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Pavement. Photograph by Marcus Roth, Courtesy of Matador Records.
One of the more remarkable things about being behind the wheel of a tour bus for Pavement is that you can easily kill Pavement if you want to. I bring this up with their driver, Jason, who responds only by smiling at me while driving at a professionally breakneck speed on the interstate somewhere between Saint Paul and Chicago at 4 A.M. as every one of the six members of the beloved nineties band lies asleep in their bunks in the cabin behind us. To my left, Jason’s freshly filled coffee mug—personalized to read LORDY LORDY, LOOK WHO’S FORTY above a beaming middle school graduation photo—jangles in its cup holder.
A fizz of dispatch comes through the receiver from the other driver, Jeff, who drives an identical bus bearing a platoon of tech and crew members that’s ripping down I-90 just ahead of us. Since we left Saint Paul, a relentless stream of consciousness has flowed from Jeff to Jason via CB radio, coursing through points of interest such as God and the best way to cook snake, to which Jason has responded only occasionally, if at all, with transmissions like “That’s a negative,” “Mmhmm,” or “Lord, that is crazy.” Jason has hardly taken a week off since his last nationwide tour (three months, Def Leppard) yet remains magnanimous, gallant, sweatless, surely underpaid. “I think it’s about time for a squirt in the dirt,” goes Jeff’s voice overhead. “All due respect, sir,” Jason says, seizing the mouthpiece, “but there is a woman in this vehicle. Please refrain from that sort of language. Over.” We pull over onto a shoulder and wait as Jeff’s crew bus deposits toilet runoff into scrubgrass with the push of a button. “I make it a point to listen to the bands that I’m moving around,” Jason offers as we watch the spot of sewage bloom, “and I think I get why people like these guys.”
I’m accompanying the indie rock group Pavement for a thin slice of their hugely anticipated, nearly sold-out, four-month monster of a reunion tour. Founded in 1989 and nominally dead a decade later, Pavement belonged to the category of unsuccessful and confounding superstars—a band who was never really that famous, that scrutable, that glory-seeking or ambitious. None of their albums or songs ever got anywhere close to gold or platinum in the US. But they were treated as life-affirmingly, almost irritatingly influential by their big- and small-time rock contemporaries, knighted as “the finest rock band of the nineties” by Robert Christgau, and earned Pitchfork’s number one song of the nineties, back when people relatively cared about the opinions held by either Christgau or Pitchfork. They summed the epoch’s diffidence (its huge concern for “authenticity,” its allergy toward the idea of “selling-out,” et al.), were blessed and cursed with the idea that they were the vanguard of a loosely defined genre called “slacker rock,” and, for some among a population that remembers using the word hipster regularly, they are—as they were for the long-lionized English DJ John Peel—“one of the best bands in the world.” This is also a band that hasn’t written anything whatsoever together since their dissolution twenty-one years ago and whose last tour happened at the tail end of the aughts.
As with most artists now granted the vague honorific of “cult band,” the enthusiasm for their reunion borders on unreasonable. Resale tour tickets in some cities were going for a ludicrous $500. Serious devotees have documented and color-coded each stop with spreadsheets that sort out setlists by album and frequency of track repetition. By the end of their North American leg, there had been a fan-made musical and a museum erected in their honor. Now, a feature-length film is purportedly in the works—one that (once again) imagines a universe in which Pavement is “the most important band in the world.”
I was pre-verbal during Pavement’s heyday, so a cushion of generational remove mediates my fandom. It is unremarkable, pathological, entirely digitally-based. For those of us who grew up in a cul-de-sac with standard-speed internet—barely sentient for the twilight of the millennium, just learning how to use words like derivative in the pejorative from blogs and message boards—Pavement seemed like shorthand for a precious and preeminent disaffection that had phased out of vogue by the time that rock was no longer the biggest thing on the planet. Fans like me ached for what we imagine we missed out on, and could marvel, in a cool, touristic way, at an Arcadian moment in time in which an artist’s persona was de facto a little brambled and blurry. Now, as a fly-on-the-wall of their reunion tour—a spectacle that brings together past and present by framing Pavement as whole, imperative, immortal—two questions loom: Will it recreate the known or unknown universe as it once was? Or will it all just bum me out?
DAY ONE: SAINT PAUL, MINNESOTA
I am walking briskly and alone along a highway bridge immediately in front of Saint Paul’s Palace Theatre, with seven hours until showtime. Pavement’s two buses stand out against the plain back entrance of the venue like two long, smooth, sleeping orcas.
Most of the team is present on the band bus, either making cereal or padding around in search of the other half of a broken tambourine. There’s percussionist Bob Nastanovich, bassist Mark Ibold, and lead Stephen Malkmus, all dressed like normal adult men, which is to say in jeans, ballcaps, and interesting sneakers. The bus’s interior has a sort of upmarket beauty, with everything stained a uniform tone of peanut butter, cabinets made of a gleaming lacquered composite wood, and a hydraulic magic button in the main lounge that extends the room out four or so feet when the bus is parked. Under the glaze of the growing sun, we look like we could be on the bottom deck of a rental yacht.
