The Adjustment League (20 page)

“You admire her.”

Her face serious as a judge's, just as suddenly. “I can appreciate qualities I've never had, even if I'd never want them.”

“It's none of my business, but do you really need this particular job, or is it just a way of keeping close to him? Hanging on to whatever's left of your place in his life.”

“You're right, it's none of your business.”

But then, a minute later, she says, musing to a space beside my shoulder, “I do worry about Max. He's too intense. Like his father. And he's never learned healthy ways to release the pressure of his work. A Type A, but without any—”

I cut through the pop-psych blather. I have to, I can't help myself when it starts.

“Other than with some Christmas music, you mean?”

A look of utter confusion—or is it panic?—in her face. She stiffens, draws back a distance behind her skin.

“You don't know what I mean. Or what I want.”

This is how it happens. Especially late in an adjustment, especially in a closing window. Things trigger me and I go off. And I see it for a moment—like a lightning flash—and keep going off, as if self-knowledge were no more than a storm in the distance.

“Yes I do. You want to gossip, trade jargon. Maybe dance a pinstep this way, a pinstep back. Consider each person's ‘unique journey' through a picture window. Whereas me, I want to learn what's what and act on it.”

“So you can do what? Barge around and break things? Hurt people?”

Maybe.
“You need to stop drinking decaf. Or start drinking it, I don't know what's in your cup. The bulls are already loose in the china shop. I'm trying to put them down.”

“That sounds plain crazy. I'm sorry to put it that way, but it does. Max warned me to expect a rant. Asked me to hear it out. But I've heard enough.”

She stands up. When I reach out and put a hand on her arm, I feel the trembling all the way up to her elbow. I don't think it's just from my touch.

“There's one more thing.” She's not looking at me, she's facing the barristas working like four-handed monkeys to serve the waiting line. “Nothing to do with you, I promise. Ever since I re-entered the Wyvern fold, there are two things I've heard more than any other. ‘You don't
know anything' and ‘You're insane.' Crazy, lunatic. Whatever. You said them yourself in our visit here.”

“Yes?”

“You tell Max and anyone else that's listening that in both cases it's pure wishful thinking.”

Big purse in one hand, library books against her chest, she frees a couple of fingers to carry her cup to the garbage, push it through the recycle hole. I like her still and wonder why. Half wish I didn't. It seldom helps in an adjustment.

§

After she leaves, I stay a while longer. Treat myself to a Venti chai latte. Spicy-sweet, whipped milk froth—more than the price of two dinners.
Not every loonie can go to the homeless, Ken. A few of them have to find their way home
.

Islands 23 July

Getting into the car, she told me she wanted to talk about something. Fearing by her serious expression it would be her desire to leave—“to go home… back to the farm”—I distracted her with other topics and she didn't find her way back to it.
Using
Alzheimer's—when I have to.

The usual calming, pleasant time at Toogood Pond, splitting an oatmeal-fruit cookie, her beloved mocha frappuccinos. Her intense interest in all the birds as one big family, blurring their species differences into variations within one category. The geese… “the smaller ones” (ducks)… “the little one, so white!” (seagull). She sees bird-ness, in all its forms. But she still knows the robin, Robin Redbreast, the first one learned the last to go. She kept thanking me for staying “so long… all day”—two and a half hours—and expressing her love of nature, the breeze “heavenly.”

The closed snack shop with the blue window coverings across the pond. It hasn't changed since our first visit in April, though there are plenty of strollers to sell ice cream or pop and hot dogs to. Something in transition? “They closed that house. No one lives there now. They're closing up every home around here.”

She can't walk far now. To the first bench—then, after a while, to the next—back. Her knees. But also, she often presses her hand to a pain under her ribs—the right side today.

As I'm reversing out of our spot, she says beside me, “You like making them… All those ones…” She can't find the words. A look both sly and desolate on her face.

“Shh,” I say, “shh.” Using Alzheimer's again. No, worse.
Praying
for it.

Like father, like son.
Gwen's words more or less. Vivian's aunt and sister going away, going off the rails. Judy gone at fifteen. Vivian posing, helping to pose. How far back did the Wyvern rot start?

Don't laugh 30 July

Went with her into Harmony Nook. A place we've never sat before—we always had Toogood Pond. High white fence. White bench under an apple tree, birds visiting a bath and feeders. A burnt-red Japanese maple opposite us, other parts unlandscaped yet. Mick's “work in progress.” Mom liked it, but perhaps found the fenced enclosure eerie, kept asking “Who is that? What are those voices?” of people passing on the walk beyond. A refuge only peaceful if you understand it as such. She does better in open places where she can see who's coming and going.

