Leviathan
Jennifer Lee
At the cash register a young man with an earring squints his eyes at my down jacket. “Grey Goose,” he says, looking from my coat to the bottle on the counter. “That’s exactly what I would name that color, that light silver-grey.”
I accept the compliment; I rarely get points for style. My mother had that department covered. My dad used to say she was the most elegant woman west of the Rockies. I miss her every day, think of her all the time, now more than ever.
Michael, my ex-husband, was stylish too. Handsome, always laughing—everyone felt good around Michael. We were Michael and Jane, his name always first when friends spoke of us. Then he packed his bags and left. My heart was broken. We had been married ten years—college sweethearts—and we had a little boy, Tim. One evening Michael confessed his affair over a bottle of wine. He cried, said he loved her, asked me to forgive him. He slept on the sofa, and the next morning he moved out.
Her. For years her name wouldn’t leave my head, and now it’s lost, a lonely word fluttered between the cracked floorboards of my brain. It was Chelsea, I think. I suppose there is some good that comes of forgetting.
I put my vodka on the seat beside me, and it rolls back and forth as I follow the turns in the mountain road. How many times have I followed the Payette River up to Loman? State Route 17 must be one of the prettiest roads in the country. It is three hours from Boise into the Sawtooths, and most of it is mountain driving. Michael and I used to come this way when we were young, to hike, to ski, to raft down the river. Thinking of Michael makes me smile. It’s been nearly thirty years, and all that hurt has healed. Despite its breakage, my heart has been stupidly resilient all my life. It’s amazing what a person can endure.
It’s too bad Michael and I didn’t stay friends; he would have understood about the vodka. He’d have tried to talk me out of it, but he would have understood. Not like Dad. My father would have accepted the hard facts—it’s not as though anyone has a choice about that—but my plans for the Grey Goose would have horrified him.
Dad ran an independent bookstore that did well until the late eighties when the big chains—Borders, Barnes and Noble—started picking up steam. By then he was tired, and the shop felt stodgy instead of hip. Mom was sick and all his attention was spent looking after her. I watched his shop sink, dust covering the shelves. It made my father sad, I could tell, but it was the least of his worries.
A few years earlier Mom had become distracted and fretful—menopause, we all thought, though no one would say it. But when she got lost coming home from the grocery store, ended up on the highway outside of Boise, heading toward Payette, driving ten miles per hour, Dad took her to the doctor. Then tests were done. She had Alzheimer’s. Mom was in her mid-fifties and beautiful. Dad was five years older, had bad knees and high cholesterol.
The first few years of my mother’s disease were what I thought of as the silly stage. She’d stick her tongue out at you if you walked in the room, try to tickle you if you sat down next to her. Tim was in school and learning to read and his favorite books were joke books, especially knock-knocks. Dad gave him what books he had, dusty volumes no one else wanted. Tim read them all. He remembered his favorite jokes for his nana. He’d sit next to her on the sunny porch, tickling her when she tickled him and deliver his lines. I remember only one: Knock, knock. Who’s there? Isabelle. Isabelle who? Is a bell necessary on a fire engine? An utterly worthless joke that Tim and my mother would laugh their hearts out over.
There’s a hot spring just off the road where the trail begins. I drove twenty miles past it and had to turn around. Lost in thought. Such a quaint expression. The truth is, I’d forgotten where I was going. Part of me wants to settle in at the hot spring, shuck off my clothes and get down to business with the Grey Goose. But hippies come here all the time, and the last thing I want is to be pulled drunk and dripping from the water.
The last time I got drunk was Tim’s twenty-first birthday. He was living in San Francisco and friends were throwing him a surprise party. Someone named Joel called me a month ahead of time to invite me. His boyfriend, I guessed, and I liked him right away, just because of his friendly voice over the phone.