Scott Kannberg, the second songwriter and guitarist, whom everyone refers to as “Spiral,” diminutive of “Spiral Stairs,” is notably absent, squeezing in a full eighteen holes of golf on a course somewhere in greater Minneapolis. (Steve West, their drummer, later tells me he wanted to caddy for him, “but Spiral wouldn’t let me get away with it. He’s got men all over this country willing to carry his golf clubs.”) Rebecca Clay Cole—the band’s overqualified keyboardist, and the only other consistent female presence on the bus—is already out too, roaming around Saint Paul in search of a museum. Bob is busily wrestling a jumbo drum of spring water onto the countertop. A pre-show morning is defined by its bumbling. “We’re in need of a sanity-type situation,” Ibold announces just as Bob leaves to hunt for a screwdriver to stab the jug with, so he and Malkmus and I hail a cab to the town’s Little Mekong district.
Tour is always part-ritual and part-obligation, but it’s particularly taxing for men who’ve all crossed the threshold of fifty and have been off the road for years. They’ve had more than eighty songs to learn, some for the very first time; the venues are the largest and toniest they’ve ever played; their label’s fuss is greater; the audience is bigger by several orders of magnitude, and every member of the band can fill a notebook with fresh anecdotes on the newfound virtues of diet, hydration, and sleep. “This is definitely the most demanding tour I’ve ever been on,” says Ibold once we sit down at an empty Cambodian restaurant, eating a shrimp cake the size of a domino. “Not just musically, but psychologically.” Ibold—who has a day job as a bartender in Williamsburg and was working a shift the day before he left—is sixty. If history repeats itself, the next reunion tour will happen in 2034, when he’s seventy-two. “We have no plans to tour like the Pixies,” Malkmus says, even before I ask. This does seem like the last of things.
This time around, Pavement will move athletically across the United States, then to bits of Europe, with an average of thirty-three hours of rest in between each show. I would be surprised if nobody in the band reaches a point of crisis by the time they get to the Australian stretch in a few months. “You tell yourself it’ll be more fun than doing the dishes at home,” Malkmus says. “But I’m just old, man.” I have to ask—what’s the point of all this, then? A new car? Karmic debt? Not nostalgia? “Sure, all of that,” he says, “but there’s something else in there.”
Though this has been obsessively documented, I’m still taken aback by the degree to which Malkmus is very clearly the nucleus of Pavement, the band and the idea. He is its principal singer-songwriter, a blindingly good guitarist, and now shaggier and more silvery than he was in 1994 when Courtney Love called him “the Grace Kelly of rock” but retains a boyish, shitkicking quality about him. He can be remarkably feline, charmingly chilly, and has a voice that permanently suggests that he is unspecifically but thoroughly over it. He is, in many senses, responsible for granting Pavement their near-universal designation as a “slacker” band, which accounts for the general slouch of the band’s posture and reifies the archetypal Gen X attitude of rather dying than surrendering any emotional investment. “You know why I’m doing this,” he says, suddenly. “I’m really playing for the fans that are like, I just really fucking like these songs. And these guys were special to me—they made me feel safe. I’m safe here at this show.” He doesn’t look at me while saying this. “I know what you mean,” I reply, soothingly. “You know what I mean,” he sighs.
By the time we get back to the Palace Theatre, the stage is ready for our opening act. A blast of organic and inorganic smells fill the building: buttered popcorn from a choke point in the lobby, a damp pigeony scent from the door that opens out onto the alley where everyone smokes, and a strong mixed waft from the green room, where a routine order has been delivered. (Their rider: Gouda, tubs of chicken salad, whiskeys and hummuses, slabs of sourdough, diet root beers, regular beers.) Like the sound of a great, muffled gong, the doors open. Two hours to go.
BEFORE THE SHOW:
—After checking in with their dog’s caretaker, who was very sorry to let them know that their cardigan welsh corgi has been having diarrhea all day, Bob is rubbing his wife Whitney’s shoulders backstage, watching the opener perform.
—Rebecca is warming up her voice in a rear atrium of the basement by blowing loud raspberries.She’s been brought on tour to make the music sound “about as close to the album as we can humanly get it,” as West notes, adding that she’s “probably the only member of the band that can actually read music.” “I’ve approached this about as devotedly as a person can,” she tells me. “Even before I was approached to tour with them, I’d known that there were piano parts on, you know, a few songs, but all the old albums have these sneaky, crunchy keys and organs all over them. It’s deceptively tough jinglejangle jazz.”
—Spiral has returned from tee time and is now on a long and desperate quest for antacids. After ten minutes, he secures half of a lucky old roll of Tums from our tour manager Mike’s pocket. Later, he shows me a text from his wife, who’s presently somewhere in California dining with their daughter. The photo shows off their spread (pasta, white wine) and her new haircut (blonde bob). “Hott,” his text replies.
