Why I'm Like This (10 page)

Earlier, our guide had jauntily disclosed to us that in the United States we would not be on a river like the Rio Pacuare. At the end of a heavy rainy season (end?) it offers class four and class five rapids—class five rapids are for professionals only—but liability lawsuits are not a fundamental part of the Costa Rican infrastructure, so here we are. Now, without a jot of jaunt, he warns, “We do not want to be on the far side of the river, you understand?” But then, funny, there we are. “We do not want to go under that waterfall!” What waterfall? I look up. The sharp peripheral spray of it stings my cheeks, and we float beneath it, unequivocal. The guide screams at us. We paddle literally for our lives. The front of the boat bends ninety degrees into the vortex; half of us are ejected into the roiling foam. The noise is immense. Rushing water is loud, you know? Niagara Falls must be deafening. What kind of honeymoon is that? It is the sound of death. Which leads me to the fact that here, finally, is the moment I have been waiting for. My body has caught up with me. Or I with it. Whatever.

It is much quieter down below the bubbles. I don't know where up is, but the guide had said, “Try not to panic; the river will spit you out.” So I don't fight. I wait, patiently, in the swirl, to see what will happen. In time—it seems like a long time but I know it is not—I am spit out. David is too, but I wish I had seen him down there:
Here we are, together
.

 

Long afterward, after we were all back safely in the boat; after we paddled to a place where the river slowed and yawned and we rested beside a tiny piece of shore; after I sat on a rock with my head between my legs and my heart beating out of my chest like the heart of a lovesick cartoon character; after the raucous, celebratory dinner in San Jose with our new friends, the husband and wife who had snatched us from the calamitous froth (You saved our lives! We just grabbed and held on! Oh, my God! Cheers!); after we flew home; long after everything; I remembered the calm. I remembered the silence in my head. No endless, contrapuntal refrain. No fear, no loneliness. No false bravado. Peace. Release. Is that what joy is?

F
OR
many years I believed that death would come to my New York grandmother, Dorothy Kaplan, in the form of a chicken. Maybe kosher, maybe not. I predicted that she would engage the chicken in a seemingly endless cycle of freezing and cooking until its molecular structure was so altered that it would combust spontaneously and consume the old woman in ball of fire.

I ate that chicken every time I had dinner at my grandparents' apartment, which, from the time I moved to New York after college, was about once a month, not counting holidays and other family gatherings. When I arrived in the late afternoon the table would be set and the challah would be grow
ing hard in a napkin-lined basket. The chicken would have been in the oven since noon, defrosting and re-cooking, acquiring its signature teeth-gnashing consistency. On the plate it looked like petrified wood and in your mouth it felt like a ball of twine. That it had been basted with lemon juice and then lightly dusted with powdered garlic and paprika was not to its advantage. And how, after all that cooking, it would wind up on the plate at room temperature is still a mystery.

Over dinner, my grandparents and I would discuss books and current events, we would shake our collective fist at President Reagan, and, eventually, when we were done chewing, we would adjourn to the living room where my grandmother would play a little Beethoven or Bach or Chopin on the piano and I would dance in a faux-balletic style for the amusement of all. Finally, we would return once again to the kitchen for a slice or two of Grandma's special, still mostly frozen, dry-as-the-desert raisin cake, another victim of the infamous Cooking-Freezing Torture. In this case, though, the cold helped the taste. Actually, no food was ever served by my grandmother at a temperature others considered standard. But then, why should it have been?

Just because a person can't cook doesn't mean she's crazy.

When my grandfather passed away of presumably unrelated causes, the dinners increased in frequency and decreased, if that was even possible, in variety. But other
meals were added, lunches at a nearby diner and Sunday brunches, which were rescued by David, who, to the endless delight of my grandmother, could make pancakes. Once in a while, praise God, we ordered Chinese food or pizza.

A little over a year ago, cashews appeared on the surface of the soil of my grandmother's house plants. Had she read somewhere that rubber plants crave salt? Perhaps. We did not question it. Who would want to know the answer to such a question? Next, the soil itself disappeared entirely from one large pot and the roots of the plant were wrapped in newspaper. Incredibly, it lived, unwatered, in such a fashion for perhaps eight months, maybe a year. Where did the dirt go?
Why
did the dirt go?

She stopped making chicken. She couldn't remember how. Cook it then freeze it? Freeze it then cook it? Does it need to be cooked at all? There was a book that everyone was supposed to read in high school called
I Heard the Owl Call My Name
. If you haven't read it here's the general premise: a guy hears an owl call his name and his days are numbered. I don't know if it really called his
name
or just hooted; I was too busy rereading
The Outsiders
. Anyway, one evening I was encouraged by my grandmother to sup on what I can only presume to have been a brand-new recipe for uncooked chicken. Note to fellow cooks: cinnamon is not an appropriate substitute for paprika.

