I’m sitting alone in a dark conference room, phone pressed to my ear, eyes squeezed shut, trying to make sense of my friend’s words. She has information for me, but she can’t think of what to call it. She jokes about Alzheimer’s and laughs. Good ol’ R., the comedy writer, the absentminded screenwriting professor, always somewhat flustered, always joking. I hear papers rustling.
“Pitching!” she says. “That’s what it’s called.”
I write it down on a Post-it Note, hoping that seeing the word will make it all clear to me. I haven’t talked to R. in almost two years — she was busy writing pilots, I was busy having babies — but she doesn’t acknowledge the gap. And we don’t need to — it’s that kind of friendship — but still, it’s strange that she’s talking like we’re picking up yesterday’s conversation. I ask if she thinks I’m a different Jen (it happens; there’s a crap-ton of us) but she knows it’s me.
“So, what is it?” I ask, smiling, trying to feel her out on this.
“What is pitching? Oh!”
That’s not what I meant, but I wait as she takes a mental step back. She explains that to get a show on TV, you have to first pitch the idea to a Hollywood producer. She’s fifteen years older than I am — in her early fifties — and wrote many of the prime-time sitcoms I used to watch in high school, college, and beyond. She coined the term “knock-enter” that prompts a sitcom actor to knock as they open a door. She knows what she’s talking about.
“This would be easier in person,” she says. “Where are you?”
“I’m at work.” My smile fades. It’s two-thirty on a Monday. Where else would I be? “Where are you?” I ask.
A pause. “I’m just, um, here. I think.”
“Here” is her gorgeous home in a posh Chicago suburb, just a few minutes away from my office. I wonder if I could stop by and suss out her situation before picking my kids up from preschool. Or if there’s someone else I could ask to check on her. The notion of a stroke crosses my mind. Or a diabetic incident, though she’s not diabetic. But then there’s another voice in the background — it’s her husband, who works from home, making sure she’s all right. I feel partially relieved, but still mostly confused.
“I was doing just fine, until Al showed up,” she says to me.
But that’s not her husband’s name.
“Alzheimer’s,” she says.
“You’re not joking.”
“No.”
In 2009, when I enrolled in a low-residency MFA program based in Vermont, I received contact information for my future classmates and was amazed to discover that one of them lived just four miles from me. Well before our first term, R. and I became fast friends over coffee and a shared fiction obsession. Her openness and sense of humor calmed my anxieties about this crazy, costly adventure we were about to embark upon.
The night before our first residency, when the threat of a snowstorm bumped our flight up by a day, we scrambled to book a hotel room together in Albany and she insisted on paying for a rental car so we wouldn’t have to wait for the college’s shuttle service. Arriving at that beautiful-but-daunting campus with a friend by my side was a gift I never expected. We explored Vermont together by car, foot, and cross-country ski. We bought matching travel mugs at Walmart and matching beers at late-night dance parties. We bolstered confidence in each other when our manuscripts were reviewed in workshop and when it was our turn at the microphone for readings and lectures.
Between residencies and after graduation, we met regularly for coffee and critiques. She brought presents when my first baby was born — a pink Blackhawks jersey and a gorgeous lace-bodice dress ten sizes too big, just because it’s nice to have something in the closet to look forward to. In those first stressful weeks with a newborn, she was my only visitor who knew she could help me best by cleaning up my dirty dishes. When my baby was old enough to sit in a high chair, we met for lunch. And after my second baby was born, I bumped into R. at the gourmet grocery store between our houses. That was the last time I’d seen her.
I’d emailed her since then about going to a book signing and a local alumni event, but never heard back. I didn’t think too much of it — we were both juggling a lot at the time. I never imagined there was more to the story.
Hours after R.’s strange phone call, I call her back and ask if I can come over. I’m worried; I need to see her. She says sure, as long as I don’t mind that she’s wearing her pajamas. So I change into mine, help my husband put the kids to bed, and show up at R.’s beautiful home with a round box of cookies.
“I look ridiculous,” she says, laughing and running her hand through her Joshua-tree hair. She’s wearing a silk fleur-de-lis nightshirt and a pair of knee-length Mr. Potato Head pants. It’s a pattern of fractured facial expressions. Misplaced eyeballs, detached arms. It’s how I imagine she feels. It’s also how I feel as an over-caffeinated, sleep-deprived mom.