When Pavement goes on, I wonder—are all old bands haunted? The show is a pilgrimage for men who look like they indulge in a good microbrew every once in a while. Those with pleading ankles and spongy knees sit; those still without stand at the front. Some audience members chuck beer cans, shriek, make out, weep. The reports that I’d heard earlier—that a couple was kicked out for having sex at a San Diego show a few days prior—seem totally conceivable, even if this was some of the least horny music on earth. “It’s so funny to see them here,” says a seated patron wearing a Guided By Voices shirt. “This is the nicest venue I’ve ever been in, and it’s like going to a cathedral and seeing a bunch of guys make a sandwich.”
DAY TWO: CHICAGO
“Shit,” says a voice beyond my bunk’s curtain. Then comes the clang of a dropped tambourine. Since clambering into my top bunk around 6 A.M., sticking a socked foot onto Malkmus’s pillow to hoist myself up, I’d slept like a rock until 11.
After seeing the sunrise with drivers Jason and Jeff—barreling southeastward, fighting highway rumble strips—we’d all arrived and parked in front of the handsome Chicago Theatre, where the band was gearing up for two back-to-back sold-out nights. The interior of the Chicago Theatre earlyish on a Thursday looks like your usual swank venue: high-ceilinged interiors with good acoustics, baroque festoonery along the walls, and a tangle of pedals and cables littering the stage like noodles. Dozens of men and women unload the two trailers, rhythmically decanting small plastic tubs from larger plastic tubs, proving David Thomas of Pere Ubu’s claim that touring “is mostly about moving big black boxes from one side of town to the other.” I watch as one tech lugs the giant, silent, theater-screen-sized video rig that the band plays in front of throughout each show, which is both a showcase for some surprisingly good juvenilia from Malkmus’s old lyric notebooks and, according to crew members, a huge logistical pain in the ass. The stage clears for soundcheck, and, now seated as the only audience member up on the prow of the balcony, I had time to study the band at their rawest.
If you’ve ever listened passively to a single Pavement song, you’ll catch shambly, wooly guitarwork and jammy bass and drum patterns; if you listen closely, you’ll notice that any given Pavement song is filled with total nonsense. In 1995, the New York Times made sense of this by calling the band among “rock’s most notorious nihilists: disaffected, disenchanted, and distanced.” An especially haunting indictment came in an episode of Beavis and Butt-head from that same year, where the two cartoon morons groan at a music video for a track titled “Rattled by the Rush.” “It’s like they’re not even trying,” says Beavis.
But if Beavis were to see “Rattled” as I see it practiced here before me—Ibold elated, Spiral hardly paying attention, Malkmus shredding while staring at the ceiling—he might notice that it’s not just a performance of ennui: the laziness is also creatively contrived, built into the music. Their tracks are crammed with odd voicings, alternate tunings, a constant sense of tonal ambiguity, slightly uncomfortable intervals. There’s hardly an ordinary sentence or ungenerative thought across their whole catalog. There are few vaguely placeable themes in their lyrics, and the vulnerability behind them—if you can find it at all—always seems like it comes at the end of a bong rip. (Verse 2 of “Rattled” goes: “Pants I wear so well, cross your t’s—shirt smells / Worse than your lying, caught my dad crying.) It sounds like rock, but rock rejiggered by modest, unshowy surrealists—always seemingly noncommittal but irrationally graceful in the end.
After any obligatory soundchecking or set-erecting, the band and crew basically tool around for indeterminate stretches of time. I find our stalwart tour techs asleep in folding chairs—seated upright, snoring, mouths agape—just off the side of the stage not thirty minutes after soundcheck was over. West has his head down on a desk in the basement. Our tour manager Mike is on an errand: Bob has asked him to buy ping pong balls from Walgreens so that he can chuck signed ones into the audience while he plays. (Ideas for other projectiles—eggs, tennis balls, shot glasses—were dismissed.) Showtime takes forever to come until it suddenly doesn’t.
OVERHEARD FROM CREW MEMBERS WHO WERE OUT OF EYESHOT:
Voice 1: “We’re gonna need some tea for the team before they go on. Herbal tea is heated between 180 and 200 degrees. Black teas, you’re gonna want them between 200 and 220 degrees.”
Voice 2: “No problem. But I really don’t think you know what the fuck you’re talking about.”
Finally, lights go on, and the show is a goofy revelation. Spiral is tonight’s quiet hero. They play a fizzy, relatively deep cut called “Date w/Ikea,” where he takes lead—legs akimbo as in a yoga stretch—and then later leaves the stage, mid-song, mid-set. (“I had to piss,” he explains after the show.) The audience loses their mind. Fans and friends throw trucker hats emblazoned with his name onstage like bouquets.
