Kinship of Clover

by Ellen Meeropol

  Marking his place with his finger, Jeremy held it up to display the cover. “It’s like the bible of the deep green resistance movement,” he said. “You know, the folks you introduced me to last night.”

  Uh-oh, Tim thought. That lecture really hadn’t been a good idea at all. “Deep green resistance, huh. Is that what the eco-nuts call people who mourn dead plants?”

  “Yeah, at first I thought it was just the plants too. That we could deal with it by freezing all the germplasm seeds like they’re doing in that bunker in Norway or Iceland. But the problem is so much bigger than that. Our whole planet is at risk.”

  “If that’s true, then it’s too big. You can’t stop it.”

  Jeremy shook his head slowly and pointed to his laptop. “I’ve been reading online. People are doing things. Things they won’t talk about in a book or public lecture.”

  “Eco-terrorism, like that speaker said? Is that what you’re getting into? Great. How about just sticking to dead plants? Maybe you could dress in all black and advertise to everyone that you’re a really deep guy, mourning all these stupid dead species?”

  “Go ahead. Make fun of me,” Jeremy said. “Make fun of everything that matters. That’ll make things better.” His brother thought he had all the answers. Tim just stood there with his ridiculous dumbo ears sticking out from his business school haircut, not a self-doubt in the world. Well, Tim didn’t have to know that Jeremy bought three six-packs of black T-shirts at Penney’s and wore them every day against his skin. Out of respect. In mourning.

  “Sorry, Bro,” Tim muttered. He couldn’t stand the wounded look on Jeremy’s face. This situation wasn’t working out well at all and he had no idea how to get out of it. Maybe when they got home for Gabe’s birthday, Jeremy would stay in Massachusetts.

  “You thought about going back to school?” Tim asked. Anything had to be better than Jeremy’s Chicken Little gig.

  “Listen. If you want me to leave, just tell me.”

  “That’s not what I meant.” Tim started backing out of the room. “Stay as long as you want.”

  “I’ll stay here through Earth Day. We—they—the people in the Green Warriors group—are planning a bunch of actions.”

  “When’s that?”

  “April 22. The weekend after Gabe’s party. You’re going to help chaperone, right?”

  “I guess,” Tim said. “And April’s cool. My roommate’s not due back until June.”

  Maybe, when they were home for Gabe’s birthday, he could talk to their parents about Jeremy. He could even call that nurse practitioner at the Health Service. She had sounded concerned about Jeremy.

  At dawn, Patty locked her office door and walked down the darkened corridor of Health Services. Even though she lived alone, sleeping during the day was tricky and she wasn’t good at it. She wouldn’t miss the night shift when she finally rotated back to days next week. Nights were quieter, so it was minimally easier to keep up with dictation and signing notes and scripts, all the tasks that computers were supposed to streamline but didn’t, not really. And the wee hours often brought in the urgent or unusual patient situations, the ones she had trouble forgetting.

  Like that odd kid with the dead plants obsession. Turning into the urgent care hallway, she passed the exam room where Jeremy and she had talked. She’d tried to tune in to his program a few nights after his visit but it had been replaced with ten-minute radio plays produced by the theater department. When she called the registrar, they told her that Jeremy Beaujolais had dropped out for the semester.

  This was a distressing part of the job. She would most likely never see Jeremy again, never know if he was okay, and that was tough. There was something peculiar about him besides his odd coloring, something she didn’t quite understand. Some patients just got to her.

  At the front desk, she waved to two day shift staffers and signed out, then hesitated. Maybe she could access his old radio program online.

  “Oops. Forgot something,” she murmured to the intake clerk and retraced her steps to her office. Jeremy’s computerized medical record yielded the date February 25 for his Health Services visit and his brother’s phone number. She scribbled it on a post-it note and stuck it in her pocket. On the website of the university radio station she quickly located the audio file for his program that night and opened it.

