It happened in front of my eyes. It had already happened; it would go on happening.
It first happened on a visit to Adelaide one afternoon when I was preparing for a family dinner party in our rented apartment. My mother dropped around in her woolen skirt and woolen blazer carrying her wicker basket containing a wok, a knife I didn’t need, extra wine glasses and plates. An apron. For these brief weeks, she was part of my domestic life. I saw her out to her white Toyota in the driveway. She tucked the basket in the corner of the trunk. She was about to close the lid when she reached back in and pulled out an object wrapped in local newspaper. She opened the parcel to check what was inside. I already knew—she’d just wrapped it up in the kitchen.
“Is this yours?” she asked, half bent into the car, eyeing the breadknife then tilting her face toward me. Confusion leapt through her eyes. I hoped she didn’t see mine. I blinked. “No, that’s yours.” Nodding, she refolded the paper. She got behind the wheel while I opened the black wrought iron gates of the apartment complex, waving and smiling from the footpath. She and my father would return later, for a Chinese dinner, or as close as I could make one. Hours of cooking lay ahead.
I scrubbed and chopped the vegetables. My mother hadn’t recognized her own knife. Was she, no, no, was she, no, was she losing her memory? I got the wok sizzling. Yes. Worse, she realized it. I’d seen that hesitation in her face. That millisecond of faltering. The question in her eyes: why do I not recognize this object? I made stir-fried chicken, green beans in garlic sauce, fried tofu with ginger and tomatoes, and rice. Our girls cleared the coffee table of their drawings and Gameboys, making space where I could place plates of food; the kitchen table was barely big enough to seat four. My family, my two brothers, my sister, their partners, arrived bringing bottles of South Australian wine, and dessert. Someone brought a folding chair or two.
I imagined I’d lived here always, and this was just another evening when I’d invited the family over for dinner. My father was happy, so happy, we were here. But my worry about my mother wouldn’t leave. As I pulled dessert plates from the kitchen cupboard, Dad came to help. It was always difficult to get him alone. In a low voice, I told him about the knife. He gave a quick nod. Our talk was worried, secretive. His face rearranged. “She keeps forgetting to raise the clothes line after she’s hung the clothes out and I keep banging my head on it—and getting cross with her,” he said. “I nearly poked my eye out.” He frowned at his impatience. I realized he’d been waiting for someone else to notice. Perhaps I was the first.
My mother’s new self was in the room. She sat on the edge of the couch, head tilted as if remembering something, as if she was perfectly all right. She was not all right. Something was pulling her away. No longer alone in her poised intelligent space, but alone in a way I’d never seen. Vacant. Floating out to sea. I was on the shore. I started to wade in, but I didn’t have the right raft. I imagined her in her father’s boat, The Dainty. A humble rowing boat. Had he made it in his woodwork shed? Or did he buy it? She always spoke of it with affection. There’s a black and white photo of her, about five, under the brim of her sunhat, looking up from her crouched position on the seat. If she were afloat with him on The Dainty, she had good company. But she didn’t have company.
I sat beside her and asked if she wanted anything else to eat. She shook her grey head. Kept her hands in her lap. I made small talk. Gradually, I drew her back to the room.
How often in the future I would see her drift far away without her intelligence flying its gentle flag. This night was the first glimpse. I didn’t know how many years or what torment lay ahead or that she would retain her dignity and her language though it was often riddled with non-sequiturs and wild assemblages of facts planted amidst deep truths. I didn’t know how her dementia would wreak its sorrow on all of us, especially my father, or that worse would happen to him. But this night, in July 2006, I understood from then on, things would be different. My daughters giggled and ate and sat on people’s knees; my father smiled and smiled at them, my mother lifted her lovely unlined face towards me, her eyes filling again with her presence, and we went on.
But she was sailing, sailing, half of her on a little ship I hadn’t known existed. It bobbed her about on an unkind sea. It threw her down the stairs to the lower deck. It tossed her up and it tossed her down. Sometimes she landed in dark water, crying. Sometimes she landed high on the mast, faculties unscathed, calling observations from the crow’s nest, making her assessments, her blue dress flapping in the wind, her grey hair turned black and young again blowing across her cheeks, her sentences turning into paragraphs, her paragraphs turning into pages. Sometimes she landed in a striped canvas deckchair and sat in the sun under a broad-brimmed straw hat and allowed her words—many, many of them, as if they’d never left—to stroll by in a passing parade, or toss themselves like a game of quoits across the deck. Sensibility intact, in command of her ship even when it struck rock and threatened to sink. She was about to turn eighty.
I am trying, still, to make sense of this. There’ll be a day when my name crashes over my lips and I won’t remember it. But she’ll remember. She always remembered my name.
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Rosemary Jones is an Australian living in Connecticut. Her essays and stories have appeared in Creative Nonfiction, Cimarron Review, Cleaver, Denver Quarterly, Sonora Review, Brilliant Flash, The Forge, and elsewhere. Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart prize, awarded an Alligator Juniper prize for nonfiction, and listed as notable in Best American Essays.
© 2024, Rosemary Jones
Halfway Down the Stairs 