERE WERE NO MEETINGS OR seminars today. None of the textbooks, periodicals, or mail in her office interested her. Dan didn’t have anything ready for her to read. She had nothing new in her inbox. Lydia’s daily email wouldn’t come until after noon. She watched the movement outside her window. Cars zipped around the curves of Memorial Drive, and joggers ran along the curves of the river. The tops of pine trees swayed in the turbulent fall air.
She pulled all of the folders out of the bin marked HOWLAND REPRINTS from her file cabinet. She’d authored well over a hundred published papers. She held this stack of research articles, commentaries, and reviews, her truncated career’s worth of thoughts and opinions, in her hands. It was heavy. Her thoughts and opinions carried weight. At least, they used to. She missed her research, thinking about it, talking about it, her own ideas and insights, the elegant art of her science.
She put the pile of folders down and selected her From Molecules to Mind textbook from the bookcase. It, too, was heavy. It was her proudest written achievement, her words and ideas blended with John’s, creating something together that was unique in this universe, informing and influencing the words and ideas of others. She’d assumed they’d write another someday. She flipped through the pages without being lured in. She didn’t feel like reading that either.
She checked her watch. She and John were supposed to go for a run at the end of the day. That was way too many hours away. She decided to run home.
Their house was only about a mile from her office, and she got there quickly and easily. Now what? She walked into the kitchen to make some tea. She filled the kettle with tap water, placed it back on the stove, and turned the burner knob to Hi. She went to get a tea bag. The tin container where she kept the tea bags wasn’t anywhere on the counter. She opened the cabinet where she kept the coffee mugs. She stared instead at three shelves of plates. She opened the cabinet to the right of that, where she expected to see rows of glasses, but instead it housed bowls and mugs.
She took the bowls and mugs out of the cabinet and put them on the counter. Then, she removed the plates and placed them next to the bowls and mugs. She opened the next cabinet. Nothing right in there either. The counter was soon stacked high with plates, bowls, mugs, juice glasses, water glasses, wineglasses, pots, pans, Tupperware, pot holders, dish towels, and silverware. The entire kitchen was inside out. Now, where did I have it all before? The teakettle shrilled, and she couldn’t think. She turned the burner knob to Off.
She heard the front door open. Oh good, John’s home early.
“John, why did you do this to the kitchen?” she hollered.
“Alice, what are you doing?”
The woman’s voice startled her.
“Oh, Lauren, you scared me.”
It was her neighbor who lived across the street. Lauren didn’t say anything.
“I’m sorry, would you like to sit down? I was about to make some tea.”
“Alice, this isn’t your kitchen.”
What? She looked around the room—black granite countertops, birch cabinets, white tile floor, window over the sink, dishwasher to the right of the sink, double oven. Wait, she didn’t have a double oven, did she? Then, for the first time, she noticed the refrigerator. The smoking gun. The collage of pictures stuck with magnets to its door were of Lauren and Lauren’s husband and Lauren’s cat and babies Alice didn’t recognize.
“Oh, Lauren, look what I did to your kitchen. I’ll help you put everything back.”
“That’s okay, Alice. Are you all right?”
“No, not really.”
She wanted to run home to her own kitchen. Couldn’t they just forget this happened? Did she really have to have the I-have-Alzheimer’s-disease conversation right now? She hated the I-have-Alzheimer’s-disease conversation.
Alice tried to read Lauren’s face. She looked baffled and scared. Her face was thinking, Alice might be crazy. Alice closed her eyes and took a deep breath.
“I have Alzheimer’s disease.”
She opened her eyes. The look on Lauren’s face didn’t change.
NOW, EVERY TIME SHE ENTERED the kitchen, she checked the refrigerator, just to be sure. No pictures of Lauren. She was in the right house. In case that didn’t remove all doubt, John had written a note in big black letters and stuck it with a magnet to the refrigerator door.
ALICE,
DO NOT GO RUNNING WITHOUT ME.
MY CELL: 617-555-1122
ANNA: 617-555-1123
TOM: 617-555-1124
John had made her promise not to go running without him. She’d sworn she wouldn’t and crossed her heart. Of course, she might forget.
