The Madwoman in the Volvo: My Year of Raging Hormones (15 page)

With my Shanghai abacus, next come the cost-benefit analyses. I can’t stop running the abacus—it is practically an internal physical organ, like my heart or my liver. Mr. Y is spending more and more hours (I keep count) at a venue that’s an hour each way with traffic. The gas and the dry-cleaning alone are a couple of hundred bucks a month. And of course, as events would have it, not much of the money he makes (he won’t tell me how much) flows into our household. Up in the Bay Area, his twenty-six-year-old son is hard at work finishing his first novel, which he really believes in, and so just for a few months Mr. Y is helping him out. A fair bit. I can’t help recalling that when I myself was the exact same age—twenty-six—and I was in a similar situation with Mr. X, myself trying to write, he refused to pay my rent for me (as he had for his ex; besides, he pointed out, no one ever had for him) and I had to get a temp job. It was an excellent experience, I learned to be more disciplined, and all was well. But no, young people today are fragile, San Francisco is expensive, and times are different.

Everywhere you look in our relationship, there are tributaries upon tributaries of conflict, lighting up everywhere like a troubled PET scan.

Meanwhile, our household is sliding into total disarray, which, due to having to write almost a thesis-load of magazine pieces to pay all our bills, I’m powerless to stop. It is true that it’s not his fault that Charter cable has temporarily cut off our Internet. This is apparently due to the fact that, thanks to the three cheapo old Toshiba laptops that I have, which my daughters peck away at like rabies-infected raccoons when I’m on deadline and scold them, our house is radiating—just seeping, suppurating—so much spam it is actually fritzing out other Wi-Fi connections on our block. We are sending out so much Moshi Monster spam, it’s like we have Internet lice.

That said—as he darts in and out of our home, backing out of the driveway with a fresh travel mug, babbling into his headphones—like sand dunes, laundry is piling up, dishes choke the sink, newspapers and magazines swirl on every chair, and, perhaps most regrettably, on our balcony bowls overflow with ash from his cigarettes (one of the nasty habits he allows himself when he is in “show mode”).

It is starting to feel less like a house with rooms and cabinets and more like a field of nests, and many of them are his nests.

Our home is such, it seems, that every utilitarian object is displayed and visible except for the one item you are looking for (scissors, keys, can opener), and now—pull up the next cue—here come the ants. That’s right—due to a sudden unseasonal heat, the earth has vomited forth ants from every corner. There are ants in the kitchen, ants in the girls’ rooms, ants in the tub, even—and what kind of metaphor is this?—ants on my computer. There are literally ants on my computer keyboard. It’s like something out of
Le Chien Andalou
. All I am missing are melting clocks and maybe a razor across a leaking eyeball.

But as Mr. Y points out, being more impressively Zen than myself, he is not bothered by ants, which are natural harmless creatures that will go away on their own schedule when the weather changes. Too, my nervous habit of agitatedly spraying Windex at the ants (George12! George12! George12!) is essentially poisoning us, by inadvertantly misting things like our dishes, utensils, and fruit with window cleaner. All this may be technically true, but in the meantime I am brushing ants off my computer, and every time the girls enter the house (coming from their dad’s house, where there are no ants; Sally’s flat pronouncement: “Dad says to get rid of ants you have to put food away”) and see the delicate shimmering trails, they utter piercing shrieks in that particular tween two-octaves-above-middle-C register that makes my bone marrow shiver. While all the time I am trying to mentally focus and concentrate in order to pay our mortgage (which includes property tax). And what about the home insurance? Did we pay the home insurance? That is Mr. Y’s job, and they are claiming we are late.

When I call him at work—where I can hear conversation and laughter in the background (“The costumes just came—oh my God!”)—Mr. Y keeps saying that everything will be fine, this is not a crisis, all of it is manageable. What I should try to bring down is my stress level, and that I can do by breathing . . .

Which is not a good dynamic between us. The more I come under stress, the more New Agey he goes, and the more his “advice” backfires. To wit:

1. Advice:
If I just let go of my negative catastrophic thought patterns, I will be able to get rid of my continuing insomnia and sleep easily through the night as he does. Result: I continue to lie awake every night with my mind racing as usual, but now I also berate myself for being a bad sleeper.

