Goodbye, Vitamin Read online

  “That’s nice,” Mom says, about Bonnie’s painting.

  The pink stuff, it is explained to me, is cantaloupe juice. “I call it ‘melonade,’ ” Mom says.

  Mom’s quit cooking, like a person might quit smoking or gambling. This is on account of Dad. What she’s figured is that it was the years of cooking in aluminum pots, cooking with canned goods, that led to the dementia. She’s thrown out the aluminum pots and pans and tossed the tin foil.

  She’s been reading the online literature on dementia. What she’s read: the brain uses minerals to function, and when magnesium isn’t available, it uses the next available mineral, aluminum. In large quantities it can cause nervous tissue damage. Though the studies aren’t one hundred percent certain.

  This is my mother, who once made all our meals from scratch: our sushi, our ketchup, our English muffins. She used to sneak her own popcorn into movie theaters because she objected to the butter from the pump.

  This is my mother who cooked dinner every night and—even into high school—never missed an opportunity to pack a sack lunch.

  This is my mother, now, who seems wary of everything—who seems to trust only juices and vitamins to do the least amount of harm.

  Joel never did like California. He always talked about leaving. Out loud, I’d agree, but inwardly I held out hope he’d change his mind—that I’d win him over. We’ve been here forever—my dad’s side, I mean: from Ireland and Germany to New York and Pennsylvania, my father’s great-greats came to San Francisco and Santa Barbara and Pasadena and Palm Springs.

  So why not be here, in this house where I grew up, and where my parents still live? I was born in Fontana, the next town over, on an afternoon in July, thirty years ago. My mom was twenty-five and newly parentless—parentless again—when she had me.

  That same year her adoptive parents were in a car accident and died; her biological parents most likely continued living, in China—she had no information about them. Maybe they thought of her constantly. Maybe they thought of her never. Maybe they thought of her sometimes, or on special occasions, like when they became grandparents to children who were not me. In any case, my mother was without a family. Without a family but us, I mean.

  There’s a photograph in the living room that hangs above the piano. It was taken in the hospital, in the hours after I was born. In it, Dad looks like a hirsute, buffer Linus, with his unruly brown beard and enormous plastic glasses. He is wearing a black-and-white patterned T-shirt. You can see the top of his tight red pants. On a previous doctor’s visit, Dad had picked up a pamphlet titled, “What can my new baby see?” Newborns have difficulty focusing, the pamphlet said. It’s impossible to know for certain that they perceive color at all. But in studies they respond to the color red, and to high-contrast patterns.

  Next to him, my uncle John is shirtless. Because it’s waist up, he doesn’t appear to be wearing anything at all. When John arrived at the hospital in a red shirt, my father was furious at his brother.

  “What’s the idea?” my dad said, but John, of course, didn’t have any idea at all. He hadn’t been scheming. He’s a colorful dresser because bright colors are always on sale. He was wearing his regular clothes. Dad was beside himself with anger. He refused to let John in to see me wearing the shirt. What you see in the photograph is my mother, stunning despite her eighties perm and with this tired but amused look, my father scowling, and Uncle John shirtless, holding baby me, smiling nervously.

  One of the floats on TV is a mechanical turtle, made from moss and sunflower seeds. “It’s not the seed parade,” Dad says, in a bad mood. Mom deftly peels an orange. She opens my father’s palm and puts the segments in his pried-open hand.

  The bad mood is because last week, Dean Levin called to inform Dad that he would not be teaching this next semester. These past several months, Dad’s missed several classes, insisted on another professor’s parking spot, and wept in the lecture hall without apparent cause. There had been, Levin said, complaints.

  Further “inconsistencies,” as he put it, couldn’t be risked. My father could have his job back when he recovered, when he could behave himself again. Levin had said when, but what he really meant—what we all knew he meant—was if.

  The floats must be covered in entirely natural materials, the announcer said. Flowers, yes, but also tapioca pearls and cranberries are permitted.

  My mother hands us each a B-12 pill, which we wash down with celery juice. B-12 builds myelin, she explains, which our nerves need to fire. Celery, a “brain food,” contains luteolin, which combats inflammation.

