What Comes Next and How to Like It

by Abigail Thomas

  I suppose it’s just as well. Sometimes when we travel together I am awkward. It feels as if we are short the next thing, but sex is the only next thing I know and it isn’t sex. When we are home we see each other almost every day. There is no need for anything more than how comfortable we are in each other’s company; we can drop in on each other any time of day or night and be welcome. But traveling, I have sometimes wanted to grab his hand, or put my arm around him. I can’t get past the impulse and don’t know what to do with it. So I hug him.

  Transplant List

  Now when Chuck talks about his own health, he speaks carefully. He doesn’t want to alarm me or perhaps himself, and his voice is measured as he explains his condition. His doctor is thinking about putting him on the transplant list. This is terrifying, no matter how the news is delivered. I say something calm in return.

  “I’ll take care of you,” I say. “When you come home.”

  “I know,” he says.

  Too Much

  Yesterday, May first, there was too much green and pink and yellow. There was no escaping the loveliness, the delicacy. Beauty assaulted me on every front—forsythia, like a breaking wave, no, a tsunami of yellow; the old magnolia exploding into pink and white, like grenades; blue sky—there was no escape from all this beauty, I was being force-fed a spring morning, even the oxygen was divine, so finally I went inside and watched The Exorcist.

  What Survives

  I ask Chuck what he thinks happens when we die.

  “You live on only insofar as others continue to think about you. Then you fade and blink out.”

  Fade and blink out. I think I can live with that.

  Dog Envy

  It is raining hard today. The dogs come in one by one, soaking wet. I dry them each with a towel, and they stand patiently until I stop. Then they give themselves violent shakes and water sprays all over and I find myself wishing I could do that, it might solve all my problems, this shaking shimmy for which there is no human equivalent.

  Big Mom’s Macaroni

  Today I made my grandmother’s macaroni. It is put together with four cheeses: Manchego, Gouda, Cheddar, and Jarlsberg. I heat up a cup of heavy cream, a cup of half-and-half, and a bunch of grated Parmesan. Big Mom knew what was good. I layer the macaroni and the cheeses, then pour the creamy liquid all over and bake it at 325 degrees so nothing curdles.

  We eat and eat. Catherine has brought salad greens from her farm share, Chuck makes salad dressing. Catherine adds too much salt to the dressing, so I slice a new potato and drop it in. They are both amazed at this bit of kitchen lore, to discover that potato absorbs extra salt. I can feel my stock go up. We watch Supernatural (of course) until Catherine has to go home to the boys. She and Chuck split the leftovers.

  “Never make this again, Mom,” she says the next day. “I ate it all.”

  And

  I got up at six because of the dogs and turned on the radio, which is my habit even before coffee and cigarette, and listened to the BBC talk with experts about fungi, which are the largest living things on the planet, and how they war with each other when competing for space and their fight sends special things into the air that can be measured, and I thought, Well, there’s the next horror novel, and then I remembered a dream I had last night about two elks dead in my backyard and how I feared the dogs would find them and turn feral and how long it would take such huge animals to disappear and how desperate my dogs would be to get at them and they lay dead in the same spot under the apple trees where a deer had died last winter, a creature I had come to think of as my deer, and how that animal was dismantled and eaten over the course of a week until not a scrap was left unused, which reminded me that I want to be sent to a body farm when I die and then I remembered the elks woke up, and Oh god, I thought, two great big elks, not threatening necessarily but certainly inconvenient, and as I locked my doors a big man I mistook for a farmer appeared saying he knew how to deal with the two big elks and I thought that meant a nice elk farm somewhere but it turned out later he chopped their heads off, presenting me with completely smooth bloodless stumps reminding me of chopped-down trees and I was stunned and sorry and then my red plastic timer went off although I hadn’t touched it, which didn’t alarm me as strange things happen in this house, and then I remembered sex again, because a student had said she first made love with her husband in a cottage across from a cemetery where there was a huge statue of an elk and now whenever she thought of sex she thought of the elk or maybe it was the other way around. So there were several things to mull over: that the fungi are what we most want to watch out for even though they are doomed to extinction before we find and label them all, and that death for me is a turning into something useful because not a scrap of the deer is left, and that perhaps “my deer” meant “my dear,” and that elks replaced my dear.

