Christmas in July

by Alan Michael Parker

  Baby gets a ride in Mother’s grip, up to Mother’s ear, the doll’s dress nonchalantly smoothed by Mother’s trembling hand. “What’s that? Yes, ma’am! Baby, you are so right! It was that Mr. Telwin, the one lived just over on Pocusset. His little girl and you wouldn’t speak, after that day. That was an incident. Your daddy was sure mad, Baby. You don’t like making Daddy mad.”

  Baby goes back into Mother’s bra. Mother looks up at me. “Honey, do you think I could have my dinner?”

  “You just ate,” I say.

  “I did? But I surely didn’t!”

  There are so many complexities to this simplest of conversations, I stop filming. I press the button on the iPad and end time with a little ping. “Honey” was the name of Mother’s late little sister, who lived in Spokane, an aunt I never knew. But Mother has called many people Honey throughout her life, including me, her only child, and it was always the endearment she used to address white children she met and liked. Who’s Honey now?

  Mother was just served her dinner by Shauna not a half hour ago—a nicely prepped plate of pot roast and peas, mashed potatoes with gravy—but she only nibbled at the food, turning the peas into the mash, more hiding. Mother’s asking for her dinner has become part of the war Alzheimer’s wages: Can I have my dinner? I’m not hungry. Can I have my dinner? I’m not hungry. I didn’t want that. Can I have my dinner? That’s not my dinner. I would like my dinner early today. I’m not hungry. Can I have my dinner? Please, may I have my dinner now? It’s dinnertime, don’t you think? I would like my dinner and then my dessert. Please may I have my dinner? Can I have my dinner now? I don’t like that.

  Much of the Alzheimer’s literature speaks to the prospect of such repetitions spiraling down to some new state and bottoming out in anger, but so far, we’ve been lucky. Mother’s confusion has been true in its precipitous plunge into childhood, falling freely past the snarls of emotional conflict. Alzheimer’s can make a person furious—all of us, really—with phosphorescent rages at the ready. I am frightened by this future, although I wonder what would happen if I merely pretended to be angry, and yelled back? A question for the social worker.

  In another world, I am still my mother’s son, and she remembers with what pride she saw me grow up and succeed—and I was so proud to make her proud. I remain grateful for what she sacrificed, a gratitude I tried to share with her not long ago, and then watched as my feelings slid off the dumb exterior of her Alzheimer’s, her affect impervious. Perhaps I shouldn’t have tried to thank her, for how it felt after; perhaps better never than late.

  In that other world, Marcus Johnson, impetuously named after a man from a library book she had never read, would not be gay. Not Millie Johnson’s only child and singular hope, no sir, not the one who got out, went to American and then to Howard Law. Once I came out, and over the years of our strained silences (guarded phone conversations, boxes of Jordan almonds on her birthday), Mother would forever reduce me to the sum of my accomplishments, not a man but a résumé: “This is my son, Marcus. Did I tell you about my son, Marcus? He’s a Howard man. He’s a lawyer for the government in DC,” pronounced the Southern way, Dee-Cee.

  I can still see myself as a kid in Pittsburgh. On a hot evening just a week ago, after waiting impatiently as Mother cooed to Baby through another endless meal, I made a little cairn of crumbs on the counter as I cleaned. That pile of crumbs set off a long-lost memory—a cataract of feeling from deep in childhood, a stunning vision of Hulk, the gaunt mutt I found in a vacant lot and rescued, and loved. Hulk, who slept on the smoked green glass coffee tabletop when we weren’t looking. One Sunday, Hulk had apparently gotten into our dinner, chicken bones scattered on the kitchen linoleum when we came home from church, a neat pile of bones deposited right in the middle. Hulk claimed to be innocent, from the satisfied and wide-eyed grin the forever hungry and too-skinny dog gave us. Who put all that garbage here? Hulk barked with dogged mock outrage at the offending remains, and my mother and I laughed and laughed.

  I haven’t remembered Hulk so vividly in forty years. That’s what Alzheimer’s does: it drags everyone back, not just its victim. The past is portentous, legible as the future in the figures cast by chicken bones. Or maybe the past is an old dog in need of putting down.

