DECEMBER 2003
On the night of Eric Wellman’s holiday party, the sky felt low and thick, like it was going to snow. Alice hoped it would. Like most New Englanders, she’d never outgrown a childlike anticipation of the season’s first snow. Of course, also like most New Englanders, what she wished for in December she’d come to loathe by February, cursing her shovel and boots, desperate to replace the frigid, monochromatic tedium of winter with the milder pinks and yellow-greens of spring. But for tonight, snow would be lovely.
Each year, Eric and his wife, Marjorie, hosted a holiday party at their home for the entire psychology department. Nothing extraordinary ever happened at this event, but there were always small moments that Alice wouldn’t dream of missing—Eric sitting comfortably on the floor in a living room full of students and junior faculty on couches and chairs, Kevin and Glen wrestling for ownership of a Yankee-swapped Grinch doll, the race to get a slice of Marty’s legendary cheesecake.
Her colleagues were all brilliant and odd, quick to help and argue, ambitious and humble. They were family. Maybe she felt this way because she didn’t have living siblings or parents. Maybe the time of year made her sentimental, searching for meaning and belonging. Maybe that was part of it, but it was also much more.
They were more than colleagues. Triumphs of discovery, promotion, and publication were celebrated, but so were weddings and births and the accomplishments of their children and grandchildren. They traveled together to conferences all over the world, and many meetings were piggybacked with family vacations. And like in any family, it wasn’t always good times and yummy cheesecake. They supported one another through slumps of negative data and grant rejection, through waves of crippling self-doubt, through illness and divorce.
But most of all, they shared a passionate quest to understand the mind, to know the mechanisms driving human behavior and language, emotion and appetite. While the holy grail of this quest carried individual power and prestige, at its core it was a collaborative effort to know something valuable and give it to the world. It was socialism powered by capitalism. It was a strange, competitive, cerebral, and privileged life. And they were in it together.
The cheesecake gone, Alice snatched the last hot-fudge-drenched cream puff and looked for John. She found him in the living room in conversation with Eric and Marjorie just as Dan arrived.
Dan introduced them to his new wife, Beth, and they offered hearty congratulations and exchanged handshakes. Marjorie took their coats. Dan had on a suit and tie, and Beth wore a floor-length red dress. Late and much too formal for this party, they’d probably gone to another one first. Eric offered to get them drinks.
“I’ll have another one, too,” said Alice, the glass of wine in her hand still half full.
John asked Beth how she liked married life so far. Although they’d never met, Alice knew a little about her from Dan. She and Dan had been living together in Atlanta when Dan was accepted at Harvard. She’d stayed in Atlanta, originally content with a long-distance relationship and the promise of marriage after he graduated. Three years later, Dan had carelessly mentioned that it could easily take five to six, maybe even seven years for him to finish. They had married last month.
Alice excused herself to use the ladies’ room. On the way, she lingered in the long hallway that connected the newer front of the house to the older back, finishing her wine and cream puff as she admired the happy faces of Eric’s grandchildren pictured on the walls. After she found and used the bathroom, she wandered into the kitchen, poured herself another glass of wine, and fell captive to a boisterous conversation among several of the faculty wives.
The wives touched elbows and shoulders as they moved about the kitchen, they knew the characters in each other’s stories, they praised and teased each other, they laughed easily. These women all shopped and lunched and attended book clubs together. These women were close. Alice was close with their husbands, and it set her apart. She mostly listened and drank her wine, nodding and smiling as she followed along, her interest not truly engaged, like running on a treadmill instead of on an actual road.
She filled her wineglass again, slipped unnoticed out of the kitchen, and found John in the living room in conversation with Eric, Dan, and a young woman in a red dress. Alice stood next to Eric’s grand piano and strummed the top of it with her fingers while she listened to them talk. Each year, Alice hoped that someone would offer to play it, but no one ever did. She and Anne had taken lessons for several years as children, but now she could remember only “Baby Elephant Walk” and “Turkey in the Straw” without sheet music, and only the right hand. Maybe this woman in the fancy red dress knew how to play.
At a pause in the conversation, Alice and the woman in red made eye contact.
“I’m sorry, I’m Alice Howland. I don’t believe we’ve met.”
The woman looked nervously at Dan before she answered. “I’m Beth.”
