Fittings

by Floyd Skloot

My wife Beverly and I arrive at the nursing home shortly after noon.  We enter the access code for the Memory Impairment Unit and walk down the hall to my mother’s room.  She is standing where she usually stands: in her bathroom, hands on the sink, gazing into the mirror, smiling at her image there.

She looks remarkable.  Gone is the lacquered golden pouf, rouge and darkened eyelids that long defined her presentation to the world.  Her hair is its natural gray.  It’s clean and soft, and smells like human hair rather than a chemistry experiment.  Instead of layers of gauzy fabric and elaborately swirled capes, she wears cotton lounging pants and an unpredictable mix of undershirts, tee shirts and sweaters.  She is braless and sockless.  Her feet, which have lost much of the swelling caused by a lifetime of elegant high heeled shoes, are encased in suede sandals held in place by velcro straps.

According to everyone involved in her care, my mother is a happy, jovial woman.  No one has ever said that about her before.  As transformed in spirit as in fashion, she’s cooperative and serene, provided someone can tell her exactly what she should do at every moment.  Triggered by stray words, she routinely breaks into song.  Say It’s a beautiful morning, Lillian and she will respond with a few lines of Rodgers and Hammerstein: Oh what a beautiful mornin’ oh what a beautiful day.  Tell her there’s a full moon out and she’ll croon Fly me to the moon.  Just don’t ask her where she comes from, or where she is, or what her two husbands’s names were, or what she had for lunch today.

Since she forgets our weekly visits the moment we leave, she’s aggrieved whenever we show up because we haven’t been there in months.  Years.  But joy in seeing us magically appears like a golden thread within the tapestry of her distress.

“Do you still write?” she asks.  Then adds, “aren’t you the one who writes?”

“Yes, mother.  I’m still at it.”

“Then it would be nice if I ever had one of your books.”

I pick up a few from her bedside table.  “You’ve got them all.”

“Oh, so nice of you to bring them at last.”

I know that this little exchange is just another example of my mother’s inability to form memories.  She’s not forgetting me or my books, she hasn’t been able to place or keep them in memory.  They’re not there to be forgotten. Still, for all my knowing, it’s frustrating to feel that our visits and our gestures offer my mother no lasting sustenance.  In the most literal sense, she is oblivious of them as soon as we leave.

There is a counterbalance to that frustration:  I’m amazed to hear her let go of perceived offenses so readily, to see things in a positive light.  Now that dementia has ravaged her memory, she no longer hoards and seasons her indignation.  This has to be as good for her as it is for me.  She lives in the moment–in the instant, really–and is more cheerful than I have ever known her to be.  Except for rare bursts of anger or frustration, as when she knows she cannot remember something, she seems content. 

As David Shenk says in his book The Forgetting, “When introspection begins to break down, so does willfulness.”  This change in my mother is almost more than I can handle.  No brooding, no defensiveness or moody tirades.  Who is this woman?  Where was she when I was young?  I wonder if this might have been my mother’s “true self,” hidden all along under some combination of psychological forces that I will never discover.  The happy little girl buried in a rubble of wrongs.  The idea fills me with sadness for her.  Or perhaps my mother has truly been transformed.  Perhaps her memory and the gothic theater it always housed–she never seemed to remember joy--was the very thing that tormented her.  Now that memory is gone, so is the torment.  Her mind seems more at east.

And what is most on her mind now is marriage.  Hers, mine, the aide’s, the social worker’s, the rabbi’s, the tv newscaster’s, the sons and daughters of her compatriots in the nursing home.

As she looks at herself in the mirror, she asks, “how old am I, dear?”

“You just turned ninety-one.”

She turns to look at me, to see if I’m joking. “Don’t say such a thing.”  Returning her attention to the mirror, she says she hopes to find another husband soon.  The men in this place don’t know what they’re missing. Then, as she always does when we show up, she asks, “when are you two going to get married?”

I hold up my hand and let the light sparkle off my wedding ring.  “We are married.”

“Oh, yes.”  She looks back into the mirror, trying to fit the pieces together, trying to connect that image with her sense of who she is, trying to figure out how Beverly and I belong in the picture that refuses to cohere.  “I remember now.”

I was present when my mother, widowed five years, met the man who became her second husband.  It was a New Year’s Eve party in the basement of her apartment building, as 1965 turned into 1966.   I’d come home for the holidays during my freshman year of college, and been hired to work the party as a waiter.  Minimal salary, but they said the tips would be great.

