Goodbye, Vitamin

On New Year's Eve, Ruth drives to her friend Bonnie’s house to spend the holiday with her. When she arrives at Bonnie’s apartment, she has already set up a makeshift hair studio. She cuts Ruth’s hair despite her rule of never cutting someone’s hair within six weeks of a breakup.

Ruth writes about her breakup with Joel and how he is now living with a new girlfriend in Charleston, near his family. Ruth explains that when their previous lease was up, Joel took care to pack his things separately from Ruth’s. When it came time to move, he informed her that he would not be moving to the new apartment with her.

Bonnie and Ruth go to a friend’s apartment for a party. Ruth runs into an old high school friend, Jared, and tells him that she is thinking about living at home for a year to watch after her father who is having “lapses in memory” (9). Ruth excuses herself from the party and goes to sit in the car. She listens to a voicemail from Joel’s mother and fantasizes about how she must hate Joel’s new girlfriend.

A minute after midnight, Ruth receives a call from Linus. She teases him about not coming home for Christmas but thinks that she can’t really blame him, considering she rarely came home in the past few years herself. Ruth thinks about how she does not like New Year’s because there is “no such thing” (10) as new beginnings. Back at Bonnie’s apartment, Ruth realizes with horror that she is still wearing her engagement ring. She takes it off and throws it back into her purse, which is characteristically full of junk.

Ruth wakes up with a hangover the next morning, remembering a dream from the night before. In her dream, she stood in the rain; Joel was holding her umbrella, but he “wandered off to follow a dog that was wearing pants” (13). Ruth looks through Bonnie’s paintings and admires one that looks like a self-portrait. Bonnie tells her to take it as a welcome-home gift.

Back at her parents’ house, Ruth finds them watching the Rose Parade together on the couch. Ruth remarks that her mother quit cooking because of her father’s condition; Her mother believes that years of cooking with aluminum cookware led to Howard’s dementia. This development is especially surprising because Ruth’s mother used to make everything from scratch.

Ruth considers staying home for a year more seriously, thinking “why not be here, in this house where I grew up, and where my parents still live?” (15). She thinks about how Joel always wanted to leave California; while Ruth outwardly agreed with him, she never actually wanted to leave. Ruth thinks about her mother, who lost her adoptive parents in a car accident the year Ruth was born, and who has no family other than Ruth and her father. She looks at a photograph hanging in the living room that shows her father holding her the day she was born. In the photo, her father wears bright red pants and a black-and-white patterned shirt because he had read babies respond to high-contrast patterns and the color red. Ruth notices that her father is in a bad mood while watching the parade and knows that it is due, in part, to his teaching contract not being renewed for the semester due to his illness.

While Annie emptied the kitchen pantry of ingredients, she started a vitamin regimen for each of them, specifically B-12 to build myelin in their brains. Ruth explains the history of Alzheimer’s disease and remarks that she wishes the disease were named after its first patient, Auguste Deter, rather than the doctor who treated her.

At home alone with her father, Ruth tries to coax him out of his office. He appears, shirtless, only to brew coffee. Ruth recalls a memory she has not thought about in years. One day, her father picked her up from school, and they noticed a dozen pigeons sitting on the hood of a car. When they walked closer to investigate, they saw that the pigeons were trying to get into the car to reach french fries that were strewn about the interior. Howard then drove them to the nearest drive-in, where they ordered french fries and milkshakes. Together, Ruth and her father fed fries to the birds while drinking the milkshakes.

This is the memory Ruth recalled whenever Linus called her over the years to excoriate their father as a “liar, and he’s a drunkard, and he’s a cheat” (20). While she listened to her brother in silence, Ruth thought that her brother must be wrong. Ruth explains that on account of their five-year age difference, Linus’s experience growing up was much different than hers. After Ruth left for college, their father began drinking again.

Ruth wakes up in the middle of the night to the sound of gunshots but realizes that her father is downstairs watching television. She sits on the couch with him and is momentarily terrified when her father hands her a banana, calling it a “curved yellow fruit” (20), before he reveals that he is joking and knows it’s called a banana. Ruth realizes that she needs to stay at home for the year but tells her mother that it won’t be any longer than that. 

Ruth briefly returns to San Francisco to quit her job as a sonogram technician and clean out her apartment. At the apartment, Ruth realizes just how little attachment she has to the space. She fills two boxes with items and then decides to trash the rest, such as her collection of misshapen nuts. Looking at the jar, Ruth thinks “what a ridiculous person I am” (24) and chews a handful of the stale nuts. She finds other items that remind her of her relationship with Joel: movie ticket stubs, his spare car keys, and seeds from an apple they shared in bed. Looking at the items, Ruth sees a representation of how hard she tried to keep the relationship alive and how “grotesque” her efforts were.

The doorbell rings and she greets her friend, Maxine Grooms, MD. Ruth recalls how they became friends: Maxine found Ruth crying at work after a fight with Joel, near the end of the relationship. They go out to dinner together, and Maxine tells Ruth that things will get better. She tells Ruth to always stop at two-and-a-half drinks and to make a list of good things when she is feeling down.

Ruth leaves her apartment behind and drives, unannounced, to Linus’s place in Santa Cruz. Linus is getting the mail when she arrives and declines her offer to come with him. Ruth remembers that Linus has a different viewpoint from her because he was still at home when their father had an affair with a physics professor colleague. Ruth, who was by then long gone from home, heard through Linus about everything going on at home because her parents refused to discuss it with her. Inside Linus’s apartment, Ruth and Linus share a few beers, and only after this does Linus ask how their father is. Ruth asks him again to visit, and he reminds her “I’ve been home” (28). They fall asleep together on the couch.