She seemed young enough to be a graduate student, but by December, Alice would have at least recognized even a first-year student. She remembered Marty mentioning that he’d hired a new postdoctoral fellow, a woman.
“Are you Marty’s new postdoc?” asked Alice.
The woman checked with Dan again. “I’m Dan’s wife.”
“Oh, so nice to finally meet you, congratulations!”
No one spoke. Eric’s gaze bounced from John’s eyes to Alice’s wineglass and back to John, carrying a silent secret. Alice wasn’t in on it.
“What?” asked Alice.
“You know what? It’s getting late, and I’ve got to get up early. You mind if we get going?” asked John.
Once they were outside, she meant to ask John what that awkward saccade was about, but she became distracted by the gentle beauty of the cotton-candy snow that had begun to fall while they were inside, and she forgot.
THREE DAYS BEFORE CHRISTMAS, ALICE sat in the waiting room of the Memory Disorders Unit at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston pretending to read Health magazine. Instead, she observed the others who waited. They were all in pairs. A woman who looked twenty years older than Alice sat next to a woman who looked at least twenty years older than her—most likely her mother. A woman with big, unnaturally black hair and big gold jewelry talked loudly and slowly in a thick Boston accent to her father, who sat in a wheelchair and never looked up from his perfectly white shoes. A bony, silver-haired woman flipped pages of a magazine too quickly to be reading anything next to an overweight man with matching hair and a resting tremor in his right hand. Probably husband and wife.
The wait to hear her name took forever and seemed longer. Dr. Davis had a young, hairless face. He wore black-rimmed glasses and a white lab coat, unbuttoned. He looked like he used to be thin, but his lower torso slumped a bit beyond the outline of his open coat, reminding Alice of Tom’s comments about the poor health habits of physicians. He sat in a chair behind his desk and invited her to have a seat across from him.
“So Alice, tell me what’s been going on.”
“I’ve been having lots of problems remembering, and it doesn’t feel normal. I’m forgetting words in lectures and conversation, I need to put ‘cognition class’ on my to-do list or I might forget to go teach it, I completely forgot to go to the airport for a conference in Chicago and missed my flight. I also didn’t know where I was for a couple of minutes once in Harvard Square, and I’m a professor at Harvard, I’m there every day.”
“How long have these things been going on?”
“Since September, maybe this summer.”
“Alice, did anyone come here with you?”
“No.”
“Okay. In the future, you’re going to have to bring a family member or someone who sees you regularly in with you. You’re complaining about a problem with your memory; you may not be the most reliable source of what’s been going on.”
She felt embarrassed, like a child. And his words “in the future” harassed her every thought, commanding obsessive attention, like water dripping from a faucet.
“Okay,” she said.
“Are you taking any kind of medicine?”
“No, just a multivitamin.”
“Any sleeping pills, diet pills, drugs of any kind?”
“No.”
“How much do you drink?”
“Not a lot. One or two glasses of wine with dinner.”
“Are you a vegan?”
“No.”
“Have you had any sort of past injury to your head?”
“No.”
“Have you had any surgeries?”
“No.”
“How are you sleeping?”
“Perfectly fine.”
“Have you ever been depressed?”
“Not since I was a teenager.”
“How’s your stress level?”
“The usual, I thrive under stress.”
“Tell me about your parents. How’s their health?”
“My mother and sister died in a car accident when I was eighteen. My father died of liver failure last year.”
“Hepatitis?”
“Cirrhosis. He was an alcoholic.”
“How old was he?”
“Seventy-one.”
“Did he have any other problems with his health?”
“Not that I know of. I didn’t really see much of him over the last several years.”
And when she did, he was incoherent, drunk.
“What about other family?”
She relayed her limited knowledge of her extended family’s medical history.
“Okay, I’m going to tell you a name and address, and you’re going to repeat it back to me. Then, we’re going to do some other things, and I’m going to ask you to repeat the same name and address again later. Ready, here it is—John Black, 42 West Street, Brighton. Can you repeat that for me?”
She did.
“How old are you?”
“Fifty.”
“What is today’s date?”
“December twenty-second, 2003.”
“What season is it?”
“Winter.”
“Where are we right now?”
“Eighth floor, MGH.”
“Can you name some of the streets near here?”
“Cambridge, Fruit, Storrow Drive.”
“Okay, what time of day is it?”