  I opened the door where the sun was at last shining and found it was still cold, so I took a shower and put on an old black dress instead of thinking about the teaching aspect of a writing life, which I had meant to mull over this morning, expecting I would have looked up the root of “teach” by now but haven’t. I look at my bookcase, and there is the fossilized bag of marshmallows my grandson wanted to put on his mother’s birthday cake and I said yes.

  Earlier I lay in bed thinking about how I’d been raised on superstition and despite having spent most of my life touching wood all had gone terribly wrong anyway and I now spurn and despise those rituals and then I wondered whether if I had been raised in a church or a synagogue or a mosque or a Buddhist monastery I would now be angry at a useless god, but never got out of bed to write it down and figure that out, but this morning I did start writing about the elk.

  Why?

  Death, it seems, death, which is always in the back of my mind because Rich was hit by a car and my daughter had cancer and my closest friend has a dying liver and other people I love have faced death and are again facing it although now death is in the room with them and how I used to be afraid of death just because it was death but now I am afraid to die in case my darlings need me.

  Outside the dogs are howling.

  And this is my most selfish thought, that if I lose the people I love what is left of my own life will consist only of grief.

  Inconclusion

  I’m sitting on the sofa with Carolina, who is snoring gently next to me, my elbow on her soft haunch as I doodle, waiting for something profound to enter my mind. Outside the birds are squawking, the little woodpecker is still working on the metal plate, the butterfly bush is moving in the breeze, and somewhere underground, after seventeen years, the cicadas are probably stirring. Eek.

  My beat-up copy of the American Heritage Dictionary serves as an ersatz Bible, and it’s on my lap. If I look up a word that sends me to the appendix, I find a bit of human history. “Happy,” for instance, once meant “luck.” Not good luck or bad, just luck. Look what we have done to ourselves. We think we can actually pursue happiness.

  I look up “certainty” because I live with uncertainty. Where did it come from? Earliest meanings: to sift, separate, decide. Not much help. I look up “mortal,” a word I have always loved because it sounds so gentle, and find to my horror that one of its earliest roots is “goblin.” Scratch that.

  I give up and think perhaps now is the time to finally organize the jumble in my cupboards. (Sift, separate, decide.) Ten minutes later my counters are covered with stacks of saucers and bowls and mugs and glasses and a wooden berry picker and old vitamins I never opened and two different espresso makers and one French press and a few Lego creations plus a pinecone, two hair bands, and a very old chocolate bar. I don’t know what to do next, so I leave it all on the counter and go back to the couch next to Carolina, who is still snoring. I consider taking a nap myself, but instead I rally and decide to vacuum the living room, puzzled and slightly alarmed by the loud clicking sounds, wondering what the hell is getting sucked
up (Legos coins ciggybutts), but I keep vacuuming and what runs through my mind instead of wisdom is Smoke ’em if you got ’em, which is no way to live even if it is a metaphor. That’s what I get for trying to think deeply.

  So I drive to Chuck’s house. His big dog, Pojd, is lying on the warm driveway, and she wakes right up because she loves me and thinks perhaps I am carrying something good to eat. Then there is Chuck in a clean white shirt. “I’d offer you tea but I don’t have any,” says Chuck.

  “I’ve come for wisdom,” I say, and he says, “Then you might as well leave right now,” or words to that effect.

  “I need to write about something big,” I say. “I need to figure out how to live with uncertainty.”

  “You’ve been doing that your whole life,” he says.

  “I looked up ‘certain,’ and it only meant ‘sift, separate, decide.’ ”

  “Useless,” says Chuck.

  “I know, and then I looked up ‘mortal.’ Guess what it meant. ‘Goblin.’ ”

  “Also useless,” he says, and we talk about how hideous that word is, capable of sending shivers up the spine. “It sounds so much like ‘gobble,’ ” says Chuck.

  Now we are sitting in his screened-in porch. An azalea has exploded into a froth of magenta right outside. Pojd puts her head on my lap and I stroke her silky ears.

  “I’m afraid of people I love dying before I do. I need to find a way to live with that. I need to come to some conclusion. Words to live by or something. A mantra.”

  “Death is both a certainty and an unknown,” Chuck says. “It’s hard to get a grip on it.”

  “I love that,” I say, writing down “certainty” and “unknown.”

