Christmas in July

by Alan Michael Parker

  Baby hears what Mother will never tell anyone again. All of the sweetness in Mother is saved for Baby. The memories have become Baby’s, whispered to Baby, memories that have risen again through the Pittsburgh slush, such as the one time the sisters went to the pictures together on a Saturday and then for ice cream floats. (Mother was never a fan of the movies when I was growing up, so the details of this story come as a surprise.) But now she’s in my movie: I play back the video on my iPad later, cue the tale told to Baby, and turn up the volume. The memory of the trip to the picture show is now mine. All of that impractical detritus of a life lived practically, white-collar poverty its denominator, Mother shares with a tiny doll who cannot keep a secret. I film Baby when I can, the too-late repository of Mother’s better intentions. I tell myself I’m filming for the doctor, but that’s not true; it’s not a documentary, I’m just rubbernecking.

  We got Baby for Mother at the suggestion of a previous home healthcare worker, a portly, acne-pocked, sympathetic young man name Darren who only worked with us a few weeks, who I wished were cute, but who made a number of great suggestions nonetheless, including shopping for Mother at NiceDolls.com. Not a porn site. (Darren was the one who suggested binge-watching The Good Wife, and in the third season, I’m still grateful.) Darren also suggested that Mother take the back bedroom, that if there were wildlife in the yard, Mother might like to watch. As Darren explained it, giving Mother a back bedroom, with something to see that changed slowly, could keep her safe. If Mother were distracted, she might not mosey into the street, curious about her long-gone childhood pals. Too often, Darren said, when the Alzheimer’s patient begins to roam, she has to be moved to a safer and more supervised facility—a move that tends to accelerate the patient’s decline.

  What Darren didn’t know was that the deer were here for me. Mother has her Baby, and I have competitive balance. Someday, and boy do I hope it’s soon, she and I will each run away with our secrets.

  “You’re kidding,” my therapist says, when I tell her this. She sits up: an unusual gesture for her. She seems a little keener, suddenly. “Where do you think you’d go?”

  “Into the woods,” I say. I’m trying not to be a cliché. “With Stephen Sondheim. Away.”

  “Oh, just get drunk when she goes to sleep,” my therapist says. “Your mother needs you.”

  My therapist is occasionally brutal. She’s a good therapist. So I get drunk while Baby’s in the washing machine (drinker, drinkest, drunk), as the doll tumbles in the dryer, and then take Baby out back with my next martini to look together at the night sky. Though the sun’s down, it’s still hot out. The sky’s too overcast for stars, and the deer wisely steer clear of me. I’m very hungry, or drunk enough to think I am. Working out makes me hungry, even just exercising alone in my room, no matter what my trainer says. But drinking’s just like working out, isn’t it?

  All of these people, Baby included, my therapist included, have more to say about my life than I do. I know they’re trying to help me; they see what it means to live with Mother, and to watch her go so slowly. But I wish they would all back off, too, or that James would call. (He chats amiably enough when I call him, but we both know this only goes one way.) All of these good people are certain of what’s right for Mark. Because of course I’m Mark. Marcus was just my stage name in Mother’s little play, way back in Pittsburgh when Baby was a doll.

  “Baby,” I slur exaggeratedly, holding her up like Yorick. “You’ve got it made.”

  In the morning, I find an empty jar of olives and a crumpled bag of corn chips on the patio out back, along with the shiny, sharp shards of my martini glass sparkling on the brick. Did the deer enjoy the chips? Unlikely, based on how I feel this morning. Cousin Shauna clucks at me, but she’s got nothing; it’s just another hangover.

  At least I remembered to put clean Baby back in Mother’s clutches before she woke. I might have been fall-down drunk, but I wasn’t stupid. Or maybe Shauna did it, picking up after me.