After a time, she took her walker and circled the space with a quizzical expression, then crossed a patch of grass to the white fence slats and murmured, then called, to the people beyond. Bent over, eye to the crack. She looked like a madwoman peering from a cage.

Back in her room, Ivy came in to invite her to the social. She was reluctant to leave “Max,” though I reassured her I'd just water her plants and follow right behind. But she halted beyond the door every few steps, looking back. Then she moved in an extraordinary way. She hurried with small steps, almost a run (though she hasn't been capable of one in years), towards me in her doorway. “Max… are you coming?”

I felt myself smiling. “I'm your son, Mom. Sandor.” Usually that's enough.

But disquiet darkened her face. And something else—something wrong etched deep that wouldn't come out.

“Don't laugh,” a staff member standing by said to me. Not sharply, but firmly. A large woman, pleasant face. No name, but I've seen her before.

Was I laughing? I must've been. Must've looked like I was.

I was only trying to jolly us back to recognition. I've done it often enough before.

Today was different, though. She seemed disturbed when I left her in the bistro. Said of the runny peanut butter on her fruit plate: “It looks like what I find in my underwear.”

And now, a few hours later, the rebuke hits home and stings.

Don't laugh.

I did laugh, damn it. A craven social reflex to defuse a tense situation. Helplessness no excuse. Laughed at someone losing the ability to tell son from son, son from husband, keep her nearest and dearest straight.

§

Someone vacates a nearby table, leaving newspapers behind. On my way out I check the
Globe
and
Post
obituaries. Nothing in either of them. Only the
Star
's sports section is in the pile, but the
Star
wouldn't be the Wyverns' paper anyway. They'd hold their noses and vote for Hizzoner, but not follow the scat trail of his takedown.

Nothing to justify your paranoia, Judy. No slighting mention, not this time. No mention of anybody.

Could've been in another day, of course. Though Saturday the standard—the most-read—especially for a society family. Writer another question mark. Max obviously with his hands (and eyes) too full. Judy—ah, Judy… Sandor the family scribe, her POA through the years. But writing takes real writers longer—they respect the work. And with the beer, the post-breakdown blanks,
flesh into smoke
tar pits… He might be a while getting it done.

Assuming it's to be written at all
. You disappear someone who commits the booboo of stepping in front of a car—vanish her so successfully the neighbours have trouble recalling where she went. Do you want to reanimate her when she commits the bigger booboo of dying alone?

§

Mrs. Rasmussen knows how to bar a door. Not that I would have expected anything less from her. “Judy's not available. She's having a bad day.” Arms folded, standing on the steps.

So that's that.

I don't hate everyone who blocks me
, I'm thinking as I three-point on Selkirk.
Depends on why they're doing it as much as how
.

Strange, the court of self. When and where it convenes, when and where it calls a recess. Spells in the waiting room. Bawling clerks suddenly calling you back in to testify, prosecute, defend, pass judgement, sentence… in proceedings that never end.

§

Cantonese Chow Mein at Shanghai Food Gallery shouldn't really taste that different from my veggie-noodle bowl. They're variations on the same simple theme. Theirs has more meat, though—shrimp, pork, beef—and slices of chicken, not shreds. More tasty grease, and much less water. And then, too—the main thing—occasionally you just need a break from your own cooking.

“Is the old man cooking tonight?” I ask the boy at the till. “Can I see him for a second?”

The boy says something in Chinese into the kitchen behind him, gets something shouted back. The old man sticks his face out of the steam, sees me, and mutters at the boy. Disappears.

“It'll be ready in a few minutes,” the boy says, cancelling the order.

Compensation on completion, unless the adjustment is ongoing
. As with Jared and Lucius and Lucy. A principle to adhere to, I think, sitting on a stool by the front window beside two girls showing each other pictures on their iPhones.

Two years ago, the old man was overjoyed to have his granddaughter's boyfriend adjusted out of her life—“gangster boy… no good, NO GOOD,” with sideways cleaver motions—and bowed with gratitude at the modesty of the terms. Now, though, as the adjustment recedes, fixing me a free dinner once every month or two has begun to seem onerous.