  She recognized the Kyrie from Missa Luba in the background and heard the tremor in Jeremy’s voice. “Begonia eiromischa was discovered in 1886 in Palau, but its forest habitat was cleared for agricultural cultivation and no evidence of the herb has been reported in over a century.” His voice sounded moist and porous, barely containing his sorrow. No wonder he ended up at Health Services. But he was no longer her patient, and psych wasn’t her specialty, so why was she listening to this?

  The Latin names contained more emotion than she would have guessed possible, and Jeremy’s reading of them was elegiac. “Orbexilum macrophyllum. Thismia americana,” his voice especially trembled on that one. “Camellia sinensis sinensis. Camellia sinensis assamica, those were teas,” he said. “And Vanvoorstia bennettiana, a victim of sewage contamination in Sydney Harbor,” a place she had never been and where she would most likely never go. “Nesiota elliptica.”

  Listening to the kid’s voice and the feelings trapped in the words and sentences, it was pretty amazing that he could function at all. How would someone help him, she wondered? Not her, of course. She specialized in adolescent sexuality and STDs. Psych was the last specialty she would pursue. She’d known that since nursing school, when a schizophrenic inpatient apparently didn’t like her looks and smashed a fist into her head. Still, just out of curiosity, how would a counselor approach this kid’s issues?

  She’d probably never see him again, and would never know. Enough of this. She interrupted the program and shut down the computer. Ten weeks of night shift must be affecting her judgment more than she’d realized.

  Chapter Nine

  Before pulling into the traffic on Belmont, Sam double-checked Flo’s seatbelt.

  “You’re going to love this place, Ma,” he said. “It’s homey.”

  Flo stared out the window. “So many wooden houses around here,” she said. “I can’t get used to them.”

  “What do you mean?” Sam frowned. “You’ve lived here for decades.”

  “In Maryland, the houses were brick.”

  “That’s where you lived before I was born, right?”

  She nodded. “Glen Echo. We made big history in 1960.”

  “Really?” Sam said. Flo rarely talked about her life before she moved to Springfield, before she married Sam’s dad. “What happened in 1960?” he asked.

  Flo turned and looked at him. “You know. The amusement park. The picketing and we won.”

  “How could I know? You never told me about this.” He turned onto Mimi’s street. “What pickets?”

  “The students from Howard. Because the park was segregated.”

  “What happened?”

  “I was arrested on the carousel,” she said with a wide smile. “But we won. Me and Charlie.”

  “Who’s Charlie?”

  Flo turned back to the window. “So many wooden houses,” she said again.

  Sam braked in front of Mimi’s house, making a mental note to Google Glen Echo.

  Mimi was sitting on the front stoop, waiting. Mimi was always early. That was the thing that bothered Flo about Mimi. Infuriated really. Like it mattered in the epic battle of good versus evil in the universe if Mimi got to a food coop meeting or a yoga class ten minutes early or ten minutes late. Flo never missed a chance to challenge her friend and ask, “Why are you so uptight?” “It’s a matter of respect,” Mimi would respond.

  Mimi settled herself in the back seat and leaned forward to kiss Flo’s cheek. Flo felt a surge of love and admiration. Mimi was brave. That time they were protesting in Washington—against the invasion of Iraq maybe, or was it Vietnam?—and the mounted police charged and Mimi grabbed h
er elbow and they stood their ground, even when the cops came at them with Billy clubs.

  Looking back, Flo wished she had been braver when the clinic nurse gave her the news, so many years before. She could have called Charlie. It’s even possible that things could have been different. Months of embarrassment and years of evasions—okay, of lying—could have been different. Her actions—her feelings—should have been different. She considered herself liberated. Her life’s work was to fight—to flaunt—the stupidities of patriarchy, of class and racial privilege. So why was she ashamed about this? It made no sense, and yet it was and had been so. Regret ballooned in her chest and she had to concentrate on breathing while Mimi talked and Flo tried to put words that made sense into the empty bits of quiet.