I learned Tim was gay when he was in high school. I’d always had an inkling, nothing I thought about very much, but gay porn magazines under the bed when he was sixteen pretty much sealed the deal. I called Michael then, and he came over. We drank a pot of coffee and talked. We were so scared. In our minds we were ready to talk about condoms and safe sex and the importance of emotional intimacy, but all either of us could imagine was Tim standing outside a convenience store, an older man pulling up and our son getting in the car with him. It must have been a scene we saw in a movie.
When Tim came home from school he was surprised to see us together at the kitchen table. I don’t remember what Michael and I said; I’m sure it was inept. After a minute of our fumbling Tim rolled his eyes at us. “Would you guys just stop it? What normal teenager talks about sex with his parents? You do think I’m a normal teenager, don’t you?” Tim must have realized he was towering over us, hands on his hips and shouting. Michael and I were completely cowed. He relaxed and sat down with us, and in a softer voice he said, “I’m not stupid. Okay?”
The party was at a mansion rented out for events, and everyone wore cocktail attire. Tim looked fantastic in a light linen suit. I watched him from the far edge of the pool as he walked toward me, a cosmopolitan in one hand, an apple-green martini in the other.
His friend Joel was the funniest person I ever knew. He was gangly with a charming smile and he wore his hair in a crazy halo of curls. Joel and Tim were together for years, long enough for me to think I had a son-in-law. We had such good times that when Tim broke up with Joel I was angry with him for a month.
Huffing up the trail through fresh powder, the only sound the shush of my snowshoes and the slosh of the vodka in its bottle, I smile, remembering that long ago party, the red and green of the fancy drinks, my son’s happiness. I settle into a spot just below the summit of a hill. My back is to a rock and the white expanse of snow is a blue glow in the starlight. For now I am warm, insulated by snow pants and the ski jacket I have worn since the 1980s. Who would have thought neon green could have such a long shelf life? I unscrew the cap of the vodka and the metal tags that seal it crackle loud in the dry air, too, from the exertion of hiking up the mountain. “To Tim,” I whisper, raising the bottle.
It’s shocking, that first sip, burning my throat and bringing tears to my eyes. In my head I retrace my steps from the snowshoe trail up the saddle, cross-country from there to this likely place. My car is parked somewhere down the road. A moment of panic fills me when I realize I can’t remember exactly where I left it, but then I laugh out loud at how unnecessary my worry is. The cold spreads across the seat of my pants, and I take another burning sip. The heat rushes straight down and warms even the coldest parts of me, and I think every soul lost in the cold should have a bottle of vodka to see him through.
Last spring Tim went to the Pyrenees. He went with a group of friends on a hiking trip. I imagined ravines, broad-leafed chestnuts, wild flowers and grey stone cottages with white linen drying in the sun. Tim told me that the only thing I imagined right was the ravines. They were in back country, and in April at the higher altitudes there was still a lot of snow.
There were six people on the trip, including Tim’s colleague Eve and her husband Mark, who acted as the designated photographer. On the last day the group was high up in the mountains hiking along the edge of a narrow ravine. The view must have been spectacular. Mark stepped out onto a snow-covered footbridge to photograph his companions. Beneath his weight and that of the late winter snow, the bridge broke. The splintering ice and wood sounded like gunshots, and Mark probably shouted as he fell, though Tim didn’t mention that. What he talked about, what stayed with him so horribly, was that the rescue team couldn’t reach Mark. He had fallen over one hundred feet, but snow at the bottom had broken the fall and he survived. He couldn’t move. Before the shadows of the canyon wall obliterated the view, the five remaining hikers could see him lying prone, a dark, star-shaped figure, not much different from the rocks and tree limbs protruding from the snow. He was conscious and they spoke to him and he replied, though his words were lost in echoes bouncing off the cliff walls. As night fell he stopped talking. Eve called to him, pleading and then screaming, her hysteria winding down only in the dark of exhaustion. The rescue team had been kind but perfectly blunt; there was no way to retrieve him, not until the snow melted and they could hike in from the bottom of the ravine. They brought tents for the hikers. They built a fire and fed the Americans canned stew, all but Eve who kept a vigil near the cliff’s edge. Mark was silent. By the time his friends had warmed their hands by the fire, the cold had probably taken him.