Tonight’s encore is also uncommonly touching because it includes a marriage proposal. The band jogs out after the compulsory caesura—the audience roars like white noise when they return—and Malkmus nearly ruins the whole thing by telling the crowd that “we’ve got some folks who are about to get married.” But the pageant goes smoothly: Chris, the groom-to-be, ushers his girlfriend Ramona onstage (they are thirty-four and thirty years old, respectively) and twirl around to a sweetish, woozy number called “We Dance.” At the end of the song, Chris gets down on one knee. They are, and it is, a perfectly Pavementian affair: fumbly, lightly lackadaisical, flannel-clad. She says yes.
Rapt in the tender human awkwardness of it all, we migrate to a totally characterless bar across the street from the hotel where the band and the crew will stay the night. I find our drummer, Steve West, reclining with a Guinness. Bargoers flock to shake his hand, making him sit down and stand up, stand up and sit down. “I’m the most off-the-grid guy here for sure,” he says, swishing the beer around in his mouth like mouthwash. West is now a stonemason in West Virginia with the granite disposition to match. “When this thing started, all of a sudden there were a bunch of dudes from the label emailing me while I’d be out behind my house digging holes. I’m about as good at this band to-do as a head of wilted lettuce.”
West has belonged to legions of bands prior to this one, but it was his work with the Silver Jews that ushered him Pavementward. The Silver Jews are something of a cousin band to Pavement—West and Malkmus played on some of their albums, Malkmus passed along the Jews’s debut to their first label, and where Pavement stands firmly on the soil of “indie rock,” the Jews err more toward country-flecked, plainspoken poetry—but their legacies have been entwined and underscored since the suicide of David Berman, the Jews’s frontman, in 2019. His life is a subject of delicate love and introspection. “Dave told Malkmus,” goes West, “‘A drummer’s replaceable—we’re all replaceable—but it’s the personalities that you can’t replace.’ So when Pavement needed a new drummer, he offered me up.” He is reverential about David, as all who knew him and didn’t know him seem to be, but his vantage is especially matchless.
“Artists have always gotten used up and spat out,” West says, leaning back on his stool. “It’s just the way that all of this works. I just hope that everyone remembers how talented he was. I don’t know what took him away from us—I just know that he understood something big about this world. I’m just lucky to have known him at all.” There is a long, terrible grip of silence, then a mangled sound in his voice as he looks away from me. “I loved him,” he says, awfully. “He was my best friend.”
DAY THREE: CHICAGO
I wake up to a group text among Ibold, West, and their soundman, Remko Schouten. “Down for Italian beef excursion? Be in front of the hotel by 11:15.”
The sandwiches from a place called Johnnie’s are pulpy potpourris of 80/20 ground beef and bell pepper and come prepared in ‘‘half-dip,”full-dip,” or austere “no dip” levels of oily jus. Digesting the whole affair alfresco, I get to know Remko, a wizardly Dutchman who’s been Pavement’s sound engineer since 1992, and is the sort of guy who’ll be working the board and time his edibles to kick in halfway through an hours-long set just to make things more interesting for himself. (This is exactly what happens later that night.)
The conversation makes its way through reminiscences (“Ibold once had to fish out his shit from the tour bus toilet in 1992”) and re-evaluations (“Their first drummer, Gary—he would throw garbage into the crowd while we played, which ultimately became a problem”), but it becomes apparent how valuable his constancy is for a band always in flux—through the coming and going of members, shifting affiliations with record labels, spats and tiffs and breakups. “We run on an absurd machine,” Remko says, which is a nice précis of thirty collected years of writing on the band. “Take Bob, for instance,” he suggests wisely. “The fact that he’s here should tell you a lot about this whole thing.”
Bob is a selcouth blend of audience motivator and whatever’s-in-the-percussion-room player who feels like the id of the group built on a shambolic sort of peculiarity. Most videos of the band online have at least one top-rated comment that reads something to the extent of “What is Bob’s purpose?” The night before, the newly-engaged Chris had offered an answer to the unspoken question outside of the bar. “Bob,” Chris declared, like he was sharing a commandment, “is the secret glue that keeps everything in place.”
“I don’t know about that,” Bob says to me as he unloads his laundry back in the basement of the Chicago Theatre upon our return. “I really don’t have the skills to play music, I’ll be the first to tell you that. But having Rebecca here really shows you how much more vital we can be when we can actually play the songs. God knows I can’t sing. It’s really fucking embarrassing. I’ve done it for years, and I’ve seen my band wince. Even people in the crowd have covered their ears.”
Not the case on our last night in Chicago. It is not the most flawless show, but the most rabid—everywhere the eye lands seems to be a fan shouting every non sequitur lyric. Like all good concerts, it’s convivial and conspiratorial, but there is an urgency in the audience tonight, a sort of disorienting attentiveness bordering on the religious. It seems everyone knows this will likely be the last time they’ll see Pavement together ever again. “Listening to this band makes me feel like the guy I was in college,” says a patron next to me, arms draped like a shawl around a woman beside him. “Sometime between then and now I became an old man, and I’m not sure how that happened.”
