A Girl's Guide to Missiles

by Karen Piper

  Nixon’s Watergate seemed poised to strike again. Could we stand it?

  But no one looked too closely at Reagan’s face. Maybe it was just too hard to admit that the head of your country, or your family, might not really be there. Then you would have to wonder who was taking care of you. People looked away, while I became obsessed with watching Ronald Reagan.

  Meanwhile, my mom encouraged my dad to ask a doctor. The first one put him on antidepressants, saying depression might make him say the same things over and over again. But it was not depression. The next one gave him a B12 shot and sent him home, saying it was a deficiency. But it was not a deficiency. Then a doctor said he had “transient global amnesia,” which meant it would go away in time. That one would have been a relief if it had gone away in time. My dad declared he would not retire until he hit the twenty-year mark, when he would get an extra $200 a month—unless he got a terminal diagnosis. The word “terminal” made me shudder and look away. I watched Ronald Reagan instead.

  Reagan was forced to testify in 1990. Most were too worried about Iraq to watch. I noticed that when he climbed into the wooden witness box, he had that old Reaganesque charm on his face, but that gradually it began to fade. I noticed that when he was handed a piece of paper, his face would scrunch up in a struggle as if he could not read. I could tell that Reagan was fake reading. His face would change from confusion to light, then back again. At the same time, my dad’s handwriting was starting to change and sometimes his letters would be reversed or left out.

  Reagan seemed happy only when he remembered the script by heart, when he said things like “Contras were freedom fighters such as we had known two hundred years ago.” It was clear from the way his eyes lit up with that old Reagan sparkle that he knew those lines usually worked. He looked surprised when no one applauded. He was in a time warp, blaming the press for foiling his covert operation, saying that if he ever got his “hands on the people who are doing the leaking,” he would “hang them by their thumbs in front of the White House.” He chuckled and thought the world would chuckle along with him in those last months of his presidency. We did not.

  In Eugene, people called Reagan a liar. Stevie Wonder wrote a song called “Skeletons,” which spoke of Reagan’s “stinkin’ lies” while the voices of Ollie North and Ronald Reagan played in the background. Earth, Wind & Fire wrote a song that opened with a newscaster asking, “The biggest unanswered question is: Where is the money?” The money from the missile sales.

  Only the Chicago Tribune thought that maybe he was sick, noting that he said “I don’t recall” or “I don’t remember” eighty-eight times in those eight hours of testimony. I would watch his face for years to come, watch it keep time, step by step, with the dawning blankness in my father’s face, the slipping into nothingness. Little by little, they went together.

  In 1992, Reagan was forced to testify one last time. By then President George H. W. Bush had pardoned almost everyone involved in Iran-Contra, and a successful war had lifted the mood of the country. Only I was still watching, along with prosecutor Lawrence Walsh.

  My dad had still not received a diagnosis. My mom said he had stopped trying to learn new computer programs at work. Eventually, he would stop trying to remember his password to even get on the computer. He would go to work and just stare at the blank screen, taking breaks to pace around. Slowly, he turned into the seventy-four-year-old man who used to work across the hall from me.

  “Don’t tell your sister,” my mom whispered conspiratorially to me. “I don’t want to worry her. Besides, Mitch works on the base and might say something. Your father really wants to get to twenty years. He wants that pin. I’m trying to help him by writing notes for him to take to work.” Her first note said “transient global amnesia,” so he could remember what he had, then his passwords, then the day of the week, then his boss’s name, and finally his own name. That front shirt pocket became very useful.

  During Reagan’s last testimony, Prosecutor Walsh slowly came to realize that he could not answer questions. He tried to refresh Reagan’s memory by reading from his diary, but even that did not help. Reagan said, “I’m not fooling when I say that when I started reading the diary the other day, I couldn’t even remember writing the things that I was writing about.” The prosecutor put the diary down.

