Still Alice Page 0,20

had an idea. She looked at each item once—a baby wearing a Santa hat pictured on a holiday greeting card from a former graduate student, an advertisement for a fitness club, the phone bill, the gas bill, yet another L.L.Bean catalog. She returned to the couch, drank her tea, stacked the photo albums back on the shelf, and then sat very still. The ticking clock and brief eruptions of steam from various radiators made the only sounds in the house. She stared at the clock. Five minutes passed. Long enough.

Without looking at the mail, she said aloud, “Baby in Santa hat card, gym membership offering, phone bill, gas bill, another L.L.Bean catalog.”

Piece of cake. But to be fair, the time between being presented with John Black’s address and being asked to recall it had been much longer than five minutes. She needed an extended delay interval.

She grabbed the dictionary off the shelf and devised two rules for picking a word. It had to be low frequency, one she didn’t use every day, and it had to be a word that she already knew. She was testing her recent memory, not learning acquisition. She opened the dictionary to an arbitrary page and put her finger down on the word “berserk.” She wrote it on a piece of paper, folded it, put it in her pants pocket, and set the timer on the microwave for fifteen minutes.

One of Lydia’s favorite books when she was a toddler was Hippos Go Berserk! Alice went about the business of readying for Christmas Eve dinner. The timer beeped.

“Berserk,” without hesitation or needing to consult the piece of paper.

She continued playing this game throughout the day, increasing the number of words to remember to three and the delay period to forty-five minutes. Despite this added degree of difficulty and the added likelihood of interference from the distraction of dinner preparation, she remained error-free. Stethoscope, millennium, hedgehog. She made the ricotta raviolis and the red sauce. Cathode, pomegranate, trellis. She tossed the salad and marinated the vegetables. Snapdragon, documentary, vanish. She put the roast in the oven and set the dining room table.

Anna, Charlie, Tom, and John sat in the living room. Alice could hear Anna and John arguing. She couldn’t make out the topic from the kitchen, but she could tell it was an argument by the emphasis and volume of the back-and-forth. Probably politics. Charlie and Tom were staying out of it.

Lydia stirred the hot mulled cider on the stove and talked about her acting classes. Between concentrating on making dinner, the words she needed to remember, and Lydia, Alice didn’t have the mental reserve to protest or disapprove. Uninterrupted, Lydia spoke in a free and passionate monologue about her craft, and despite Alice’s strong bias against it, she found she couldn’t resist being interested.

“After the imagery, you layer on the Elijah question, ‘Why this night rather than any other?’” said Lydia.

The timer beeped. Lydia stepped aside without being asked, and Alice peeked in the oven. She waited for an explanation from the undercooked roast long enough for her face to become uncomfortably hot. Oh. It was time to recall the three words in her pocket. Tambourine, serpent…

“You’re never playing everyday life as usual, the stakes are always life and death,” said Lydia.

“Mom, where’s the wine opener?” Anna hollered from the living room.

Alice struggled to ignore her daughters’ voices, the ones her mind had been trained to hear above all other sounds on the planet, and to concentrate on her own inner voice, the one repeating the same two words like a mantra.

Tambourine, serpent, tambourine, serpent, tambourine, serpent.

“Mom?” asked Anna.

“I don’t know where it is, Anna! I’m busy, look for it yourself.”

Tambourine, serpent, tambourine, serpent, tambourine, serpent.

“It’s always about survival when you boil it down. What does my character need to survive and what will happen to me if I don’t get it?” said Lydia.

“Lydia, please, I don’t want to hear about this right now,” Alice snapped, holding her sweaty temples.

“Fine,” said Lydia. She turned herself squarely toward the stove and stirred vigorously, obviously hurt.

Tambourine, serpent.

“I still can’t find it!” yelled Anna.

“I’ll go help her,” said Lydia.

Compass! Tambourine, serpent, compass.

Relieved, Alice took out the ingredients for the white-chocolate bread pudding and placed them on the counter—vanilla extract, a pint of heavy cream, milk, sugar, white chocolate, a loaf of challah bread, and two half-dozen cartons of eggs. A dozen eggs? If the piece of notebook paper with her mother’s recipe on it still existed, Alice didn’t