Her ankle could probably use the time off anyway. She’d rolled it stepping off a curb last week. Her spatial perception was a bit off. Objects sometimes appeared closer or farther or generally somewhere other than where they actually were. She’d had her eyes checked. Her vision was fine. She had the eyes of a twenty-year-old. The problem wasn’t with her corneas, lenses, or retinas. The glitch was somewhere in the processing of visual information, somewhere in her occipital cortex, said John. Apparently, she had the eyes of a college student and the occipital cortex of an octogenarian.
No running without John. She might get lost or hurt. But lately there was no running with John either. He’d been traveling a lot, and when he wasn’t out of town, he left the house for Harvard early and worked late. By the time he got home, he was always too tired. She hated depending on him to go running, especially since he wasn’t dependable.
She picked up the phone and dialed the number on the refrigerator.
“Hello?”
“Are we going for a run today?” she asked.
“I don’t know, maybe, I’m in a meeting. I’ll call you later,” said John.
“I really need to go for a run.”
“I’ll call you later.”
“When?”
“When I can.”
“Fine.”
She hung up the phone, looked out the window and then down at the running shoes on her feet. She peeled them off and threw them at the wall.
She tried to be understanding. He needed to work. But why didn’t he understand that she needed to run? If something as simple as regular exercise really did counter the progression of this disease, then she should be running as often as she could. Each time he told her “Not today,” she might be losing more neurons that she could have saved. Dying needlessly faster. John was killing her.
She picked up the phone again.
“Yes?” asked John, hushed and annoyed.
“I want you to promise that we’ll run today.”
“Excuse me for a minute,” he said to someone else. “Please, Alice, let me call you after I get out of this meeting.”
“I need to run today.”
“I don’t know yet when my day’s going to end.”
“So?”
“This is why I think we should get you a treadmill.”
“Oh, fuck you,” she said, hanging up.
She supposed that wasn’t very understanding. She flashed to anger a lot lately. Whether this was a symptom of her disease advancing or a justified response, she couldn’t say. She didn’t want a treadmill. She wanted him. Maybe she shouldn’t be so stubborn. Maybe she was killing herself, too.
She could always walk somewhere without him. Of course, this somewhere had to be somewhere “safe.” She could walk to her office. But she didn’t want to go to her office. She felt bored, ignored, and alienated in her office. She felt ridiculous there. She didn’t belong there anymore. In all the expansive grandeur that was Harvard, there wasn’t room there for a cognitive psychology professor with a broken cognitive psyche.
She sat in her living room armchair and tried to think of what to do. Nothing meaningful enough came to her. She tried to imagine tomorrow, next week, the coming winter. Nothing meaningful enough came to her. She felt bored, ignored, and alienated in her living room armchair. The late afternoon sun cast strange, Tim Burton shadows that slithered and undulated across the floor and up the walls. She watched the shadows dissolve and the room dim. She closed her eyes and fell asleep.
ALICE STOOD IN THEIR BEDROOM, naked but for a pair of ankle socks and her Safe Return bracelet, wrestling and growling at an article of clothing stretched around her head. Like a Martha Graham dance, her battle against the fabric shrouding her head looked like a physical and poetic expression of anguish. She let out a long scream.
“What’s happening?” asked John, running in.
She looked at him with one panicked eye through a round hole in the twisted garment.
“I can’t do this! I can’t figure out how to put on this fucking sports bra. I can’t remember how to put on a bra, John! I can’t put on my own bra!”
He went to her and examined her head.
“That’s not a bra, Ali, it’s a pair of underwear.”
She burst into laughter.
“It’s not funny,” said John.
She laughed harder.
“Stop it, it’s not funny. Look, if you want to go running, you have to hurry up and get dressed. I don’t have a lot of time.”
He left the room, unable to watch her standing there, naked with her underwear on her head, laughing at her own absurd madness.
ALICE KNEW THAT THE YOUNG woman sitting across from her was her daughter, but she had a disturbing lack of confidence in this knowledge. She knew that she had a daughter named Lydia, but when she looked at the young woman sitting across from her, knowing that she was her daughter Lydia was more academic knowledge than implicit understanding, a fact she agreed to, information she’d been given and accepted as true.
