Phil Perez

I had a phone conversation with my mother yesterday,
it lasted about one hour and fifteen minutes.
She processed, she responded, she absorbed, she was pleasant
for a good part of our talk that went all over, that traveled through time and space.
She accepted the bed bumpers and how they should be placed,
although, earlier, she insisted the aide wash and dry the sheets, again, we are back to that,
because they were wet.
But weren’t really.
She told me she is constantly dreaming about crazy things
sometimes embarrassingly sexual things, she wouldn’t expand and I tell you:
I was glad.
The topics came and went and spun around, there was even laughing. Then
there was talk about how the aide stole her phone, how my mother couldn’t
get me no matter how hard she tried to call, “isn’t your phone number, ________________?
She would recite it perfectly. But the phone was dead. Hidden in her bag. Uncharged.

She was wearing all white, a newly wed, living with her parents in Brooklyn, working at the Army Base
when a kid drove a truck into her and knocked her down (traumatizing her for life) and they picked her up and
brought her inside and she was OK but so scared.
One day mama answered the door, it was Captain Price and Colonel McAlister from the base, they came for a visit
but she was at the movies, probably at the Pitkin Theater across the street and someone
knew she was there and came to get her and she ran home:
Captain Price! Colonel McAlister!
And mama said, in her Yiddish accent, “where are you going I am going to make the tea!”
So they stayed for tea and cake!

I never heard my mother imitate her mother’s accent before, she laughed! “Mama was so cute,” she said
So many stories bubbling to the top, effervescing at the top of the glass, dancing in the past’s eye.
But my attempts to soothe lasted just so long and then something happens,
you see here is the roller coaster syndrome
as I call it, here is the up and the drop, the climb and the collapse, it is the great joke that is played on me
and it gets me every time, every damn time, even though I keep up my guard, I get stung, by the bees that carry the venom, the bees that are now named and have the moniker bestowed by the doctor,
who is gingerly increasing the meds as they can be dangerous to the elderly:
ALZHEIMER’S DEMENTIA! PARANOIA!

“Yesterday,” the aide wrote, “there were a lot of people in the room, I couldn’t see them only her. Sometime she scare me.”

I saw it in writing in his letter of need to be submitted with paperwork
to appeal the long term care’s decision for a 24-hour live-in. Again, I ask for 2-12 hour shifts.
ALZHEIMER’S DEMENTIA. The brain looses oxygen, a vascular deterioration. This is what happens.
It happens to people of all ages.
I begin to shrink in fear. Paranoia!

She told me about how her father came to America and stayed with his brother and sister-in-law:
She couldn’t remember the name but I knew, I am the keeper of names:  Peretz. Called Philip. Married to Libby.

Then, I am dropped from the apex of the ride, my stomach contracts, my teeth clench, I look for the iron bar
in front of me to hold onto. Some people on rides can descend with their arms in the air like they are in surrender
like they yield to power and have no weapon and they come down in that drop and wave and scream.
They know they will exit the ride intact.

I just scream. I have no guarantees. I might just crawl off and get sick to my stomach.

She already has slept with him twice. She meets him in the bathroom, he is in there all day, I don’t know
how he can stay there all day, he goes to her bed. He is good looking, very good looking. She is telling me this in a whisper and I respond at my end and she shushes me because the aide will hear, she tells me to be quiet!
You with a loud voice will spoil it all!!

“I know his name,” she says, “he is from the building, PHIL PEREZ!”
He’s in the bathroom now! Candy went to have her lunch, I am in the room with a man!

Do you see me atop the Cyclone in Brooklyn, about to descend?
The one who is holding on so tight her hands are raw?
Do you see me with my gritted teeth and squeezed eyes that do not want to see anymore?

There was a click,
Dead air.
My mother was in the room alone
with Phil Perez.

The series starts here:
Part 1: And The Band Played On … a mother’s life, a daughter’s journey

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