You are looking out your front
window at
the house across the street. Lovely job
with the Christmas lights this year. Big
frosted bulbs in primary colors trace the house-shape from ground to
roof peak. Each window outlined neatly,
electric candles
fake-flickering above each sash. You were
going to get on a ladder and do the same thing.
If you were going to live, which you aren’t.
You are lying in the living
room because you’re
at the public stage now. Vanity and
pretense disassembled themselves when the hospital bed came in. Big metal frame more solid than bone, a
good
proxy for your shrinking body. Besides,
people want to say their goodbyes. And
shouldn’t they crack bowls of Christmas walnuts, as they have
these thirty
years past? But now they come and
leave
through the back door, through the kitchen.
You have not asked for the front door to remain closed, but your
husband
has made some kind of decree. As if
watching friends enter and leave will remind you that you won’t
again. Enter that is.
Leaving, you’ll be leaving. Just
leave that to Grace.
Grace is Hospice, a black
woman in pink
scrubs. Grace took your mother’s
antique
bowl-and-pitcher and filled them with hot water to wash your hair. Grace says tings for things and hands you fat
joints from your prescription bottle.
Grace will be there, when it happens, if your husband cannot. You have told your husband he
doesn’t have
to. You have told him it is up to
him. You have said it’s
unlikely you’ll
even know he’s there.
You hope he knows you are
being polite.
You should have put a bed in
the living
room long ago. Very pleasant here, with
the fireplace. That’s one reason you
have visitors at all. But you
aren’t a
fool—it’s the prescription too. You
are
generous with the fat joints, more generous than last time you played
procurer. When you snuck them from your
father’s stash hidden
inside his backgammon set. When you took
one to the park at twilight and handed it around. Scott
and Betty, Bob and Deb. Greg, the
first to touch your tits. All your wet
lips around the burnt-smelling
end. No one thought it was working, but
suddenly, everything was funny.
Your daughter will not partake. Your daughter is in AA. Your
daughter has things to live for and
cannot help telling everyone else they do too.
Even you, who does not. She would
like you to at least respect her
recovery. You would like her to sit on
the davenport instead of standing over you, jaw-skin sagging. She is older now than you were when she was
born. You will not meet her children,
should she bear any. A forbidden thought:
you hope she will not. She has built
a
fragile and temporary life—part-time jobs, half-sober men,
apartments let
month-to-month. Your fault or her nature?
Likely both. But
you would like to go back to the day she
was ten and you let her have half your vodka tonic at a wedding. You would like to live, if you could, if only
to give her what she wants.
But dying takes its work too. On that front, you are doing a pretty good
job. You saved up for it, like a trip to
Paris. The hospital bed, Grace, the fat
joints. And what comes next.
Satin-lined oak with brass trim. You
asked the undertaker if you could take it
for a test drive. He was not shocked. People ask all the time. You
lay in the floor model, looking up at your
husband. Until then, he’d been
laughing,
indulging your whim. Until then,
he’d
sworn to hold your hand when it happened.
You hold your hands up before
your
face. Blue veins, yellow skin. Your fingers move easily.
You could play the piano, if one were brought
to you. You tap out the first bars of The Wild Horseman on your thighs. Amazing
how much you can still do, this
close. You last made love three weeks
ago. You will never get arthritis
and
watch your hands curl. You will never go
blind or bankrupt or be in a plane crash.
You have swum far out. An ocean
of worry is behind you.
Ocean.
You will not see the ocean again.
Not until the ice caps melt, at least. Your
husband is putting you in the ground so
he can plant flowers on your forehead every May. How
deep can a marigold root reach? You would
have liked cremation,
pulverization. Render your fat like whale oil, then scatter a bit of
you here
and there. But you are the deserter, so
he gets to choose.
The red embers glow beneath a
coat of
ash. Grace puts the fire to bed each
night, piling ash over heat for rekindling come morning.
She dozes on the davenport in her stocking feet,
nurse clogs abandoned under the coffee table.
Grace snores and you cannot roll her on her side.
Across the street, the
Christmas lights
go out. They are on a timer.
They go on and off whether the family is home
or not. A year ago, you found this
sad. The warm lights and the empty
house. The state of modern family
life. Who wants to go to the
Dominican Republic for Christmas when you can
sit in front of your own warm fire?
Your husband asked if you wanted a tree this year.
You said yes, at first. Then no,
when you remembered you’d be mulch
before it was. And
say you did make it to Christmas? What
would anyone dare give you? A book is a
risk and with all the fat joints,
you can’t concentrate anyway. Movies
then. It may very well happen while you
are watching something stupid, since you like to watch stupid things
now. If you were close, would
Grace be sure to
turn off Happy Gilmore? You
will have to ask her in the morning.
All the clocks chime twelve. Your husband still winds them, turns the
brass keys on Sundays. They will keep
good time forever, if you wind them. You
have picked a few things to think about when it happens.
If you are lucid, if you are conscious. Science
is not as clear on the bright line as
you imagined. Nothing temporal or sentimental, your therapist advised
when you
told him of your plan. Wedding day,
vacations, birth of daughter, all out.
But this is one: your husband turning the clock keys. He has done it since you were married; you
can picture him at any age. He will
do
it when you are gone. He will do it
until he goes. Even if he doesn’t,
you
will picture it that way.
When
you were young, you lay your head on his heart, sad at the likelihood
it would stop
before yours. Man versus woman, natural
fact. Then you got up and went for
Italian food. Then you got up and made
coffee.
You asked him, when it was certain, if he would trade places with you. He should have said yes. Because
that was impossible and it would have
been kind. When he said nothing, it was
like a knife. But now, you think of
him
winding the clocks. He will go on doing
it when you have slipped every yoke.
Body, mind, pain, time. Love,
too, most likely.
Breathe. A pain swells under
your
shoulder blade. The room goes white
around your body. Pain so sharp you make
your own daylight. Grace has left a fat
joint on the bedside table. You snake
your arm through the guardrail slowly. If she
catch on fire, I’ll put her out, Grace says when your husband
objects to
night smoking. Grace pried the
safeties
off a pack of Bics. The flame shoots
easily under your thumb. For a moment, you
consider lighting the blanket that swaddles you. But
Grace doesn’t need testing.
You breathe the smoke into
your gut. Do you feel it? Is
it happening? Drizzling outside now,
street of wet asphalt,
might as well be a river. Pink is a
pretty color on Grace. Your daughter is
coming again tomorrow. She plans to
bring mangosteen and an energy healer.
It worked for Shauna-from-Tuesday-group’s mother. You laugh so hard the pain jolts in your
shoulder. You
laugh so hard Grace stirs and stops
snoring. You struggle to breathe, to lay
back and stop. You put out the fat joint
and let the buzz wash you. The house
across the street seems closer now, as if the drug has sharpened your
sight. The people that live there are
drinking beer near an ocean. They are
dancing to music with a fast drumbeat.
When I was a child, I watched my grandfather dying of cancer in his living room, much like the woman in the story, surrounded by family and friends. When I wrote this, I was thinking of him, but also of Carol Shields’ novel The Stone Diaries, in which Daisy Flett is conscious right up to the moment of her death. I have been married five years and I think I had a drive to explore my own fear of what it would/will feel like to lose my spouse, or for him to lose me. I wanted to create a woman with a lively, funny mind who can look at her life objectively and without self-pity, but can also feel deeply what she and her family are losing. |