“Late morning.”
“Name the months backward from December.”
She did.
“Count backward from one hundred by six.”
He stopped her at seventy-six.
“Name these objects.”
He showed her a series of six cards with pencil drawings on them.
“Hammock, feather, key, chair, cactus, glove.”
“Okay, before pointing to the window, touch your right cheek with your left hand.”
She did.
“Can you write a sentence about today’s weather on this piece of paper?”
She wrote, “It is a sunny but cold winter morning.”
“Now, draw a clock and show the time as twenty minutes to four.”
She did.
“And copy this design.”
He showed her a picture of two intersecting pentagons. She copied them.
“Okay, Alice, hop up on the table. We’re going to do a neurological exam.”
She followed his penlight with her eyes, she tapped her thumbs and pointer fingers together rapidly, she walked heel to toe in a straight line across the room. She did everything easily and quickly.
“Okay, what was that name and address I told you earlier?”
“John Black…”
She stopped and searched Dr. Davis’s face. She couldn’t remember the address. What did that mean? Maybe she just hadn’t paid close enough attention.
“It’s Brighton, but I can’t remember the street address.”
“Okay, is it twenty-four, twenty-eight, forty-two, or forty-eight?”
She didn’t know.
“Take a guess.”
“Forty-eight.”
“Was it North Street, South Street, East Street, or West Street?”
“South Street?”
His face and body language didn’t expose whether she’d guessed right, but if she had to guess again, that wasn’t it.
“Okay, Alice, we have your recent blood work and MRI. I want you to go for some additional blood work and a lumbar puncture. You’re going to come back in four to five weeks, and you’ll have an appointment for neuropsychological testing on that same day, before you see me.”
“What do you think is going on? Is this just normal forgetting?”
“I don’t think it is, Alice, but we need to investigate it further.”
She looked him directly in the eye. A colleague of hers had once told her that eye contact with another person for more than six seconds without looking away or blinking revealed a desire for either sex or murder. She reflexively hadn’t believed this, but it had intrigued her enough to test it out on various friends and strangers. To her surprise, with the exception of John, one of them always looked away before the six seconds was up.
Dr. Davis looked down at his desk after four seconds. Arguably, this meant only that he wanted neither to kill her nor tear her clothes off, but she worried that it meant more. She would get prodded and assayed, scanned and tested, but she guessed that he didn’t need to investigate anything further. She’d told him her story, and she couldn’t remember John Black’s address. He already knew exactly what was wrong with her.
ALICE SPENT THE EARLIEST PART of Christmas Eve morning on the couch, sipping tea and browsing through photo albums. Over the years, she had transferred any newly developed pictures to the next available slots beneath the clear plastic sleeves. Her diligence had preserved their chronology, but she’d labeled nothing. It didn’t matter. She still knew it all cold.
Lydia, age two; Tom, age six; and Anna, seven, at Hardings Beach in June of their first summer at the Cape house. Anna at a youth soccer game on Pequossette Field. She and John on Seven Mile Beach on Grand Cayman Island.
Not only could she place the ages and setting in each snapshot but she could also elaborate in great detail on most of them. Each print prompted other, unphotographed memories from that day, of who else had been there, and of the larger context of her life at the time that the image was captured.
Lydia in her itchy, powder blue costume at her first dance recital. That was pretenure, Anna was in junior high and in braces, Tom was lovesick over a girl on his baseball team, and John lived in Bethesda, on sabbatical for the year.
The only ones she had any real trouble with were the baby pictures of Anna and Lydia, their flawless, pudgy faces often indistinguishable. She could usually find clues, however, that revealed their identities. John’s muttonchop sideburns placed him solidly in the 1970s. The baby in his lap had to be Anna.
“John, who’s this?” she asked, holding up a picture of a baby.
He looked up from the journal he’d been reading, slid his glasses down his nose, and squinted.
“Is that Tom?”
“Honey, she’s in a pink onesie. It’s Lydia.”
She checked the Kodak-printed date on the back to be sure. May 29, 1982. Lydia.
“Oh.”
He pushed his glasses back up onto the bridge of his nose and resumed reading.
“John, I’ve been meaning to talk to you about Lydia’s acting classes.”
He looked up, dog-eared the page, set the journal on the table, folded his glasses, and settled back in the chair. He knew this wouldn’t be quick.