  “I’m glad we’ve come to this place in your feelings,” says my therapist. “It’s good that you’re not hating her anymore.”

  “But I want to.” I try not to pout.

  “Yes, of course. And maybe you can again when she’s gone. But now you can’t.” She pauses. “So what will you put there instead of hate? Hate digs a hole.”

  Neither of us speaks. On the bookshelf, my therapist’s ticking clock performs its maddening, steady march through each of my rationalizations.

  The astonishment of my mother’s Alzheimer’s is that she has returned in her mind to the promising life she had before me, albeit in a Saxon South she never inhabited. Will she grow up, get pregnant, and raise me once more? Will she live long enough this time to cast me out again? What direction is she going, and at what speed? Can I slam the door harder? If we’re doing this again, what’s my exit strategy? Hate digs a hole—so what does love do?

  My therapist says that for too long I’ve been the guy who chooses the path of most resistance, emotionally, to win the game I call my feelings—an unhealthy choice, and never a path to happiness. Such insights keep me traveling to DC each Friday to talk through my troubles for $300, and then treat myself to a night on the town. In DC, having not yet sublet my apartment, I can cab my way back from anywhere I cruise, do what I want. Therapy and then sex, words and then none; I know the ways my desires mirror one another.

  For all of my self-interest, and believe me, there’s plenty, I’m an affable guy, agreeability my profession. For years, my work for the Fed has involved negotiating restitution for what one or another person (or persons) has perpetrated against an injured party, as I pursue a middle way, reconciliation my bag. Usually, my cases include a client or firm taking umbrage, the wronged party’s peevishness most of the problem. In a negotiated process, reconciliation affords each party dignity: reconciliation assures us that we were right to feel wronged, because someone is always wronged, the process alone redemptive a priori. Ridiculous, really—I work to reconcile the claims of others, and now live a life of unclaimed injury, Mother’s rejection my constant companion.

  She has Baby, but she’s the baby here, and that’s no fun. I miss hating her; it was so much better.

  Less fun: the suspicion that I was never wronged, no matter the horror stories in my memory.

  Cousin Shauna claimed the smallest bedroom, an eight-by-ten-foot box painted lime green by the owners of the house, a boisterous family of six relocated by Alcoa to Akron. Mother’s bedroom is across the hall, a larger, bright blue box formerly occupied by twin preteens, complete with stick-on glow-in-the-dark stars glued to the ceiling. We discovered the stars shortly after moving Mother here: she likes to lie in the dark and tell Baby about them.

  Mother’s bedroom faces out back, with two windows that look upon a long and deep yard cutely adorned with half of a split-rail fence—a decorative accessory, although the logic of its location in the backyard confuses. Who cares, if no one sees? Nevertheless, there’s the rail fence, six lengths of architectural comment.

  At the far back of the lawn, beyond the fence, the woods begin, signified by the onset of scraggly underbrush, long grasses and shaggy weeds, and a bed of maidenhair ferns the deer won’t eat. We are in deer country. The white-tailed deer appear regularly, parading through my cocktail hour. Sometimes they materialize much later, deeper in the night, to invade my insomniac haze as I stand at 3 a.m. in the living room. Sometimes they don’t come at all. But when the deer do come, the picture windows make of their showiness a marvelous display, and I am their glassed-in, appreciative audience. I love those deer—I would say so happily to any therapist. To a deer, I could commit.

  The white-tailed deer is prim
arily active during twilight. It’s my favorite time of day, too—when I get to leave work (schedule permitting), hit the Metro, and aim myself toward a dirty martini with extra olives. It’s a time to do what I please. Dinner with friends in Adams Morgan, dancing at the Mill in S.E., I wear a suit to work and a different outfit later, changing with my clothes. I feel the gift of twilight as a biological boon, like an alarm that goes off in my blood.

  Naturally, the deer in Saxon Hills wouldn’t know me from Caesar, or love me back; nor do they stand for any real need of mine, despite the fortuitous hour of their arrival, everyone just in time, pretty enough for a cocktail. The deer don’t care—which also means that the deer don’t judge me. It is July in Maryland, in an endearing ranch house I have arranged for Mother to live in as long as her illness agrees. Perhaps the world will let the two of us misunderstand each other in peace.

