It’s 1982. She’s a junior in college, an English major, spending the spring academic quarter studying art and literature in England. The cuisine is awful: gloppy meat pies, mushy peas, Marmite, treacly-sweet custard poured over everything. The fish and chips wrapped in newsprint paper are good, but this American student longs for a cheeseburger, fries and chocolate milkshake. She takes the Tube with a few of her junk food-starved classmates to London’s Hard Rock Cafe. There they dive headfirst into thousands of glorious all-American artery-hardening calories, swimming in mountains of Heinz ketchup and French’s mustard. It’s all delicious: fatty, salty, sweet. The mother-disapproved triumvirate. Over the course of the quarter, she’ll return three more times to the Hard Rock, satiating her food longings as well as her occasional bouts of homesickness.
***
It’s 1998. She’s donating blood at her synagogue’s blood drive. She’s never given blood before. The young man taking her history asks her how she’s feeling today (fine), if she’s on any medications (no), what is her blood type (O positive). Then the blood man asks, between 1980 and 1996, did you spend time adding up to three months or more in the United Kingdom?
She’s surprised by the question and takes a moment to think about it. Almost three months, she says, but I spent several weeks traveling on the Continent instead of studying in my English dorm room. Please don’t tell my mother, she adds laughing.
The blood man doesn’t laugh. He looks at her. Was it three months or not?
Not quite, she answers, does that count?
He’s not sure. She asks him why he’s concerned about her time in England. He says they’re trying to assure the safety of the blood supply against the incidence of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. She stares at the blood man, wonders what the hell he’s talking about.
I don’t know what Creuz—
Mad cow disease, he says.
Mad what? she thinks.
Did you eat any red meat in England? he asks.
Yes, she answers. She remembers the English waitress bringing the burgers to the table, the mouthwatering aroma.
He looks down at her chart. Well, if it really wasn’t three months, he says, then you’re probably okay.
She donates blood.
Every few months after her donation she receives telephone calls and mail from the local blood center. Please donate again, they say. We miss you and your beautiful, healthy blood! She would like to continue helping the center, but the idea of mad cow disease has stayed with her. She doesn’t think about the possibility of the illness all the time, but whenever the center contacts her, she remembers the blood man’s serious tone, curses her love of red meat.
She reads up on mad cow disease. Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, she learns, is actually the name of the disease manifested in humans. If you’re a cow with mad cow disease, you suffer from bovine spongiform encephalopathy. She hopes the cows have access to this necessary information. The disease literally eats away at the brain (bovine or human); the term spongiform refers to the appearance of the infected brains, which become filled with holes until they resemble sponges under a microscope.
A diagnosis of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease means memory loss, rapidly progressive dementia and eventual death. However, the disease can only be positively confirmed by a brain biopsy (not a great idea for a living person) or an autopsy (definitely not a great idea for a living person). She understands that she might never know if she has the disease or, more likely, that if she does have the disease, by the time it’s kicked in she’ll be too far along in the disease’s dementia to recognize it. Or to care. The realization frightens her, turns her stomach. While her mind’s still somewhat intact, she thinks, she can’t allow her blood to potentially deposit such suffering in others no matter how rare an actual occurrence of mad cow disease might be. So the next time the blood center calls, she tells them that she was in England for three months in 1982 and ate red meat. She mentions the blood donation at her synagogue a few years ago.
As she expects, the center stops contacting her.
***
It’s 2018. Her 80-year-old mother’s neurologist says the MRI shows her mother has shmutz in her brain. Shmutz. Apparently, the Yiddish word for dirt or filth has become a medical term, spoken now by a highly trained and educated Indian-American neurologist. Shmutz.