A flare went up, a bell tolled. The owl hooted.

Not long after, I found my grandmother, a tireless, impeccable housekeeper, vacuuming the living-room carpet without the vacuum plugged in. We had what seemed to be an intelligent debate, which I lost, about the relative benefits of electricity. Happily, the ten-inch strips of carpet nap which ran hither and thither throughout the apartment and still comprise one of the sharpest visual images of my childhood—a strange green Cubist landscape—could be maintained by the pressure of the Electrolux alone, that is, sans Electro. Soon my grandmother couldn't tell a cabbie to take her to Lord & Taylor. She couldn't order French toast or blintzes or noodle soup. If she found her way to the diner without me she had to sort of
describe
what she wanted. Eyeglasses became teacups and telephones became combs and a lot of things became just “things.” I was startled to notice one day that her
Times
crossword was filled in with nonsense words. She had taken her address book apart and only A through K and S remained. Thank God she could still play the piano, although the selection dwindled to four pieces, two Chopin, one Bach, and one rather dramatic-sounding Czerny speed exercise. They are all now burned, like the multiplication table, into my consciousness.

My parents came in every weekend from Connecticut and over time I found myself at my grandmother's apartment at least two or three times a week. She needed an escort around the neighborhood, a companion. I posted my phone number
next to the kitchen phone, which I soon regretted. She took to calling me several times a day to ask when I was coming. She lost all track of time. Sometimes she woke up at three o'clock in the morning and thought it was three o'clock in the afternoon. She dressed and went downstairs and neither we nor the dark of night could convince her otherwise. If you told her you were coming at ten in the morning she would sit by the door for hours the night before, finally calling to ask in furious tones, “Where are you? Where are you?” Worst of all was that she knew something was wrong. Her head felt funny. Things were not as they should be, they were all off. She was becoming aware of gaps and was frustrated and angry and scared.

My grandmother's visits to the doctor now included a seemingly impromptu question-and-answer session between her and the doctor. The doctor asked: “Where do you live?” and “Can you draw me a picture of a horse?” My grandmother's answers were: “I live where I live” and “Are you crazy?” The doctor diagnosed her with Alzheimer's disease.

We had hoped that perhaps it was any number of other things: your garden-variety senility (whatever that is), a couple of small strokes or “episodes,” or perhaps even depression. We wanted it to be something treatable. The only way to be absolutely sure it was Alzheimer's was a genetic test, which we decided against. She was very old. Let her go crazy in peace, we said. Let her go in peace.

And indeed she has, pretty much. For her. In her own
demanding way. A low dose of Zoloft helped considerably for a while, but the truth is she was never a peaceful person to begin with. My mother can certainly vouch for that. More weekends than she'd like to remember her in-laws parked themselves at our house in Connecticut. My mother would serve meal after meal, nosh after nosh. Over endless cups of Sanka my grandmother would quiz my mother on the price of everything in sight. What did she pay for the chopped liver? What did she spend on her hair? How much did the gardener cost? Wasn't that a lot? The only time she didn't ask was when my mother was giving her a cashmere sweater or a silk scarf or a Waterford bowl, although most of these things she put away and didn't use because they were “too good.” Meanwhile, my dad would have come back from tennis or golf just in time for the afternoon nosh and a nap. Recently my grandmother has taken to referring to my mother as “the maid” or “the woman who works for Jack.” The truth will out.

My grandfather, on the other hand, was a sweet, slightly hypochondriacal man who loved to sing bel canto songs (he breathed expertly from his diaphragm) and read whatever author was considered the hardest to read. Thucydides. Solzhenitsyn. He laughed at any joke that wasn't on him and occasionally some that were. He had large, smooth hands and a long, pale face with watery blue eyes and a majestic forehead. He resembled God without the beard. He swam and ice-skated until the age of ninety-two and when he died
at almost ninety-seven he had all his marbles. The worst thing you could have said about him was that he told you the plot of the same opera every time you saw him and that he was a closet capitalist. He faithfully toed the socialist line until you put a porterhouse steak in front of him. The only person ever to do that was my father, who had his own business. My grandmother didn't buy expensive cuts of meat. And even if she had she would have cooked it until it was unrecognizable. Until it was a porterhut or a porterhovel. On one of the many occasions my grandfather held forth on the subject of his Russian childhood, he described his family as Gentlemen Farmers. “Ha,” my grandmother spat. “Ha ha!” It wasn't a laugh; she actually said the word
Ha
.