  Merging onto 91, Sam tried to follow Flo and Mimi’s discussion. Mimi seemed to elicit more coherence from his mother than he did. Maybe because they’d been friends for decades and were equals, instead of the shifting power differential between mother and boy, elderly mother and adult son. Still, the women’s conversation followed Flo’s current brand of nonlinear discourse, zigzagging wildly and bouncing off names he didn’t recognize. Charlie never came up. Sam wondered if Mimi knew about him.

  “Would you look at that?” Flo pointed at the car ahead. “What kind of person pays for a vanity plate reading Ya Hoo?”

  “You’re a snob, Ma,” Sam said.

  She’d always been a snob. He had often benefitted from her strong opinions and rules, reading To Kill a Mockingbird instead of The Hardy Boys, not allowed to exceed his one hour of television and even that was carefully monitored. One evening when Flo was out at a meeting, Sam found his dad watching an old science fiction film and asked, “Does Ma know you’re watching that?” His father had laughed. “Your mother keeps us on a tight leash, doesn’t she?”

  He took the first Holyoke exit and turned onto Hillside Village Lane, rubbing his upper lip. He’d shaved off his distinctive handlebar mustache at Zoe’s request two years earlier. Sometimes he missed it. He’d always figured it was his mustache that made people want to tell him their life stories. But even with a naked upper lip, people still spilled their guts, and his own finger still migrated there when he was worried. Today he was definitely worried; there was no way Flo was going to agree to Assisted Living, even with Mimi along as cheerleader.

  Halfway up the hill, they turned into the parking lot. The pseudo-chalet architecture was annoying but the building overlooked the Connecticut River with a view of the western hills and the city to the south. Sam didn’t see why they reserved the most spectacular setting on the mountaintop for the affiliated nursing home, when those patients couldn’t fully appreciate it. Of course, he might feel differently if his mother were living there. Would she need a nursing home? How soon?

  He turned off those questions and tried to remember the details of Hillside Village. When he’d called to make the appointment, the Assisted Living director explained that any potential new resident would have to be evaluated by their physician.

  “She has her own doctor,” Sam said.

  “Of course,” the director had said, “but we have different care options, ranging from Independent Living to the nursing home. For example, Assisted Living is for those residents needing extra care with ADL, activities of daily living. We’re very proud of our new Memory Unit. It’s designed to reflect the latest thinking in dementia care. Our physician will determine which is the best fit for your mother. He’ll also review her current medications. Some individuals with early dementia can benefit from medications that primary care providers may be reluctant to prescribe.”

  Reluctant to prescribe? That sounded ominous, but Sam had agreed. It was hard to believe that his mother would be a good fit for the restrained grace of Hillside Village, with or without medications. In his experience, she took pride in not fitting in, from disrupting PTA meetings to picketing the high school performance of West Side Story for its cultural stereotypes. Picketing. That made him remember her comment about Glen Echo and Charlie, whoever he was.

  The director met them at the door. “I’m Trixie. Welcome. You have an appointment with Dr. Robertson, and I hope you’ll join us for lunch, but first I’d like to show you our home.” She took both of Flo’s hands in her own and smiled. “We have wonderful activities. I think you’ll like it here.”

  Trixie led them to a sunny room with couches and easy chairs arranged in small conversation groupings. Flo played her hands along the bank of multi-paned windows, but the place reminded Sam of Colonel Mustard in the conservatory with the candlestick. He trailed behind the three women as they toured an empty apartment with freshly painted white walls and new gray carpet, the elegant dining room and informal snack bar, the gym and heated pool and puzzle room. It reminded him of visiting preschools with Zoe. He wondered where the block-building area was, and the dress-up corner.

  Flo was underwhelmed too, until they walked into the art studio.

  “Oh!” She hurried to the potter’s wheel and scraped a fingernail across the dried clay on the metal wheel head. She settled her tush on the molded plastic seat and straddled the wheel. She belonged here.

  “Clay?” she asked.

