blueberry gingerbread concerto

I am the first one to arrive at Dad’s, and I find him in “hysterical” mode. He knows he’s supposed to be going somewhere but the details are hazy and he’s gotten frantic trying to figure out what to do. “Where’s my money?” he demands, looking around the bedroom, even though his wallet is sitting where it has always sat, on the dining room table. I bring him his wallet and count the money for him out loud, so he feels reassured, and then herd him into the kitchen and give him a blueberry muffin and a cup of coffee, and explain, again, who’s going and where we’re going. When Dad hears that it’s just four familiar people going, he suddenly relaxes. “I’m greatly relieved,” he says, “I thought the whole thing was going to be 30 people and I wanted to get out of it.”

Dad’s trying to tell me he’s losing it, but he can’t remember the word “marbles” so he says, “I’m losing my apples . . . my pears . . . my donuts.” He’s running through his inventory of round objects, but somehow the category of food has also been entered as a search term, so he’s stuck on round foods, when marbles aren’t a food at all.

I start getting Dad ready – ancient black loafers exchanged for dressy brown ones, teeth brushed, false teeth in, pills taken and packed – and then Marie shows up. She looks down his sweater to see what he has underneath – I hadn’t thought to do that. “She’s inspecting you, Dad,” I tell him. “For guns?” he asks.

Marie goes in the kitchen and starts packing snacks for the trip, because, she says, “he eats all the time.” “What is she doing?” Dad wants to know. “Making snacks for you,” I tell him. “Why do you always want to know what I’m doing?” Marie asks him, in a teasing tone. Dad suddenly assumes a mock-innocent expression and gazes at the ceiling. “I’m looking at the ceiling,” he says, “it’s a very nice ceiling.”

When we arrive at Mohonk, I lead Dad into the room we will be sharing. I’ve had a series of role-reversal moments here – a couple years ago, it was the shock of being the “adult”, the person in charge of checking us in and handling the paperwork, when it had always been Dad’s responsibility in the past. Dad had been bringing me here since I could barely walk – when I was three, he spent hours turning me around in the waters of Lake Mohonk so that I wouldn’t see a water snake and lose my innate love of swimming. When I was a moody thirteen, and my mother’s issues were fast becoming more than either he or I could handle, he brought me here in midwinter, just the two of us, and I relished the tranquility of reading by the fireplaces. Now, for the first time, instead of sharing a room with my mother or, in later years, my partner, while he had his own room, Kate and Brianna are next door and I’m bunking with Dad. He’s too easily disoriented to be left alone in a new place.

In the room, Dad prowls around the perimeter, reminding me powerfully of the way cats behave in a new environment, though instead of identifying his surroundings by smell, he asks me what each object is each time he passes it. Finally, he identifies one of the beds as his, and relaxes.

At dinner, a formal, four-course meal, Dad does brilliantly – I order for him and he manages to clean his plate and avoid doing or saying anything unusual or knocking anything over. The only mishaps are a little bit of food that winds up on his cardigan at the end of every course, since he is without his special plates, which are actually soup plates that were used on the trains of the Baltimore and Ohio railroad. The china is heavy, hard to break or tip, and the plates are a hybrid of plate and bowl, with a hefty rim. Not being able to see, Dad usually just sweeps everything on the plate against the rim on the side closest to him and scoops it up from there. Without a rim, this means that some food goes overboard. Tomorrow we’re asking for an extra napkin so we can cover him up from chin to knees.

We get to the dessert course, and tell Dad that I think he’ll like the blueberry gingerbread. Something about the sound of that phrase catches his ear, and he starts repeating it, using different tones for each syllable – a falsetto “blue” followed by a bass “berry” and then a midrange “ginger” and a high-pitched “bread.” He does this several times, varying the tones for each word, luckily quietly enough that the other diners don’t notice. When Brianna returns from the bathroom, several minutes later, he does it again, apparently for her benefit.

“You’re my favorite girl,” says Dad, as I finish removing his necktie after dinner, which sounds like a nice, fatherly sentiment – until the next sentence; “Do you want to be fucked?” He asks. “No!” I say, a little louder than I mean to. Dad seems more relieved than disappointed by this response. “I’m not sure I could do it anyway,” he says. I hide in the bathroom to give his mind a chance to wander on to something else.

“How many people will this ship hold?” he asks me, apparently thinking that we’re on a cruise. “This is not a ship, Dad, it’s a building sitting on the ground,” I tell him. “It just sits here, year after year,” he says. “For 140 years,” I tell him.

It’s past 8pm, and we’re getting into Dad’s personal witching hours. He starts having increasing trouble saying anything that makes sense. “You’ve got the boils, no biles – what’s a good word?” he says to me. I don’t have the slightest idea what he’s talking about, so I can’t suggest a word. After that he gets quiet, apparently deciding that it’s easier to lie there and rest than to struggle with uncooperative words.