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. |