  The white-tailed deer is an athlete. Weighing between one and three hundred pounds (I weigh under two hundred, when I’m lying), the white-tailed deer can run at speeds up to thirty miles per hour and jump ten feet in the air. While there’s little cause to treat the deer allegorically—they’re not my guilt, they’re not my redeemers, they’re not here to transport Mother’s soul, they’re not emissaries preparing us—I find their athleticism striking in comparison to my own, a symbol of something nonetheless. I can’t run or jump. In fact, just from wear and tear, I’ll probably need a knee replacement soon, happily relying upon my Civil Servant healthcare, unless some elected buffoon takes it away. Of course, I wouldn’t eat a twig if you offered me a decent paté. (I often find the chewed-off stubs of branches at the edge of the woods.) By comparison, more flamboyantly, I would absolutely wear my gorgeous antlers for show. Like that of the ram or the elk or the peacock, my horny plumage would bear the standard of my virility. Word on the street (read: the Internet) is that the antlers of the white-tailed deer are for rubbing. I get that. If I’m going to rub or be rubbed, I’m going to look good.

  Of course, I have explored my sexual habits with my therapist—it’s one of the best parts of therapy. We analyzed together what looking good means, and what I find attractive in a man, both body types and outfits. What James was into, when he wasn’t into being vain. What I like to do in bed. What kind of guy I think is hot. Not surprisingly, I like the bad ones, at least for short-term encounters. That Friday session with my therapist was a Top Ten therapy moment—talk as foreplay, before my cruising began, to discuss desire and then go hunting for its object. Later, I was aroused for hours.

  The bad men validate my badness, naturally, and pose no long-term threat to my social order. Everyone agrees it’s a hookup. Bad’s not the same as stupid: I am a man ever ready with condoms, despite what a bad man may want, and James and I were always safe.

  The deer know I’m watching. They know I wait for them, that I keep to my side of the glass, that Mother joins me on occasion, that Cousin Shauna is learning to enjoy the time of day and sure does like those delicious cocktails I pour, and that there’s something deer-like in humanity’s collective behavior at dusk, our own crepuscular habits. I know as much about them, I think, tallying data, as they know about me. From the wild side of the window, we’re sedentary, circumspect beings not easily frightened, our watering hole bountiful, our foraging easy, the refrigerator bright with produce. The deer might even see I’m learning to be kind.

  Cousin Shauna’s so good with Mother, I am in awe. Shauna asks direct questions that elicit on-point answers, runs the meeting well, leads her patient carefully. Mother trusts that Shauna makes sense, even if Mother often calls Shauna “Hattie,” which was Mother’s own mother’s name. Shauna seems okay with the fact that Mother is now a child: it is a truth universally acknowledged that Cousin Shauna will make a good mother.

  Me, I don’t get a consistent name—Honey sometimes, Moo-Moo, a childhood nickname, and even names I don’t recognize. I think Mother’s Alzheimer’s gets this one right, actually, my life never quite fixed. Although at times I miss the name Marcus. Because it was in fact Marcus Aurelius who said, “It is not death that a man should fear, but never beginning to live.” How the hell did my mother know that I would be that man?

  Mark suffices, low-key and agreeable.

  In the cells in Mother’s brain, in the victim of “the Alzheimer’s” (which is what Shauna calls it, with the deterministic morbidity of the definite article), acetylcholine has begun to break down. As the doctor in Pittsburgh described the disease to me and Aunt Emily, memory’s like the surface of sand at the beach, at the water’s edge. The wave comes, and everything floats in the wave, carried here. We pick something from the wave, and we remember. Now the wave recedes and deposits driftwood and bits of plastic and seashells upon the bubbling sand. That’s what it’s like when the nerve cells in the brain are isolated, they devolve to detritus. Until, eventually, there
are no more waves.

  I appreciated this doctor at the hospital in Pittsburgh, whom we saw early on. I admired the pressed jib of her, the manner in which she communicated the relative uselessness of the drugs—Aricept, Namenda, high doses of Vitamin E. The doctor was informative, a fount of confidence and pessimism. We were given timetables and charts, Emily and I; we were shown the grim future, the potential for years of limbo. I have always liked theologians, less so theology.

  There’s a deer on the chaise longue in the backyard, long legs and black hooves restful and akimbo. It’s the most absurd sight I have ever seen—a deer on a chair—but I can’t be that tanked, can I? It’s either too early or too late. With my martini glass in one hand and the big shaker in the other, the jar of olives in my pants pocket, I stand aghast at the door to the patio. I can see the flashing of white, and fur, and flesh. There is a deer lying on my deck chair.