It's while I'm looking out at the street that she returns. Not a dream, not a hallucination, not even a waking vision. More like an overlay. I don't stop seeing the street—still bright, it's not even 5:00 yet. I don't stop hearing the girls, the cooking sounds behind me.

But I also see what I saw intermittently all night long. That unrelenting struggle to free her face from the stone it's glued to or grown to be a part of.
Turning to me
, I thought at first—but maybe I'm just the one standing in the same direction as freedom. And she's succeeding, too. The wizened, wispy-haired half of the face now has almost a quarter of the plump, golden-haired side forced round… the profile getting on toward three-quarter view.

Such energy in the eyes! The eyeball rolled into the crevice of the far one shooting beams of intent where it means to go—but also in the outward one, sunk in veiny wrinkled folds. Shining out of both of them, a baby's clear, implacable determination to move from where it is.

“Order ready!”

The three of us turn. He points at the two girls, then at me.

“Yours almost.”

13

Driving up the
404
, I feel the engine sticking again. Like it's revving through wet sand. Do open stretches, higher speeds bring it on? But it was tooling down Kennedy when I first felt it, the Saturday Maude died, when I mentioned it to Lucius. Something that comes and goes?

Or you do?
Mind on, then off. Aware, then in the dark. Present and accounted for, then AWOL.

§

Toogood Pond the nicest park I've found in the city. And Unionville's Main Street the perfect lead-up to it. Cafés, shops and restaurants, pubs, even an ice-cream shack (closed in October), hanging flower baskets—gracious old homes, Maude's “likable houses,” down the side streets. Worth well over a million each, no doubt, but the owners in agreement—for property values if not for good taste—to keep an old-time, small-town vibe. Like Niagara-on-the-Lake in a way. But doing a much better job of keeping it real.

The parking lot full on a Sunday. I get the last spot and start up the dirt-and-gravel path on the left-hand side of the pond. Big willows overhanging the water. Trees on the grassy slope further to my left, screening the road above. Quiet. Fall colours. Wine reds, golds, straw yellows. Browns in all shades coming forward, green dropping away. Dissolving like a scrim.

Strollers, joggers. Couples, kids, families. Old people, alone or with a middle-aged child, usually a daughter. A bench now and then, someone resting on it. Most people offering a greeting, unless too deep in the iWorld.

Midway up the side, I step into a patch of strong déjà vu. Like I've stepped into a painting I know, or a scene from a movie I've watched countless times.
Been-hereness
. My head swims woozily, and I have to sit down on the bench to get my bearings.

As soon as I do, it comes clear and I can account for it.

An oval of grass, a stubby curving peninsula. Willows to either side, but a clear view across the pond. Right in front of me, by the water, the long irregular clump of thistles, milkweed, tall grasses and wildflowers Maude stood in front of. The sun that's warming the back of my neck the sun that was shining on her face, glinting off her glasses. I don't have the photo with me today, but I don't need it.
This is the spot
.

They would have stopped here, for a rest. Shared the cookies or sandwiches often mentioned in the book, the mocha frappuccinos. The photographer—who else but Sandor?—maybe staying on the bench, zooming in on her. Or, more likely—her unsteady walking—leading her out by the flowers and backing off a few paces for the shot.

It's eerie to be sitting where they sat, and to know it for certain. And to see other things not in the photo but in the book, like peering around the glossy borders of the frame. The closed-up snack shop with blue tarps over the windows on the other side, overhanging the water. To Maude it was another shuttered home. The birds dotting the water, dozens of them—geese, ducks, cormorants, gulls. Gliding. Flapping in short flights. What she thought of as one big family of bird, coming in different sizes and colours.

One glowing success as a writer, Sandor—if you'll take it. Your subject more vivid than her describer. The dead more present than the living
.

The son's reflections and recriminations fall away, detaching like the dandelion filaments, leaving just pure glimpses of the gone.

For a few moments it's just Maude sitting beside me on the bench. Staring out at plants and sky. Same as we did from Vivera's window a week ago.

§

I move on. A full circuit of the pond is a kilometer, I hear one power walker inform another. Already a few have lapped me a couple of times.

A sign with pictures and the names of fish species living in the lake. A log covered with sunning turtles. Heron stalking the weedy shallows behind them. Then the path ducks into trees, comes out on a wooden bridge over a swamp dense with bulrushes. Flattened path through them, muskrat probably, leading to some splashing amid waving stalks.

