by Nathaniel Krenkel
The green plate rests in my lap.
“Imagine how much this would cost in a restaurant.”
Under different circumstances, I’d say something rude—the snarky son—but for now, I stay silent and force another bite of the walnut and raspberry buckwheat pancake.
“Susie, you’re boy is here,” he says. My mother’s head remains down “Talk to her while I finish up,” he instructs me.
The sound of water, dishes entering the sink, hard objects hitting hard surfaces.
“Just talk to her.”
But I can’t do that. It’s too…performative. Instead, I set the plate aside and I put my hand on her leg. This draws my attention to her lower half uncovered, her adult diaper, her papery flesh, no blanket, toenails yellow. I scoot to the edge of the chair and move my hand to her shoulder. I don’t squeeze, but press in, making myself known. She lets out a noise, soft, almost a coo. Saliva forming bubbles, air streams to make more noise. My father is now deep in his sink, and I lower my head, trying to look up into her face. Her body, shaped like a comma. I can’t find her eyes and, for that matter, I don’t know if they still work. Hairs grow from her upper lip. Earlier, when the nurse was feeding her, she used a term: pocketing. As in, my mother would not swallow, but rather, she’d move the banana slices into her cheek, like a hamster. “She’s pocketing,” the nurse had said. My dad at that point had come in and wedged his finger into my mother’s mouth. “Got it,” he said, flicking the food onto the plate. My mom let out a noise like a pet preparing to vomit. “Oh Susie, you’re fine,” he said in a playful tone.
I take my hand away from her shoulder and cut another bite, put it into my mouth and swallow. There is something gauzy and slow-moving about all of this. I’m a child again, back in the farmhouse in Michigan, desperate to do anything but eat the remains of my peanut butter toast which grows cold on the plate. But I try to anyway, to please my father. My mother’s not there, she’s still at work—the graveyard shift at the hospital—and I have no one to provide me with shelter. Years later, I would write a poem about this, the first time I heard my father say the word fuck, just after he unleashed and sent the plate crashing through the glass-front of the oven window. Dad thinks his buckwheat pancake is a remedy, but it’s not working. I only want to flee, to leave him with his wedding vow, his smothering existence, this town stuck in the 1980s, a dying kingdom, hellish with its banality. Guns and fake flowers and shit coffee. It’s not my vow. I didn’t promise anyone anything.
He pops his head around. “Good, right?” I look over at my plate.
“Tea?”
“Please,” I say.
He returns with a steaming mug. “It’s green tea,” he says. “It can cure anything, it’s as good as medicine, don’t you think?”
“Thank you,” I say.
I bet it doesn’t cure this, I imagine saying. But I drink the whole cup, just in case. A lot of disease is hereditary. CRISPR probably won’t save me, so green tea it is. Dad comes back in, wiping his hands on a rag. “We can get going pretty soon, Suzie usually rides up front, but I’ll put her in back today.” Mom makes another sound, this one on the same spectrum as the vomiting cat, but less intense. “Oh shoot, I almost forgot her juice.” He disappears into the kitchen. I eat one more bite of pancake and quietly gag, wishing I had more tea. Dad returns with a glass of beer and a straw. “Here you go Suzie.” He guides the straw between her lips. He beams as she drinks her juice. “Her favorite part of the morning. The only medicine she likes,” he says.
I can’t help but smile at this. My father, the master of the micro-brew, the small batch Boysenberry framboise, the double IPA, the Czech dark lager, the first to buy the tie-dyed hoodie at the gift shop on the way out of the tasting room. He’s always finding ways to weave the surrounding world into his personal grand narrative. Did Mom ever really like beer? I can picture her drinking wine, red wine, but not beer. No…wait, there she is: sitting in a recliner chair, a coastered can on the table next to the TV Guide, a small glass on top of Magnum PI’s face, the lite beer inside the glass bubbling away. She takes a sip. But it’s not her…it’s my grandfather. He sipped beer from little drinking glasses, he read TV Guide, he made a single 12 ounce can stretch out over an entire Tigers game on a late spring afternoon. This is his chair, his living room. He’s still a decade away from his own decline, and my mother would take out a long-term-care insurance policy as soon as it was clear what was happening to his mind. That policy now pays for the nurse who puts banana into her mouth.
“Talk to her,” my father says. I close my eyes and exhale, frustration and fear, my own brain poised to betray me and leave me diapered and pocketing. Broken, misfiled T’s, G’s, A’s and C’s.
“I don’t know what to say…I…Mom, hi. It’s nice to see you.”