  The house is virtually snackless. She’s emptied the pantries of foods she’s deemed harmful. Everything is a potential cause of the disease. Cereals and breads contain sugar, and high blood sugar exacerbates the disease. Saturated fats raise the risk of the disease.

  In lieu of our regular salt is low-sodium salt. We have bananas on the counter and a packet of turkey where the butter should be, and miscellaneous fruits and vegetables for juicing. We have nuts and we have the last shards of a box of Triscuits.

  Something Mom does when she’s frustrated is she adjusts the arm of phantom glasses on her temple. She got her eyes lasered four years ago, but tonight I notice her pushing at invisible glasses, watching a TV that isn’t turned on.

  Another reason I know she’s not herself: on Christmas, typically her favorite holiday to cook, we went to a buffet. On top of which, she didn’t take any baked potatoes for the road.

  I read: Alois Alzheimer was the senior physician at the Municipal Mental Asylum in Frankfurt when Frau Auguste Deter was admitted. The year was 1901. She was a fifty-one-year-old woman who was anxious and forgetful and, near the end of her life, behaved aggressively and unpredictably. She died five years later.

  Cutting Auguste’s brain open, Alois Alzheimer found abnormal protein deposits surrounding her nerve cells. He called them plaques: neuritic or senile plaques. He also found twisted fibers inside the cells: he called those tangles. When plaques and tangles interfere with the normal function of brain cells, that’s what we know as Alzheimer’s.

  The neurons are trying to connect—that’s what their function is, that’s what they do—but the plaques and tangles prevent the nerve cells from transmitting their normal messages. The cells aren’t able to communicate with one another because of abnormal protein deposits in the spaces between them. The cells keep trying and trying and trying, but in the end they’re choked off. In the end, they die.

  I wish they’d named it “Auguste’s.” Because, “Alzheimer’s”? Really? When she was the one who’d suffered.

  January 5

  Mom is at book club. Meanwhile it is impossible to get Dad out of his office. Earlier I considered slipping cold cuts under the door. I draw a fingernail on each banana. I rearrange the fruit bowl. Now the lemons are resting on top and the kiwis lurk beneath.

  At one point Dad emerges, shirtless, into the kitchen, to brew himself coffee. I get my nipples from him, I realize, alarmed.

  In her absence, Mom has given me two twenties to order pizza—our fourth or fifth since Christmas. The sausage topping looks to be spelling HI, like maybe the pizza maker heard the desperation in my voice and wanted to send me an encouraging message.

  Mom’s all-ladies book club is reading Anna Karenina. Anna’s newly pregnant, and I’m picturing all the ladies taking the opportunity to share stories about their own pregnancies. My mother, I know, is probably bragging that I ripped her favorite pair of jeans.

  In one of Mom’s magazines, there is an article about how to keep your man.

  • Never surprise him with short hair.

  • Don’t try to change him.

  • Play games, but not too many.

  I catch a glimpse in the window’s reflection and surprise myself with short hair.

  Here’s something I haven’t thought about in forever. Once, on an afternoon in the third grade, Dad was picking me up from school when we noticed, in the parking lot,
a dozen or so hysterical pigeons, assembled on the windshield and hood of another car. We got closer and saw why: there were french fries scattered inside the car, on the dashboard. We watched the desperate birds pecking at the glass for a moment, before my father said, “Let’s go.”

  He took us to the nearest drive-through. We bought milk shakes and fries and headed back to the parking lot, where we drank the milk shakes and fed those pigeons, a fry at a time.

  That’s the memory I used to conjure whenever Linus would telephone to tell me what was going on, whenever Linus said, about our father, He’s a liar, and he’s a drunkard, and he’s a cheat. And I would listen, in silence, and comfort my brother, all the while thinking, No, that’s not possible. No, you’ve got it wrong.

  Linus’s deal is that he’s angry with Dad. On account of the five-year age difference between us, things weren’t the same for him. Linus was in the eighth grade when I left for college, and the next year our father was drinking again. What happened was he hadn’t had a drop when we were growing up, and after I left, he did.