She looked at Tom and Anna, also sitting at the table, and she could automatically connect them with the memories she had of her oldest child and her son. She could picture Anna in her wedding gown, in her law school, college, and high school graduation gowns, and in the Snow White nightgown she’d insisted on wearing every day when she was three. She could remember Tom in his cap and gown, in a cast when he broke his leg skiing, in braces, in his Little League uniform, and in her arms when he was an infant.
She could see Lydia’s history as well, but somehow this woman sitting across from her wasn’t inextricably connected to her memories of her youngest child. This made her uneasy and painfully aware that she was declining, her past becoming unhinged from her present. And how strange that she had no problem identifying the man next to Anna as Anna’s husband, Charlie, who had entered their lives only a couple of years ago. She pictured her Alzheimer’s as a demon in her head, tearing a reckless and illogical path of destruction, ripping apart the wiring from “Lydia now” to “Lydia then,” leaving all the “Charlie” connections unscathed.
The restaurant was crowded and noisy. Voices from other tables competed for Alice’s attention, and the music in the background moved in and out of the foreground. Anna’s and Lydia’s voices sounded the same to her. Everyone used too many pronouns. She struggled to locate who was talking at her table and to follow what was being said.
“Honey, you okay?” asked Charlie.
“The smells,” said Anna.
“You want to go outside for a minute?” asked Charlie.
“I’ll go with her,” said Alice.
Alice’s back tensed as soon as they left the cozy warmth of the restaurant. They’d both forgotten to bring their coats. Anna grabbed Alice’s hand and led her away from a circle of young smokers hovering near the door.
“Ahh, fresh air,” said Anna, taking a luxurious breath in and out through her nose.
“And quiet,” said Alice.
“How are you feeling, Mom?”
“I’m okay,” said Alice.
Anna rubbed the back of Alice’s hand, the hand she was still holding.
“I’ve been better,” she admitted.
“Same here,” said Anna. “Were you sick like this when you were pregnant with me?”
“Uh-huh.”
“How did you do it?”
“You just keep going. It’ll stop soon.”
“And before you know it, the babies will be here.”
“I can’t wait.”
“Me, too,” Anna said. But her voice didn’t carry the same exuberance Alice’s did. Her eyes suddenly filled with tears.
“Mom, I feel sick all the time, and I’m exhausted, and every time I forget something I think I’m becoming symptomatic.”
“Oh, sweetie, you’re not, you’re just tired.”
“I know, I know. It’s just when I think about you not teaching anymore and everything you’re losing—”
“Don’t. This should be an exciting time for you. Please, just think about what we’re gaining.”
Alice squeezed the hand she held and placed her other one gently on Anna’s stomach. Anna smiled, but the tears still spilled out of her overwhelmed eyes.
“I just don’t know how I’m going to handle it all. My job and two babies and—”
“And Charlie. Don’t forget about you and Charlie. Keep what you have with him. Keep everything in balance—you and Charlie, your career, your kids, everything you love. Don’t take any of the things you love in your life for granted, and you’ll do it all. Charlie will help you.”
“He better,” Anna threatened.
Alice laughed. Anna wiped her eyes several times with the heels of her hands and blew a long, Lamaze-like breath out through her mouth.
“Thanks, Mom. I feel better.”
“Good.”
Back inside the restaurant, they settled into their seats and ate dinner. The young woman across from Alice, her youngest child, Lydia, clanged her empty wineglass with her knife.
“Mom, we’d like to give you your big gift now.”
Lydia presented her with a small, rectangular package wrapped in gold paper. It must have been big in significance. Alice untaped the paper. Inside were three DVDs—The Howland Kids, Alice and John, and Alice Howland.
“It’s a video memoir for you. The Howland Kids is a collection of interviews of Anna, Tom, and me. I shot them this summer. It’s our memories of you and our childhoods and growing up. The one with Dad is of his memories of meeting you and dating and your wedding and vacations and lots of other stuff. There are a couple of really great stories in that one that none of us kids knew about. The third one I haven’t made yet. It’s an interview of you, of your stories, if you want to do it.”
“I absolutely want to do it. I love it. Thank you, I can’t wait to watch them.”
The waitress brought them coffee, tea, and chocolate cake with a candle in it. They all sang “Happy Birthday.” Alice blew out the candle and made a wish.