Rebecca Heath Anderson
Alligator Godzilla Mass
This is an excerpt from a piece about my family’s experience with frontotemporal dementia. FTD’s symptoms are often mistaken for personality changes rather than the markers of a devastating disease that includes major behavioral changes and the loss of language. By sharing our stories, we shed light on an illness that deserves greater awareness, compassion and research.
My mom flew halfway around the planet just to embarrass me, I thought as I picked her up at Kansai International Airport. Except for her shoes, she’d draped herself entirely in varying shades of green: a pilled, musty smelling forest green sweater, olive jeans she had dyed herself, and neon socks so bright I flicked my sunglasses on and off in exaggerated jest before we hugged for the first time in a year.
In truth it was a miracle that either of us ever made it to Japan.
‘Well, the stars must have aligned,’ she said in her thick Wisconsin accent as we boarded the bus from Osaka to Yonago, the rural town where I was teaching English. I’d been working since I was 15, but this was my first ‘real-real’ job, and she was visiting to celebrate my 24th birthday and see the cherry blossoms. I was sure she’d heard that phrase—stars aligning—from the psychic she visited weekly with Donna, her cashier colleague back at the local hardware store, Kitz & Pfeil.
By ‘thick accent’, think Frances McDormand in Fargo (‘Oh, don’tchya know’); frequently mistaken for a Canadian (‘…Er, no?’ tacked on to the end of every sentence, including direct statements); and add in an extra ‘y’ randomly into words. She spoke in a dialect only innately understood by her five siblings raised on a dairy farm outside of Weyauwega, and could turn a simple hello into an eight-syllable question.
I was worried about more than her attire on this visit. We hadn’t seen each other since the previous summer when she helped me pack for my move. We had been sitting in her tiny living room in Menasha, surrounded by the mountains of crap I’d trekked back from Madison after graduation. I had never been out of the country before yet had waited to sort and pack until almost the very night before flying out. The puzzle of what I’d even need to bring for two years in a foreign country overwhelmed me, plus, I’d been too preoccupied with cultivating a growing collection of boyfriends. My mom was pissed–jyust pyisst–that I’d left things for the last minute again, but not so mad that she didn’t keep offering to take a smoke break with me or play a quick round of rummy.
‘Now, do they have stores in Japan, er no?’ she asked after she played her hand and discarded.
‘Do you mean a certain type of store?’ I asked.
‘Noooo, like, can you buy things when you live there?’ she asked again, leaning forward while exhaling a plume of smoke from her Salem Light 100. I looked around the smokey room, my eyes resting on her Toshiba TV, and over to the pack of Fuji disposable cameras we’d bought together earlier that day. Trying to keep condescension out of my voice, I answered, ‘Yes, they do have stores there.’
As I crossed items off my packing list, we chatted, and she continued to pepper me with questions about a place I’d never been yet but was aching to get to. I wanted to start my life as far away as I could.
‘Now, do they have sex in Japan?‘ she asked conspiratorially as she lit one of her thousand candles, like it was some great mystery of the universe.
‘Mom.’
‘What? Do they? Don’t you want to know?’ she asked.
‘Mom. Jesus Christ. How do you think Japanese people exist?’ My patience had left the room. So had hers.
‘God fucking dammit, Rebecca, STYOP using the Lord’s name in vain!’ she yelled while angrily taping together a box for me. In a calmer voice, and mostly to herself, she added, ‘I meant, do they talk about sex.’
Our relationship was steady in its oscillation between warmth and startling volatility, as though we were two-step dancers attempting to fling each other right off the face of the earth with each spin, but unable to let go. We had even gone long spans of time not speaking to each other at all. The once sporadic and short-lived silent treatments had matured into a yearlong gag order before the beginning of my first year away at college. I remember the deep sadness of that time, feeling unmoored while all my friends’ parents packed up station wagons and helped them move into the dorms, and I was on my own, figuring out how I would afford to eat.
My mom and I had both come from a long line of first-born daughters held together by the middle name Ruth but not much else. I was the first female in my family to go to college, and I thought at the time that she had lit my financial aid FAFSA paperwork on fire out of pure jealousy. This was in the late ’90s, before everything was online. I’m told that when my parents were still married, their deal had been that my mom would first work to pay for my dad to go to tech school, and afterward, he would pay for her to go. They divorced before she could claim her due, and she was left uneducated, raising three children under the age of five all by herself.
I can clearly picture the burning rage in her eyes as she holds the packet of FAFSA forms I so desperately need her to sign, her blue Bic lighter fanning across the edges, the flames catching and edging upward before she throws the remnants in the sink and turns the faucet on, the ink and embers gurgling down the drain. As clear as this image appears now, I cannot truly remember if she only threatened to burn the papers, or if she did in fact burn them. I know with certainty that I requested a new batch of forms and filled them out myself, forging her signature easily, with the looping ‘R.’ in the middle matching my own.
‘She probably burned them, Becca,’ my younger sister says. I ask why, and she reminds me that this happened around the same time as the ‘shearing-scissors-balloon-popping-Mother’s-Day-incident’. I hadn’t been home for that event but can feel the longing in the pit of my sister’s stomach when she says the word byalloon, the same sorrow I feel when I hear the word pyaperwoork. We hear these words always in mom’s voice: the long vowels, the extra syllables and extra ‘y’s, and the loss. My older brother has completely blocked these years, but I’m sure there are certain words that could make him flinch, too.
My mom and I had slowly inched our way back to each other in the proceeding years after the year of silence, and her vacation to visit me in Japan was her big olive branch. Maybe that was why she had dyed her jeans and drenched herself in green. I knew how much this trip was a sacrifice for her. It meant two weeks of unpaid time away from her minimum-wage job at Kitz & Pfeil, plus the cost of the flight, train tickets, food and spending money. When you live well below the poverty line, a regular trip like this can cost almost a half year’s wages.