2. Advice:
If I say I’m feeling sad or stressed, he gently parries with the wisdom that we choose all our moods, the (supposedly) good news being that we actually have power over our own minds. Result: This of course simply makes me feel more anxious, because now instead of just being blue I am a person who makes self-destructive choices (“Oh great—and now I am going mad”) and who has lost all perception of reality (because I have no memory of actually “choosing” the bad mood).

3. Advice:
To bring myself more peace, I should begin meditation. He gives me CDs from Eckhart Tolle to listen to in my car. They were given to him by one of his partners on
Jam City
. The other day they were all talking about mindfulness and controlling one’s emotions, and they all agreed these were really important things.

Sample Tolle passage: “Resistance is an inner contraction, a hardening of the shell of the ego. You are closed. Whatever action you take in a state of inner resistance (which we could also call negativity) will create more outer resistance, and the universe will not be on your side; life will not be helpful.” Result: I want to punch him
and
Eckhart Tolle in the face. “Life will not be helpful”? “Nor will your male partner,” I should add.

The horrible truth is that, aside from the nests, when Mr. Y is at his job and my kids are with Mr. X, I feel terribly lonely in my big clattering house. Sometimes all I can think of to get through the day is draw a number line from 8:00
A.M.
to 8:00
P.M.
and shakily shade my progress to the evening in half-hour intervals. (My own version of
Fifty Shades of Grey
.) When he comes home fifteen minutes later than usual (“I got caught in this conversation about the ticketing—”) I am outraged.

Dinnertime has gone from dreadful to nightmarish. When the girls are in, I just feed them at 5:00 as I used to. Which in a way is a blessing.

When the girls are away, Mr. Y and I try for increasingly rare “date nights” (oh my gosh—has it come to this now, date night?). I cook dinner now and set the table for us both, being that he is now not the Ethel to my Lucy but rather the Lucy to my Ethel. (I have also started to take in his dry cleaning for him because time is so short on his days off I do not want him to consume all his free time with errands.) Due to his schedule, we often eat at strange late hours, but it’s the best we can do.

So here we are, shakily, putting one candle in a candlestick, can’t find the other.

I make the mistake of asking: “How was your day?” He makes the mistake of nattering on about the play, and as I watch his mouth move, I feel an itchy trigger finger and think those awful words only a woman who needs a man neither to support her nor to be a father to her children can think: How long until I vote you off the island?

So while I and the house are being neglected, where has his customary WASP love and service gone? Into the hapless cast of
Jam City
. I can hear Mr. Y delivering his special personal care on the phone (which he picks up at all hours of the day or night): “Absolutely. I am completely available. Call me anytime.” I notice him putting an old floor lamp from our garage into his car. What the—? He explains that one of the out-of-town dancers, SpookyZ, needs a lamp for her temporary apartment, and he knew we weren’t using it anyway. I see him printing out twenty résumés for the ten-year-old son of one of the actors, which is not technically his job but he offered to help out as a favor.

AT THIS
moment in life, when the stories are never elegant, everything tends to go wrong at once. There is now a sad turn involving Alice, my father’s little Chinese wife. It seems that her penchant for chattering Chinese at one no matter how many times one reminded her one was American was not, as we’d thought, due to her natural girlish sweetness or simply a symptom of her English skills plateauing after fifteen years.

Oddly, Alice is starting to . . . disappear. Increasingly, she is being found wandering at 2:00
A.M.
on freeways in places like Torrance (fifty miles away), and is being brought home in the dead of night by police officers.

Meanwhile, forensic analysis reveals that Alice has withdrawn thirteen thousand dollars, gone to a bank in Chinatown, and purchased a useless universal life-insurance policy, an event she cannot recall. Clearly Alice is getting confused. But the situation is more acute than that. Alice is now even starting to disturb the tenants—the tenants! She is waving butcher knives at them, hurling their things into the street, setting fires in the backyard (Malibu is brushfire country). She is also starting to hit my father, leaving him bruised and bleeding.

I learn this last bit via the Malibu police, whom my father called because Alice was hitting him—not to have her arrested but, as my dad says, just to “scare” her. To evade capture, Alice ran away with a duffel bag stuffed with their passports, marriage certificate, immigration papers, and two small, tightly packed envelopes, one with exactly thirteen crisp one-dollar bills inside it and another with a Keystone Kops–type mélange of Chinese money, Turkish money, and . . . as I said ruefully, upon discovery, to my sister: “I didn’t know Bill Nye the Science Guy
had
his own currency.” When I gave Alice the bag (returned by the police), she accused me of stealing two thousand dollars from it.