  “I’m very embarrassed,” Reagan admitted. “I’m sorry. . . . It’s like I wasn’t president at all.” It was clear there was no way Reagan was going to remember what he had done with those weapons. It was possible not to remember whom you sold missiles to, or how to make them fly straight, or how to fix anything anymore. At some point, you had to let the weapons go, even if they were broken.

  Finally, Prosecutor Walsh asked Reagan if he remembered a particular secret meeting in Geneva where the weapons sales took place. Reagan lit up. “No,” he said, “but I remember another meeting in Geneva.” It was the one in which he’d first met Mikhail Gorbachev. The meeting, he said, was “in a big home along Lake Geneva and at a table like this only a little longer with he and his team on one side and me and my team on the other to deal with the weapons.” Reagan kept talking, sinking into the memory. “As everybody started to sit down, I looked across the table at him and I said, ‘Why don’t we let our two teams start this discussion about the reduction of the weaponry and all, and why don’t you and I get some fresh air?’ He was out of his chair before I finished that sentence.” Reagan was smiling wistfully, clearly back in Geneva. “So he and I left and we walked about a hundred and fifty yards down across the lawn to the lake where there was a beach house. It was cold, a real wintry day, and that beach house had a big roaring fire going in the fireplace. . . .” And he smiled, deep in that meeting, looking as though he had taken a walk in his mind and would let those in the courtroom stay to sort out the weapons.

  “Sell, sell, sell,” the people around him could keep shouting, but Reagan would turn to my dad and say, “Why don’t you and I get some fresh air?” Reagan would wink and take my dad’s arm, and they would walk, arm in arm, down the lawn to the beach house. Maybe they both wanted someone to finally acknowledge that they were, quite simply, sick and that there was no getting around it. All you could do was hang on for the ride, not put yourself back the way you were before, which is what everyone wanted you to do. Reagan would not have cared if my dad repeated himself, and my dad would not have cared where the missiles and money went. They could have had a moment of peace before they had to pull themselves back together to go out into public and look blank. Then they could prepare themselves for people like me telling them how normal they were. They did not want to be normal anymore, which only they knew. All they wanted was a roaring fire, a beach, and a wintry day with a friend.

  My dad retired with his diagnosis in hand in July 1994, the same year Ronald Reagan announced his disease. In a handwritten note, he said simply, “My fellow Americans, I have recently been told that I am one of the millions of Americans who will be afflicted with Alzheimer’s disease.” After retiring, my dad actually seemed happier, content to be given a boxed pen-and-pencil set, a bobcat photo, a framed bighorn sheep, and, especially, that twenty-year pin because it took so long to be diagnosed.

  After years of doctor-led wild-goose chases, my parents had gone to the Mayo Clinic and accepted that the best possible fit was Alzheimer’s. Through neuropsychological testing, the doctors said they could be about ninety percent sure. Ninety percent was enough. Only I could not say the word that started with an A. It was still transient global amnesia to me, because the other one went with “terminal.”

  “It’s terminal,” my dad had said when he announced his diagnosis. “I’m going to quit my job.” We all knew and did not know. “I thought you should know,” he said to his shocked children.

  “But you seem fine,” I lied. “Everyone forgets things. Maybe they’re wrong.”

  “No, I’m worse than you think,” he said calmly. Betw
een us, we could not say the word, nor did he want to carry it in his shirt pocket. “Anyway, with all this new technology at work I’m feeling pretty useless.”

  Only my mom could say it, maybe because that was now her full-time job, his disease. Ironically, my mom seemed to rally as my dad went downhill, maybe simply because someone had to. She still got cross when she found five new cups of coffee in the house, knowing my dad forgot he had already poured them. But she also started to laugh more often. Maybe knowing was a relief for them both.

  Their children, on the other hand, scattered like mice into holes.

  “He’s relieved to have Alzheimer’s,” my mom said one day. “He was ready to quit work, and he thinks it won’t be painful.” I think he was happy to be retired and ready for the slow decline.

  “But I’m not!” I wanted to shout. The part of my reality that was contained inside my father’s head was going to pieces. I was going to pieces.