My mother’s escort was an old boyfriend named Teddy, the man she’d abandoned in 1938 to marry my father.  Teddy had re-surfaced in her life after my father’s death, first showing up as a contestant on To Tell the Truth in its next-to-last season.   Posing as a South Seas explorer, he’d stumped Peggy Cass and Tom Poston but not Orson Bean, and made my mother stand up at the kitchen table and scream: “He’s no explorer, he’s Teddy Serenata!”  When a grinning Teddy told Bud Collyer that he lived in New York, my mother grunted, picked up the phone and dialed Information.  She and Teddy started their second romance a week later.

By New Year’s Eve, they’d been dating for over a year.  I remember liking Teddy the few times I met him, a dapper little man the same size as me and my father, given to wearing striped sport jackets and loose slacks in pastel shades, his graying hair slicked back.  He reminded me of the old Yankees shortstop, Phil Rizzuto.  My mother said he was good company, which meant that he still wasn’t husband material.

So it wasn’t a surprise when my mother left that New Year’s Eve party with someone else.  Julius, recently widowed, was visiting his sister and brother-in-law for the holidays and had agreed to tag along with them.  Fate sat them at my mother’s table.  By the time I served their soup, I could see what was happening.

My mother and Julius danced.  Teddy sat, smiling, nodding to me or to the occasional neighbor who recognized him, growing smaller as he nibbled on a roll.  My mother and Julius danced some more.  He was lean and handsome, six inches taller than my mother, correct in posture, serious in demeanor.  At midnight, she kissed Julius first, then pecked at Teddy’s cheek and–quite publicly–the poor man was once again abandoned.

When the party broke up, Teddy left without saying goodbye, not even to me.  My mother walked out arm-in-arm with her new beau, beaming.  She forgot about rallying everyone to leave their waiter a tip, and I ended up with five dollars from the table for my night’s work.  They were married in early March.

“Yes, I remember when you met,” my mother says now, walking over to us.  “I was there.  Some kind of party.  Floyd, you came with somebody else, what’s-her-name, your old girlfriend, the Italian.  Then you met beautiful Beverly.  You forgot the Italian immediately and out you walked with this one.  Very romantic.”

That is not, of course, how Beverly and I met.  But such confabulations are typical of the way memory and identity and time have grown fluid for my mother now.  Within the space of a moment–the time it takes for her to lift a cup of coffee to her lips–she might see me as her son, her late brother, her first husband and her last boyfriend.  Oh Floyd, it’s so good to see you.  How is your house on the lake? (this is addressed to her brother, whose house on Lake Mahopac in New York was a place she last visited about thirty years ago).  I’m glad you stopped with the cigars (to my father).  Let’s go up to my room later, and don’t forget to bring me a Pepsi (this is to Irv, her final boyfriend, whom she last saw in New York six months ago).                 

I’m trying to learn how to drift in time with her, to let go of my yearning for a genuine conversation or connection, for the things she says to make sense.  If I can do that, it becomes possible to witness her rediscovery of things I’ve never known about.  Suddenly, there’s a touch of warmth in these stray memories, and a veracity that convinces me they’re real.  Passing a friendly Weimaraner and her owner as we approached a coffee shop, I expected her to recoil and curse the man for exposing her to potential filth.  Instead, she said oh, what a nice doggie! and stopped, hands lifting from her walker, to add, we had a dog when I was a little girl.  Its name was Wee-toy but Papa called it Pee-toy because it always wet the carpet.  Huh?  My mother had a dog?  In a Bronx apartment?  It peed and wasn’t immediately put to sleep? 

Mostly, though, her memory fails utterly.  When two students from Portland State University, as part of their course requirements, visited the nursing home on a strangely ironic mission to help residents compile “memory books,” they were unable to discover anything from my mother except that her parents sold furs in New York.  She simply could not tell them anything about her life.  The problem, in part, was that they asked directly.  My mother can’t retrieve items from memory that way anymore; they have to surface of their own accord, driftwood on a sea of forgetfulness .  And she certainly can’t present her few memories in any sort of coherent whole–she can’t tell a story now, can’t connect the few bits that remain into a narrative.  So, when asked, she didn’t remember her marriages, her relatives, her experiences in art or theater, her childhood.  She did think she had a son who was a writer.  But he died.  One of the students called me to schedule a visit here, to collect photographs and assemble a life story.