Anne's Beard

“Annie, let’s get you shaved before your daughter gets here.”

“Hannah?”

“She’s coming to see you.”

“Who?”

“Hannah. We gotta shave you. You gotta beard.”

Anne raised the flat of her hand in the air. “Leave me alone.”

The chores of dressing had grown worse over the months. Between Alzheimer’s and the isolation of Covid, Anne’s decline had escalated. A year earlier, the police had arrested her for driving without a license and taken away her right to drive.

“I was looking at the sea,” she told them.

“You’re driving on the golf course.”

“It’s the best view.”

* * *

Anne’s daughter arrived at Bay Shore Condominiums in Provincetown just after lunchtime.

“Hannah’s here!” Miriam said from the kitchen.

“Hannah?” Anne clapped her hands. “Hannah!”

Hannah hugged her father. “You look like the bearded lady in the circus, Dad.”

“I told you toshave, Annie.” Miriam chided.

“I can’t take you out for dinner looking like this,” Hannah said.

“Where?”

“Fanizzi’s. We can watch the sunset.”

“That’d be great! I haven’t been there in years.”

“Well, a few weeks.”

Anne looked confused. “I don’t understand what you’re saying.”

“Come on, Annie. We shave,” Miriam insisted. “Hannah here now. You gotta look like a lady.”

The two women helped the frail Anne stand upright.

“She’s lost weight.” Hannah said. “You’re too thin, Dad.”

“I’m almost one hundred.”

“You’re ninety.”

Anne shook their arms off and wobbled toward the bedroom. There was no hurrying anymore. Everything took time. Lots of time. The shaving. The adult diapers. Compression socks followed by the size 10 black men’s sneakers. The two women smiled at each other from behind their masks.

“No sign of the wallet?” Hannah asked. Miriam shook her head. The wallet had disappeared before the arrest on the golf course. It had Anne’s Driver’s ID. They had looked everywhere before Covid. Under furniture, in file boxes, behind the hundreds of Moleskine notebooks lined up in the closet. It was nowhere. Hannah couldn’t move Anne into a memory unit without a state ID and to get a new ID, she either needed the old one or she had to request a birth certificate for her 90-year-old gender transitioned parent, who had been born male not female, and then figure out a way to get the government bureaucracy to issue an ID to Anne, instead of Floyd, which was her birth name. And gender. The government had made it so hard to get IDs that anyone, like her father--who didn’t even remember she was female, somedays--couldn’t get proof they existed.

Miriam patted Anne’s face dry. “I gonna go now, Annie.”

Anne flailed at the affection. “Leave me alone.”

* * *

Anne cussed when the elevator didn’t arrive promptly. She used to hold her hand over the crack in the doors to feel the air pressure change when the elevator was coming. She used to play chess and piano, and design houses and cars. She used to paint huge landscapes. She used to be a man.

Downstairs, Hannah helped her father into her old Saab. Independent and ornery, as always, Anne fought the help and the seatbelt.

“Damn it!” she growled. “I hate these things.”

“Where should we drive?”

“I can’t drive anymore.”

“I can.”

They headed down Alden to Shank Painter, past the dog park and then right on the highway. “The dunes are beautiful today.”

Over the years, Anne had done a series of paintings called The Dunes of Pilgrim Lake. No. 3, Hannah’s favorite, was in a museum in Boston. No. 7 was in Anne’s living room. If she were still painting today it might have been No. 9, the light was just right—a scrape of snow contrasted a storm-worn sky. Hannah drove slowly so Anne could see the world she had once painted and remember it. Sometimes she fell asleep while they were driving and Hannah realized she was the one thinking about painting the dunes, not her father. Other times, her father’s pale blue eyes would be judging the light and the shape of trees or the line of the horizon, and there would be a little smile. That was why Hannah drove her around. For that smile.

Provincetown was a forlorn February grey. Snow drifts clung in the shade of scrub oaks. Pines devoured by the Southern pine beetle looked like felled soldiers. Covered with seafoam green lichen, lithely carving the air like dancer’s torsos, silver beeches stood as solemn survivors of the tree pandemic. The light was cushioned and pale. The wind muffled to a whisper. “Remember when we used to walk here?”

Anne nodded, but Hannah had a feeling she was borrowing Hannah’s own memory to call her own, trusting her daughter to be keeper of the past.

They pulled into Herring Cove Beach. Erosion had ruined the parking area. Human construction had ruined the view. Anne had done a series of paintings based on the Herring Cove gulls surfing wind currents overhead and mounted them on ceilings. When Hannah looked at those works of art she remembered being a child and hanging her head out of the window of the old Chrysler, while her father pointed out the flight patterns of vultures circling overhead, and her mother shouted “Keep your eye on the road!”

Anne loved flying and used to have a sailplane and a twin-engine Cessna. Hannah wondered why her father quit flying when he became a woman. Had it been a weird sort of self-misogyny?

They passed Winter’s Walk and the salt marshes then curved back to the far end of town. The sun didn’t seem to be where it should have been. One minute it was over the sea and the next over the Pilgrim monument, as if it was playing a trick with perspective. They parked at Fanizzi’s restaurant. Hannah helped her father out of the car, and pulled a mask over the large, misshapen ears poking out from under Anne’s wig.