  Over time, I came to think of his disease as a kind of flood, gradually filling up parts of his brain and making them unusable. For us, it was definitely an unwelcome visitor. But for him, it may have felt like walking on a beach in Cornwall every day, watching the stars.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Near-Death Experiences (NDEs)

  Perhaps my sister got pregnant because my dad had Alzheimer’s. It is hard to say, but I was not particularly pleased. I had seen how babies took over women, like in the movie Alien. Those babies turned the women into something else. I did not want to lose the sister that I knew. I wanted her the way she was, with only me and Mitch. We were the kids. The addition of a husband had been hard enough, and now I felt I might lose her. She had been changing along with me, covertly, drinking wine but hiding the wine bottles when our parents came to visit. We had strategized together. Then, suddenly, she betrayed our covert quest and decided to become our parents instead. She was going to settle down. How could she?

  My mom once said of having kids, “That’s just what you did back then.” Since it was not “back then” but now, I took this to mean that I did not have to have kids like she did. I assumed she had not wanted them either. I thought we were all in it together, but we were not. Even my mom later said I had completely misunderstood her. “No, I always wanted kids,” she corrected me. “Ever since I was a little girl. I thought you would want to be a mom too. You would be such a good mom.”

  I wanted to throw a glass across the room.

  “But, but, the future!” I stammered. “Why do people keep having kids when things will only get worse? Climate!” I shouted, too riled to add “change.” My mom looked at me like I was two, with the kind of smile reserved for little kids.

  “Ah, but you were such cute kids,” she said. Then, “Don’t say that. I had you!”

  I was alone in the universe.

  Nevertheless, I adapted. When my sister called me from the hospital, I still recognized her voice. She reached out from her antiseptic room to my mold-filled one. I had put my futon in the tiniest attic cubbyhole room, where black tentacles crawled across the walls, not realizing it could make me sick. By then, I was what people called a “professional student,” used to the various discomforts. I once told my mom I had calculated how to survive on $5 a week by eating only lentils. Afterward, she sent me a $5 bill with a note attached: “For a week’s worth of food.” I found out lentils had their disadvantages.

  My sister got pregnant the year of Reagan’s first testimony. Around her due date, I got antsy, staring at the mold on the walls and seeing terrible pictures and prophecies in it. I stayed at home waiting for the phone to ring. Cell phones had made their appearance—big, brick-sized things with antennas—but I was a decade behind being able to afford one. Same with computers. Instead, I typed blocky yellow letters into the soft brown screen of my $100 word processor. After a lifetime of manual typewriters, I thought it was miraculous.

  “Hello,” my sister said when I picked up, then made a deep, low-pitched groan.

  “Are you calling me from the toilet?” I asked. “It sounds like you’re doing a BM.”

  “No, no, that’s just a contraction,” she said.

  “Are you having your baby?” I replied. I started to pace as far as the cord would allow. “Should I hang up? Do I need to call an ambulance?” I did not even know that women could talk while in labor.

  She laughed, more relaxed. “No, it’s okay. I’m already in the hospital. Labor takes a long time, and it’s so boring here. I thought we could chat.”

  So we did. I told her all the things I could not tell my parents, knowing she was a vault, knowing that we would never spill the secrets that might disappoint them. Then the pain got too bad, the contractions too close, and she had to go.

  I waited by the phone for good news after that, but it did not ring. All night.

  In the morning, I knew something was wrong when my mother said hello. “Karen,” she said next, “there’s been a complication.”

  “Where are you, Mom?” I heard clanging in the background.

  “I’m at the hospital and your sister . . . well, she’s unconscious.” Her voice was too quiet, swallowed up by the clanging hospital and moldy walls.

  “What?” I asked. “What’s going on?”

  “The doctors say she’s barely hanging on. Her bilirubin is 5.1.” My body went numb. I had no idea what 5.1 meant, but I knew that when my mom starting pulling out the numbers, it was never good.

  “But where’s the baby?” I asked, suddenly afraid there was no baby. Just 5.1.