  But now there are arms, and now there are hands. It’s not a deer. It’s a girl in a hat. What’s she doing here?

  With my butt, I bump open the door. Cousin Shauna’s gone for groceries, Mother is in the living room in her wheelchair, and I’m here in the sweaty twilight with a deery girl in my borrowed backyard.

  “Can I help you?”

  She twists around to look at me but doesn’t get up. “No. I’m just lying down.”

  “You’re…” I don’t know what to say. I step fully onto the red brick patio, pour a good martini, put down the shaker to add my two olives—and when it’s all poured, I extend my hand politely, guests first. “Would you like a martini?

  “I’m thirteen,” she giggles.

  That means no.

  “Would you like a Pringles?” she offers in return.

  “No,” I smile. “Thank you.” I place the olive jar on the glass table and ease into the other chaise longue. She’s in my chair. It’s a good martini.

  Drink slowly, I tell myself too often.

  “I thought you were a deer,” I say.

  The girl looks at me, just turns her head. Something’s in her gaze, and she’s so thin, like Mother. I think the girl might be sick too.

  “Who lives here?”

  “No one,” I say, the quick answer a surprise to me, too. “I mean, we’re temporary. We’re tenants. My mother…” The sentence ends badly. “I’m leasing the house for my mother. My cousin stays with us. I go home to DC on weekends.”

  None of this information could possibly matter to the girl. What is she doing here, eating chips and acting in my backyard movie? We sit in our chairs. There are crows somewhere.

  After a while, the girl asks, “What does a martini taste like?”

  It’s something to do. “I’ll get you a glass,” I say, jumping up again.

  Inside, Mother asks a question I don’t hear, and I call out, “Yes.” I aim myself at the breakfront and the stemware. Cousin Shauna has her own special glass, so I take another, a different style, one with swirls. Cousin Shauna’s glass could be a Murano, another example of Shauna’s recent education, the ruination of young Shauna, her Bildungsroman.

  Out back again, I pour. “Here.”

  “Thanks.” She sips. “Whoa,” she says, and coughs.

  “Do you like it?”

  “Definitely not,” she says. She takes another sip.

  There’s a lot of quiet and a little noise in Nature, bugs or something. We drink. She coughs.

  “So.” I perch at the edge of my lounger. “I’m a lawyer, and I want to ask you a few questions. Would that be okay?”

  “Sure,” she says. “But I don’t like to talk.”

  “That’s fine,” I say. “The gin will help.”

  “I’m not a dumb kid,” she says.

  “That’s good,” I say. My third martini is always my favorite, until the next one. “But you’re a teenager, right?” She giggles. I know so little. “Do you hate your mother?”

  She looks at me. “That’s…no…” She lets out the word. “I just can’t be there. There’s too much…I hate Aunt Nikki. Bitch.”

  “Oh.”

  “Do you hate your mother?” the girl asks, returning the favor.

  I like this girl. I look over my shoulder, and the girl looks too. We can see Mother in her chair, talking to Baby.

  “That’s her?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you hate her?”

  “I probably do. Or I did. I used to. Hell, I don’t know.”

  “That’s confusing,” she says. “What’s she holding?”

  “It’s a doll. She’s got the Alzheimer’s,” I say. “It’s hard to hate a sick person.”

  “She’s dying?”

  “We’re all dying,” I say.

  “Wow, don’t say that. That’s not cool,” the girl says. “You don’t know.”

  She’s got on big black boots unlaced at the top, some kind of leggings, and plaid shorts over the leggings. There are buckles and snaps on her little black vest, like tribal markers sold at the mall. She’s wearing an ugly knitted hat—well, it’s all ugly—and she looks to have no hair. She’s sick. I imagine she smells bad.

  My martini has gone too far. “You’re very mature for your age,” I say, to help.

  The girl shakes her head. I don’t know if she’s agreeing. She wedges a little stack of Pringles into her mouth.