In short, a doctor’s visit confirms that Alice’s once-quaint-seeming disconnects are actually symptoms of deepening dementia, the crows that are now coming to roost. Which is to say that instead of being my dad’s twenty-years-younger insurance policy, it is now a relatively young seventy-two-year-old Alice who requires full-time care, at six thousand dollars a month, and she could live—what?—another twenty years? At that rate she will go through all his money, and then Kaitlin and I will have to begin to pay.

We’ve just seen this happen with Patty, a longtime family friend of ours. Patty had just gone through a devastating experience with her mother, Sabine, who lived until ninety-eight—ninety-eight! By the end of Sabine’s life, the last ten years of which she had spent in various states of dementia, the family was totally destroyed. Even though they had secured long-term-care insurance early on, due to various (Medicare? Medicaid? Medi-Cal?) complications (involving shoring up? spending down? who could follow it?), the care of Patty’s mother ended up costing the family the staggering amount of almost six hundred thousand dollars. Patty cut her work to half-time to oversee the constantly shifting emergency modes of her mother’s care, while gradually annexing more and more of her and her husband’s savings to pay for it. This in turn financially impacted her children’s choices of college, setting off a range of tortuous family dynamics.

Over this time it seems Patty herself has aged thirty years. Though her mother had a relatively benign disease (I visited Sabine once in her convalescent home and, albeit probably medicated, she seemed waxy and distant but calm), by contrast Patty has had a viral one. Before one’s eyes, you could watch forty-something Patty herself changing into an old person. Under the shadow of her mother’s decline, she descended into the frowse of the full-time caregiver, she whose tireless efforts no one else understands. The hair frizzed and grayed; her resting expression changed: the eyebrows went helpless; the mouth sagged; the shoulders rounded and dropped. Patty even began dressing like a senior, in bulky cardigans (due to the cold hospitals) and flat almost nurselike shoes (due to long walks to the parking structures, she said, carrying multiple bags of supplies—the medicines, hot-water bottles, medical tights).

Clearly Patty—the eldest daughter—felt guilty about her mother, perhaps overly so, and she lost perspective around weighing the needs of her still-growing family against the needs of her ever-declining mother.

But Kaitlin will not make that same mistake, because Kaitlin is a brilliant manager. So she jumps into full gear to manage the Alice project. Her efforts are heroic. She is eventually able not just to switch over Alice’s health insurance (for years, my father hadn’t purchased her any, preferring to play the odds on her relatively young age), but to find the only assisted-living facility in California that has Mandarin-speaking caregivers. Kaitlin is able to do that after an enormous amount of research, augmented by the fact that she is both a development director and former scientist, speaks Mandarin herself, and has the laser focus of the Terminator. The facility is a relative bargain at four thousand dollars a month, given that Alice requires a private room, due to her penchants for ceaseless pacing until 4:00
A.M.
, putting on the clothing of her roommates, and, well, going to the bathroom in the middle of the floor and then bagging up and hiding . . . what has come out. While Alice has traveled, I have performed backup when I can, pouring a heavily medicated Alice from her wheelchair into my Volvo, or helping lift her wheelchair in a winch onto a—all hands waiting, with goggles and safety gloves and orange jumpsuits—Southwest flight. But it is never enough; my sister is doing one hundred times more than I am, and I continually fail her. Except for terse Alice emergencies, the phone lines between us lapse into icy silence. And you remember there is also my dad. As opposed to a mentally addled wife/caregiver, Dad now gets his own health professional—a forty-two-year-old Filipino male nurse named Thomas—and as a result he is suddenly receiving the best care of his life. Understand that my Dumpster-diving father is a man who can survive on things like past-its-due-date sushi and the leftovers of other people’s Starbucks coffee. He has ingested bacteria for so many decades he may actually have morphed into another life-form (with a resting pulse rate of 34, I remind you). But now—hydrated, fed, washed, and laundered—weirdly, my father is roaring back with a formidable energy. Which is to say we now have a sometimes-wheelchair-bound but nonetheless always extremely active now eighty-nine-year-old who greatly enjoys getting bathed and diapered and fed ice cream and crashing UCLA science lectures and—oh, by the way . . . every day he calls me now—are you ready for this? He wants
sex
. He proudly needs only one-sixteenth of a Viagra pill for
sex
. There is some automatic Googling to find, to one’s slow-blossoming horror, in-home services that use the phrase “healing hands”!