I raise the Grey Goose bottle in a toast, the starry night blurring through the glass. I drink to Mark in the dark cleft of the mountains, to his wife, Eve, who was unable to leave the place for three days, and to Tim, who paced my floors in troubled silence when he came to visit a month after the trip. The details of what happened I had to pull from him. I was fascinated, particularly by the circumstances of Mark’s death. What must he have felt? Was there much pain? How soon did he die after he stopped talking? Was he afraid when he learned there would be no rescue, or did it fill him with the peace of certainty? Tim looked around the room as if the answers to my questions could be anywhere. He was too kind, too shocked, to tell me to back off. I shouldn’t have asked him these questions. I should have allowed my son his privacy, stopped asking for details he couldn’t know. But I had my reasons. I needed to prepare myself for my main goal of Tim’s visit, and somehow talking about Mark’s death helped me do that.
The next morning over breakfast I told my son that I’d been to the doctor. I’d been forgetful lately, with names and appointments, and once left a hardware store in bright daylight without any idea what was in my shopping bag or where my car was parked. Tests confirmed my fears, and I told Tim I’d been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, same as his nana. He stared at me and then burst into tears.
A part of me was relieved at the diagnosis. Life leaves no one much dignity in the end, and since my mother’s death I’d feared this. Now that it’s true, my worst fear, I’m calm. Calm but not resigned, and I plan to stay that way. It’s horrible what people grow accustomed to. An old college friend is living with the results of a botched abdominal surgery. He had a tumor in the intestine, early stages of a slow-moving cancer, and the doctors went to take it out. Something unusual happened, or someone screwed up, and my friend Tony lives with a bag now, one that needs to be changed a few times a day. It lies strapped to his side beneath his clothes. He’s cancer-free, and Tony, a big man who used to love to ride bikes and rock climb, shrugs and says that’s what matters. He could live another twenty years with those bags. He’s ready for it. He has adjusted.
Or my neighbor, Anne. She is seventy and looks younger but she had a stroke last year that left her body intact but stole her words. Anne is a poet with books in the local stores, but unless the effects of her stroke miraculously disappear she will never write another poem. In the first months after her stroke Anne wandered about her house, sweeping. I could see her through the curtains, back and forth across the rooms, coming outside to sweep her path, all the way down to the cement sidewalk. I invited her over for coffee once, but it made us both miserable. Anne has since come to terms with things. I see her walking to church on Sunday mornings. She is a lapsed Catholic, no longer lapsed. One thing the church does well is that it gives you a place to bring your despair. I went a few times myself. I admit there is solace in a church. But still. I have no intention of getting used to things. My disease is a slow one, and I could live well for a few more years, forgetting names, getting lost, the things that are important to me taking leave one by one until Tim has no choice but to find a nursing home for me, one that, at the end of a long tunnel of sickness, will be able to provide the advanced level of care I will require when I have to be strapped in a wheel chair and fed with a tube.
At what point, I wonder, does a person say enough is enough? I can’t go through with this; I didn’t pick the ending I’ve been given. I would dearly love to keep the next few years of my life. I could forget the names of everyone I ever knew, give up the keys to my car, neglect to eat anything but canned tomato soup and I’d think life was a bargain, even at that price. But in forgetting so much I’m afraid I would also forget there was a line in the sand, one I was committed to stand behind. In the nursing home, my mother eventually had to wear clothes without buttons because she tried to eat them. I visited her once and her shirtfront was wet with saliva. She fingered the bottom button, as if she were unaware that I was there, and lifted it to her mouth, snapping at the threads with her teeth. I will not let myself get to the button-eating stage; once you are ready to eat your buttons, there is no turning back.