  Trixie dug a damp brown clump from a plastic barrel and handed it to Flo. She held the fragrant earth close to her face and inhaled deeply, then placed it in the center of the wheel. She dipped both hands in the water pail and tenderly covered the clay. She pressed softly on the pedal and the wheel began to turn.

  Her hands cupped the spinning mound, smoothing the bumps and holes. She eased the clay up into a tall cylinder and pressed it back, lifted it once more and pushed it down again. The clump was now symmetric. Centered. Pressing harder on the pedal, she dug both thumbs into the center of the mound and pulled them slightly apart to form the bottom of the bowl. Her fingers urged the sides up toward her face. She leaned closer, opening herself to the earthy smell, the feel of clay molecules sliding elegantly against each other and through her fingers. Her swiss-cheese brain didn’t matter here.

  “Wow,” Sam said when the wheel stopped spinning and the bowl glistened. “Where did you learn to do that?”

  “Charlie,” she said. So many years since her fingers danced with clay. So many lost years. So many losses.

  “Charlie?” Sam asked.

  Flo remembered how clay caked on Charlie’s overalls and how it flaked off on her when they kissed in the bisque drying room at the Corcoran. She let Trixie lead her to a sink to wash her hands and guide her down another identical hallway to the medical office. She sat alone in the exam room with arms crossed. She scraped a bit of dried clay from her shirt and put it in her mouth, savoring the taste. She didn’t need a damn doctor, unless this one could fix her brain or give her a transplant but she was pretty sure they hadn’t invented those yet. Her brain lost things, lost words and memories and ideas and names and even essential things like this morning, when she stood in the kitchen holding a piece of metal with two parts and a tiny wheel in the middle—with sharp edges—and unable to remember what it did or why she needed it.

  How odd that some things were lost and some memories lived razor-sharp in her head, in her body. Her skin remembered the scrape of Charlie’s beard when he skipped shaving and the webbing between his first and second toes, while so many other things wobbled in her brain, important things she was supposed to know like the route home from the park and how to scramble an egg. When that happened, and it happened more and more, she tried to hold fast to whatever the vanishing thing was in her brain but her heart raced and she breathed faster and faster until she thought she’d die of breathlessness and dizziness and sometimes the thought swelled and burst, leaking bits of ruined images from her useless head.

  After the exam, the nurse escorted Flo back to Mimi in the waiting room, and gestured Sam to follow her.

  “Dr. Robertson will speak with you now,” she said.

  The doctor sat behind his desk making notes on a yellow pad. Sam took one of
the matching plaid chairs. Was plaid supposed to make him feel comfy?

  “Your mother’s dementia is moderately advanced.” The doctor spoke without looking up. “Early Stage Five. It’s too late for Assisted Living, but I think she’ll do well in our Memory Unit.”

  Sam tried to hide his reaction. Why not call it an Alzheimer’s Unit, or Dementia. It seemed cruel to call it a Memory Unit when the residents were losing theirs.

  “What’s the difference?” he asked.

  “More staff for one thing, to monitor pharmacotherapy.”

  “Why drugs, if there’s no cure?” Sam asked, aware of the argument in his voice, the annoyance threading between the words of his question.

  “We can sometimes slow the progression.” The doctor finally looked up and made eye contact with Sam. “Help people feel less agitated.”

  You mean easier to handle, Sam thought.

  “Also the physical layout of the Memory Unit addresses the behaviors common to these conditions. For example, the hallway is circular, so our residents can walk and walk and never get lost.”

  “Don’t they notice they’re going in circles?”

  “No, Mr. Tobin. They do not. In any case, with your mother our goal would be to get her settled with the appropriate services now, before the disease progresses.”

  “Progresses how?” Sam asked, even though he’d read the entire Alzheimer’s Disease website carefully and had memorized the seven stages. He knew the symptoms to come: the wandering, the suspiciousness and delusions, the incontinence, the belligerence.

  Except, of course, Flo had a long history of belligerence.

  “We’ll address new problems as they come up,” the doctor said. “I think your mother will do well here, as long as we address her anger issues. I’d like to start her on a medication for that.”