Linus and Ruth go to the beach together in the morning, and Ruth makes one last appeal to Linus, reminding him “He’s our dad, though,” (29). Linus responds that he doesn’t care. Ruth stops often on the drive back to her parent's house, buying fruit at roadside stands and collecting rocks at passing beaches.

She spots a black truck emblazoned with the words “EAT MORE ENDIVE” (29), and the driver pulls over to let her pass, giving her a small wave. Ruth runs into the truck driver at her next stop, and he apologizes for not warning her about the poor-quality coffee as she spits it out in the parking lot. He hands her a bottle of Five Hour Energy and tells her it feels “like the sun coming up in your head” (30). Ruth sits with the truck driver, and he tells her about endives and asks her what she does for work.

Ruth reflects that when she tells people that she does sonography, they often assume she works with whales. Instead of correcting them, Ruth began studying whales and echolocation so she could answer their questions. The truck driver does not ask her about whales but instead hands her a small, homemade recipe book called Cookery by Carl, filled with endive recipes. He tells her about a Thai tradition where people create cookbooks before they die and pass them out to friends and family so that when they use the cookbook, they remember the deceased. When Ruth finally makes it home, Annie greets her and tells her that her toes are frozen, a sign that the grapefruit trees will not produce any fruit this year.

The next morning, Annie goes to work and leaves Howard and Ruth at home. Howard again refuses to leave his office, and Ruth bides her time watching educational videos and reading old newspapers. Ruth observes the backyard, looking at the familiar piles of lumber for the patio her father has been meaning to build for years. She watches the bird feeders in the hopes that birds will arrive, but they don’t, and her father does not leave his study.

Howard shows Ruth another page from the notebook. In the entry, young Ruth asks, “What do birds do in the rain?” (35) and Ruth remembers that conversation. She recalls that she kept asking her father about how the birds stayed safe in the rain and that she did not feel adequately reassured by his response. She also remembers that he ultimately became annoyed with her queries, while her mother helped her to build a birdhouse out of popsicle sticks.

Ruth does a load of laundry while on the phone with Bonnie, who is complaining about her boyfriend. Ruth feels relieved that she is not the only one with relationship and career problems. She reflects on her long friendship with Bonnie, settling on a memory from when they were 14 at Huntington Beach. A man on rollerblades stopped to flirt with them and bought them lemonades, but they ran away in horror when he pulled out a condom and asked them if they knew what it was.

Howard enters the kitchen, notices Ruth, and tells her to go home. Ruth remembers that the doctor said irritability might be a side effect of Howard’s dementia. Howard’s teaching assistant, Theo, calls Ruth and makes a proposition: A few of Howard’s former students would like to meet for a made-up class. Howard would think the class was real, and it would help him to keep his mind occupied. Theo explains that nobody, including the administration, would have to know. Though Ruth knows her father misses teaching, she does wonder why his students would attend a class they were not receiving credit for. Theo’s answer, “Your dad’s a good teacher. And a good friend” (40) surprises her. Ruth recalls going to campus with her father growing up, how she often heard laughing coming from his office and how obvious it was that he loved his work. Theo asks Ruth to at least consider his idea and gives her his number. Ruth does not write it down at first but gives in when Theo asks her to repeat it back to him.

Ruth occupies herself at home by running up and down the staircase, coaxing a blue jay to eat from the bird feeder, and trying to keep the Christmas tree alive with sugar water. Admitting defeat, she drags the tree to the curb. She watches Family Feud and gets the distinct sense that she is out of touch with others when one of the game’s questions reveals that many people prefer artificial Christmas trees over real ones because fake trees have no scent.

While eating takeout on the couch with her mother, Ruth tries to explain that aluminum is a naturally occurring element in many things, like “cake mix, antiperspirant [...] the earth’s crust” (42) to convince her mother that Howard’s illness is not her fault. Her mother ignores her, telling her to put on a sweater.

Ruth sits outside her father’s office, sliding tortillas underneath the door while begging him to come out. She continues to find trivial things to occupy her days such as digging hair out of the bathroom drain with chopsticks and reading Alzheimer’s caregiver forums.

Ruth finds the phone number for Dean Levin, the man who fired her father, and calls him. Ruth reminds him that she is Howard Young’s daughter and insists that he has never been better. She asks if there is any way Howard could have his job back, but the Dean says no. He tells Ruth that her father is “unwell” and that he’ll call the police if he sees her father on campus. Levin’s cold response angers Ruth, who recalls that he and her father have a rivalry that dates back years.

Ruth calls Theo, and they meet the next morning at a local doughnut shop to discuss their plan for Howard’s class. They decide to meet on Mondays because Levin is not on campus then. Theo will find an empty classroom for the class to meet and will explain the change in schedule to Howard.

Theo offers important background about Levin’s anger towards Howard: Before he was fired, Howard sent emails to the provost insisting that Levin be fired. Howard was also showing lapses in memory such as showing up to classes on the wrong days and forgetting names, grades, and tests. Ruth asks how Theo knew she would be home, and he admits that her father talks about her all the time and how excited he was that she would be home for Christmas.

Ruth calls Dr. Nazaryan, Bonnie’s father and another professor at the college, to tell him about the plan. He is excited to hear about it and even offers his classroom for their Monday class meetings.

Annie is surprised when Howard tells her that the college changed its mind and offered him a position teaching his California History class after all. Annie glances at Ruth, and Ruth can see that she understands something is up, but Annie chooses not to question it. She tells Howard to take Ruth to class with him as his assistant. Howard reluctantly agrees and tells Ruth that her duties are to make photocopies and ensure that the library has copies of the textbook.