  “She had the baby, and the baby is okay,” she said. “He’s a boy. It’s just that, afterward, Christine did not get better. The nurses kept saying she would, but she was hurting so they gave her something to sleep. Then she woke up in the middle of the night and was rocking in pain and crying. By the time the doctors got her into testing, her bilirubin was too high. Extremely elevated.”

  “Is she going to die?” I asked, cutting her and her numbers short.

  “They don’t know yet. She’s on anticonvulsion medication, and she went into a coma around seven this morning. They say all we can do is wait.”

  I hung up the phone, sat down on the floor, and stared at my carpeting. I had a nephew, but all I could think about was the crappy carpeting in my crappy apartment. I needed my sister. To have a sister, even one who beat you up as a kid, is to have someone who shares the grief of being a woman, which may be precisely why she beat you up. Even while I was at grad school, she was sometimes jealous and angry about my freedom. I would explain that not being able to afford food was not so wonderful. Then she would say, “It’s not so wonderful to be married sometimes too,” and we would call a truce. My mother always said, “It’s a man’s world,” but only a sister learns what this means with you as you are growing up. My sister held my memories in her brain. Even though she fought with me about what had or had not happened, without the fighting, no one would even care about those memories, what was true or untrue, what was mine and what was hers.

  I went into my bedroom and began to scrape away at the mold, first with my fingers and then with a knife. After a while, I got out the bleach. I did not leave the house or go to classes. I just kept scrubbing.

  A week after she went into a coma, when the walls were polished white, the phone rang again. “I’m okay,” Christine said, though she sounded barely conscious. “I’m awake,” she said. “They say I’ll make a full recovery.”

  “Good, good,” was all I could say, afraid another word might kill her.

  Then she said something I could never have expected. “No one is here. I have to tell you,” she said, gasping for air between words.

  “Okay . . . ?”

  “It was wonderful, Karen,” she slurred. “I died. I have to tell you.” She drew out each word slowly, almost painfully, in a whisper.

  “You rest,” I said, assuming the morphine
was talking. “I’ll talk to you soon.”

  But even when she was feeling better, she insisted that she’d died. She called me secretively to tell me about it. I worried about her brain but did not say so. She sounded beatific as she explained, “Don’t tell Mom, Karen. She’s pretty upset right now about the whole thing. But Karen, it was just like you hear about. There was a white light and then it got bigger and I was in a white room full of people that I didn’t know, but I wasn’t scared. They were standing there waiting for me. I walked into the crowd and felt enveloped in all this love and bliss. I know it’s all going to be okay now. I want to go back there again.”

  She would never change her story. During her slow hospital recovery, her voice reminded me of how she sounded in labor, when she was grunting and then gasping for air with each contraction. But this was a weird labor of death as she spoke in short bursts before stopping from exhaustion on the phone.

  She was diagnosed with HELLP syndrome, which stands for hemolysis, elevated liver enzymes, low platelet count. Everyone just calls it “Help.” It’s a rare disorder triggered by pregnancy that causes your enzymes to elevate and destroy your liver. HELLP might as well be a person who rips your liver out in front of you and starts chowing down on it. By the time they caught it and stopped it from its munching, my sister had only a quarter of her liver left. According to her test results, she should have been dead. My mom said later that even the doctor had said her chance of surviving was not good.

  Luckily, I learned that livers grow back, so we waited for that to happen.

  My mom was with my sister then, while I was stuck in classes. She said Mitch had tried to go home and rest as soon as Christine stabilized. “So he asked the nurse when he could visit the baby again,” she said, “and the nurse said, ‘That baby’s going home with you. Nothing wrong with the baby.’” So Mitch learned how to take care of an infant full-time while Christine dreamed of being in Heaven. My mom and dad refused to leave her side. Just in case. So baby Jonathan became his daddy’s boy. Oddly, he developed a fear of touching the floor as he grew. He wanted to crawl but would put his hands on the carpet and start to scream instead, holding them up for someone to wash. He wanted someone to fix it all.