I tell her she looks great, and she does. This is two friends who know that the looking itself — standing face to face — is what’s great.
And this isn’t so different from the time I drove 800 miles, unannounced, to check on my mother, who came to the door in a fleece-lined magenta nightgown I remembered from my childhood. Except her house was a trailer in the woods with dysfunctional plumbing, she’d just finished a two-month stint in jail for drunk driving, and I wasn’t sure I’d find her alive.
But there she was.
“Well, you’re a sight for sore eyes,” my mother said, blinking into the light. My daughter has her sun-flare hair.
Now here I am at another door, a grand entrance, taking it all in. Proof that R. is here, as she said.
R.’s house is dim and quiet. Her Aussie Shepherd mixes, Scout and Buck, bowl me over with kisses, dropping tumbleweeds of white hair. They’re a welcome distraction, something to focus on. Unabashed love. I sit with R. at the kitchen table and she tells me about her diagnosis, a bucket-list trip to the Galapagos Islands, her older daughter’s acceptance at NYU, her younger daughter’s hockey games. The words come in torrents and then push up against the dam. I try to redirect the flow. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. She and I used to swap manuscripts and book recommendations and stories of all kinds, but now she forgets her thoughts mid-sentence. She tells me she can’t read books. I don’t ask if she can write.
“It is what it is,” she says. It’s a phrase I say all the time. Maybe I picked it up from her.
There’s a piece of paper on the table between us, and I realize it’s the pitching information she wanted to give me. It’s a handout she used in the screenwriting class she taught at Northwestern. It might be the last thing she wrote.
“Watch your audience in the room,” it says. “If you think you’re losing them, you are, so crack a joke about it if you can.”
It’s good advice. I crack jokes, and she laughs. I’m determined not to lose her.
“Set up the series before you pitch the pilot episode. … Inverted pyramid; pitch big picture to small. Also less is …”
The document stops here. “More,” I think, mentally filling in the missing word.
“I just can’t believe these pants!” She’s looking down again, her fingers splayed, staring at the googly eyes staring back. More laughter. It’s comfortable.
I tell her I love the pants. I tell her I love her. By the time I leave, we’re both crying. We both forget the cookies I brought. I leave them on her table, unopened.
I mention R.’s illness in an email to my mother. I can’t remember if I’ve ever told her about R. She doesn’t remember either. She writes, “So many diseases seem to be related to the food we eat. Very scary that there are so many chemicals in our food supply.” It’s her response to every bit of bad health news, now that she has shifted the focus of her addiction to nutrition. As if R. could have prevented this whole thing by eating my mother’s grain-free, sugar-free organic diet, where breakfast is a cup of tea with coconut oil and dinner is a plate of cauliflower. As if R. doesn’t already shop at Whole Foods and play tennis nearly every day, even now. As if my mother will live forever. I don’t reply to her email for two weeks.
I write a poem about R. Because that’s what I do. And then I write another poem. This one’s about my father. He doesn’t remember things either — but in his case, he’s forgotten the long-ago things, not the seconds-ago things. Or maybe he does remember — he just doesn’t acknowledge them. Like when he and my stepmother bought a cat, even though she said neither of them knew anything about cats, and I nodded and smiled and my father said nothing, even though we’d had a calico for years when I was young, when he was still there. But she’s right — he probably didn’t know anything about it.
There’s a new email chain among our classmates from grad school, all of us getting back in touch as we realize it’s been five and a half years since we graduated, and what do we have to show for it? Some of us more than others. I ask R. if she’d like me to tell them what she’s been dealing with. She says sure. I draft the email, suggesting snail mail as the best way to contact her. I paste in her address. Hit send. And then my demons creep in.
What if R. told us about her buddy Al when we were in school, and I dismissed it as a joke back then, too? What if everyone who sees my email says “duh?” What if I’m the one who can’t remember? This is the stuff that keeps me from posting much on social media — the fear of being so late to the party that it’s not worth showing up. It’s the feeling I get when everyone posts tributes to some famous person who just died, and I inwardly confess I thought he was already dead. And it’s the theme of every conversation my mother and grandmother ever had together. So-and-so lived in this house, not that house. No, they didn’t. Yes, they did. The back-and-forth of two people trying to prove to themselves and each other that they still have their wits — my grandmother in spite of her age, and my mother in spite of her alcoholism — and me in the middle as referee, looking for the faults in everything they both say, and ultimately turning the microscope on myself.