“All right.”
“I don’t think we should be supporting her out there in any way, and I certainly don’t think you should be paying for her classes behind my back.”
“I’m sorry, you’re right, I meant to tell you, but then I got busy and forgot, you know how it gets. But I disagree with you on this, you know I do. We supported the other two.”
“That’s different.”
“It’s not. You just don’t like what she picked.”
“It’s not the acting. It’s the not going to college. The window of time she’s likely to ever go is rapidly closing, John, and you’re making it easier for her to stay out.”
“She doesn’t want to go to college.”
“I think she’s just rebelling against who we are.”
“I don’t think it has anything to do with what we want or don’t want or who we are.”
“I want more for her.”
“She’s working hard, she’s excited and serious about what she’s doing, she’s happy. That’s what we want for her.”
“It’s our job to pass on our wisdom about life to our kids. I’m really afraid she’s missing out on something essential. The exposure to different subjects, different ways of thinking, the challenges, opportunities, the people you meet. We met in college.”
“She’s getting all that.”
“It’s not the same.”
“So it’s different. I think paying for her classes is more than fair. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you, but you’re hard to talk to about this. You don’t ever budge.”
“Neither do you.”
He glanced at the clock on the fireplace mantel, reached for his glasses, and placed them on top of his head.
“I’ve got to go to lab for about an hour, then I’ll pick her up at the airport. You need anything while I’m out?” he asked as he stood to leave.
“No.”
They locked eyes.
“She’s going to be fine, Ali, don’t worry.”
She raised her eyebrows but didn’t say anything. What else could she say? They’d played this scene out together before, and this was how it ended. John argued the logical path of least resistance, always maintaining his status as the favorite parent, never convincing Alice to switch over to the popular side. And nothing she said swayed him.
John left the house. Relaxed in his absence, she returned to the pictures in her lap. Her adorable children as babies, toddlers, teenagers. Where did the time go? She held the baby picture of Lydia that John had guessed was Tom. She felt a renewed and reassuring confidence in the strength of her memory. But of course, these pictures only opened the doors to histories housed in long-term memories.
John Black’s address would have lived in recent memory. Attention, rehearsal, elaboration, or emotional significance was needed if perceived information was to be pushed beyond the recent memory space into longer-term storage, else it would be quickly and naturally discarded with the passage of time. Focusing on Dr. Davis’s questions and instructions had divided her attention and prevented her from rehearsing or elaborating on the address. And although his name elicited a bit of fear and anger now, the fictitious John Black had meant nothing to her in Dr. Davis’s examining room. Under these circumstances, the average brain would be quite susceptible to forgetting. Then again, she didn’t have an average brain.
She heard the mail drop through the slot in the front door and had an idea. She looked at each item once—a baby wearing a Santa hat pictured on a holiday greeting card from a former graduate student, an advertisement for a fitness club, the phone bill, the gas bill, yet another L.L.Bean catalog. She returned to the couch, drank her tea, stacked the photo albums back on the shelf, and then sat very still. The ticking clock and brief eruptions of steam from various radiators made the only sounds in the house. She stared at the clock. Five minutes passed. Long enough.
Without looking at the mail, she said aloud, “Baby in Santa hat card, gym membership offering, phone bill, gas bill, another L.L.Bean catalog.”
Piece of cake. But to be fair, the time between being presented with John Black’s address and being asked to recall it had been much longer than five minutes. She needed an extended delay interval.
She grabbed the dictionary off the shelf and devised two rules for picking a word. It had to be low frequency, one she didn’t use every day, and it had to be a word that she already knew. She was testing her recent memory, not learning acquisition. She opened the dictionary to an arbitrary page and put her finger down on the word “berserk.” She wrote it on a piece of paper, folded it, put it in her pants pocket, and set the timer on the microwave for fifteen minutes.
One of Lydia’s favorite books when she was a toddler was Hippos Go Berserk! Alice went about the business of readying for Christmas Eve dinner. The timer beeped.
“Berserk,” without hesitation or needing to consult the piece of paper.
She continued playing this game throughout the day, increasing the number of words to remember to three and the delay period to forty-five minutes. Despite this added degree of difficulty and the added likelihood of interference from the distraction of dinner preparation, she remained error-free. Stethoscope, millennium, hedgehog. She made the ricotta raviolis and the red sauce. Cathode, pomegranate, trellis. She tossed the salad and marinated the vegetables. Snapdragon, documentary, vanish. She put the roast in the oven and set the dining room table.