“I hate these things!”

“It’s better than dying.” She looped her hand around Anne’s forearm. “Ready.”

“I don’t need your help.”

“I have to hold onto you, Dad.”

“Why?”

“So, if you fall, I can push you!”

Anne laughed and let Hannah take her arm.

They sat next to each other in the booth. The sky was just starting to pink. Provincetown Bay mirrored mauve.

“Look at the Grebes, Dad.” Punk-haired waterfowl dunked their heads in the water, looking for fish.

The lighthouse stood alone on a spit of land fading into the horizon.

“Why didn’t you ever paint this view?”

“I couldn’t make it work.”

The sky was magenta and orange and Anne smiled. “I love you.”

“I love you too,” Hannah said and wondered if she was lying.

“Do you need any help?”

Hannah felt sad. Covid had wiped out her job. Her tenant’s job. She did need help, but her dad couldn’t help anymore. The Trust was limited to Anne’s care and she wasn’t allowed to write checks anymore. There was an attorney in charge now. Like the rest of the world, Hannah was on her own. The string of lights cascading up the Pilgrim monument’s grey stone edifice flickered on.

* * *

In the condo, Anne got ready for bed, alone, while Hannah snooped through her father’s things. Always looking for the wallet and anything else that might be missing. On the breakfast table her father’s latest Moleskine sketchbook was lying shut. In the closet was a library of black sketchbooks stretching back to the 1960s. Everything from poor artist, old fashioned black sketchbooks to Moleskines, which she had started buying in 1997, when they first came out. The library was full of Anne’s lives. Every expenditure. Every sketch idea. Every argument. Hannah’s horse. Hannah’s drug rehab. Anne’s divorce from Hannah’s mother. Anne’s sex change. Anne’s awards. Anne’s art trips through Europe, Alaska, Asia, Vermont. Hannah’s hospitalizations. The sketches had changed over time from female figures with no faces to landscapes. There were no faces on Anne’s women.

Hannah had started going through the library of notebooks, when it became clear Anne was losing the plot and might not be able to tell her things much longer. In the scramble between memory and threat of death, Hannah had tried to piece together the complications of her father’s identity to see if she might find answers to her own. But there was too much time to cover and not enough to catch up. Amid the sketches and daily diary notations were numbers. Last year’s Moleskine had been filled with half-finished letters and strange calculations that made little sense. There were no more drawings. The latest edition sitting on the table would be the last. Most of the pages were blank or illegible. If Anne had any messages left to give, they were undecipherable.

“I’m going to bed now!” Time had been, when Anne refused to be seen without her wig on. Now she came out of her bedroom with her eyebrows drawn high on her head and her pale bald head barely covered by thin white wisps of hair. She looked like a Kabuki actor. Hannah stood up and came over to kiss her father good night. It was six thirty.

Anne walked back into her bedroom, sat on the bed and slipped a yellow, knit hat over her head. The covers had been pulled back in a particular fashion and she now lay carefully down with her feet under the comforter. “Watch this.” She reached over with her left hand and flipped the comforter over her body. Placed both arms on top of the bedspread and smiled. “See.”

“That’s great, Dad.” Hannah turned out the lights.

* * *

In the living room, Hannah shut her eyes and tried not to think too hard. The night felt too broad. Too empty. There were so many things to do. Packing the apartment. Moving. Hannah didn’t want to do any of it. She couldn’t imagine her special and weird father in an institution. Would the caregivers be kind to her? Would they shave her when she needed it? Treat her with respect or would they scorn her and laugh? Hannah had her own Anne jokes, but desperation changed things.

Dune No. 7 hung on the far living room wall. A seagull circled on the ceiling. Hannah walked into the guest room and opened the closet. She stood in front of the wall of Moleskines. What was she going to do with so much history?

The old bureau her father had used in the 1960s was wedged into the corner between the library and a stack of unfinished canvasses. Every time Hannah visited she looked in Anne’s bureau drawers; sometimes she found missing things. Sometimes not. Tonight an odd array of things had been moved around. Men’s woolen socks. Post-it notes. Gorilla tape. Paperclips. Old bank statements. She moved the socks. Paused. She couldn’t really believe her eyes. It was there. Anne’s missing wallet. Gone for almost two years, now rolled up in a pair of ski socks. She shook her head. “Where’d you hide it all this time, Dad?” She unsnapped the latch and opened the flap. There was Anne’s grim DMV mugshot. Bank and frequent customer cards were still tucked into their little sleeves. Hannah chuckled. She wanted to tell someone she had found it, but there was no one else to tell. The sock the wallet had been rolled seemed stuffed. Hannah reached inside to see what else her father had squirreled away.

A wadge of bills. Still crisp Hundreds. She started counting. Her heart ached. Between groupings were tiny colorful flags with dates. “Oh, Dad... Twenty grand?”

How long had Anne been hiding money for her to find? Before the Alzheimer’s took attendance, before Hannah became aware of the disease?

The library. The paintings. The cash. The memories. The burden. It was all she had left.

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