  In the middle of the night, under the impression I am hearing gunshots, I realize that more likely it’s the television, and it is. Downstairs, Hawaii Five-0 is on TV and Dad is nursing a mug of something steaming. I inquire about it. He’s put Triscuits and hot water together and created a sort of Triscuit gruel.

  “Hungry?” he asks.

  “Now I am,” I joke.

  “Here, take this curved yellow fruit,” he says, unhinging me a banana.

  “You mean banana,” I say, trying my best to not sound terrified.

  There is a pause before he says, “I’m joking, daughter.”

  We watch episode after episode in silence, until somehow several hours manage to elapse.

  “Shall we?” I say. “Give sleep another go?”

  “I don’t go to sleep,” my father says, with some indignation. “I go to sleeps.”

  “Good night, Dad,” I say, not adding that I know exactly what he means, though I am my father’s daughter, and I do.

  It’s occurring to me that I can’t not stay.

  “Just the year,” I’m going to tell my mother.

  Just the year is all it will be.

  January 6

  But first, it’s back to San Francisco. There’s my job I have to quit, and all the things still in my apartment. I start driving in the morning and reach San Francisco by midafternoon.

  First stop is the Medical Center. My supervisor is in the cafeteria, bent over a tangle of lo mein, looking too young to be a supervisor, and tired like he always does. He likes to use diamond as a term of measurement. “Just a diamond,” he sometimes said, if we were at lunch together, and I was squeezing ketchup onto both our burgers. I liked that.

  This past Halloween, he and I showed up at the same party, in matching outfits we hadn’t planned. He was the Burger King and I was the Dairy Queen and—a little bit drunk, newly disengaged from Franklin, who had been distracting me from my disengagement from Joel—I put moves on him. He was having troubles with his girlfriend at the time, and did not refuse them.

  “So,” I say now, taking a seat in the empty chair across from him. “I quit, I guess.”

  “Just like that?” he says. He tears open a packet of hot sauce with his mouth. This can’t be coming as a surprise. I like my job—I’m adept enough—but I was never anything special.

  “Just like that,” I say.

  He wordlessly tosses me his fortune cookie. He has a policy about eating the cookie first. He insists on eating the cookie before reading the fortune. Not eating the cookie, he believes, voids the fortune. I eat the cookie, to indicate to him that I haven’t forgotten.

  “ ‘To remember is to understand,’ ” I read out loud. “That’s dumb,” I say, without thinking, and right away I regret it, because what if these were actually the words of a famous wise person? Words that everybody else knew about but somehow I’d missed encountering? Maybe Jesus had said it, or maybe Confucius.

  I ask him how Christina is doing. Christina is his girlfriend. At Halloween he’d been having troubles with his girlfriend, at the time, not his girlfriend at the time. When they got back together, after the Halloween incident, it was a relief to us both.

  “We’re looking for a place together,” he tells me. “Something month-to-month. She’s afraid to sign a one-year lease.”

  “What’s so bad about a one-year lease?” I say.

  “That’s what I said.”

  “Here’s what you do,” I say. “You say, ‘Let’s get married,’ and wait a moment before you say, ‘Just kidding! Let’s sign a one-year lease.’ ‘Let’s have five kids. Let’s sign a one-year lease.’ ”

  “Let’s move in with my parents. It’ll save on rent,” he says, catching on. “Let’s sign a one-year lease.”

  “Let’s adopt a child from Korea.”

  “Let’s sign a suicide pact.”

  “No? How about a one-year lease?”

  “See you next year?” he says.

  “See you next year,” I agree.

  The light coming in through my apartment’s bay windows would be pretty, except all it does is illuminate the dust on the floor. I never fully committed to unpacking. I feel not even the slightest attachment to this apartment.

  I fill a big suitcase with as many clothes as it will take, and the rest of the clothes I throw into a garbage bag for the Goodwill. I pack one box and then two more and when it still seems I have not made a dent in my belongings, I decide to trash the rest.

