Lydia’s journal, iPod, Sanford Meisner on Acting, and a framed picture sat on her nightstand. Alice picked up the journal. She hesitated, but barely. She didn’t have the luxury of time. Sitting on the bed, she read page after page of her daughter’s dreams and confessions. She read about blocks and breakthroughs in acting classes, fears and hopes surrounding auditions, disappointments and joys over castings. She read about a young woman’s passion and tenacity.
She read about Malcolm. While they were acting in a dramatic scene together in class, Lydia had fallen in love with him. She’d thought she might be pregnant once, but wasn’t. She was relieved, not ready yet to get married or have children. She wanted to find her own way in the world first.
Alice studied the framed photograph of Lydia and a man, presumably Malcolm. Their smiling faces touched. They were happy, the man and woman in the picture. Lydia was a woman.
“Ali, are you here?” called John.
“I’m upstairs!”
She returned the journal and picture to the nightstand and stole downstairs.
“Where’d you go?” Alice asked.
“I went for a drive.”
He held two white plastic bags, one in each hand.
“Did you buy me a new copy of Moby-Dick?”
“Sort of.”
He handed Alice one of the bags. It was filled with DVDs—Moby Dick with Gregory Peck and Orson Welles, King Lear with Laurence Olivier, Casablanca, One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and The Sound of Music, her all-time favorite.
“I was thinking these might be a lot easier for you. And we can do this together.”
She smiled.
“What’s in the other bag?”
She felt giddy, like a little kid on Christmas morning. He pulled out a package of microwave popcorn and a box of Milk Duds.
“Can we watch The Sound of Music first?” she asked.
“Sure.”
“I love you, John.”
She threw her arms around him.
“I love you, too, Ali.”
With her hands high on his back, she pressed her face against his chest and breathed him in. She wanted to say more to him, about what he meant to her, but she couldn’t find the words. He held her a little tighter. He knew. They stood still in the kitchen holding on to each other without uttering a word for a long time.
“Here, you nuke the popcorn, and I’ll put the movie in and meet you on the couch,” said John.
“Okay.”
She walked over to the microwave, opened the door, and laughed. She had to laugh.
“I found Moby-Dick!”
ALICE HAD BEEN UP ALONE for a couple of hours. In that early morning solitude, she drank green tea, read a little, and practiced yoga outside on the lawn. Posed in downward dog, she filled her lungs with the delicious morning ocean air and luxuriated in the strange, almost painful pleasure of the stretch in her hamstrings and glutes. Out of the corner of her eye, she observed her left triceps engaged in holding her body in this position. Solid, sculpted, beautiful. Her whole body looked strong and beautiful.
She was in the best physical shape of her life. Good food plus daily exercise equaled the strength in her flexed triceps muscles, the flexibility in her hips, her strong calves, and easy breathing during a four-mile run. Then, of course, there was her mind. Unresponsive, disobedient, weakening.
She took Aricept, Namenda, the mystery Amylix trial pill, Lipitor, vitamins C and E, and baby aspirin. She consumed additional antioxidants in the form of blueberries, red wine, and dark chocolate. She drank green tea. She tried ginkgo biloba. She meditated and played Numero. She brushed her teeth with her left, nondominant hand. She slept when she was tired. Yet none of these efforts seemed to add up to visible, measurable results. Maybe her cognitive capabilities would noticeably worsen if she subtracted the exercise, the Aricept, or the blueberries. Maybe unopposed, her dementia would run amok. Maybe. But maybe all these things didn’t affect anything. She couldn’t know, unless she went off her meds, eliminated chocolate and wine, and sat on her ass for the next month. This was not an experiment she was willing to conduct.
She stepped into warrior pose. She exhaled and sank deeper into the lunge, accepting the discomfort and additional challenge to her concentration and stamina, determined to maintain the pose. Determined to remain a warrior.
John emerged from the kitchen, bed-headed and zombie-like but dressed to run.
“You want coffee first?” asked Alice.
“No, let’s just go, I’ll have it when we get back.”
They ran two miles every morning along Main Street to the center of town and returned via the same route. John’s body had grown noticeably leaner and defined, and he could run that distance easily now, but he didn’t enjoy one second of it. He ran with her, resigned and uncomplaining, but with the same enthusiasm and zest he had for paying the bills or doing the laundry. And she loved him for it.
She ran behind him, letting him set the pace, watching and listening to him like he was a gorgeous musical instrument—the pendulum-like swinging back of his elbows, the rhythmic, airy puffs of his exhales, the percussion of his sneakers on the sandy pavement. Then he spit, and she laughed. He didn’t ask why.
They were on their way back when she ran up beside him. On a compassionate whim, she was about to tell him that he didn’t have to run with her anymore if he didn’t want to, that she could handle this route alone. But then, following his turn, they ran right at a fork onto Mill Road toward home where she would’ve gone left. Alzheimer’s did not like to be ignored.
Back home, she thanked him, kissed him on his sweaty cheek, and then went straight and unshowered to Lydia, who was still in her pajamas and drinking coffee on the porch. Each morning, she and Lydia discussed whatever play Alice was reading over multigrain cereal with blueberries or a sesame bagel with cream cheese and coffee and tea. Alice’s instinct had been right. She enjoyed reading plays infinitely more than reading novels or biographies, and talking over what she’d just read with Lydia, whether it was scene one, act one, or the entire play, proved a delightful and powerful way of reinforcing her memory of it. In analyzing scenes, character, and plot with Lydia, Alice saw the depth of her daughter’s intellect, her rich understanding of human need and emotion and struggle. She saw Lydia. And she loved her.
Today, they discussed a scene from Angels in America. They passed eager questions and answers back and forth, their conversation two-way, equal, fun. And because Alice didn’t have to compete with John to complete her thoughts, she could take her time and not get left behind.
“What was it like doing this scene with Malcolm?” Alice asked.
Lydia stared at her as if the question blew her mind.
“What?”
“Didn’t you and Malcolm perform this scene together in your class?”
“You read my journal?”
Alice’s stomach hollowed out. She thought Lydia had told her about Malcolm.
“Sweetie, I’m sorry—”
“I can’t believe you did that! You have no right!”
Lydia shoved her chair back and stormed off, leaving Alice alone at the table, stunned and queasy. A few minutes later, Alice heard the front door slam.
“Don’t worry, she’ll calm down,” said John.
All morning she tried to do something else. She tried to clean, to garden, to read, but all she could manage to do effectively was worry. She worried she’d done something unforgivable. She worried she’d just lost the respect, trust, and love of the daughter she’d only begun to know.
After lunch, Alice and John walked to Hardings Beach. Alice swam until her body felt too exhausted to feel anything else. The hollowed-out flip-flopping in her stomach gone, she returned to her beach chair, lay in the fully reclined position with her eyes closed and meditated.