The problem lies in knowing which is the last exit before I am locked on course. How will I know when my final opportunity to control my fate is before me? How will I recognize the moment? My greatest fear is that I will let it slip past. I fear that I will become so enamored with the taste of canned soup and the view of mountains from my kitchen window, mountains I don’t know the names of anymore but whose outlines are familiar, that my opportunity will pass. What a broken, simple joy that moment at my kitchen window would be. I would take it in a heartbeat, but I’m fairly certain that if I did, if I grasped the last straw of pleasure, that final glimpse of beauty, all choice would be lost and the button-eating days sure to come.
I hold the bottle up to the starlight. The viscous liquid—cold, cold—sloshes back and forth. Nearly half the bottle is gone, and I am enjoying a warm drunkenness. Even my fingertips in the thick ski gloves no longer hurt.
When Tim and Joel broke up ten years ago it was as if I was reliving the death of my marriage. The situation bore no similarity, but I sat at the kitchen table and cried. It was pure selfishness. Joel had made my broken family whole. He made me happy. I thought he made my son happy. It was Tim’s decision to end it; he wanted a child and Joel did not. I wanted to scream at my son—you’re a gay man, you idiot, get a dog! But that sentiment too was selfishness and a cliché. My son would have been a wonderful father.
Tim tried for years to have a child. International adoption held the best chance for him, but many countries won’t consider homosexual applicants. For a long time, we were hopeful of China, and I liked imagining my brown-skinned grandchild. But nothing came of all those applications, so much yearning, and recently Tim has stopped talking about the prospect of adoption. My son is beginning to look like a middle-aged man—balding, with a slight paunch. He will almost certainly remain childless, and this, to see his one best dream beaten down, hurts more than anything. I could tell him that he has spared himself, that adulthood without children is the definition of golden years, but I’m not fool enough to think that would comfort him.
My mother’s illness kicked in just as she and Dad were getting ready for their golden years. Young people always snicker at that term, but having made it through child-rearing and a career, I know that the anticipation of one’s golden years is no joke. I want them, for Christ’s sake. When you get down to it, it’s my deep desire for golden years that has driven me into the snow with a bottle of vodka. I know I can’t have them. But knowing doesn’t make me want any less. Here’s to the Grey Goose.
They had bought a Winnebago. First they were going to see Canada, then Mexico. They never went to those places. Dad was too worried to go far from home on his own with her, so we took only a few trips, a week here or there when Tim had school holidays. Our last trip was to Red Fish Lake. Mom was erratic and couldn’t be left on her own even a few minutes or she’d wander off, either down the asphalt toward the highway, or into the woods, snapping pine twigs as she meandered away. Dad was tired and depressed from taking care of her, so I often left him in the campground with Tim, playing cards at the picnic table. Our last afternoon Mom was restless. She kept wading into the frigid lake, delicate as a bird and splashing the clear mountain water. “Come swimming with me, Janey. Come swimming with me,” she asked over and over again, reaching down to ruffle the surface of the lake.
No way was I swimming; the cold was the sort that hurts your bones. But I wanted to make her happy. “Mom, let’s rent a canoe. Would you like that? Come on, I’ll take you for a ride in a boat.”
The lake is deep, hundreds of feet, and it radiates a blue-black coldness. I still remember the echo of the paddle against the aluminum sides of the canoe, the way the sound vibrated through the metal. Mom laughed and let her hand drift on the lake, mesmerized by the tiny waves. I rowed us about until our shoulders were sunburned and we were thirsty for the Cokes I’d brought along in a knapsack. We drank them quickly, savoring their perfect sweetness. After we returned the canoe, Mom and I jumped from the dock into the waist high water to cool off, and we laughed and shouted and splashed each other with the wonderful shock of it.
Mom forgot this quickly. A week after we’d returned to Boise it was as if we’d never been to Red Fish Lake. I, however, have cherished the memory for twenty-five years.