  “Would you like to stay for dinner?” I ask. “I was just about to cook. We can do better than chips—and I can’t only drink. I’ll have a nasty hangover.”

  “I don’t eat fish,” the girl says, still chewing.

  “No fish.” I smile. “I’ll whip up a little something. I’ll call when it’s ready.”

  Will she stay? Will the deer recognize her?

  It’s just past Mother’s dinnertime. I can make linguine with jarred pesto and a mixed greens salad from the prewashed box. Mother will have pasta with a dollop of tomato sauce, which is bound to be an adventure and will lead to a washcloth bath—but Shauna will be back to take care of all that. Shauna the clean-up crew, the miraculous, sure cousin ready for the wiping up.

  I’m drinking! There’s a houseguest! I turn on my iPod, sync the Bluetooth speakers, and groove to the new D’Angelo while I putter in the kitchen. I waited fourteen years for D’Angelo. How long can I wait for Mother?

  The appliances are ancient. The electric stove works well enough, although it’s not very sophisticated. The burners are hard to regulate; they heat up slowly and then suddenly they’re too hot. Nonetheless, thirty or so minutes later, we have dinner. I wheel Mother to the table, though she’s muttering a little aggressively, and I call the girl in from the patio. The three of us settle at our places. I open a bottle—nothing special, a little white Burgundy—and with a silent nudge and a smile, I offer the girl a glass.

  “Yes, please. I’m bombed. You left me out there.” She slurs a little. “Olives taste like fish.”

  Dinner’s good enough, better than Pringles, or the girl’s just hammered, her smile cockeyed. Either way, she chows with gusto. Mother eats two bites, then stops, maybe even dozes, then stirs again and plays with her food. I have given her a fork and spoon for her pasta and applesauce, along with a tiny glass of wine—she’s not supposed to drink, but we have a guest—and Mother seems pretty happy.

  In slow motion, it begins: years of slow motion bring us to this. With a shaking hand and a spoonful of pasta and sauce, Mother’s eyes widen in confusion. Something has scared her, something she cannot make sense of—her hand shakes more, tilts, and then she dribbles food onto her front and down her housedress, Baby in there somewhere. I forgot to give Mother a bib.

  Mother begins to whimper.

  “Oh no,” the girl says. “Lady, it’s all right. Lady…”

  “It’s okay.” I wave the air, comfort everyone. I stand to go get something.

  “Baby,” Mother says.

  “It’s okay.” I step toward the kitchen. “It’s just a spill. We’ll clean it up.”

  “Baby!” Mother is more insistent.
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  “Be right there,” I call from the paper towels.

  “Let me help,” I hear the girl say.

  When I turn back from the kitchen doorway, I see the girl standing and reaching toward Mother, napkin ready to wipe the mess, Mother clutching Baby, the doll splattered with spaghetti sauce.

  Then Mother’s slapping at the girl hysterically. “Get off me, you fucking bitch! Cunt! Cunt bitch! White cunt bitch! Fucking cunt! Whore cunt! Cunt licking, white fucking, white fucking bitch! You’re hurting Baby, you fucking white bitch!”

  The girl freezes, looks at me. I’m sure my mouth is open too.

  The girl throws down her napkin and runs, banging open the patio door, into the woods. Her arms flail, her white legs flashing.

  I watch the girl run. She’s away.

  She should have stayed, and I should have run.

  Mother’s screaming.

  Run, Marcus.

  MEG’S TEAM

  I go to all the games. Sunday afternoons, the boys play pickup double-headers at Rockerson Park, Tuesday night league games are at Findlay Park, Wednesday night league games are at Findlay again, and then Friday night league games are at A.B. (That’s what everyone calls it, although the park’s named A.B. Wo-je-ho-ee-woah-ee or something.) I bring different seat cushions for the different seats in each ballpark, hand warmers and space blankets in case the temperatures drop, and pack the cooler with healthy snacks for between innings or between games at the doubleheaders. I bring the first-aid kit. Of course I travel to all of the regional tournaments, but that’s another story, and different guys and girls are involved on those teams. I always keep the book, which means I’m the scorekeeper. Everyone knows that’s what I do: Meg keeps the book.