alzheimer's squared & the nature of friendship

the voice after the tone sounds as if it hasn't spoken words it understands in a very long time.

"h-hello? hello. i - gosh, nancy? is this you? i hope you've kept the same number, but it sure has been awhile. this is mark.. maria's husband. i was just.. well. i'm calling because.. i mean, of all people, you should know. it's.. she.. AHEM. maria has passed away. it was alzheimer's disease. dementia. i'm sorry. i hope this finds you well. i'm sorry." *click*

apparently mark was never particularly good with words.

not a thing like maria, who taught my grandmother how to fold and starch clothes in the basement of woolworth's department store. nanny's first week as a working woman was saved by her new friend's endless advice, her easy laughter, and her affinity for american hamburgers; a delicacy she had never seen in puerto rico. nanny found this endlessly amusing, mostly because she couldn't imagine having the money to order meat from a restaurant. at a time when it was so easy to lose touch, theirs was a friendship that transcended time, distance, marriage, and family. in the absence of cell phones and the internet, they met up after work twice a week. instead of facetime, they planned yearly vacations in the summer after they got married. when mark's job moved the family to virginia, nanny and maria mailed photos and letters back and forth for decades after. years later, after landlines were installed, the weekly phone calls were marathon. so close was maria to nanny's heart that when she found out i would be competing in national history day in washington dc, the hartman house had the first phone to ring about it.

two months later, i walked into a sandwich shop on capitol hill with my mother and nanny expecting lunch, and was swept into a suffocating hug by a woman wearing a stunning amount of jewelry. i met maria over plates of hot pastrami on rye and listened in awe as she wove stories out of dead air. she spoke them alive with so much color it was dizzying; tales of the city as it never will be again, and life before labor laws; dim lounges full of cigar smoke and music that "lifts your feet off the floor whether you like it or not."

memories of her and my grandmother, young and beautiful, laughing at those who overlooked them. the kind of women who don't say they're going to do something before they've already done it and cleaned up after. on that day, i learned that my grandmother was once a lot more daring and worldly than she ever let on. laughing uproariously, maria pointed across the table and said so herself. i remember thinking that i could only aspire to have friends who talk about each other the way they did. in their seventies and still giggling like teenagers, i hope i remember them just as they were for as long as i live.

"you know, little girl; your nanny sure was a smartypants back in the day. she still is! looks will fade, but they can never take your smarts if you've got 'em. first one in her family to ever go to college, and this one left with a degree! and she's a daredevil, too, if you can believe that. she won't tell you so, but believe it. i've seen it with my own eyes."

there's a note taped to the refrigerator that says 'church!! mass card for maria, sympithy card mark' in cursive that's unsure of it's own edges. if it's true that no one can take away the power of your mind, somebody forgot to tell alzheimer's. nanny doesn't come out of her room for several hours, and when she does, she makes a beeline for the old photos with a fistful of scrap-booking pens and labels. she extracts the ones she's looking for from their sleeves like they're made of tissue paper, and begins to write everything she can remember about each photo on the back in shaky, misspelled script.

"maria, me (nancy), date ? 1952, before kids? husbins longi sland"

quietly, hesitantly, i sit down beside her. take the pen gently out of her hand. i pull a stack of photos towards me and choose the one my eyes land on first. her recall is better when she doesn't have to think about how to turn memories into words, then words into handwriting. the picture features two grinning, olive skinned women struggling to hold on to their wide brimmed sun hats while laughing against the wind. brown as berries, heads thrown back, visions in their matching white swimsuits and towels flung over their shoulders. nanny looks like she's seeing ghosts.

"that's her. that's us. we went to the lighthouse at montauk point one summer and laid on the beach like a couple of movie stars. she tried an oyster for the first time and hated it. it was quite a trip. mady was born a year later, then johnny. tina. then maria had her kids, and we had to grow up. people have to grow up. so we never went back."

her face isn't lighting up at this story the way it usually does when she tells one. nothing feels quite the way it's supposed to. but my mother was born in 1959, so i print 'maria hartman and me, nancy rathbun - montauk point, summer 1958,' in my neatest handwriting on the back and into the album it goes. nanny, proud as ever, expresses her gratitude by pretending she doesn't see me doing this. my presence here reminds her of what's real and she isn't interested in it. right now, in this moment, she needs to believe that alzheimer's is something that only happens to other people. i let her.

"what about this one? i don't recognize the background."

nanny's brow furrows. she studies it closely, then a small smile breaks across her face. she likes being asked questions because it means someone still has faith in her answer.

"we went out dancing one night in the city and a funny guy with a bird on his shoulder asked to take our photograph. i had just graduated from college, so we said yes and i sprung for the print. then, when maria started working somewhere with a xerox machine, she took it to work with her and made a copy for herself right under the boss' nose! because we couldn't afford two prints and she loved this photograph. i told her i'd have given it to her if she wanted it, but she had real balls, maria did. she never took a handout. she had real balls."

i text my mom for the year nanny graduated and print the details accordingly, thanking my grandmother for the information. she smiles again, a little wider now. time passes quickly when you think about it, so we look at old photos and we try not to think about it. desperate to hold on, i think we're unraveling quicker than the memories we're clinging to. being someone's best friend demands a heart in pieces, so we crack open our chests and we give them ours. time takes and takes, changing everything in the process. terrified, we commit every detail of each other's faces to memory in case the air between us disappears, too.