I can’t blame my father for blocking out the memories, even if it means repressing parts of my childhood. I do it, too.
One Saturday afternoon I ask R. if she wants to get out of the house. Yes, she says, almost desperate. But she assures me her husband and her teen-age kids and their friends are usually over, that the house isn’t always this empty. I don’t know if she’s allowed to leave, if she’s supposed to tell someone first. But I drive off with her anyway. It’s an act of rebellion for me. You want Starbucks? You shall have Starbucks! We sit in comfy chairs and drink our iced caffeine and I want to commiserate with her over the horrible state of our nation, and the world, but I wonder how much news she hears. I want to ask if she ever bumped into Trump in Beverly Hills, or if her people ever worked with his people, but I don’t really want to know the answer.
Instead we watch the young folks of the world come and go with their credit cards. There’s a guy with stick-thin women dressed in tight black clothes with holes at the shoulders and in back and down their thighs, like they’ve been in a tiger cage — that’s the style these days. R. needs help ordering. She doesn’t have her purse, but I assure her I wanted to pay anyway. It’s not that different from taking my mother to the all-you-can-eat buffet all those years ago, looking the other way as she stuffed her purse with pork chops. I remember R.’s words from an earlier phone call: You must be doing — great! I try to assure her we’re all in a tiger cage of one kind or another.
A couple days later she calls me at dinnertime.
“You know I’m not dying soon, right?” she says.
“I hope not!”
Her husband has just brought in the mail: letters and postcards from our old classmates across the country. I worry that it’s too much. I worry that it’s not enough.
“Well, you ask a bunch of writers to write, and that’s what you get,” I say.
She laughs and laughs. She always makes me feel like the funny one.
My phone rings early the next Saturday. I expect to see R.’s name on the screen, but it’s my elderly neighbor from two doors down — the one I’ve never met. I dropped off cookies and my phone number with her husband a few months ago, just in case either of them ever needed anything, and this is the first time they’ve called. The wife is alone and worried because her husband hasn’t come back from his walk yet. It’s a beautiful summer morning; I say he probably took the long way home. But she can’t hear well and talks over me: He left the house at 4:30. The sun rises early this time of year, but not that early.
“You mean you haven’t seen him since 4:30 yesterday afternoon?” I ask, frowning, but she doesn’t understand my question. R.’s voice rings in my head: This would be easier in person.
I grab two of the blueberry muffins I’ve just baked with my kids, call to my husband, and run across the neighbor’s lawn to the elderly couple’s house. I knock, but there’s no answer. I knock louder, and wonder if I should just go ahead and enter. As I reach for the doorknob, the door opens. It’s the husband, back from wherever he’s been — not a walk, but a coffee shop or newsstand. His wife must have fallen back asleep after he left and was disoriented when she woke up — it happens sometimes, he says — but now everything is okay. He wears a smile in his eyes, grateful for the muffins and the company.
I follow him through a vintage kitchen and into what used to be a dining room, where the wife is waiting in an armchair, every surface around her stacked with mail. Her skin is paper, an extension of the library displayed behind her on brace-and-board shelves. I sit in a third armchair across from theirs and we talk about the neighborhood, how it’s changed in the forty years they’ve lived here. They ask about my parents, the way older people do. I’m proud of my father’s affiliation with universities they know. My mother is harder to explain, though I’m proud of her, too, for what she’s overcome. I tell them about my kids instead. When I leave, I promise to have them over for dessert when their son visits in the fall. It’s a promise of memories yet to be made, and I hope they remember.
It’s finally August and my friends from grad school who use their degree to teach are scrambling to catch up on their personal lives before the fall semester starts. I arrange to Skype with one of them from R.’s house, the next best thing to being together in person. R. holds her cellphone to her ear, unnecessarily, while we talk through my laptop. I’m grateful, in a strange way, that our friend can see for herself R.’s confusion in all its forms, that she doesn’t have to rely on me for proof of what’s happening. The camera validates my assessment of the situation, my conviction that all is not right here. I hate that I need the validation. But if each of us wears our many past selves like layered clothing, then I’m always one shirt away from the child who spent decades scrutinizing her mother’s every move, searching for slurs, shakes, and stumbles, but dismissing even the most glaring symptoms of drunkenness, giving her every benefit of every doubt.
