Her tiny sharp shoulders hunched in the blue bathrobe
make me think of Emily Bronte's little merlin hawk Hero
that she fed bits of bacon at the kitchen table when Charlotte1 wasn't
around.
So Ma, we'll go?I pop up the toaster
and toss a hot slice of pumpernickel lightly across onto her plate?
visit Dad today? She eyes the kitchen clock with hostility.
Leave at eleven, home again by four? I continue. She is buttering her toast with jagged strokes. Silence is assent in our code. I go into the next room to phone the taxi.
My father lives in a hospital for patients who need chronic care
about 50 miles from here.
He suffers from a kind of dementia
characterized by two sorts of pathological change
first recorded in 1907 by Alois Alzheimer.2
First, the presence in cerebral tissue
of a spherical formation known as neuritic plaque,
consisting mainly of degenerating brain cells.
Second, neurofibrillary snarlings
in the cerebral cortex and in the hippocampus.3
There is no known cause or cure.
Mother visits him by taxi once a week
for the last five years.
Marriage is for better or for worse, she says,
this is the worse.
So about an hour later we are in the taxi
shooting along empty country roads towards town.
Th e April light is clear as an alarm.
1. Charlotte Bronte (1816-1855), English novel-with Emily Bronte's. ist, author of Jane Eyre, and sister of Emily (1818? 2. German neurologist (1864-1915). 1848), author of Wuthering Heights. Throughout 3. Parts of the brain. Neurofibrils are nerve fibers. 'The Glass Essay,' the poet compares her own life
.
286 6 / ANNE CARSON
As we pass them it gives a sudden sense of every object 75 existing in space on its own shadow. I wish I could carry this clarity with me
into the hospital where distinctions tend to flatten and coalesce. I wish I had been nicer to him before he got crazy. These are my two wishes.
so It is hard to find the beginning of dementia. I remember a night about ten years ago when I was talking to him on the telephone.
It was a Sunday night in winter. I heard his sentences filling up with fear. 85 He would start a sentence?about weather, lose his way, start another. It made me furious to hear him floundering?
my tall proud father, former World War II navigator! It made me merciless. I stood on the edge of the conversation,
90 watching him thrash about for cues, offering none, and it came to me like a slow avalanche
that he had no idea who he was talking to. Much colder today I guess. . . . 95 his voice pressed into the silence and broke off,
snow falling on it. There was a long pause while snow covered us both. Well I won't keep you,
he said with sudden desperate cheer as if sighting land. IOO I'll say goodnight now, I won't run up your bill. Goodbye.
Goodbye. Goodbye. Who are you? I said into the dial tone.
105 At the hospital we pass down long pink halls through a door with a big window and a combination lock (5?25?3)
to the west wing, for chronic care patients. Each wing has a name, i IO The chronic wing is Our Golden Mile
although mother prefers to call it The Last Lap. Father sits strapped in a chair which is tied to the wall in a room of other tied people tilting at various angles.
.