A shady section then over the stream that feeds the pond. Cool and covert-seeming. Trees interlacing overhead to form a tunnel, it must be nearly opposite the end I came in. Leafmeal, stick bits, swirling along. Fall rains lately, the water rising.

Leaning against the bridge railing the spot to pull out the book, let it open where it will.

Little birds 31 July

Something I forgot about yesterday. Mom kept coming back to a part of the Chinese lunch they'd had. “Little birds,” they'd been served, she said. How big? She made a circle the size of a toonie with her thumb and forefinger.

They couldn't have been that small, I said with a chuckle, trying, again, to jolly it away. I seemed to have been trying to do that all day.

“These little birds,” she insisted. Thumb and forefinger again. They'd cooked them. She couldn't get over it. She seemed partly admiring and partly horrified at the ingenuity of it.

“Noisy to eat.” Crunchy? I suggested. “Yes, crunchy. With little bones.”

She always had transformative vision. Leaves that formed families and whispered their histories, insects that carried on quirky arguments, a corner of unstained board that protested its neglect. She was a wonderful mimic, and when someone took root in her brain, she magnified them into a caricature that surpassed the original, becoming, like a Dickens character, something strange and indelible. Under her gaze, everything alive and interacting—how it delighted us as kids. (Dad laughing along, chiding when she “went too far.” His boundaries to the real not too elastic—just ask J.)

People with imaginations lose their minds differently than people without imaginations. I think they suffer more. Whatever got added to sane contemplation—depth, layers, richness, intricacy—now gets added to insane obsession. Fancies, whimsies, gorgeous visions now turn vicious, ugly, cruel, grotesque—horror's gallery. It gives me a preview of myself with dementia.

Maybe, Sandor. And maybe not. It's not just strength of imagination. It's also how outward-facing it is. For all your sympathy for Maude—who seems to have brought out the best in you, no question—you seem pretty stuck on yourself.
I know, I know. I may be underestimating you.
I heard you in the bar.

High thresholds 1 August

These were (these are?) my family, and yet I can't easily imagine anyone else, even strangers, hearing me call out in distress so loudly and so often without offering some aid. In them I sense what I have always sensed and feared: a cold it is dangerous to stand close to.

What you thought, J? Mother? As you cut yourself with blades? Offered your body to a car?

What crimes have I conspired in? How far, how deep, do they go?

“Beauty and gentleness.” Where did I read that? That no matter what someone's cognitive ability is, they still respond to beauty and gentleness. What further guide is needed?

Mom submitting herself to Dr. Spira's treatment table, meekly and somehow happily. Another sacrifice. She looked small lying there. Her feet dangled off sideways until I shifted them in line with her body. “Thank you, dear.”

No sign of pain, even in her eyes, when Dr. Spira injected the freezing in her upper lip, then cut the wedge out of her filtrum and seared the spot with several blasts of liquid nitrogen. She lay still as a statue, hands folded across her stomach.

“A high threshold,” Dad used to say of her. “The highest pain threshold I've ever seen.” Which meant something coming from an anaesthetist. But a strange thing to say—I thought so even as a child—about your wife. An odd compliment to keep repeating.

When her leg veins became varicose—she would have been in her late thirties, all of her children born—they used to go over to the ER in the evening so he could “strip her veins.” They made the procedure sound minor—though how could it be, the stripping of veins? She would come back bandaged from thigh to ankle, limping and joking about her “elephant legs.”

An online site tells me now that vein stripping—when it is still done—is done under general or spinal anaesthesia. Yet they were gone and back in an hour.

A high threshold.

Now I'm the one who feels cold—the cold I've felt before with the Wyverns. Cold to give you the queasy shivers. It drives me out of the silent shade and into the populated sun. Two Chinese men sitting on lawn chairs under a willow, fishing poles planted, bobbers out where the stream widens through rushes into the pond. Seeing them like emerging from a deserted subway into a city square at noon.

The more I read, the more light is shed, the more darkness is discovered.

Sandor's growing sorrow and pity, multiplied by guilt, remorse. Exhaustion. Burnout. Which broke him, surely, I have no trouble believing that part. But why did contrition never make it up into atonement? Giving up on visiting Maude eventually, downing pints with his friends the night after her death. Doing nothing—nothing I can see—to help Judy, his sister and a windblown moaning ghost these four-and-a-half decades. Like a confession record stuck on
bad I'm sorry bad I'm sorry
… Can't unstick to
make it better… make a start
.

No wonder you needed a high threshold.

