The Letter Opener (9 page)

Inside the apartment, the answering machine light was blinking. I pressed Play and after a pause I was listening to a canine rendition of the song “Our House” by Crosby, Stills and Nash, Paolo’s familiar voice performing a sequence of off-key bellows and howls. The whole production was so ridiculous and elaborate, it made me laugh out loud. A fitting end to a bizarre day, I thought.

But a part of me knew that Paolo wasn’t joking. He was upping the ante.

We do not remember days, we remember moments.

From
The Burning Brand: Diaries
1935–1950 by Cesare Pavese

M
Y
M
OTHER
’
S
T
HINGS

27 hotel toothbrushes (from my sister, Kana)

35 bars of hotel soap (also from Kana)

51 egg cartons (empty)

117 matchboxes (full)

163 ballpoint pens (new and used) divided into bundles of 20 and tied with elastic bands

11 rolls of digestive biscuits (unopened)

22 brown sugar packets

7 tins of cocktail nuts (6 unopened, 1 opened and partially eaten)

15 cans of chicken broth (unopened)

I
n early October, I invited Andrei to accompany me to visit my mother at Sakura. For some reason, I decided not to tell Paolo. It was a cool day and when we arrived most of the residents were inside busily preparing for the annual fundraising bazaar. In the dining area, several women dusted homemade
manju
cakes with rice flour, while others prepared marinated sacks of bean curd for
inarizushi.
The sweet tang of rice vinegar and cooking sake drifted through the air. Mary Yamada offered us some
mugicha
, roasted barley tea, which Andrei drank gratefully. I cupped my hands around a recycled office mug and brought the earthy liquid to my lips. It warmed my throat.

As we finished our tea, Andrei’s eyes began to inspect everything—the upright piano and craft table in the common room, and the scenic posters of Kamakura and Mount Fuji that lined the halls. Near the entrance was a round brass medallion engraved with small-petalled
flowers and the words:
SAKURA. A BLOSSOM OF LIFE.
I left Andrei alone in order to call up to my mother’s room, and when I returned, he had wandered away. For a moment I thought he had left, but I found him standing in Roy Nakano’s room, carefully examining a garden of miniature trees on the windowsill, as if he were acquainting himself with each individual leaf. Ceramic trays of pine, azalea and bamboo were arranged on top of stacks of
Popular Mechanics
: each curiously curved tree positioned off-centre on a small hill of earth. Bonsai. The art of cultivated deformity. Roy had packed soft green moss around the base of each creation.

When Andrei noticed that I had entered the room, he walked over to the shelves and pointed to an old photo of Roy, taken in an internment camp.

“Is this man a professional gardener?”

I shook my head. “No. I think it’s just something he picked up during the war, in the camps.” I said “in the camps” as flatly as I might have said “at school” or “at the cottage.” “It’s twisted, isn’t it? So-called dangerous enemy aliens tending their flowers.”

“Ah, yes. The manure-loving pacifist as treason suspect. I know very well about the state and its villains.”

“If it wasn’t so tragic, it would almost be funny. Just think of all the crimes against national security committed with a trowel and spade,” I said.

He grinned. “Well, it’s incredible what he’s done,” he said, pointing at the collection of bonsai. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”

We left Roy’s room and walked toward the common room, where my mother sat waiting with her hands clasped around a small pleated-leather handbag. Her black, shoulder-length hair was loosely arranged. I said hello and introduced Andrei. She smiled and pulled her shawl close to her, twisting the ends at her chest. I gave her the
oranges I had brought. She placed them on the table and then massaged her knees.

Shiro, the white kitchen cat, tiptoed by with a bandaged stump where its tail had been severed.

When my mother finally spoke, her voice sounded cracked from underuse. “See the cat?” She pointed. “Gloria thinks that someone in the building chopped its tail off deliberately.”

“That’s terrible. Why would anyone do something like that?” I said.

Her voice, now that her throat was cleared, suddenly became warm and buttery. “To make it look like a Japanese bobtail.”

I leaned forward and reached for the purse she had just placed on the table. It contained a fresh package of tissue, nail scissors and loose change that jangled like spurs when she walked.

“Gloria has a morbid imagination,” I said, examining the purse.

My mother stared at my hands.

“It’s almost broken,” I said, gently tugging at the leather purse strap. The stitching was unravelling.

