Literary
From the story, “People Like Frank”
The new microwave has a reminder function on it. It’s so you won’t forget that there is something in it, which we used to do all the time with the old one. You’d open it in the morning to find yesterday’s cup of coffee, a cold half-baked spud or the like. Frank calls it the “senile setting” and the beeping drives him crazy. And it makes him angry that he needs it.
He’ll start off a project, like replacing the bathroom fan, and then he ends up over across the other side of the house cleaning the rust off the porch light, every counter and table in between full of tools and bits. And then he gets mad that he forgot what he was doing and stomps back in to finish installing the fan. In the meantime, he’s forgotten that he was warming up his second cup of coffee. Now the new microwave beeps at him, and he gets mad again. I’m getting used to him getting distracted, but I still hate the mess.
In the old days, our apartment was tiny and I had to clean up after him if I wanted to make supper or have a place to fold the wash. Over the years, he got better about putting things away. Now when I come across a hammer or other tool left out in the rain or the rake leaning up against the fence, looking lonely and forgotten, I know it’s not on purpose; it’s that Frank doesn’t remember what he was doing with it. We usually come across these things in spring, when the snow melts. I’ve stopped blaming him.
I think he has a bit more pride or maybe it’s shame, and he’ll come back and start to tidy up until he gets mad again and starts throwing things when he can’t fit them back where he got them from. He’s like that, flashy temper. There are lots of reasons why people get angry sometimes, and I think he’s made up of all the reasons. He just can’t help himself—it’s such a habit. I’m used to it and I don’t much like it, but I put up with it. I can’t change him.
It didn’t use to be this way. Frank has always been the kindest person. If you needed help moving, you didn’t even have to ask, he would offer up and just be there with his truck, a pizza and a six-pack of beer. Back in the day, I would find him underneath the neighbor’s car changing the oil, driving somebody across town to an appointment, or professing to me in the quiet and dark dawn that he wanted to be a better man. He would do anything for anybody, even people he didn’t know. If you ask any of our friends, they would say he is über thoughtful and helpful. People like Frank. He is a small man with a big heart. I used to call him my love extremist.
Back in those days, nobody ever saw a temper, and I don’t think he was angry very often, and if he was, it was only in private. Like when he would read of an injustice in the news and stomp around for a while trying to help find a solution, then send off a fiery letter to the editor offering up some suggestions. It was a gentle kind of anger, I wouldn’t even call it anger; it was just passion and I was never afraid of it.
That is the Frank I fell in love with. And even though I know something about genetics, and even though I knew his parents and could see the life he came from, especially when they both fell into dementia themselves, I never imagined it would happen to him. Perhaps I was just naive or didn’t want to know. When you are first in love, the last thing you think of is the bad or tragic ending that could be yours. It’s hard to see past your next date, lovemaking session or first child, let alone thirty or forty years down the road when the change that has maybe started to happen on and off finally gets itself together enough to turn the gentle, funny and talented man that you loved into a monster that you now can’t stand. Your own balance slides back and forth between compassion and fear, and the blankets bunch up between you in the bed like a new third person whose name is Apathy, because I’ve stopped caring altogether. It’s hard enough just keeping up with him most days, never mind feeling regret. I can’t—there’s just no time in my day.
Sometimes Hate is his second name, like this morning when it slapped me in the face.
The dog’s shit smelled like a hundred dead rotting things, and the putrid after-scent woke me out of a dead sleep and I felt exhausted at the thought of having to clean it up. The dog woke up ill, Frank said, but wouldn’t tell me why. He was afraid to—probably the dog ate something on the trail or on their final toilet walk of the night. Sometimes he gives them big chunks of cheese without me knowing because he’s afraid to lose their love, especially when they curl up with me at night—I can feel they are tense around him. But for the mess, Frank just let me deal with it, instead of possibly making himself feel worse because he can’t focus enough. He gets distracted, and I don’t blame him, it’s not him, it’s the disease and that realization makes me have all the feelings.
It’s hard being a parent to your spouse, having to remind them when to eat or shave or when to take their medications or vitamins, when to put on clean clothes or even take a shower. It’s all hard because you never see it coming. Frank and I were so in love and had our routines down, there were no cracks in our mutual armor, “us against the world” for so many decades, thousands of miles or happy road trips, writing songs and reciting poetry over breakfast, such a solid and complete life that you don’t see the cracks when they start to form. The little niggly things that at first you write off to allergies or a cold, or a sleepless night. A surprise fight that blows up out of nowhere like a spring storm or a pair of socks shoved in the cutlery drawer. Misplaced reading glasses that you find months later in the freezer. Then you start to wonder what’s going on. If I would have known then what I know now . . . I’d seen both of his parents with Alzheimer’s, why didn’t I anticipate it? After years of watching parents and our friends come to long, sad endings with various dementias, why didn’t I see? I berated myself for some time but I think the answer is that I didn’t want to see it, my denial was so strong, and I was just tired, tired to think that old life was still following us around, but this time without an escape, because it was in our own house and our own bed and not some miles away in another town, somebody else’s problem to deal with. I was just too tired to see it.
