This Is the Way We Talk

Today I will coach her and she will pass the test and the doctor will send her home, as if the only thing standing between her and the sliding glass doors is a mere confusion over dates. (Later, I will tell the doctor that I am lost without a calendar. I will suggest they put calendars in all the rooms.)

________

I have a plan. After she recalls the date, and names the president, we'll hop in the car and head down the open road. Maybe we'll go to Madagascar. I read about it in a magazine in the lounge down the hall. The mellifluous m, the sibilant s call to me. And all those syllables! I've heard that dogs should have two-syllable names: Fido. Rover. Charlie. But a place should roll off the tongue. Mad-a-gas-car. You cannot rush it. It sounds warm, sultry. Easy. Breezy. We must go.

Knowing her, she'd just as soon go shopping. We'll go to Safeway, fill our cart with all her favorite things. Olives and blue cheese. Gingersnaps. Diet tonic water. Cut flowers. Ritz crackers. Yes, Ritz. Once, she made an apple pie from the apple-less recipe on the box. She said it was pretty good, though it didn't taste like apple pie per se. (She uses little verbal flourishes like that. I'll miss that. I should tell her.) "The trick was the cinnamon," she'd said. So we'll toss a couple of boxes into the cart. Then maybe we'll go to Costco and get hot dogs for lunch. For dessert, we'll sprinkle cinnamon on Ritz and pretend we're eating apple pie. We might even take in a movie, but she'll only go in the afternoon. She loves exiting a dark theater into the glare of daylight where people are bustling about, full of purpose. She says it's like getting off an airplane and finding yourself in another world.

The doctor had better chop chop, or we'll never get out of here.

________

Yesterday she said, "I dreamed I was running up and down the hall looking for someone to translate a letter in Japanese.

"Odd," she said. "I've never been to Japan."

"Would you like to go?" I asked.

"Oh, Vera," she sighed.

________

The nurse comes in and says, "How are we doing today?"

"I'm doing okay. How are you?" mother replies, but she isn't mean. She even compliments the nurse on her uniform, says it's cheery. "All those dogs. What are they? Bassett hounds? Beagles?"

She tells the nurse that when she was young, girls weren't allowed to wear pants to school. "On cold days, we wore them under our skirts. We had to take them off first thing when we got inside the classroom."

"You're a real card, Francine," the nurse laughs and checks mother's pulse.

"I can tell you don't believe me, but it's true," mother says, as if she hardly believes it herself. She's only sixty-nine, but she must feel as if she'd been alive before the invention of pots and pans. Or fire.

________

While the nurse bathes her, I go down the hall to the lounge and read a magazine filled with ideas on how to simplify your life, though everything in it seems enormously complicated. I spend too much time reading about how to reuse the plastic tubs that fake butter comes in, only the article says, "repurpose." Reuse. Repurpose. Either way, you're supposed to decorate all the plastic tubs that clutter your cabinets, then use them to hold all the odds and ends that clutter the rest of your life, like stray buttons, dead batteries, keys that don't fit any locks.

I flip to a recipe for a casserole using tuna and noodles, which actually is simple, though it's nothing new. Lately, I'm finding that most things presented as fresh and new are, in fact, old. Perhaps when everyone who was around for the first round of...