“Please give that back.” She reached for the purse and turned to Andrei. “Will you put your mother in a nursing home when she becomes old and inconvenient?” A playful smile crept across her face.

“Jesus, Mum.”

“Perhaps,” he said, also smiling, “but if I did, I would be like Naiko and visit often.”

There was a pause as my mother contemplated his answer. I raised my eyes to look at Andrei, who seemed to be enjoying her directness.

“Are you married?” she continued.

“No,” he replied.

My mother studied Andrei in silence and then began to nod. “Yes. It’s probably better that way.”

I turned tensely to my mother.

Andrei laughed. “You must be the first mother I’ve met who doesn’t believe in marriage.”

“
Pfft
,” she said, and relaxed a little. “I say
pfft
to marriage.” Then she leaned over and whispered, “But last night I had two offers.”

Andrei and I both laughed in surprise. She giggled.

When we were ready to leave, Andrei walked over to my mother’s chair and offered his hand as she stood up. Their spontaneity and the casual way he touched her made me envious. Here was a man with an abundance of history, but none whatsoever with my mother. She was possibly the only maternal figure he had encountered since arriving in Canada and he was blissfully free to enjoy her company.

He hugged her. “Bye-bye, Mrs. Ayumi.”

Although it felt awkward, I hugged her, too.

When I stepped back, I noticed that the blue cardigan she wore under her shawl was buttoned incorrectly, but I stopped myself from saying anything.

“Thank you for coming, Mr.—” She smiled and tilted her head for a moment, but the name didn’t come to her.

“Andrei,” he said gently.

“Mr. Andrei. It was a pleasure to meet you.”

Her face was glowing and her eyes had a bright, almost lucid look.

Aging is a form of estrangement. We feel psychically matched to our image until our skin begins to soften and sag, and then one day we look in the mirror, dismayed to see an intruder with jowls and creases. When I was little, my father told me that the bags under his eyes were pockets stuffed with all the visions and images that had slipped away.

My mother’s apartment at Sakura consisted of a small bedroom, a sitting area, a bathroom and an intercom connected to the caretaker’s station. I found it pleasant but cramped, preferring to meet my
mother in the common room, where there was more space to socialize. The walls were painted a cheerful sunflower yellow. Shafts of light streamed through the windows and, in the early afternoons, a largeformat television played American soaps or
doramas
videotaped from Japanese TV. On the days she remembered to do it, my mother joined the other residents who congregated on the couches between two and four o’clock, eyes glued to the television, avidly enjoying its young models, its undiluted bursts of passion.

There were many Saturday afternoons that I sat with them on the couch, eating
osembe
and peanuts, enjoying the confinement that aging permitted, the ever-decreasing perimeter of choice and movement. It startled and amused me to realize that I was a young woman with the precise, repetitious habits of an old woman.

Before my mother came to Sakura, a social worker arranged to do a cognitive evaluation. He showed me the list of questions but told me he would have to be alone with my mother, presumably so I wouldn’t give her any signs or clues. To test her long-term memory he asked: “Who is the prime minister of Canada? When was the Second World War? When were you married?” To test her short-term memory, he named three objects—motorcycle, earmuffs, pineapple—and asked her to repeat the names immediately and again five minutes later. To test her judgment, he asked, “What would you do if you were walking down the street and saw a wallet on the sidewalk?”

My mother did all right on some of the questions, but not well enough overall to warrant an unconditional pass. In her ability to remember and master new things, for example, she was assessed as “considerably impaired.” By the end of the visit, the social worker had determined that my mother was exhibiting signs of confusion and mental decline that could no longer be attributed to forgetfulness or mere distraction. When he suggested that she was an ideal candidate for
assisted-living, somehow making this sound like a lavish compliment, I numbly accepted his opinion and moved her to Sakura—prompting a series of arguments with my absentee but nonetheless disapproving sister. That was twenty-two months ago.

Kana said, “It’ll just make it worse. There are studies that show—”

“She needs help. And you’re not around to help her ‘get better again.’”

“The studies say institutionalized care can lead to a downward spiral…rapid deterioration…intellectual decline. She’s just overtired. What she needs is a good, long holiday.”

Kana was annoyed because she thought our mother was acting older than she was. She didn’t like admissions of weakness or defeat. She believed in self-diagnosis, self-help, the idea that everyone—with hard work and an occasional spa treatment—was perfectible.