‘It feels like you won the lottery,’ I said as we found our seats on the bus to Yonago and settled in for the three-hour journey. She looked out the window for a long while as the Osaka cityscape gave way to mountains. ‘Well,’ she hesitated. ‘Donna and I went up to Oneida.’ There it was. Gambling. A new one in her repertoire of addictions. When I didn’t respond, she added hopefully, ‘And I can pay off your credit card?’
I rested my head on her shoulder, and she tilted to rest her head on the top of mine. Nestled in together and holding hands, I told her all about the time I panicked when my students crawled out the window and ran away during class; I shared the cultural mistakes to avoid, such as sticking your chopsticks upright into a bowl of rice, as it’s bad luck when done anytime other than during funerary rites; and, I begged her not to ask my boss Matsumoto-sensei, who would be our tour guide for part of the trip, any stupid questions. Do Japanese people have sex? Pffft.
‘Now, does Matsutsi have a family, er no?’ she sat up and asked.
‘It’s Ma-tsu-mo-to,’ I said, ‘and call him Sensei.’
‘That’s what I said, Myatsuuuutsiiii.’ She frowned, realizing what she’d said, and then laughed. I felt embarrassed for how loudly we were laughing on the bus, the Japanese salary men next to us trying to sleep, with Asahi Shimbun newspapers covering their faces.
I brought my voice back down to a whisper while teaching her important phrases she’d need. ‘Arigato gozaimasu,’ I sounded out slowly for her. Thank you very much. ‘Now you try.’
‘Alligator Godzilla Mass,’ she said proudly.
I slowed it way down, having her repeat each syllable after me.
‘A.’
‘Aaaah,’ she repeated.
‘Ri.’
‘Reeeee.’
‘Ga.’
‘Gyaaa.’
‘To.’
‘Toh.’
‘Now put it together: arigato,’ I encouraged her.
‘Alligator,’ she responded.
Much of her trip is a blur to me now. When I flip through the photo album, my breath catches at the beauty of the flower arrangement we made together for a city-wide showcase, and I’m surprised by how young she looks, how similar my jawline today looks like hers profile in the photo of us kneeling together during a tea ceremony. I worry if I will become her, or already have. Like a flipbook animation, I see us moving from a day at Kaike beach on the coast of the Sea of Japan, to smiling together outside of Matsue Castle with ‘Matsutsi’ as our guide, (yes, she called him that), to picnicking during the cherry blossom festival, with Mt. Daisen ablaze in the sunset.
It’s only half the story. If I were to turn the animation flipbook over and flick through the backside of the pages, we’d also see her crumpled in a crying tantrum on the sidewalk outside of a bustling, loudly pinging pachinko parlor, acting as a toddler, hanging onto my leg and refusing to leave unless I’d let her gamble. And, after enjoying an elaborate meal prepared by my new British boyfriend–now husband–we’d see her yanking me aside and whispering harshly, ‘If I were you, I’d ask him, ‘Hey, what the hyell are you hiding from me?”’ I ask what she means, and she shrugs, “Men just aren’t thyat nice.”
On the last full day of her trip, my birthday, I’d arranged for us to stay at an onsen–a Japanese hot spring resort–and overnight in a ryokan, a traditional tatami room with futons on the floor instead of Western beds. I wanted to share with her what I’d come to love about Japan: the calming aesthetics, the deep relaxation of soaking in lavender scented pools, and the peace of living within strict constraints and rules. Slow purposeful movements. Grace. No volatility.
As we undressed in the onsen’s changing room, I explained that swimming suits weren’t allowed. Before entering the baths, we’d need to first wash ourselves in a methodical way, sitting on a low bench, ladling water from a bucket as we lathered first our private areas and then the rest of our bodies. “Oh, we both get to be in our birthday suits today!” she said joyously. An old obaasan grandmother coughed lightly, and I shushed my mom.‘We have to be quiet in here. Whispering only. No running. No swimming.’ I was trying to avert my gaze away from her as we washed, but noticed she was the one staring at everyone else, her mouth gaping open. ‘And no staring, it’s not polite.’
She tried bringing her towel into the bathing area and was baffled when I said no, she must return it to the changing area–regular towels aren’t allowed in this sacred space, only a tiny washcloth you can place atop your head.
While she returned her towel, I stepped into the medium temperature bath first, wanting to cover myself. It was the largest bath, and empty, and the best temperature before trying out the much hotter and then the freezing pools. Even the temperature of the baths had a precise, natural order to them, designed to relax your muscles like a deep-tissue water massage. Outside of the large window, the cherry trees in the curated Japanese garden flickered in the dusky wind; a blossom fell and floated in the outdoor pool.
When she came back into the steamy baths area, I raised my forefinger to my mouth and gestured for her to enter quietly. She began to skip and then actually jumped into that bath, splashing me purposefully and laughing. ‘Mom!’ I whisper-yelled. She started to float on her back, her nipples and pubic hair rising above the water line. I looked away, not wanting to see her in all her nakedness and not wanting to catch anyone’s eyes and definitely not wanting to be kicked out. I overheard two Japanese ladies whisper, ‘Gaijin.’ Foreigners. I’d had to get special permission even to attend this onsen as a gaijin with two tattoos–a double taboo, and here she was acting like a little kid.
She rolled over in the water into a breaststroke, and like a frog fanning out its front and hind legs, she glided across the bath with a huge smile splashed across her face. It might be the only time I’ve ever seen her truly have fun. AQ