Anna, Charlie, Tom, and John sat in the living room. Alice could hear Anna and John arguing. She couldn’t make out the topic from the kitchen, but she could tell it was an argument by the emphasis and volume of the back-and-forth. Probably politics. Charlie and Tom were staying out of it.
Lydia stirred the hot mulled cider on the stove and talked about her acting classes. Between concentrating on making dinner, the words she needed to remember, and Lydia, Alice didn’t have the mental reserve to protest or disapprove. Uninterrupted, Lydia spoke in a free and passionate monologue about her craft, and despite Alice’s strong bias against it, she found she couldn’t resist being interested.
“After the imagery, you layer on the Elijah question, ‘Why this night rather than any other?’” said Lydia.
The timer beeped. Lydia stepped aside without being asked, and Alice peeked in the oven. She waited for an explanation from the undercooked roast long enough for her face to become uncomfortably hot. Oh. It was time to recall the three words in her pocket. Tambourine, serpent…
“You’re never playing everyday life as usual, the stakes are always life and death,” said Lydia.
“Mom, where’s the wine opener?” Anna hollered from the living room.
Alice struggled to ignore her daughters’ voices, the ones her mind had been trained to hear above all other sounds on the planet, and to concentrate on her own inner voice, the one repeating the same two words like a mantra.
Tambourine, serpent, tambourine, serpent, tambourine, serpent.
“Mom?” asked Anna.
“I don’t know where it is, Anna! I’m busy, look for it yourself.”
Tambourine, serpent, tambourine, serpent, tambourine, serpent.
“It’s always about survival when you boil it down. What does my character need to survive and what will happen to me if I don’t get it?” said Lydia.
“Lydia, please, I don’t want to hear about this right now,” Alice snapped, holding her sweaty temples.
“Fine,” said Lydia. She turned herself squarely toward the stove and stirred vigorously, obviously hurt.
Tambourine, serpent.
“I still can’t find it!” yelled Anna.
“I’ll go help her,” said Lydia.
Compass! Tambourine, serpent, compass.
Relieved, Alice took out the ingredients for the white-chocolate bread pudding and placed them on the counter—vanilla extract, a pint of heavy cream, milk, sugar, white chocolate, a loaf of challah bread, and two half-dozen cartons of eggs. A dozen eggs? If the piece of notebook paper with her mother’s recipe on it still existed, Alice didn’t know where it was. She hadn’t needed to refer to it in years. It was a simple recipe, arguably better than Marty’s cheesecake, and she’d made it every Christmas Eve since she was a young girl. How many eggs? It had to be more than six, or she would’ve taken out only one carton. Was it seven, eight, nine?
She tried skipping over the eggs for a moment, but the other ingredients looked just as foreign. Was she supposed to use all of the cream or measure out only some of it? How much sugar? Was she supposed to combine everything all at once or in a particular sequence? What pan did she use? At what temperature did she bake it and for how long? No possibility rang true. The information just wasn’t there.
What the hell is wrong with me?
She revisited the eggs. Still nothing. She hated those fucking eggs. She held one in her hand and threw it as hard as she could into the sink. One by one, she destroyed them all. It was marginally satisfying, but not enough. She needed to break something else, something that required more muscle, something that would exhaust her. She scanned the kitchen. Her eyes were furious and wild when they met Lydia’s in the doorway.
“Mom, what are you doing?”
The massacre had not been confined to the sink. Empty shards of shell and yolk were splattered all over the wall and counter, and the faces of the cabinets were streaked with tears of albumen.
“The eggs were past the expiration date. There’s no pudding this year.”
“Aw, we have to have the pudding, it’s Christmas Eve.”
“Well, there aren’t any more eggs, and I’m tired of being in this hot kitchen.”
“I’ll go to the store. Go into the living room and relax, I’ll make the pudding.”
Alice walked into the living room, shaking but no longer riding that powerful wave of anger, not sure whether she was feeling deprived or thankful. John, Tom, Anna, and Charlie were all seated and in conversation, holding glasses of red wine. Apparently, someone had found the opener. With her coat and hat on, Lydia poked her head into the room.
“Mom, how many eggs do I need?”