SAG HARBOR
Summer 2014
That handbag drives me crazy.
It’s a gold-sequined bag, big enough to hold all the essentials: change purse, cosmetics, identification. The kind of bag that everything gets dumped into, with no compartments, so that car keys get mixed in with old Life Savers, good jewelry, perfume samples, and spare change.
When her memory began to fade, B. would misplace the bag—either in the apartment or at the restaurant—and so the scavenger hunt would begin. I looked in the obvious places: dresser drawers, under the bed, in the bathroom. Dana was the one who realized that B. tended to put her bag in eye-level places. Like in the broiler over the stove, or on a hook in the coat closet. Or, at the restaurant, among the bottles over the bar. So we learned how to find it most days. Now that we’re out in Sag Harbor full-time, B. has a whole new network of hiding places. Whether she means to hide her bag and other items, or just forgets where she’s put them, I can’t say for sure—and perhaps neither can she. But it’s like a scavenger hunt every day here.
Always, when she gets ready for bed, B. takes the handbag into her closet. This is where it goes off the radar. The closet is more of a mess than ever. Now she balls up her clothes from the day and throws them in a pile, or sorts and re-sorts them by some foggy logic that will change the very next day. Hidden in those piles, a different pile each night, is the gold-sequined bag. B. won’t let me look for it there: I’m not allowed in. Hours the next morning are spent looking for the bag, until B. reemerges, triumphant. If I were a better caregiver than I am, I would clap and congratulate her. Instead I find it hard to hide my exasperation.
Over the last months, the gold handbag has grown heavier, as more and more spare change accumulates in it. B. never used to keep spare change in her bag. She does now. I’d guess that bag has come to weigh five pounds, getting heavier all the time. Kind of a metaphor, right?
The latest way B. deals with the bag is to carry it from room to room, morning to night. At least she tends not to lose it by day. But she won’t let me empty it of all that spare change. It just clinks around with her, like a sack of gold, ready for purchases she no longer makes.
There is, I’m convinced, another reason why B. keeps that bag at hand. As tired as it’s come to look, it represents her sense of decorum. Her mother always told her: a lady carries a bag. It holds your lipstick, your compact, your travel flask of perfume, and of course your mad money, enough to get you home if you and your gentleman caller get mad at each other. The fact that B. carries hers from room to room is not, to her, a sign of illness. It’s proving she’s still the kind of lady her momma taught her to be.
I get that, and I find it as sweet as you probably do. I just wish that her valuable jewelry hadn’t found its way into that bag, never to be seen again. I’m talking a lot of valuable jewelry, six figures’ worth. We had matching Rolex watches, even. No longer: hers is gone.
Possibly—and this is hardly reassuring—that missing jewelry may never have found its way into her handbag at all. B. may have tucked a bracelet or necklace into a balled-up cashmere sweater that went out for dry-cleaning—very expensive dry-cleaning. She may have put the odd piece or two into some kind of container that got mistaken for trash. All I know is that her beautiful pieces are gone, along with the life they symbolized. I could go out and buy her some new jewelry, but why? We’d both just worry about losing it—me a bit more than B. We’ve got enough stress without that.
The other day B. lost her phone. We called her number to no avail. It’s probably in that closet somewhere, its charge depleted. B. calls almost no one now, and when friends call her, she fails to call them back. But we’ll get a new phone—everyone has a phone, right? Perhaps the old one will surface first.
Meanwhile, B. spends hours each morning rummaging through her clothes. I used to think she was just looking for what to wear that day, and maybe she is, but it’s more than that: it’s an obsessive behavior. Unfortunately, that’s part of Alzheimer’s, too.
Let’s give some of those clothes away, I say to B. She doesn’t need five long summer gowns. I don’t say this, but it’s true: B. isn’t likely to attend many fancy benefit dinners from now on. Those days are gone. Let’s give the gowns away, along with some of the older clothes she never wears; buy some casual clothes for the country home we now live in full-time. B. is adamant: no way. “I don’t want new clothes!” she says. “I don’t want fashion help!” Alzheimer’s has touched whatever part of her brain governs shopping. She used to love buying new clothes. Now, she says, she wants no new stuff—only to keep what she has.
Actually, B. has a whole other wardrobe in storage—her Manhattan clothes. The sensible move would be to put a lot of the Sag Harbor clothes in storage with them, especially the winter wear, and bring some of the newer, summer-weight clothes out. But I can’t make B. aware of that other wardrobe at all: out of sight, out of mind. And having me move anything out of that Sag Harbor closet is a no go with her.
Now the clothes closet drama has entered a new phase. B. is filling shopping bags with clothes and lining them up by the front door. She says she doesn’t want to be a burden anymore to me. She also wants to be sure her clothes are safe from my meddling. So she’s taking them home. What she means, as she explains every time she gets upset these days, is that she’s taking them down to Everson, Pennsylvania, her hometown.
Every morning, B. goes out to her little Mercedes-Benz two-seater. It’s a car I bought her some years ago as a present. Some hesitation or fear, or maybe confusion, keeps her from putting the bags in the car. Instead she get in and sits there, keys in hand, not quite up to starting the engine. And there she remains, until I come out and tell her it’s time for breakfast.