After the encore, Ibold and Malkmus dawdle for a few perfunctory hi-byes before swiftly exiting out the back door for a bar called the Empty Bottle, where a band called Wand is playing. Wand is signed to Drag City, the Chicago-based indie label responsible for springboarding Pavement to fame. Drag City’s founder, Dan Koretzky, whom Malkmus has excitedly been calling “Papa” all evening, greets them, beaming to see friends inside the humid dive. “Didn’t think you’d make it,” he says. Ibold, gazing into the audience—which seems to gaze back at him—adjusts his glasses. “Wouldn’t miss it for anything,” he responds.
On our way in, Ibold and Malkmus are honked, gawked, shouted at. (There’s a Great show, guys! and an I love you! and then a Marry me!) When we get inside, they part the sea. Two men individually buy me a shot of Fernet when they see me passing lagers to their indie rock saints. Standing there—as a band sort of in apex and sort of in twilight, alongside a younger band who are perhaps on the road to their own sort of apex—I can only imagine that all of this is striking a note that they could’ve only dreamed of striking years ago.
NEW YORK CITY: THE END
My version of tour ends not on the midwestern road but back in New York, at the Pavement Museum, a four-day pop-up event in SoHo billed as a course through the band’s “real and imagined history.” It turns out the room is a shrine to Pavement in a way that feels half like an exhibition, half like pornography for ultrafans. Contemporary acts—Snail Mail, Soccer Mommy, Bully and Sad13—performed Pavement’s splashier hits on a makeshift stage. Old music videos play on loop on tube TVs with built-in VCRs; lyric sheets are strewn around and encased like curios; there are communiques with record labels, lyrics on napkins, old show programs, the suit that Malkmus wore when he worked as a security guard at the Whitney Museum. I see Spiral there and ask him if it all feels a little like a mausoleum. “That’s really nice of you to say,” he replies.
It’s important to note that a significant amount of the ephemera inside the room is totally fabricated. There are tour posters for lineups and dates that never existed; there are T-shirts for real past tours that were created (and knifed to look roughed-up) precisely for the museum; immortalized in a box, there is a pair of handcuffs that Malkmus brandished during a 1999 show, announcing to the audience that they symbolized “what it’s like being in a band.” The placard next to it reads “These are the original handcuffs.” They are not. They were purchased from a sex shop a few days prior. Same goes for another shadow box, encasing a lone brown toenail that allegedly once belonged to their original drummer, Gary Young (again, no: it was clipped off of the foot of the set’s art director), and for a poster of Malkmus starring in an Apple “Think Different” ad “from 1996” that he absolutely wasn’t a part of. “I have no say in this whatsoever,” said Malkmus earlier that week, of both the museum and the upcoming film. “We’ve all sent them some stuff, but I really don’t even pay attention to what these guys are doing. None of us do.”
All the ersatz stuff is not subterfuge or sinisterism or deepfakery; this is–to explain the joke–a joke, in keeping with the arch “who-gives-a-shit” quality at the core of the band’s brio. A keen-to-rabid fan could plausibly discern between most bits of artifact and artifice but a casual one (which, more often than not, means a younger one) might accept them all, reasonably, as patent bits of reality. One had to admire it. All this puckish stuff made clear how little it matters what’s real: it’s Pavement not only for a generation already seduced by its apocrypha, but also for the present one, familiar with reenactments and revivals, and possessed of its own breed of absurdity. There’s probably also something to be said about how my own relationship to Pavement—private, greedy, and up until recently, comfortably unilateral —might have made the whole hall-of-mirrors scenario unfolding before me feel a little stupid and perverse. It did, but fandom demands a certain level of delusion. It is dumb and blind to real or invented ironies. To press a band into legacy and lucite before they’re gone is a pure and selfish impulse–and it makes it so they can’t ever die.
Mina Tavakoli is a writer from Virginia. She has written for Bookforum, The Nation, The Washington Post, and NPR, among others.
This was originally published at The Rumpus on September 13, 2017.
No. It’s my mother’s favorite word lately.
Did they feed you?
No.
Are you happy here?
No.
Do you love me?
No.
It’s a Sunday at the tail end of fall. The autumn scents of pumpkin and cinnamon have vanished somewhere with the last of the dying leaves. Above my mother’s bed, skinny leafless branches tap at the glass window in slow rhythmic movements. My mother shifts to her side and draws her blanket close to her face, balling her fists tight under her chin. She shivers like a page caught in a gust of wind.
“No,” she says, although I haven’t said anything. It’s no longer a word, but a sound that’s not meant for anyone but herself. It’s her second day here at Saint Martha’s Nursing Home and although she can’t communicate anymore, I can tell she hates it. Projecting, my husband Jerry said yesterday when I told him about my suspicions. Well, he didn’t say this; he exclaimed it, like a detective would after finally putting together all the clues. He decided I hated Saint Martha’s, I hated leaving my mother here and—as usual—I was making this about myself. Projecting. He was loose with the tongue because he has nothing left to lose: he’s been sleeping on the couch for about two months now, surrounded by his model airplanes and ships. The subject of divorce has been lobbied between us more times this month than a volleyball at the beach.