Her mother’s actual diagnosis is multi-infarct dementia, a type of vascular dementia caused by a series of small strokes. The strokes have, the neurologist explains in non-Yiddish-infused English, damaged your mother’s brain tissue due to improper blood flow and a lack of oxygen and nutrients. It’s very common in people with a history of high cholesterol and high blood pressure. Her mother has had high cholesterol and high blood pressure for as long as she can remember. Now her mother can add multi-infarct-shmutz dementia to her list of ailments. There’s no cure for this dementia, the neurologist says, only attempts to prevent future strokes by keeping cholesterol and blood pressure under control with medication. She wonders if her mom even noticed she was having all these strokes.
***
It’s 2023. She stands at the, the…what’s that word again? Crap. Like a meeting, a spot, across…oh, crossroads.
She sits at the crossroads of mad cow and shmutz.
How am I going to write this essay if I can’t remember any stupid words?
She rereads what she’s written so far. Great, first the narrator stands at the crossroads, then she’s sitting. What, she sits down in the middle of the intersection? Is she hit by a speeding car driven by a mad cow? A piece of shmutz?
She rewrites: She stands at the crossroads of mad cow and shmutz.
What a ridiculous sentence.
But she is standing at crossroads, isn’t she? Isn’t that why she started writing this piece in the first place? She’s forgetting words, can’t remember the ends of the books she’s just finished reading. Or the authors’ names. Or her online students’ names. She’s chalked it up to exhaustion, aging, depression, menopause. But who knows? There’s the toll from the pandemic, becoming solitary, trying to keep her elderly mother safe from 2000 miles away, her 35-year marriage fraying under stress, adult children returning to the proverbial nest, one with a new identity and pronouns. Who wouldn’t forget the stupid word crossroads? Who the hell needs to go looking for any crossroads? And doesn’t crossroads suggest a choice, control over what comes next?
I have no control over my life, she thinks. I’m controlled by everything and everyone else around me. Including, she realizes, the possibility of an unstoppable herd of silent shmutzig mad cows stampeding through blood-filled arterial rivers en route to her brain.
She’s genetically escaped the high blood pressure, but her cholesterol has always been a bit high. All that cooking with chicken fat from prior generations has found an inherited home in her bloodstream. Doctors suggest diet and exercise—less eating, more movement. And she manages that combination for a time. Then she gets hungry and lazy and the cycle begins again: higher blood test numbers, less ice cream and cheese, more movement, lower blood test numbers, no medication. Now she’s at the point in the cycle where she’s dreaming of a Baskin-Robbins Polar Pizza. And so it goes.
Her mother says over the phone that while she can’t keep straight what day it is, she’s clearly remembering moments from her childhood—moments she hasn’t thought of in so long. I can picture my dog Tippy, her mother says, the faded green door to the garage where I kept my bike, the alleyway behind our house that the garage opened up to, my junior high friend Janice’s secret stash of cigarettes under her canopy bed two houses down the block from ours.
Isn’t that funny? her mother asks.
Yes, funny, she says, and strange. You’ve never mentioned Janice before.
Haven’t I? asks her mother. We’d smoke together by the biology pond behind the school.
What she knows from the neurologist but doesn’t repeat to her mother—it’s common for someone with dementia to rekindle long-term memories while simultaneously losing short-term ones.
What she does say to her mother—I didn’t know you smoked that young.
She imagines how it feels to be her mother, stuck in this strange in-between place of memories gained and lost. While it doesn’t seem to bother her mother, she wonders if she herself will eventually forget who her husband is but remember her college boyfriend, her prom date in high school, Billy in first grade who kissed her and bought her a pink straw pocketbook for her birthday. She wonders what ever happened to Billy, whose family moved away that summer after first grade. She’d Google him but can’t remember his last name.
Maybe that’s a good sign, she thinks, not remembering his last name, a detail from over fifty years ago.
She looks at the essay on the screen, how little she’s written that she likes over the past few hours. She’s frustrated, thought writing about familial and hamburger-driven dementia would help her cope, make her laugh in that cold-hearted way she likes to laugh, sounding like the Wicked Witch of the West, annoying her husband. Thought she’d have finished writing the piece by now, or been closer, able to submit it to a literary magazine exploring themes of mental health or motherhood. But it’s just a digital mess, no overarching narrative point, no resplendent literary turns of phrase.