“Nice to see you?” my dad says.
“What? It’s a thing people say.”
“Nice to see you?”
“She can’t even hear, can she? I mean, there’s nothing going on in her…sorry, I’m sorry. This is just…it’s intense. Last time I was here—”
“You mean last year?”
“Last time I was here, it wasn’t this bad…was it?”
“Welcome to my life,” he says as he wrestles the straw from my mother’s mouth. The glass is empty. I look down at her legs. Her left foot is noticeably larger than the right.
“Anther pancake?”
I take the deepest breath I’ve taken all day. “I’m good,” I say. “But thank you.”
He explains how it’s going to take him several minutes now to get her ready. He is prone to share the details about what this entails, but before he can start, I excuse myself and go outside to wait on the porch. Today we’ll be driving to the coast to examine the lot he’s purchased and on which he intends to build a home. He has no idea if he’ll be moving into it alone, or with her. I close my eyes against the sun and have the same imagined conversation I always have when I’m here, me telling my wife that no matter what, if the day comes, we get on a plane for Switzerland and she comes back alone. No diaper changing, no juice, no remedy, no banana stored in my cheek, none of it. A final trip, and that will be that.
The door opens and he pushes her out, tells me again how Medicare paid for the wheelchair. He lifts her into the back seat. Cat vomit sounds, and she’s in. I get in the front and roll down the window, tilt my head into the sun. We’re less than ten miles up the road when I remember, she’s back there behind me. I keep forgetting. No, forgetting isn’t the right word. There is no word I can find to explain the moment you realize your mother’s in the back seat, even though you’ve not seen her, or spoken to her, in years. Dad says, “My father used to drive us to DC every summer. Back then you could just wander…have I told you this story? We were at the Capitol on the shuttle that takes congressmen from the dome to their offices, and it was crowded. This man stood up and gave my mother his seat. Can you guess who that man was?”
“JFK?”
“I have told you this before…you should have stopped me.”
“No. It was a guess.”
From the back seat, my mother shrieks. “See, that’s her way of saying she’s still here. I understand her, you know? I know what she wants.”
“And what’s that?” Even with the window down, the smell of urine persists.
“She wants to matter.” My dad reaches back and puts a hand on his wife. “She wants to still matter. But I think she’s about done. I think she’s been telling me lately, she’s ready.”
“By not eating?”
“Sundowning,” my father says.
I drink two beers while my father drinks one. He doesn’t know I ate a weed gummy earlier. It helps. A Tom Waits song about the dying Earth plays on the tap room speakers and I look past my father at a couple seated at the bar, protected by their connection to one another. We’ve left Mom in the car. I imagine this couple walking past, not seeing her at first. When they do, what does that feel like? To walk past an open car window on a sleepy western town’s Main Street and realize there’s an old women slumped and alone in the back seat. Does it feel the same as when you suddenly sense danger? Like when you realize you’re not alone, that your happiness is not impenetrable? That someone is watching? Only, no one is watching. She’s not there. It’s only her body, a bag of groceries, not even a panting dog, a sack, the bone machine. Dreams wilder than anything can fathom.
No tears. Not a single one, the whole time I’m with them. But, flying home, somewhere over Kansas, the woman next to me asks if I’m from Boston. “No, I live in Portland,” I tell her. “Oh, we’re going up to Portland too. After we visit Boston.” I nod. She then tells me she has Alzheimer’s, and that she and her husband are taking as many trips together as they can. I look down at the symmetry of industrial farms and put my headphones back on.
In Logan, I see her husband waiting with their bags outside the bathroom. I stop and tell him that I’m returning from visiting my parents, that my mother too has the disease, and that, before it got bad, my father took them to Italy to see art, to Germany to drink beer, and to Michigan to visit old friends. I told him that what he is doing is important. He didn’t see my tears because I was already walking away, desperate to find my bus and get back to the safe little armpit that is Maine. I still don’t understand why my father’s suffering leaves me frigid, why I’m so shutdown by his reality, while this couple on the plane broke me in two. But I understand a little. I understand that this is how the world works, that empathy is our only grace. I understand that sometimes it’s better to speak up and address our shared pain, even if it risks overstepping. That is to say, perhaps loving a stranger for a minute outside of an airport bathroom is the best we can be.
When my mother’s ghost eventually comes, I promise I will talk to her then. Until then, I’ll be running.
Nathaniel Krenkel lives in Portland, Maine. He is the host of Rhizome Radio at WMPG, and runs the record labels Team Love and Oystertones.
January House Literary Journal 
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