My mother shakes so much I’m thankful for the rails on each side of the bed. There’s no thermostat in the room, just an absurd antique iron heater that would look out of place except that this whole facility looks like the setting of a Victorian-era novel. Perched on a mountaintop, the structure of Saint Martha’s dates to colonial times when it was used as a lookout during the Revolutionary War. It was abandoned after the war ended and left to rot and ruin, until the late 1800s when it was renovated by Catholic nuns and converted into an asylum. In the 1900s, most of their patients were elderly people with some form of dementia or Alzheimer’s, which led to their decision to turn the asylum into a home for the elderly. This building is so old that all the heat is turned on at the same time—winter. No thermostats; you just open and close the heater’s valves.
I know all of this because I had an argument yesterday with one of the nuns, Sister Frances. She’s in charge of the wing my mother is in, the Alzheimer’s and dementia section of the facility, where they place the residents who suffer from severe forms of these diseases. The ones who repeat the same words over and over like a prayer; the ones who need to be fed and bathed and have their diapers changed.
Sister Frances and I argued because I wanted her to turn the heat on in my mother’s room. She gave me the Saint Martha’s history lesson to explain why she couldn’t do that: it would be too expensive to turn the heat on for the whole building before winter. I told her with what they charged monthly my mother should have her own private sauna if she wanted one. The compromise we arrived on was extra blankets, but even this would take an extra day or two because they “didn’t have any extras.”
I hate to admit it, but Jerry was right about something: I hate this place. But that doesn’t change the fact that I think Mom doesn’t like it either. I like to imagine she’s pretending to be cold, to shiver so much, just to let me know she doesn’t like it here, because that would mean she’s still in there somewhere. I only put her in this place because she’s always been such a devout Catholic. I thought being around nuns and crucifixes might trigger some memories, make her feel more at home, but I’m not so sure anymore. I also didn’t realize these nuns actually operated with amenities from the 1800s.
My mother turns on her side, now facing me. She looks at me through the silver strands of hair that fall across her face.
“No,” she says. Her face is as thin and sharp as I’ve ever seen it. Her eyes are set in deeper than I remember and dark bags hang heavy under her gaze.
“No what, Mom?” I say, standing up from the red cushioned chair next to the bed and walking towards her.
“No.”
“Are you cold, Momma?” I take a measured step forward.
“No,” she says, still shivering.
“Are you hungry?”
She looks away from me and stares at the ceiling as if trying to solve a puzzle. I haven’t been this close to her in a while. For the last month she’s been confusing me with someone else. She’d look at me and turn red and either cry or claw at me. During one of these instances she called me “Marie,” during another she called me a whore. I have no idea who Marie is or was—I don’t even know if she ever existed.
I miss hearing her say my name. Monica, she’d call from downstairs when dinner was ready. Monica, honey, she’d whisper if she found me crying in my room after school. I place one hand on the bed rail and I slide the other into hers. I never get used to the feel of her wrinkled skin, the fluid movement of bluish veins under my thumb, the warmth it radiates. I feel like a child again. I feel like my mother’s daughter for the first time in months.
“Momma,” I whisper.
She stares at me for a few seconds. I think she’s trying to connect the dots. Get the gears grinding. I fear she’s going to see “Marie’s” face in mine. But she looks away. She stares at the wall and coos like a bird.
“No,” she says. “Coo.”
By the time I leave Saint Martha’s, the sun has set. Rain falls hard and angry from the dark gray clouds hiding the hundreds of stars that can be seen from this hilltop on a clear night. On the drive back home, I feel cheated. The first time my older brother, Gabe, and I visited Saint Martha’s was during its open house last spring, when the trees were heavy with green and flowers scattered through plains like wildfire. We drove up the gravel path that cut through the green hill like a scythe through tall grass, unprepared for the beauty we were about to see. Saint Martha’s during springtime looked magical: surrounded by flowers and greenery—the whole color spectrum on top of a hill.
Gabe flew in to Massachusetts from California, where he pretends to be too busy “working” to come help take care of Mom. He calls himself an actor, despite being forty-three and only having two infomercials and one tiny non-speaking role in his portfolio, or whatever actors call their résumés. I practically forced him to come so he could check out the facility where Mom was most likely going to end up. I even paid for his airline ticket. He had lived here in Greetlebay and worked as an English teacher at a local high school for about fifteen years before having some sort of identity crisis and deciding he was going to make it as an actor. Coincidentally, this sudden burst of passion happened at the same time Mom started getting worse, when she started misplacing memories and faces as often as she misplaced her keys. I don’t know why I made him come. Why I spent that money. I didn’t really have to bring back my brother, who didn’t really want to be here. Maybe it was my last attempt at keeping the family together—at having a family at all. In the end, his contribution to the decision-making process amounted to, “This place seems fine.”