Why am I bothering?
She knows that years ago her mother, a retired middle school English teacher, would’ve known what to do to liven up the piece, give it legs. Back then, she could have called her mom and asked her what the piece needed, what was missing. Her mom was her best editor; they’d loved working together to find just the right word or rearrange a paragraph so the sentences read more clearly, more impactfully.
Not anymore.
She goes downstairs, outside into her backyard with its new patio and furniture (so welcoming, so comfortable), but cannot escape the incessant barking of the next-door neighbors’ dog. She’s asked them repeatedly to try and keep the dog inside or perhaps on the far side of their yard, but to no avail. She’s mentioned that she works from home, needs to concentrate, that even with all her doors and windows closed, the dog is so loud she feels as if it’s barking right next to her while she tries to write or teach online in her office.
It’s a dog, the neighbor says. It likes to be outside, likes to bark. Sorry.
She dreams of hiring a dog hitman. Or maybe one for the neighbor. She wonders how mad those cows would have to get before they’d be available to do her evil bidding.
She needs a change of scenery, so she goes for a walk around the neighborhood. She thinks about walking the mile and a half to Starbucks, ear buds soothing her with a classical music radio station stream from the phone in her pocket.
I deserve a latte, she thinks. No, maybe I don’t deserve one, but I want one and I’m still capable of walking to Starbucks to get one. I still know the way. Yay for me.
How very small life has become.
Back at the essay, latte by her side.
What she does say to her mother—I didn’t know you smoked that young. According to the American Lung Association, the majority of adult smokers began smoking before age 18, many addicted before they finished high school. She knows her mother smoked when she was pregnant with her, imagines how much taller she might have been.
She remembers her mother coming up the stairs of their house wearing a faded green housecoat over capri pants, an unlit cigarette in her mouth, and asking her mother if she could have one, too, be just like her.
Have one what? her mother had asked, removing the cigarette from her mouth, hiding it in her hand.
Crap, another long-term memory.
Quick, what’s the date? Wednesday. March 15, 2023. Ides of March.
Beware.
Good. Great. Not demented yet.
Her mother had still been smoking after her younger brother was born—as a toddler he developed childhood asthma, but then grew up to be six feet tall and asthma-free.
Where’s the lesson there? He’s tall, I’m short. He had asthma, I didn’t. Smoke, don’t smoke, what difference did any of it make? She imagines a herd of mad cows lighting up at the biology pond, passing the cigarette between them hoof to hoof.
Her mother finally quit smoking for good after she contracted walking pneumonia and her doctor said she’d die if she didn’t stop. It was years ago but could still be a contributing factor in her dementia, according to the Alzheimer’s Society.
When she and her young family moved to the West Coast for her husband’s job, she was bereft. At that time, they’d lived fairly close to her mother, about an hour away, and she’d see her at least once a week, especially after the kids were born. Her father had died decades earlier, and she and her mother had grown apart through all the usual channels: teenage rebellion, college and grad school away from home, new career, new marriage. But her fledgling writing career and the subsequent babies had helped them reconnect, find new ways to swap respective knowledge, spend more time together. After the move west, she’d talk to her mother on the phone almost every day, trying to recreate the treasured time they’d had sharing insignificant moments: planning freewriting assignments for her creative writing students, her husband’s out-of-control snoring, one child’s love of reading Harry Potter, the other one’s fear of the name Voldemort when read aloud.
Now her children are adults, and her and her mother’s phone conversations, down to once a week, consist of her mother’s rediscovered long-term memories and a handful of questions and comments repeated over and over: How’s the family? her mother asks. How’s the weather? How are your friends? You have such interesting stories about your friends. And then again: How’s the family?
