Chapter 7

Birthday

“Because you are so amorous/You make me think I’m glamorous,” Mom wrote on Dad’s birthday, when they’d been married 26 years. But earlier, in 1959, after 15 years of marriage: “I count my calories in vain . . . I never will be glamorous.” Yet, in an old photo, she’s posed proudly, without her ever-present glasses, hand on one hip, in a tight black sheath and high heels.

By the time of her 88^th birthday party, eight years after her Alzheimer’s diagnosis, she would not have recognized herself in that photo, or any photo.

I’d invited two women to her birthday party, all that was left of Mom’s small circle of old friends and longtime students in the self-therapy workshops that she ran.

I came with a chocolate cake, Mom’s favorite, and candles. Barbara brought vanilla ice cream. Lorraine arrived with flowers. All three of us gave her birthday cards.

Mom was in her customary chair at the dining room table, Dad at her side, her back to the plate-glass window that faced the now-scraggly backyard, which she had once so loved to gaze at from this very table, back when she and Dad were avid gardeners. She was gnawing on a piece of dry toast spread with peanut butter, her false teeth on a plate beside her. Her terrycloth bathrobe had food stains on it—had the washing machine malfunctioned again?--and her hair, no longer wavy, framed her pale face in thin gray wisps.

Mom seemed delighted to see me and Lorraine, politely mystified by Barbara’s presence, and especially ecstatic about the cards, the cake and the vanilla ice cream. She read the message on each card aloud, haltingly, admiring the design, thrilled with the Hallmark sentiments--she who’d always written those witty poems for each family member on every birthday, she who was once a literary snob, a trait I inherited. Then she reshuffled the cards and began again. And again. Each time she was thrilled anew. Then there was the cake, the best she’d ever eaten in her life, she said, and she had three helpings, with plenty of ice cream, and pointedly asked Lorraine, a famously slow eater, whether she intended to finish her ice cream and cake—in fact, asked so many times that Lorraine finally pushed her plate over to Mom. Lorraine and Barbara and I sat beside her, like ladies in a coffee klatch, and occasionally shouted into her ear, which was the only way she could hear anyone when they talked, and reassured her that yes, we’re very glad that she’s enjoyed this vacation and that my father has been such pleasant company for her, and yes, we agree that this is the best cake any of us have ever eaten in our entire lives.

Although now her social circle had shrunk down to Barbara and Lorraine, Mom was very popular when she was young. Despite a traumatic childhood, she’d managed to coat her neuroses with a vivacity that drew people to her. She was in a sorority in high school, engaged for the first time at 18, was a real “live wire,” loved parties and dances and was friendly with everybody on our block. She sang in the synagogue choir, went to PTA meetings, chatted on the phone with other moms, kept in touch with a few high school and college friends back East. Later she studied psychology, then developed her theories of gestalt self-therapy, lectured on family dynamics at adult education programs, led self-therapy groups, and self-published two books about her teachings, books that ended up being translated into multiple languages.

Throughout these decades she was much in demand socially. Her students, as she called them—those who attended her lectures and joined her ongoing groups and weekend self-therapy workshops--wanted to be her friends as well, but few ever achieved that exalted position. Only three of them, Lorraine, Harriet and Francine, were the privileged guests, with their husbands, at the small New Year’s Eve parties that Mom held every year, and were Mom’s companions at the opera and ballet, events that Dad had no interest in.

Mom lived for those workshops. She cleaned the house obsessively in preparation, laid in a food supply, slept extra hours in advance, scheduled no activities the few days before. The workshops were held right here in this small house where Mom at this moment was contentedly eating her birthday cake. Participants sprawled on sofas and chairs and reclined on the rug, sobbing, pounding pillows, sharing their deepest agonies week after week in a therapeutic environment that for many helped them to exorcise the demons of the past and get on with a healthier, happier future.

Lunchtime was for fun. Mom prepared the identical menu every week: roast pork, applesauce, French bread and homemade apple pie with her signature wheat germ crust. Everyone sat at a long table set on the grass in the middle of the backyard, under the shade of the cedar tree. Dad, sequestered in the bedroom with his golden retriever during sessions, was a welcome guest at mealtime. He picked kumquats from one tree, mouth-puckeringly sour oranges from another, persimmons in the fall, proudly passed them around. Buddy went from person to person to be petted.

Now, so many years later, on Mom’s 88^th birthday, the chaise lounges and chairs, their aluminum legs finally rusted and their plastic seats split and broken, were gone. The grass was subsumed by weeds, Mom’s beloved flowers had withered, the patio was covered with grime and leaves and dead potted plants. Mom no longer remembered the workshops, or the books she’d written.

Her downturn had started years earlier, when she first lost interest in going to concerts and performances. By then, Lorraine had gotten divorced, Harriet’s husband had died, the New Year’s Eve parties had long been abandoned. Finally, Dad, no doubt tired of the weekend cacophony of screaming, sobbing and pillow-pounding, convinced Mom that the therapy groups were too exhausting for her, and she retired. Later, Francine was killed in a car crash, and Mom--who’d always sobbed inconsolably over sad stories in the newspaper--seemed unperturbed and remarked only that Francine had been a deeply depressed person anyway.

I’d always gotten phone calls from my mother regularly, but I was starting to be puzzled by a new radio silence.

For a while Mom still kept in touch with some of her students, like Barbara, her loyal star pupil. Students had always been welcome to call and write to her, but only to discuss their problems and seek her advice. Earlier on, she’d stopped answering letters from her old school friends in New York, cut all ties to her few remaining relatives. Gradually the students drifted away, sending her the occasional postcard or birthday card. By the time Alzheimer’s was diagnosed, no one was left to hear the news except Barbara and Lorraine and Harriet. The live wire, the charismatic workshop leader, the arts lover, the devoted mother—gone.

Mom did not know that Harriet, her onetime best friend, was not at her 88^th birthday party—Harriet had dropped out of the circle years earlier, wanting to remember Mom the way she was. Nor, absorbed in her cake, did my mother necessarily know who we were at any given moment, or when we were last there, or when we’d arrived or would leave or would come again, if ever.

But she, who’d dieted obsessively all her adult life, knew that there was that half-eaten piece of cake on Lorraine’s plate. Her entire world had narrowed down to a slice of chocolate cake.

I wished I could do what Harriet had done: stop time. Choose to remember Mom as she once was. I even wished I could choose to remember Mom as she’d been, say, five years earlier, when she was in the late early stage of Alzheimer’s, or maybe the middle middle stage -- before she went deaf, when she could still walk around on her own steam, when she still wanted to go out for pizza, when she kept her false teeth in her mouth most of the time and liked to watch the kids in the playground across the street, when she still sometimes knew who I was. When there were brief moments of clarity, when the old Mom shone briefly through, enlivening her slack face and vacant eyes.

Yet back then, in those relatively early stages, I was often sad, and frustrated and annoyed with her constant repetitions and complaints and demands. Even though I knew worse was to come, it never crossed my mind to be grateful for the way she was at that moment. (And in the same way, to feel grateful for the way I am now, with all—well, most--of my wits about me, is somehow impossible, as though contrary to the laws of nature.)

The party was over. We kissed my mother goodbye and headed for the door. She was gnawing on dry toast and peanut butter again. We heard her piping, insistent voice as we closed the door: “No, I don’t want to put my dentures in.” By then she’d forgotten about the chocolate cake, and about us, too.