  For example: the jar of old almonds on my desk. I like to collect those almonds with the slight curve, the ones that hold your thumb. And not only the curved nuts, but also the nuts that don’t have the standard tear shape, that are shaped more like buttons, with a rounded edge instead of the point. Almond anomalies.

  What a ridiculous person I am. I unscrew the jar and tip as many anomalies as will fit into my mouth. They’re stale and it hurts to chew. I give myself the hiccups.

  For example: ticket stubs to movies Joel liked more than I did. His spare car keys. A receipt from the airport drugstore from when, the morning after a red-eye, I bought mascara to wear in an attempt to look less tired. (Joel was picking me up. In the end I looked worse.) Seeds, from the one time we broke our own rule and shared an apple in bed.

  It was grotesque, the way I kept trying to save that relationship. Like trying to tuck an elephant into pants.

  I put the guitar I never play anymore on the curb. I sweep and mop. I hear somebody pick the guitar up and start strumming a Simon and Garfunkel song.

  The doorbell rings. It’s Maxine Grooms, MD, here to help with the furniture.

  “Way to say goodbye,” Grooms says, unhappily.

  “I’ll miss you,” I say, and hug her tightly.

  Grooms was the one who happened to be around when I’d caught her—and myself—off guard, by crying, after a fight with Joel, one week near the end. We’d always been cordial, but, at that point, we couldn’t have exchanged more than ten words.

  What could we have in common? was what, I’m sure, the both of us had thought.

  She is ten years older than I am. She wears tall high heels with her doctor’s coat; she wears expensive glasses and the perfect, complementary shade of lipstick. She appears flawless and smells amazing, always. Patients respect her implicitly.

  We were at work and I was waiting for the handicapped stall that she was coming out of, and she could’ve simply left me, looking sad and red as a tomato, but she didn’t. She stood next to me outside the bathroom and gave my back a few awkward pats.

  We had no choice but to become friends after that.

  Now we are having a last dinner together, at the Spaghetti Shack—a dinner I’m buying because I feel responsible, because it was my fault, our becoming friends.

  That’s what I think, sometimes: Who is to blame for this friendship?

  After spaghetti, after wine, we tipsily drag my mattress to the curb.
Within the minute, we watch a man in a Buick pull up. He pushes the mattress onto the top of his car—doesn’t bother tying it down or anything—and drives quickly away.

  Four years ago Grooms had been married, and two and a half years ago her husband had left her for his barista, who was younger but less pretty and less smart, and last year the divorce was made official.

  “But there are days now,” was what she said, after she found me crying in the bathroom, “I wake up and it’s like none of those ugly things ever happened.”

  “You’re the doctor,” I said. “What’s your prescription?”

  Try not to feel too shitty, was her main piece of advice. Stop, always, at 2.5 drinks. Make a list of good things—however small. I did everything she said. Granted, I would have tried anything.

  I often wrote 2.5 in Sharpie, on the back of my hand, nights before I went out—a reminder.

  I bought a notebook and started keeping a list.

  • Found a ten-dollar bill in the back pocket of jeans from the thrift store.

  • Found a parrot-shaped leaf.

  • Watched a woman reach her arms overhead and stretch in a satisfying way.

  “I didn’t want to show you this,” Grooms says, “because I didn’t want to jinx it. But it’s really, really happening.” She pulls a photo from her wallet: the baby boy she’s been in the process of adopting. He’s a miniature Michelin Man. His name is Kevin.

  Soon I’m asking Grooms: “Do I say goodbye to Joel?”

  “You’ve said goodbye to Joel,” she says. Annoyed. Like, what’s your problem—have you learned nothing? I’m ashamed to have chased her news with this.

  We say goodbye. Or I say goodbye, and Grooms grunts her disapproval, affectionately.

  I drive to Santa Cruz, where Linus lives—not bothering to call ahead. He’s between semesters, which I know means he’ll be home, trying to write his dissertation but more likely watching DVDs borrowed from the library, and cursing when he has to skip over the damaged parts, which inevitably there are.

  At the exact moment I pull up my brother is standing at his mailbox. He peers at me, like he’s trying to focus on something through the bottom of a glass.