Our friend on Skype tells us she’s finished her novel and it’s getting some interest. I want to hear more about it, but not now. She asks R. about her daughters. R. thinks the younger one is seventeen, but she’s not sure. R. puts down the phone and tries to thank our friend for the call. There are tears. My hand on her knee. Faces getting splotchy. We say goodbye, and then I say goodbye to R., too — I promised my kids we’d go to the playground when they get up from their naps, but I need to go to the store on the way home and it’s getting late.
R.stops me as I’m packing up my laptop. She’s thought of something important and urgent. The words catch, release, flow again.
“Are you writing?” she asks.
I know she wants honesty. She hopes I’ll say yes. I feel bad, but — yes. Writing all the time. A novel and stories and essays and poems and I can’t stop. It’s manic these days, the urgency. Desperate. Maybe it’s the threat of nuclear war, the horrible chance of it all. Maybe it’s just the threat of my own mortality, my own cognition. As if I might forget where the story is heading. But I know and she knows and you know. None of this can last, and the order of the endings is a crapshoot.
I go on vacation with my family — a long road trip to the coast of North Carolina — and tell R.’s daughter that I might be out of reach for a few days. But R. calls several times while we’re driving and my ringer is turned off. She leaves two messages, three minutes each, of silence. I listen to every second, just in case. On our first morning at the beach, I see I’ve missed another call from her. I start to worry something’s up. I call her back from the aquarium parking lot, my kids in tow.
“Is everything okay?” But of course it’s not. It never will be.
“Sure! It’s — yes,” she says. Then a pause. “There’s going to be an Alzheimer’s walk.”
“Oh great! Do you know when it is?” Though it doesn’t matter. I’ll walk anytime — any distance, anywhere.
“No.”
I pause. “Well, I wouldn’t expect you to. That’s kind of the point, right?” She is the only person I could say this to. She laughs.
“It’s like my mom said. You have to — to.”
“Laugh, or you’ll cry.”
“Yes.”
So we do.
When you walk through R.’s front door, the first thing you see is the collection of framed photos standing on a tall, narrow table. A color graduation portrait of R.’s stunning older daughter, and a black-and-white glossy beside it.
“She looks just like you,” I say, pointing to the glossy. Soft, olive eyes and dark ramen-noodle hair.
“That one is me,” she says. She explains that’s the photo she used for auditions, back before she started straightening her hair, when she wanted to be an actor and before she became a writer.
I look again and flash to the first time I came to her house — in the period before Al. I’m pretty sure we had this exact same conversation. Me pointing to the photo, the whole spiel. I wonder if she remembers. She remembers the Before, just not the five-seconds-before. I wonder how much her daughters will remember. Our culture puts so much emphasis on documenting our children’s lives, but what of our parents’ lives? I would give anything for a glimpse of my mother as a young woman, going off to work every day, before she met my father, before the anxiety settled in, before she gave up on everything.
It’s summertime in Vermont, seven years back, and the air is thick with stories. The legacies of those who came here before us to write. The tales of the greats. Our own fictions, tangled with truths. We’re in the rental car, just R. and me, winding along narrow roads. Our GPS doesn’t work, but we’ve got a full tank of gas and a free afternoon so we don’t care. It’s a feeling we’ll never have again, though we don’t yet know why. The mountains look like the broccoli served in the cafeteria at every meal, trees packed with literary vitamins, and we eat them all just by opening our mouths to the wind. Tiny white houses catch between our teeth. In our throats, empathy for the people we pass carrying tools and children and laundry from the line. It fills us like memories we didn’t know we had. We could stay with them forever, but at least we’d be together, so that would be okay. Hours go by, and deer and turkeys and the promise of moose, and we cross into New York and it’ll be dark soon. We turn off the highway and we’re still not sure where we’re going, except for a vague notion that we’re heading back, that we’re lost and found at the same time, knowing we’ll both take this feeling with us wherever we go from here.