I try to think of things I’d like to forget. Not that day on the lake, despite the dim flickering of my mother’s mind, but perhaps there are other things I wish I didn’t know anymore. Of course, sitting here stonily drunk in the snow, I can’t come up with a single memory I would wish to relinquish. I want to keep them all, even the memory of last year’s root canal.
I’m sure it is colder now, but I don’t feel it. My legs are numb and buzzing, and even if I wanted to, I don’t think I could stand up and make my way back down the mountain.
I’m convinced no one would ever willingly give up anything from the treasure trove of memory. It’s what makes us who we are. We are composed of memory, it’s the unstable bedrock of our identity, and with each forgotten moment the sand shifts, the self alters, until what is left is only tatters, a jigsaw with too many pieces missing. My mother, in the end, forgot how to walk, to talk, to swallow. What self was that? What woman lay in that crib-like bed chewing the sleeve of her shirt?
Since her death twenty years ago, I’ve fought to recover my mother, to remember her without the imprint of her illness. When she seems most distant, when all I can recall is the frailty of her final years, I leaf through old photo albums to find the truth I’m seeking. She is there in those heavy pages, a young woman in a smart-looking shirtdress, kneeling on a picnic blanket in some long ago spring. Later, more matronly but still beautiful, she is holding Tim, only a few days old. He is red and wrinkled and unappealing as a newborn kitten, but my mother loved him completely.
It is hard work scratching through layers of memory to a point when my mother was not weighed down with Alzheimer’s. Sometimes her illness is all I can remember. It took so long for her to die, so many years as a sick woman, that the person she would like most for me to remember is deeply buried.
That is how I explained it in my letter to Tim, the one I left on the kitchen table where I’m sure he’ll find it. I want him to remember me the way I am, not the way I will become. There is some vanity in this, I admit, and he will be angry with me for a while. But there is wisdom in my choice as well. I’ve lived long enough that I’ll stand by this claim, no matter what doctors and politicians and the rest of the world’s sanctimonious assholes have to say about it. I have a choice. I have a right to choose.
In the album, there is a photograph of my mother and me standing on a sun-swept dune, staring at the ocean. We were staying on Nantucket Island with my father’s sister, our one visit to the East Coast, when I was nine years old. Coming from the Rocky Mountains, I was in awe of the water all around me, the vast ocean. We visited a whaling museum, and my father told me the story of Moby Dick, the mad ship’s captain in search of the great white whale. The whale was called leviathan, both in my father’s story and in the little museum plaques. I asked my mother what the word meant. She told me it was an old-fashioned word. Sometimes it meant whale, sometimes sea monster. I imagined being alone on a dark sea then and understood perfectly the terror of leviathan. Later, as we stood on the tallest dune looking out to sea in search of whale spouts, whenever she saw the misty spray of a whale’s presence, my mother would point her finger and whisper in my ear, leviathan.
Settled in the snow, I can hear my mother’s voice again, see her arm pointing toward the horizon.
I have never seen the ocean since that long ago trip, but last night I dreamed of it. I dreamed I was a statue, my body cast in plaster, and that I floated on waves. I was tethered to an island around which I journeyed, like the hand of a clock. When my journey ended, I began to sink. Fear overcame me, fear of solitude and the weight of water, and I descended deeper and deeper. Suddenly Tim as he had been when he was five swam into view. He smiled in rapture, his body like a brown seal, slick and firm and supple. My son reached out and touched my hand, waking me.
Later in the morning, while I wrote the letter for Tim, I wrapped myself in the memory of the dream. It did not dissuade me from what I meant to do, but it did remind me of what I must give up. Nothing in the world is as hard to leave behind as my son. I wrote that in the letter. I hope he will understand.
I take a final sip of the Grey Goose. Leviathan, I whisper. The snow is a blue canvas in the moonlight, swelling like waves. It crests at the horizon and touches stars.