My house looks unfamiliar under rainfall: a black and blue silhouette in darkness, unwelcoming and eerie. I sit in my car and listen to the engine run lazily, a soft murmur under the wash of rain. I don’t know when exactly it transformed from a home to a house. The blinds are shut, but I don’t need to see inside to know that Jerry is either slumped on the couch eating macaroni and cheese and watching television or he’s hunched over the dinner table, working on one of his model airplanes, or a tiny ship in a bottle. He finds comfort in repetition, in rituals. He’s built the same ten or twelve different models over and over again because he knows them by now and won’t find any surprise or complication in the process. Among his favorites are the F4U Corsair with its tiny yellow-tipped propellers, the American Airlines Boeing 767 because it’s the only airline he trusts, and the red 1917 Baron Fokker Triplane, with its three sets of wings and the black cross on its tail.
For our last anniversary, I gave him a custom-made model set of the very cruise ship we were on when he proposed, the Carnival Liberty. I had to do a lot of research to get the details right, online searches and many calls. Decks on the ship: 16. Balconies: 28 (all on the 16th deck). Length: 855 feet. Guest capacity: 2052. On-board crew: 920. Emergency lifeboats: 24 (12 on each side). The model is still in the white and red box it came in, gathering dust next to the model planes and ships and bottles. He gave me a scarf that year. One he knew I already owned, because, as he pointed out, “It’s your favorite scarf, but in a different color!” I wish I’d returned it that very day instead of wearing it to work to protect his feelings.
There’s a finished model of a WWII fighter jet gliding in place over the glass dinner table, its target apparently the cheesy white china plate. No Jerry. For half a second I expect to find a note clinging to the model plane (a grey Messerschmitt Me 262) the way he used to let me know he ran out for a quick second to buy more crazy glue or a magnifying glass because he lost another one.
The model plane is dainty and fragile. They’re always lighter than I expect them to be. I hold the Nazi jet by its wings like a baby bird or a dead moth and push with my thumbs until one of the little wings snaps. I consider breaking the other one as well, but settle for one and leave the jet right where it was before I go to bed.
In the morning I hear Jerry creep into the room. He shuffles socked feet and slides closet doors gently, trying not to make a sound. I pretend to be asleep, because I don’t know what I would say or ask if we talked right now. For the first time in years—in our marriage—I don’t know where he spent the night. I know he didn’t come in last night because I got up after midnight to get a glass of water, and where I expected to find a fat blanketed lump on the couch, I found nothing. I shift to my side but pretend to still be sleeping and he freezes for a moment. I hear him open a few drawers and pick up a pair of shoes before leaving the room.
I get out of bed and walk out of the room after I hear Jerry’s car driving away. If someone asks him what his job is, he’ll say he’s a writer. In reality, he works a nine to five in a government building, writing little blog posts about public health and safety. He’s never written a short story or a poem that I know of, and I’ve never seen him writing outside of work. But he likes to pretend things are better than they really are. It’s his way of life: repetition and denial.
Later, at work, my mind is elsewhere, nowhere near the insurance forms I should be filling out. My mind is in Los Angeles with my deadbeat runaway brother; it’s at the top of a hill in a cold ancient building, watching my mother coo at the walls; it’s wherever my husband was last night, watching him do all the things he could have done with a prettier, younger version of me.
Still, it seems absurd—logically—to be angry with him. Even if he was with someone else last night—why should I be mad? We’ve talked about separation many times, called each other many things we can’t take back and put all our belongings in some intangible mental list of division. Most of these conversations ended the same way, me trying to think of new things we could try—marriage counseling, sky-diving, swinging, something, anything—and Jerry saying he’s tired of trying, or that there’s nothing even left to try because we’ve tried it all. Jerry gave up. Jerry is done. He’s been looking at apartments for a month now. We’re only together on paper. Yet, whenever my mind wanders off I picture tiny model planes set ablaze and soaring through the sky or tiny ships in bottles crashing into jagged rocks, pushed by violent waves.
After work, I drive fast to Saint Martha’s, a little recklessly, because I’m eager to see my mother. I’m eager to be in her quiet room and sit by her side and hold her hand while I talk and she listens. I’m eager to touch her hair and tell her stories—her own stories about her own life—and maybe I’ll even sing to her, like the doctors have recommended or I’ll hum, since I don’t have a singing voice. Maybe I’ll finally tell her about my failed marriage.
Crossing the threshold of Saint Martha’s entrance feels like stepping into a different world, where time moves at the same pace flowers bloom and the general atmosphere is perpetually that of a wake. I pass by portraits of Jesus Christ and the Virgin Mary, rosaries hung from their top corners; residents who smile at me, who say hello and hi and good morning (despite the sun having already set), who smell like piss, who look lonely. Some of them seem healthy and alive—more so than my mother. And I can’t help asking why not them?