  The deer come most sundowns, and I wait for them by bracing my body, breathing through my mouth, jittery and anxious. The deer stand in the backyard, or they leap through, and that’s all. Nothing is different when the deer go. Sometimes I wonder whether there ever were any deer.

  I have a crush on one particular doe, more reddish along her backside than the other females, with an asymmetrical splash of color that runs from her neck at a jaunty angle across her chest. She looks like she’s wearing a sash: she’s my beauty. She’s a recent mother, with two fawns that gambol about like awkward wind-up toys, their white spots playfully dramatic, furry polka dots or even stars. All of the deer have milky white stomachs and long tails with white undersides, and all seem to have a ring around each eye. Even though the Greeks and Romans named no constellation after the deer—only after her nemesis, Orion the Hunter, whose belt I can see from the backyard, sometimes, around dawn—the white-tailed deer who visit seem to me of a decidedly cosmological order, inevitably transitory and yet earthbound, servants of the ancient gods and their ready passage through the western Maryland sky.

  It’s like watching soft-core deer porn. When the doe and her two fawns show up as a trio, I am at my happiest. I pour my first Beefeater’s and sink into a plush, ugly chair facing the broad backyard, Mother napping before her simple dinner and muttered evening of relentless television. All of the woodsy world’s a sight for my pleasure: the windows square the scene, the deer framed into focus. I gaze upon the animated backyard diorama as the fading light bends to obeisance and the gin slides down my throat. With the deer there, in their benevolence, Nature makes a case for a god I have never known. Atheist though I am, their wary intelligence seems an argument for belief.

  The two fawns could be related, but as Cousin Shauna says, “That’s just silly, all the deer are.” One of the fawns—ever so slightly smaller—has a habit of prancing to a halt a pace or two behind her sister, then scurrying up and tucking her head into her sister’s long neck, as though seeking some kind of protection, with a little nick and a tilt. It is a religious gesture, although I can’t place the image exactly from my youthful, sexually distracted touring of Italy and its ubiquitous churches. Perhaps somewhere in Assisi? The larger fawn seems the proudest of the deer: she never bends her head unless to eat. Even when she eats, she seems so sure. The larger fawn is also the least watchful, the calmest of her generation. How has she come to be a calm deer? How would a calm deer survive?

  The movements of the white-tailed deer have been documented broadly. In wooded northern climes—the kinds of woods and meadows we in the nation’s capital have seen developed into boomburbs—thriving agricultural habitats support ten deer per square mile. In sparser surroundings such as Saxon Hills, white-tailed deer have become “varmints,” as the guy at the local hardware store disparagingly called them. (All I asked was what do the deer eat.) In suburban areas, the deer have become a plague upon the passionate gardener, whose heirloom tomatoes are forever at risk.

  That the white-tailed deer is a herd animal makes sense to me. In my own relationships, and in the kinds of passing erotic encounters I once favored socially, monogamy fell prey to more generalized desires. I too was more of an animal, less reflective, my pursuit of beauty carnal and fraught, although sometimes I still like being that man.

  My mother is somewhere in between states of being, at the moment, one animal becoming another.

  In therapy last week, I mentioned the idea that my mother had abandoned her humanity as she failed more often to recognize the present. “That’s bullshit,” replied the expert. “People choose all the time not to recognize the present. It’s a coping mechanism. It’s how I make my living, Counselor. It’s how I pay the bills.”

  I answered: “But I’m all about the present.”

  My therapist smiled, which is much like my therapist laughing, or as close as she gets. “Yet here you are, and there’s work to be done. You’re here because you think the past might be worth rehabilitating.” And then she added with a bigger smile: “You’re not getting off the hook, sneaky human. No one’s cured.”