My mother was now entering Alzheimer’s middle state and I began to picture her mind as a Jackson Pollock painting: repetitive, overlapping loops, bundling and broken lines, all searching vigorously for a beginning.

Anyone who knew my mother well could see that her mind had become tangled.

My mother was once a scrupulous organizer. When we were little, she held on to all the photographs we ever took, every letter and birthday card she had ever received. She slipped everything into clear plastic sleeves and made raised print labels with her Avery label gun. My sister and I took my mother’s stashes for granted. We thought she was uptight when really she was just a firm believer in posterity. She was showing us that keeping a record of life gave it meaning.

Then, around the time of my twenty-first birthday, after Kana had left for Europe to work for a British newspaper, my mother suffered a mild concussion after slipping on a patch of black ice at a
subway entrance. She quickly recovered, but soon after began acting oddly. My sister came back and discovered while doing laundry that my mother’s pant pockets were filled with small scraps of paper. Smoothed out on the kitchen table, they formed an inventory of our mother’s mind: things she needed from the drugstore, bills that needed paying, names and numbers of close friends, family birthdays, places she had visited or hoped to visit, the dates and times of television shows she planned to watch, the bloom time of various flowers in our garden.

multi-vitamins, dental floss, hydro, phone, Anita
922–6190,
Ellen
304–1211,
March
22
nd (Jody’s Birthday), Ronchamp (Notre Dame-du-Haut), Kyoto (Ryoanji), Paris (Ste. Chapelle)…

By the time I reached my mid-twenties, my mother was regularly losing things like her watch and datebook and acting genuinely bewildered when they appeared in places she professed never to have left them. Her secret lists multiplied with these slips of short-term memory. The contents of her dresser became a source of preoccupation and constant rediscovery. When something caught her eye it was adopted—like an Expo 67 pin she attached to her tennis visor, or a cosmetics case she carried around with her everywhere for weeks, a pincer grip sliding the zipper back and forth, her other bumpy hand kneading the fabric like pastry dough.

“I never want to be like her.”

Kana made the observation one afternoon a few years back as we sat at the kitchen table, casually observing Ayumi in the other room. It
was the harshest thing she had ever said about our mother and I was taken aback by the coolness in her voice.

“It’s so depressing.” She frowned. “All that fussing and tinkering. All her fucking paraphernalia.”

It was a Sunday. Kana was wearing a shoulder-baring alpaca sweater and dark fitted jeans. Her hair was piled in a knot on top of her head. She looked casual and glamorous at the same time. Sometimes she was so beautiful it stupefied me.

Our mother was matching teacups and saucers, carefully dusting each set as she removed it from the glass cabinet and placed it on the dining table. She was concentrating in such a way that I knew everything else was blurring into the background. It was clear that she would be lost for hours.

Kana continued. “I pity her. Imagine having to rely on possessions to tell yourself who you are. Why do women do that? It’s a woman thing, isn’t it?”

I nodded but I felt secretly unsure. My mother had always been a collector. I remember shelves from my childhood lined with thickly glazed bowls and translucent egg cups she had gathered over the years. Painted china cats arranged in order of size. Plates that were never used because they were too beautiful. It was never just “loot.” Her collection rivalled the stock of most antique stores. But more recently her formidable stash had come to include detergent samples, elastic bands, old issues of
TV Guide
and blister packs of pills.

I wondered if a man in her position would behave the same way. Was it women’s particular dementia—or salvation—to obsessively tend to the order of the material world?

Shortly before my mother moved to Sakura, I went to visit her at home one evening and found her sitting at the top of the stairs with red, tear-filled eyes. She was holding a can of lemon furniture polish
in her hands. When she noticed me standing by the banister she stood up and tried her best to fake a cough. I remember she even placed a hand against her forehead as if feeling for a temperature. The onset of the flu, she said. When she passed me, she patted my shoulder in a way that was completely foreign to me.

That same evening I discovered that she had killed her house plants, not by neglect but rather by drowning them with overvigilance, watering them over and over again.

The first few nights at Sakura, my mother told me, she lay awake, listening by habit for the CN trains that used to pass along the tracks near her house. She heard instead someone walking up and down the hall, a patter of footsteps receding then approaching, receding then approaching. Eventually the sound soothed her to sleep.

I stopped by on my way to work the next morning to see how she was settling in. The nurse came by with her medication shortly after I arrived.