The Alzheimer’s section of the building is one of the farthest from the entrance. When I’m about halfway there, Sister Frances intercepts me.
“Excuse the intrusion,” she says. “I don’t mean to be nosy, but do you know who Jerry is?”
“Jerry?” I’m surprised because Jerry’s never come to visit my mother. “My husband, Jerry?”
“Oh,” says Sister Frances in a tone that would seem grave, if she didn’t dip every word in the same tenor. “Your mother has been calling for a ‘Jerry’ all day.”
This is odd. My mother was never a fan of Jerry. In fact, when I told her that I was pregnant with his child and that I was planning on marrying him all those years ago, she begged me not to do it, not to have the baby—this was the first and only time I heard her say anything so un-Catholic. It was also the moment I realized how hard it must have been for her to bring me up by herself. It had nothing to do with Jerry, but with how young I was and how hard she’d worked to get us to where we were. I was seventeen and she had raised me by herself, during a time when a single mother was treated like a leper. One day she threatened to poison both our meals if I didn’t abort and promise not to marry anyone until I was at least twenty-one. She was joking—maybe half joking—but it never had to come to that, because I had a miscarriage seven months into the pregnancy, a little after Jerry officially proposed.
“I’ll have to tell Jerry. I’ll bring him with me next time.”
“About that,” Sister Frances says as she fixes the black veil pinned over the white coif, “I didn’t get a chance to talk to you about this during your first visit—transitions and all of that. We find it’s best—this is completely optional and up to you of course—but we find it’s easier for the patients to transition into living here if their families give them space for at least the first one or two weeks.”
“Space?”
“Yes. We encourage families to—”
“Are you asking me not to visit my mother?”
“Well no, it’s just—”
“My mother is seventy-eight. And she’s frail. She could get a cold and die tomorrow.”
“Oh dear. I think I may have upset you.”
“I think you may have,” I say, more coldly than intended. Before I can say anything else, she bows her head and walks away.
I imagine telling my mother, “They don’t want me to visit you for a week or two.” She would be sitting on her bed, her legs crossed at the ankles, a crossword puzzle or a book in her hands. She’d lift a pen to her mouth and pinch it between teeth, the way she always did when stuck.
“What’s a six-letter word for ignoring truth,” she might say, without looking up from the puzzle.
I tell her I don’t know without really thinking of an answer. I’ve made her younger, somewhere in her late twenties. The silver from her hair shed away to make room for a glossy black. Her wrinkles have disappeared and she wears light pink lipstick and blush. For a second I envy her beauty.
“What’s wrong?” she might say and look at me.
“It’s nothing. I’m fine,” I’d say, knowing this answer won’t work. My mother could always tell when something was wrong. She always knew exactly what to say to get me to talk.
“I know you better than you know yourself, Moony.” She only called me Moony on special occasions, particularly when I was sad and didn’t want to talk—post-breakups, job losses, and all the other little failures of life. Days like today.
“Why were you calling for Jerry?” I might ask her.
“Oh, I just wanted to spit on his face one more time, just in case.” She would wait for me to laugh. And I do.
“We’re getting divorced.” Even in this imagined scenario my voice cracks.
“About time!” she would say and maybe throw the puzzle in the air or tear it up. “You’re too good for him, Moony. Too good for anyone! What did I always tell you?”
I know what she wants me to say, but I wait in silence. I want her to say it. And in this scene, she does.
“It’s just you and me in this world. It’ll always be just you and me.”
My mom is asleep when I enter her room. I sit next to her in the red-cushioned chair and I’m glad to find she has an extra blanket wrapped snugly around her. I want it to be like when I was a little girl, when I would walk to her room in the middle of the night and crawl into her bed. She’d wake up and she wouldn’t even say anything; she’d just stroke my hair until I fell asleep next to her, feeling safe by her side.
“Mom,” I say, already feeling guilty about waking her up.
She opens her eyes and stares at me without saying a word.
“I’m getting divorced,” I say, and for some reason I wait for her to say something back. She looks over at the wall behind me.
“I’m sad, Mom. I’m so, so sad.”
“Coo,” she says. “Coo.”
I come home to find Jerry has moved out most of his things. His underwear and sock drawers are empty, his work shirts and pants are missing as well. The model planes and ships have flown and sailed away from the windowsills and shelves where they once resided. I hope to find the cruise ship I gave him has also floated away, but of course he’s left it behind—he has no need for it. I pick up the dusty red and white box from the floor and open it on the dinner table. I spill its contents over the glass and marvel at the infinitesimal pieces that need to be put together. The bright orange lifeboats stand out among the many dull pieces and for a moment I picture myself sitting alone on one of these lifeboats in the middle of the ocean slowly rocking from side to side, letting the ocean currents guide me blindly to my next destination. I hunch over my dinner table inside my new home and I start building the model set of the place where it all began. Coo, I whisper as I begin to put the pieces together. Coo.
***
Rumpus original art by Mark Armstrong.
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