The secret Altar

Literary Review, Summer, 2002 by Duff Brenna

In 1980 I published a story in Sou'wester called "In Memory of Joy." The story concerned a boy of fifteen meeting a man and a woman who had just arrived in town. The woman had been a dancer in Las Vegas and the man was trying to make a name for himself as a bodybuilder.

The boy thinks the dancer and the bodybuilder are wonderful and he introduces them to his father, who ends up paying the bodybuilder for a night in the sack with the dancer. At the end of the story, the dancer and the bodybuilder have taken off with all the money that the father has been saving. The boy, in love with the two most fabulous people he has ever seen in his life, had stolen the money and given it to them. The story ends with the bodybuilder leaving his weights in the back yard and the boy looking at the weights and realizing he would never be able to lift so much and that there are only certain people in the world, like the bodybuilder himself, who are able to handle great weights. The theme, of course, is WEIGHT itself, how we are saddled with it, how it pulls some of us down (like the father in the story), but how some of us handle it all right and keep on keeping on.

"In Memory of Joy" is based on a B-Girl and her boyfriend, who I met in Alaska in the early-sixties when I was traveling around on my own. I lived with Joy and Chris (their real names) for a few months and, indeed, like the boy in my story, I did give Chris money. I worked as a rug-cleaner and a dishwasher in Anchorage and Chris was always bumming money from me. He spent his time at a gym, pumping iron and posing in the mirror and preparing himself for the Mr. Alaska contest. He also worked nights as a bouncer in a nightclub. Joy worked there too. She would sit with men in the bar and try to get them to buy her champagne.

I don't know if Chris won Mr. Alaska, because I caught a ride out of Anchorage a few weeks before the competition was to begin, and I never saw my two friends again.

Cut to 1978 and I write "In Memory of Joy." And I get the story published and pretty much put it out of my mind.

Cut to 1993, the year I find out my mother has Alzheimer's disease. She was living in Prescott, Arizona, at the time and I went there with a truck and moved her down to San Diego and kept her for a few weeks, before I gave up and put her in a retirement home, where I hoped she would get the "expert" care she needed. I certainly didn't know how to deal with her myself. She would act wild sometimes, pacing the house at midnight, babbling incoherently, taking off her clothes and piling them on the bed and trying to pack them in her suitcases, saying she was going to visit her brother or her mother or her dogs. She would lose her teeth, her glasses, her rings; anything that could be lost, she would lose it. She wouldn't bathe unless I gave her a bath. This was a woman who had been fanatical about cleanliness ever since I had known her. When my sister and I were old enough to dust furniture and run a vacuum, it was our daily job to do both. We scrubbed the bathroom every day as well, the sink, the toilet, the bathtub, scouring pads used on all of it, the mirror cleaned, the faucets buffed with a dry cloth so that they sparkled. In the kitchen, the floors were literally clean enough to eat off of. The rooms in whatever house we lived were immaculate and reflective of my immaculate mother. She would bathe every night in a hot tub of water, shower every morning before she went to work, dressing each day in the purest, cleanest, whitest, most fashionable attire of her profession. She was an executive dietitian in charge of menus for an entire hospital. And then she grew old and sick and forgot to bathe, forgot to clean her dentures (before she lost them for good), forgot to flush the toilet, make her bed, change her underwear, wipe herself, forgot, forgot, forgot--

--who she had been, how old she was, where she was, what year it was, who was President of the United States, who her husbands had been, what her two daughters' names were, what her son's name was--

--forgot how to tie a shoe or how to press the Velcro straps of her jacket together or button a blouse or how to tell time. Like Benjy in Faulkner's The Sound And The Fury, there was an uncertain value in her clockless days, for she had always hated time, every time-bought wrinkle appearing on her face was measured with a modicum of fear and anger; but at last in senility she was almost always in the present tense, with brief slippages into memories past, the distant past, the days of youth, never yesterday, last week, last year. The long-ago-far-away was present, was now, and what was now for the rest of us, made no sense to her.

I knew that her decline had quickened when she forgot that she had a dog, though she had loved him, it seemed, more than anything else on earth and had spoiled him like a mother would spoil an adored child. They would get their hair groomed every week, she to her hairdresser, he to his. He would sit in her lap at dinner and eat off her plate. She would pick out choice tidbits and feed him with her fork. Spoiled dog indeed, but a good dog, kind and loving and only asking for a little affection from me when I inherited him after it was clear she could no longer take care of him. Certainly his life changed radically after I took him into my home. No laps allowed. Regular dog food out of a sack or a can. The Dapper Doggery once a month and sometimes not that often when I would take the scissors to him myself and "groom" him in order to save money.