When her mother’s repetitive questioning first began, it didn’t dominate their conversations. Still, she’d try to think up different answers each time, keep her mother talking, engaged, changing the subject. But as her mother’s neurons started firing fewer chemical transmitters and more and more shmutz, the questioning overwhelmed their discussions. The calls became too hard for her, too draining. They made her feel angry, impatient, even though she knew none of it was her mother’s fault, which made her feel angry and impatient with herself. Now she might tell her mother one story—my friend Margot and her husband are getting a divorce, or Grandchild #1 got a raise at work—and the answers to the other questions are all fine, fine, fine. And then fine again. Questions she asks her mother—How are you feeling? How’s the new caregiver, the new walker? Are you reading any books?—are quickly dismissed: As well as can be expected at this age. Getting used to them. I’m not really interested in reading anymore.
That’s the most disheartening answer. Her mom had been a voracious reader.
How’s the family?
I miss talking to my mom. Our calls aren’t conversations anymore, no real back and forth. I’m basically talking at her. Once in a while she speaks like her old self for a moment, but I know she won’t remember any of it five minutes after we hang up. I wonder if she realizes she’s repeating herself or is mercifully unaware.
***
It’s still 2023. She reads a book, a memoir, written by someone who graduated from her high school. The author is fifteen years younger than she is. She’s never heard of him before; it’s his first book. She’s wildly jealous but enjoys the book—about the author’s years working at a New York art museum—and the descriptions of various masterpieces takes her back unexpectedly to her college art courses in England: slide photos of paintings by Constable, Reynolds and Turner on the projector screen, munching chocolate McVitie’s in the darkened classroom, visiting the National Gallery, the Tate.
Well, that’s a bit unsettling, she thinks, as the full title of Reynolds’ “Dutch Boats in a Gale (The Bridgewater Sea Piece)” suddenly comes back to her. She sees the angry water, can sense the swells, the approaching collision, the desperate sailors in the lifeboat. She grabs the sides of her chair and wills herself back to the present. But an image of wellie-wearing mad cows storming up the National Gallery portico steps (and through those imposing columns) takes root.
Go look at the pretty pictures, she silently yells to the cows. I’ve already paid your entrance fees. Leave me alone.
In the book’s acknowledgment section, the author thanks his—and her—favorite high school English teacher. She quickly falls down the rabbit hole Googling the author, the teacher, the school. She finds an old yearbook picture of herself online. She’s in a school production of You Can’t Take It With You, dressed as the character of Essie, a comic ballerina wanna-be. In the picture she’s in a pink tutu, standing on her toes, arms in ballet first position, next to the guy playing her Russian dance teacher. She remembers that guy—he played football and did theater and ended up at the University of Chicago. She doesn’t remember his name, but the plethora of long-ago details the picture has unleashed is troubling, dementia-wise.
Looking closely at the picture, she remembers how it felt to be so young and thin, all done up in stage makeup, happy…
No, I wasn’t always happy. Everything’s a drama to high school theater kids, even when it isn’t. What’s the word I want instead of happy? Carefree? No. Untethered? Yuck. Exultant? Oh, come on. I’m not saying I was joyful, it was more of an excitement, an all-over feeling of…what’s the stupid word?
She closes her eyes and imagines herself on stage with David. That was the guy’s name, David. She can see everything and everyone onstage, it’s all lit up, but the packed audience is dark, house lights down. It’s just her and David and Deborah and Artie…
Damn it, I remember all their names.
Onstage, in the picture, she’s pretending to dance badly. She remembers the audience laughing. There’s a short staircase behind her that will soon take her upstairs, aka offstage, but in that moment, she feels like there’s a real second story at the top of those stairs, bedrooms, bathrooms, a lighted hallway.
Immersed? Almost. Energized? Too general.
What the hell is that word…something to do with metals, but not how I want to use it. She opens a tab for the thesaurus, looks up energized.
Galvanized. There it is.
Looking closely at the picture, she remembers how it felt to be so young and thin, all done up in stage makeup, galvanized. Her mother, intelligent and alert, somewhere in the dark audience, watching her.
Oh, Mom, she thinks.