  When the doe and the two fawns arrive as part of a herd, something else altogether happens to my backyard world. There’s a kind of military appearance to the power and majesty of the flashing bodies of so many deer, the red and brown and white fanfare of their fur, and to their shifting and dashing. They run and run and then stop, bound into our yard, and then run and stop, and stand, and run again, a madcap choreography. It reminds me of a platoon cut off from command, a faraway general barking orders into a dead radio, small groups of soldiers massing uncertainly with neither instruction nor inclination to proceed. A herd of deer that stops running and poses, poised—they seem to me all readiness and no plan. Now what? they seem to ask one another.

  I have counted eleven deer in our yard at one time, although rarely a buck of any great size. They seem commonly to be women and children—which I said once to Shauna, who continued to humor my city mouse terminology, as she responded with her usual tenderness, “Oh, you loopy doopy. They’re not anything. They’re deer. Let’s just watch a little TV.”

  My identifying with the deer resides in a simple desire: I want to be someone else. To step into the yard in their midst, to be acknowledged as someone a deer could know—a slight flick of an ear, hello, as the deer continue to munch upon the heads of the landlord’s columbines. We would toast each other, me with my Beefeater’s and the deer with their flowery hors d’oeuvres, share a moment of pure being. It’s of course an absurd wish, as my wishes tend to be. I have only once tried to greet them, stepping outside to welcome my beauty. The result was an immediate rout. How they fled from me.

  Yes, I know, everyone wants to be someone else—and Mother’s failing, yes, I know, I know, which makes me wish most of all for her safe passage, wherever she goes. But one of the curiosities of Alzheimer’s is how it incites such grief in its caretakers preemptively. Mourning comes early in these parts.

  I’m keeping it all together, though, aren’t I? That lie feels good.

  I would imagine my mother has a similar desire. Her infantilized toy friend seems to indicate a need to relive a past that never happened, in a changed shape and form. Mother’s memories appear so sweet—how could life have been that sweet? She and Baby beat a path back to postwar Pittsburgh, where my granddad swept steel shavings in the mill and my grandmother cleaned toilets when not too pregnant, and everyone wore little hats wherever they went. I’m not making up the hats: I have seen the photos, the suitors in their snap-brimmed trilbys, the sisters in tri-corner bonnets with a bit less flair. Which gives me an idea: I’ll get my mother a hat. Perhaps I’ll get a little hat for Baby too, and pin it to the doll’s head when Mother’s asleep. I’ll try not to stab the doll in the eye. The thought makes me laugh aloud, which earns a little look from Shauna.

  Until her Alzheimer’s changes again, there’s a surprising lot to do. In the night, Cousin Shauna and I surreptitiously slip to Mother’s bedside and snatch Baby, whose little brown head juts from Mother’s nightgown. I hold the flashlight aimed away as I light the scene
indirectly and Shauna eases the doll from its slumber.

  Baby, who smells like her old lady, needs a bath. The original packaging for Baby said to wash the cute and cuddly doll weekly, and do so during your three-year-old’s nap. The doll—an African-American sleep aid, whose eyes curl to a close when we lay her body down—is safe for little girls. In the lab, the prototypes were subjected to pull strength and choke tests, the filling polyester and flame resistant (not the same as flame retardant, my lawyer self knows to note). But Baby does not fit into a toilet paper roll: the standard opening of a human child’s mouth is said to be roughly the size of a toilet paper cardboard tube, and as such, dolls like Baby are made larger to prevent choking. When I read this, I understood that Baby could easily fill Mother’s adult-sized mouth, and choking could ensue, and no one would be at fault. No litigation would be warranted by such an accident.

  What cracks my bell is the historical anomaly: Baby is black. I know well Brown v. Board of Education, and with the sixtieth anniversary of the ruling having recently passed, the case has become prominent again—especially now that the news is the news. Professor Kenneth Clark did the heavy work with the children and the different-colored dolls, and the great Thurgood Marshall did the rest, broadly inferring from the solid data and arguing that the separate but equal statute of Plessy v. Ferguson violated the Fourteenth Amendment in the case of minority schools. My mother was the right age to have had one of those blond, white dolls, shaming the household and confusing any little girl who loved the fake girl’s rubbery, alabaster skin. The real girl could never be as lovely as her doll. My mother is the wrong age now; she’s of no age, I think, just dying along. But at least Mother is dying with a sociological and legal correction cradled in her arms.