From the deck of the disused snack shop, I see us looking back from the bench across the pond.

Maude and I. Snack bags in our laps.

No trace of fucking Sandor.

There's a stone bridge at the other end of the pond, near the parking lot, with a sluice gate under it controlling the waterfall that drops down fifteen feet or so and runs on in a fast, narrow stream curving past willow banks. The volume of water coming through tells how much water the lazy-looking stream at the other end brings in through the deadfall and bulrushes. Leaning against the railing, looking up occasionally at the dark clump of trees at the other end where I was, I open the book again. People pass behind me, saying “
Excuse
me” to squeeze a stroller or walker past.

Sunflower 21 August

I feel guilty for snapping at her, and alone in that feeling too. The special loneliness of being with someone with dementia is to be alone with your understanding. To be singly responsible for the total survey of two people and their situation. But the wrong in that is that it places too much emphasis on companionship of the mind. I pack up the lunch and we go on. Slower and slower she moves, hunching further over the walker. She shows no sign of unhappiness. Only an endless puzzlement and curiosity about the now always new-to-her. “What is that orange?” “The worker's vest on the next property.” “What's that sound?” “A cicada.” “Bzzz. Humming. Humming brr, hummer brr…” “A humming bird?” “Yes, that one.”

And then one of those astounding moments. As we pass the window of her room, which she usually can't recognize from outside or another direction, I say, “There's your sunflower.” “Yes,” she says. “Facing east. Is that right?” Peering up at me. “Yes, it is.
Exactly
.”

Driving home, more of the visit comes back to me, as often happens. Driving a kind of processing. When I arrived, she talked of what a wonderful place Vivera is, how kind the people are to her, how “lucky” she feels—beaming with unfeigned gratitude. As if she needs to believe, and has succeeded in believing, that she is in the best and safest of all possible situations. In her smiles and wide-eyed exclamations I saw a terrifying vulnerability.

The same terrifying vulnerability that prompted her anaesthetist husband to pack her away after her suicide attempt? The hassle—the endless hassles—of dealing with people not asleep. The Sandman seems to hover behind these pages, a source of unspecified darkness.
Stripping veins. The daughter he wronged.

I button the book in my lower jacket pocket and resume walking around the pond. I do the whole circuit on the path. Once, twice, three times. Then a fourth—quickening my pace each time. Like a power walker—one who passes me, in spandex and wrist weights, beams solidarity—though I'm chasing a totally different kind of fitness. In fact, each lap brings more stabs and throbs from all the fracture and dislocation sites. All the ones I remember—from fights, from accidents, from stupid stunts—and all the ones I sense but can't remember, since they happened outside of conscious memory.
Damaged goods
.

Stop… ease up for chrissakes!
Anyone seeing my increasingly distorted limp, the grimaces I can't suppress at particularly sharp jolts, would tell me that. But the pain is just what I'm after. It stokes the cold fury I need stoked.

Infants gumming grins from strollers. Seniors from walkers or wheelchairs. Middle-aged man matching the slow advance of a younger companion between canes. The able-bodied, the disabled. Young, old. Singles. Couples. Even teenagers breaking out of mutual engrossment to say hello. The whole human family at its warmest is greeting me with a smile of welcome. It's almost unbearable—like a travel brochure in the hole. It makes me walk faster, but the faster I walk, the faster it comes towards me.

Family. Belonging.

Why do—how can—Max and Sandor prefer their hamster wheels of piss-smelling pints and porn shots in a dental bib?

Especially when Sandor knows better. Or knew, at least.
Around Toogood Pond
proves it. He saw a better path—walked it for a long time—and then stopped. Gave up. His “breakdown.” Fair enough. But
breakdowns come and breakdowns go—what're you going to do about it, that's what I'd like to know
.
Graceland
Lois's favourite album—and the songs sank into me too. Before my all-jazz era.

It's Sandor I feel the greatest rage for. Probably because he's not all bad, far from it—and the not-bad part goads me like a key just out of reach. Max a clearer case. His royalties for Christmas Music are coming to him, coming soon. No need to think further on it. But Sandor? Comes from a family that, behind a glossy veneer, operates like a drug cartel: the strong reaping the family winnings, the weak tossed to the side of the road. Judy. Maude. And Sandor himself? Nobody said this breakdown was his first. But somewhere along the way, he did the hard and tricky work of escaping from the family freezer, stepping into the sun. Maybe just partway, maybe not for long—few escapes are permanent.