Something's wrong. It's late August, and Barbara Biskup, a relative newcomer to the Alzheimer's day care at Madonna Rehabilitation Hospital, paces the long corridor that leads to in-patient quarters.
She strides with purpose, hands in pockets, head forward, looking preoccupied.
Weeks earlier, Barb, 81, escaped from here wearing this disguise. Someone held open an exit door for what looked like a visitor in a hurry.
Barb is also striding into the early middle stages of the disease, feeling lost and anxious beneath that mask of impatience.
It's 11 a.m. this day, and roughly a dozen clients sit in the day-care room skinning cucumbers for pickles. There's no talk, just a click, click of peelers.
Barb storms into the doorway, peers about the room and strides back up the hall. She's had more difficulty adapting to this place than most newcomers, who typically settle in within weeks.
People are also reading…
Her expression asks: Why am I here?
And indeed, here can be a strange place, a place where people carry around the pet rabbit's cage for no reason.
Barb repeatedly asks others to open the locked door.
"It's almost lunch time," program manager Geri Hepp will tell newcomers. Their spouse bought their lunch, so they might as well eat, she'll add, winking, appealing to their frugal sides.
Barb eyes Hepp suspiciously.
"Uh-huh, OK."
The exchange exemplifies one of the difficulties in working with Alzheimer's patients. Barb realizes she isn't all there anymore, but that doesn't mean she's anybody's fool.
She senses untruths, even well-intentioned ones.
Like everyone here, Barb started coming after her family exhausted itself providing her care alone. Spouses typically aren't young and can't endure successive sleepless nights, endless questions and constant worries.
Barb was alone for just a moment while her husband, Jerry Biskup, got a checkup at the VA. Police found her wandering on the other side of busy 70th Street.
"If I had 24 hours of it," says Jerry, 84, "I probably wouldn't last too long."
Those first days of Alzheimer's day care, however, can be rough. Families come, Hepp says, looking like, "I don't know how to do this." It's like dropping off a child for the first day of kindergarten. Until now, this person has been the focus of every waking moment.
She'll be fine, Hepp tells them. What are you going to do?
Probably watch the clock, they'll say.
People with Alzheimer's often can't read clocks. But like children left at kindergarten, those left behind can stare at the clock with no sense of time passing.
Former managers still try to direct those around them. Analytical types still try to explain the world.
"Barb never quite trusts us," Hepp says. "It's part of who she was."
Throughout her life, Barb honed her BS meter until it could detect even slight untruths.
"Uh-huh, OK."
It still works, even though she no longer recalls she's been married 56 years.
"I'm dating this guy," she tells Faun Little, who directs the day-care program. "But don't tell Daddy."
Sometimes, Barb walks in search of family.
Gary, her son, will be here soon to pick her up, Hepp tells her.
Oh, I'm not looking for them, Barb says. She's looking for her folks, who in her mind still raise goats on a farm near Alma.
"OK, Barby, ready to go?"
It's mid-afternoon when Jerry arrives to pick up his wife.
He spends a moment chatting with Hepp. Barb sits next to him, relaxed, almost giddy, like they're going on a date.
At home, Jerry puts on an apron that bears their wedding photo, a gift from their son.
Who's that?
"I think it's my sister," Barb says, adding: "Too bad they didn't make it."
Jerry's eyes gloss with tears.
They met on a blind date soon after he got out of the Army following World War II.
"I was one of Patton's ghosts," he says. "She was a talented and smart farm gal."
Barb played piano, wrote poetry and made furniture. They married in 1949 and had one child. Barb still plays piano, though not as well, and she knows it.
She was a secretary, typist, and for more than 20 years, she kept the books for a series of family businesses.
"She was brilliant with numbers," says son Gary.
And brilliant with sarcasm, he adds.
A few years ago, while doing taxes, she kept adding the same figures over and over, crying. What's wrong with me, she asked.
"I didn't know what to say," Gary says.
He and his father now realize her troubles began in the late 1990s. She would go to a store, Jerry says, and sit there for 45 minutes looking at stuff.
Still, "that thing called denial is so strong," Gary says.
Barb still has "little moments of clarity." Like the time months ago when she apologized after an outburst. I think I was mean to you, she told her son on the way home. I'm sorry.
The first neurologist they took her to see was pretty sure she had Alzheimer's, and as the three of them got up to leave he handed over a folded prescription form that said, "No driving."
Barb will find her moments at Madonna becoming easier. She'll fit in and make friends.
And like many others, once she's here, she appears to enjoy herself. But also like many others, it's a struggle to bring her back.
When Jerry makes breakfast, she'll start crying, wondering why she's not like other people, he says.
"She'd never been that way," he says. Never been weepy.
Gary typically drives her to day care. At first, he told her he was going so he could help out there.
"She saw right through that."
In his 50s, Gary still isn't much good at lying to his mother.
You're not taking me to that place, are you? she asks on a different day.
Gary tries out a new lie.
"I really got to see that rabbit," he says, scrunching up his nose to imitate the day-care's pet bunny.