My grandmother had her own brand of socialism. She really didn't like anything to be too good. Serviceable was the best. Nice was acceptable under certain conditions. Fancy was suspect. In a restaurant, anything more exotic than shrimp scampi was not to be trusted. And she was very particular, very judgmental about people. She was intimidated by education and wealth and often felt as if those who had them were lording it over her. She compensated for this with a sort of reverse snobbery. “She's a prima donna,” she would say to you, under her breath, as soon as some unsuspecting acquaintance was out of earshot. Or some stranger; she didn't discriminate. Later, as her hearing began to fail and she refused to wear the expensive hearing aids I forced her to
buy, this became problematic. The insults came loud and fast. “She thinks she's the queen.” “La dee da.” “How can a person be so fat?” She kept a leg up on people by withholding information from them, by not letting them in. Two days after my grandfather died, my grandmother and I ran into one of her neighbors. The woman kindly asked, “How is your husband?” My grandmother responded, “Not so well.”

It has never been my belief that my grandmother and I were alike. I definitely
look
like her side of the family, but I have to hope that my personality descends from my mother's side. There is, however, a place where my grandmother and I come to a meeting of the minds. There is nothing more satisfying to her than when some fancy-pants is brought to justice. Like the voice-over says in
The Magnificent Ambersons
, people eventually get their comeuppance. Perhaps this was a holdover from her socialist beginnings, or perhaps it was a result of a life full of struggles. Whatever the source, it appears to be her legacy to me. I, too, have an innate sense of spite, an ongoing low-level resentment which is occasionally capped off with glee in the face of what I perceive to be the well-deserved ill fortune of select others. My grandmother and I are not vengeful, exactly; we prefer to wait for something more like karmic justice to be done. Besides, revenge is an act, you take it and you are done. Resentment is a state of mind, ongoing. Seething is something one can reasonably do for a lifetime, if one is so inclined. One day, many years ago,
while we sat with my grandfather as he lay dying in St. Vincent's Hospital, my grandmother told me the story of Ceil, the Phillips' Milk of Magnesia heiress, who'd married into the family by stealing my grandfather's sister Sarah's boyfriend, who was the brother of their sister Beatrice's husband. (Don't try to parse that out; just move on.) The family agreed that Ceil was not a very nice person, but what really irked my grandmother was that Sarah's potential husband had been filched by a rich girl, a Capitalista. When Ceil's later life was marked by terrible tragedy, my grandmother was unsympathetic. “Ceil got hers” is what she said. Frankly, I'm usually satisfied if someone I don't like was reviewed badly in a play. I'm still young, though.

Despite all this, there were always people for my grandmother to have lunch or play bridge with, or attend a concert or visit a museum. Just because she criticized them behind their backs didn't mean she had no friends. In recent years, though, many of them have died or have disappeared into their own troubles or live too far away. And of course, my grandmother is further isolated by her diminished comprehension and impoverished vocabulary. I'd say her poor hearing and hard-to-please nature were obstacles as well, but they never stopped her before. Occasionally she tries to make new friends, but despite her best efforts things still go wrong. A woman in her building asked her to lunch but then only served her a glass of seltzer.

I tried to involve her with a senior group designed for the hearing and memory impaired. There were coffee and dry cookies, her favorites. There was mural painting and bead stringing and poetry reading. The people were nice. One woman spoke Yiddish to her. My grandmother smiled and nodded in response. While she was smiling and nodding she would turn to me and hiss, “Let's get out of here.” She hated all these old deaf people, and she wasn't
game
. If she didn't understand the point of something, like stringing beads while you chat to make the time pass and keep your fingers nimble, she made a conscious choice to be too good for it. Also, I don't think she could understand or even hear a lot of what was said, which, of course, was the point of being there in the first place. It is too bad my grandmother never really understood irony. We only went to the senior group three times and always left within an hour. The last time was when I made her stay for the armchair exercises to music. Big mistake.

 

As my grandmother's dementia worsened, my family stubbornly contended that she still knew who we were. She might not remember our
names
, but she knew us. We recently came to the painful realization that often she has no
idea
who we are. My father is alternately “my son,” “my husband,” “my father,” “the man,” “the men,” “Yashka,” and in a spectacularly successful distillation: “The Jew.” My mother
is “her,” “the woman,” “Sylvia” (not her name), “Emma” (no), the aforementioned “maid,” and, after a recent visit to Connecticut, “that wonderful woman” and conversely, “that bitchy woman.” My brother, Steve, is “Bob.”