She begins to cry—openly, noisily, not bothering to wipe her nose which is dripping all over the keyboard. She reads over what she’s written. Auto spell has changed the word “English” to “anguish.” Her favorite high school anguish teacher. No other mention of “English” in the essay is affected, just in this one place.
She wipes her face and laughs out loud.
She changes the word back to English and hits the save button. She knows that anguish is the perfect word, not for the English teacher, but for her.
***
It’s 2024. Her mother receives an email from the bank. In addition to paying all her mother’s bills for the last several years, she’s had her mother’s emails automatically forwarded to her. Mostly junk, but not this time.
Account alert: Your account is overdrawn by $3088.20, it reads.
She calls her mother. I paid my taxes, her mother tells her. I wrote a check. Isn’t that what I’m supposed to do? I always pay my taxes.
You were supposed to wait for me to come visit in a couple of weeks, she says, so we could go over the taxes together and transfer the money to your checking account that you need to pay them.
I paid my taxes, her mother says again. Isn’t that a relief?
Sure, Mom, she says. A big relief.
She realizes there is no relief. There’s too much shmutz for any relief. Too many damn cows paying their bovine taxes. I need to update my advance directive. Make sure that when mad cow or shmutz kicks in, someone pushes me out a window or smothers me with a pillow. She wonders how exactly her lawyer will phrase those directive wishes.
She spends the next several hours calling her mother’s bank, waiting on hold, transferred, then transferred again. It doesn’t matter how many previous hours she spent establishing a power of attorney at that idiotic bank. She finally wires $4000 of her own money into her mother’s account to cover the overdraft and be done with it.
On the phone the next week, after the usual how’s-the-family barrage, her mother asks, do you remember when you were in sixth grade and you and your friend, Olivia, bought seven candy bars at the grocery store and put it all on my account?
She doesn’t recall, but says yes to keep her mother talking.
When I saw the bill, her mother says, I remember trying to be angry at you, but laughing at your confession—you and Olivia in a sugar frenzy, stuffing your faces with chocolate, sneaking wrappers into the outside garbage can. That must have been what those raccoons were trying to get when they pulled all the garbage out of the cans that week. What a mess that was, remember?
She tries to remember, but all she can think of is her, her mother, the cows, the shmutz—all of them entangled in an eddy of pulling out garbage and cleaning up messes over and over again. Repeating stories, holding back words of frustration and irritation, sadness, heartbreak.
But that’s what it must mean to love someone, she thinks, even if you’re firmly entrenched at the crossroads of mad cows and shmutz.
Oh, I’m not really going to end this essay with that same ludicrous phrase, am I?
All at once she sees herself and Olivia, sitting on the yellow plush carpeting in her bedroom, giggling, trying not to make too much crinkling noise as they unwrap the chocolate bars one after the other. They each eat three Hershey’s with Almonds and split the last one, a Three Musketeers. She can taste the candy, smell the chocolate all over hands and face, feel the delight in her mouth, the churning in her stomach.
Crap.
She opens a new tab on the laptop screen to order a Baskin-Robbins Polar Pizza for pickup after dinner. She’s about to put the mint chocolate chip one in her cart, but then changes her mind and closes the page.
Not today shmutz, she thinks. Not today you mad, mad cows. Go trample someone else’s crossroads.
She rewrites the last line.
She tries to remember, but all she can think of is her, her mother, the cows, the shmutz—all of them entangled in an eddy of pulling out garbage and cleaning up messes over and over again. Repeating stories, holding back words of frustration and irritation, sadness, heartbreak.
But that’s what it must mean to love someone, she thinks.
And everyone remembers love.
At least she hopes so.
Cynthia Gordon Kaye earned her MFA from San Francisco State University where she taught undergraduate creative writing courses and was the recipient of an Edward B. Kaufmann College of Liberal & Creative Arts Scholarship. Her work has appeared in Superstition Review and HerStry, was shortlisted for the Craft Flash Fiction Contest and longlisted for A Public Space Writing Fellowship and The Masters Review Anthology. She lives and writes in California.