Excerpt from Chapter Two of ALZHEIMER'S DAUGHTER:
Each night at
bedtime Mom would tuck me in, hold my hand and kneel beside my bed to pray for
family, friends, and the state of our nation. We’d say things like, “God,
please cure Aunt Jenny’s pneumonia, heal Mr. Smith from his heart attack, and
guide Khrushchev.” I didn’t know who Khrushchev was, nor comprehend much about
the Cold War, but I knew the U.S. was at odds with the Soviet Union.
Without fail, hours after Mom prayed
with me, I’d hear my parents kneeling––Mom on her side of the bed, and Dad on
his––murmuring prayers to thank God for their blessings.
Growing up in the
old house, I’d hear groaning and clanging from the furnace, imagining a monster
lurking in the shallow, mousey basement. That contraption heated the whole
house through a three-by-five foot register in the dining room floor, next to
the staircase Mom grumbled about dusting while she put Dad’s old socks on both
hands, running them up and down the spindles. On cold mornings I’d scoot down
the stairs on my rump, and sit on the warm register, letting heat ooze into my
goose-pimply skin, calming my chattering teeth until the metal became so hot I
had to move or burn my backside.
Mom’s voice roused
me from my warm trances as she hollered, “Jean, get moving, we’ve got to go
through your flash cards before you leave for school.”
As Dad knotted his
necktie, and Mom straightened it, she’d ask him, “What do you want for dinner
tonight?”
He’d kiss her
goodbye then chuckle, “Whatever you can spare.”
Then he opened the
oak front door with the oval glass, a cold draft sneaking in, before it creaked
closed behind him. Eating my breakfast of Alpha Bits, my knees curled
underneath me at the kitchen table, I’d hear Mom murmur, “Your dad wouldn’t
complain if I served him mud.” I’d watch out the window as my father with his
long, quick strides began the quarter-mile walk to work.
I never remember
Dad driving to work, even in the dead of winter, because we lived so close. Our
used brown 1950s Ford Fairlane rarely left the detached garage, because we
rarely left town. In those days, Dad never would have bought a new car. He
said, “A car takes us from point A to point B. We need nothing fancy.”
After Dad, Ann,
and I vacated the house, Ibby’s focus became a meat and potatoes evening meal.
Most nights we even had homemade dessert contributing to her plumpness. Her
teeth suffered from her stash of Milky Ways, Snickers, and Three Musketeers.
When she was in her early forties she decided she wanted straight teeth and a
pretty smile. So the dentist pulled her upper and lower molars, gave the sore
gums a couple of days to begin to heal, then pulled the remaining front teeth,
socking the dentures into her raw mouth. To work through the throbbing, she’d
walk to the mirror and smile brightly. The image of her straight white teeth
beaming back––her only anesthetic.
Between meal prep,
Ibby washed clothes in the wringer washer. Wearing housedresses belted with a
fitted bodice––June Cleaver-like, without the pearls––she carried laundry to a
sagging clothesline. Dad’s pants and shirts, our skirts, blouses, sheets, and
underwear along with Mom’s bras fluttered in June, and flapped so hard some
came loose––landing in the neighbor’s yard––in the angry gray freeze of
February.
Rivertown from 1950
to1960 likened to “Mayberry.” Opie––in his striped tee shirts, jeans, and shorn
hair could have been one of my classmates. My most vivid school memory is of
Friday, the 22nd of November in 1963. My third grade classmates and
I covered our heads with our lunch boxes and ran for our lives, risking glances
at the sky––hearts pounding, bobby socks and Mary Janes flying––searching for
imagined Soviet planes, which we feared could bomb us. That night Mom, Dad, Ann
and I huddled around the black and white Philco, as Walter Cronkite told the
nation John F. Kennedy had not only been shot, but was dead. Tears seeped down
our cheeks as Jackie Kennedy, in her blood stained dress, having removed her
pillbox hat, stood beside Lyndon Johnson as he was sworn in.
Most days after
school, kids chased each other, running through connecting backyards––playing
good guys against bad guys––never knowing in whose yard we’d end up. Ibby, even
though she was fiercely overprotective, never
worried. She knew I’d be back to eat supper. We listened for our moms to holler
“Dinnertime!” almost yodel-like. Understanding when first and middle
names––‘Jean Louise’––were yelled we’d better run home fast because dinner was
getting cold.
The only exception
to our heavy meals occurred at end-of-summer harvest. Dad, because he was so
practical, planted the vegetable garden in the spring. Mom, wearing her
seersucker pedal-pusher pants, picked and prepared the vegetables, but allowed
herself the beauty of her flower garden. It was not as practical as Ed’s
garden. It didn’t produce food, but did give her joy––often a single rose in a
bud vase decorated our diner table.
My mouth waters,
and I can almost feel the sticky sweat on my neck remembering the steamy heat
of the old house, with the ever so slight movement of air through the white,
Priscilla curtains as we’d begin supper by spreading a thick coating of butter
on a piece of Wonder bread, then rub the buttered bread on to an ear of sweet
corn. After gnawing the rows off the cob, and licking the butter off my hands,
the piece of warm bread was a bonus. The year I had a gaping hole in my mouth
from having lost all four of my front teeth––top and bottom––mom took pity on
me and cut the kernels off the cob. Harvest meals were rounded out with
peppered green beans seasoned with bacon drippings saved from Dad’s breakfasts
of bacon and eggs, and tomatoes––still warm from the garden––topping cottage
cheese sprinkled with sugar.
A slatted swing
suspended by two chains from the ceiling of the wrap-around front porch was the
only place to catch a breeze on still summer days. I’d swing my baby dolls,
while my sister and her teenage girlfriends, holding their transistor radios to
their ears, practiced dancing to Wah-Watusi
and Twist and Shout from the
previous week’s American Bandstand.
Memories jerk through my mind, like the
clicking sound of reel-to-reel movies, of sitting Indian-style on the warm
sidewalk, cranking my skate key to clamp my roller-skates to my saddle shoes.
The bottoms of my feet vibrated, and the skate key lobbed from a leather string
around my neck as I raced to the store––navigating uneven slabs of sidewalk
pushed out of place from ancient maple and oak tree roots––to spend my
allowance of a nickel on creamy Fudgesicles or maple-filled Bun candies.