  “And you can’t deal with it when you’re at a remove,” he continues. “You need to clear a path. What you need is a new approach.”

  And with the word “approach,” something falls into place.

  Behind my studio, hidden by the forsythia and a field of stinging nettles, is a quarter acre of beautiful, almost spooky land. The silence there feels almost holy. The trees are tall and the light filtering through is green, the ground covered with myrtle and branches and nature’s other debris. One enormous tree, felled by a recent hurricane, lies with its roots exposed, small creatures exploiting the decay. Once or twice I have picked my way through to this hidden place, but the nettles are waist-high and footing is uncertain. I should hire someone to come with backhoes to clear away the brush and snarl and tangle so I can look into the more mysterious place. I tell Chuck.

  “It’s a place to stand,” I say. “And maybe that’s the approach.”

  “And you don’t want to sift and separate and decide,” says Chuck. “You want a view of the whole wild mess.”

  So there is no conclusion, but it feels like one anyway.

  “Because it’s worth looking at,” says Chuck.

  Vacation

  Mom,” says Catherine, when I tell her of my plans for plowing up the forsythias. “Mom, maybe you should save that money for a vacation.” Catherine wants all of us to go away together somewhere hot with blue water and child care. All-of-us makes a big package, but Catherine has dreamed of this since her treatment began. We never get around to it. It’s not that we lack the will. We have the will. We lack the money and the follow-through. Real life is always in the way. But somewhere an island is dancing in the sun, waiting for us to get our act together. There are palm trees and turquoise water and blue sky and white sand, and everyone is safe.

  The End

  I wish that when the time comes we could all join hands and rush into the surf together.

  Back Window

  My friend Maya gave me the back window of her old Land Rover, complete with windshield wipers. “24447CS” is scrawled in yellow highlighter on the glass. The window has been in my studio for more than a year as I try to decide what to paint on it. What is behind us?

  I decide to paint nothing. Grabbing a rag and some soapy water, I plan to keep it clean.

  Love

  Love can accommodate all sorts of misshapen objects: a door held open for a city dog who runs into the woods; fences down; some role you didn’t ask for, didn’t want. Love allows for betrayal and loss and dread. Love is roomy. Love can change its shape, be known by different names. Love is elastic.

  And the dog comes back.

  Acknowledgments

  Thank you first, and always, to my family. You know who you are. You are my life. Special thanks to Catherine and Tim for placing their trust in me.

  Ann Patty, you made me do it. Your help and encouragement kept me at it. Thank you.

  Luis Jaramillo, Heather Abel, Alison Hart, and Matthew Brookshire, thank you for our many writing weekends and glorious feasts. (Where’s that cookbook?)

  Thank you also, Michele Mortimer, for your early support and reassurance.

  Thank you, Hannah Verrill, for your open heart, and Bar Scott, for your friendship.

  Robin Desser, Pam Dorman, Elisabeth Scharlatt, and Dan Frank, your kind words meant the world to me. Still do.

  A thousand thanks to Nan Graham, for your thoughtful input and enthusiasm and support. I am beyond grateful. Thank you, Kara Watson, and all those at Scribner who helped in so many ways to make this a book. I appreciate everything you’ve done.

  To the Oncology Support Memoir Workshop: Carol Dwyer, Blaze Ardman, Nancy Henry, Dean Lavin, Roberta Jehu, Kathy Burgher, Suzanne Dean, Juliet Harrison, Annie La Barge, Marjorie Leopold, Craig Mahwirt, Marge Roberts, Sharon Stonekey, Barbara Sarah, Phyllis Silvers, Micky Shorr, Robert Smith, and Ruth Wahtera. What can I say? You let me into your lives. You gave me the grit to finish this book. You show me how to live.

  Finally, a special thanks to Stephen Dobyns, for a reason apparent to anyone familiar with his striking work.

  Continue reading for an excerpt from

  A Three Dog Life

  by Abigail Thomas

  Available from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

  What Stays the Same

  THIS IS THE ONE THING that stays the same: my husband got hurt. Everything else changes. A grandson needs me and then he doesn’t. My children are close then one drifts away. I smoke and don’t smoke; I knit ponchos, then hats, shawls, hats again, stop knitting, start up again. The clock ticks, the seasons shift, the night sky rearranges itself, but my husband remains constant, his injuries are permanent. He grounds me. Rich is where I shine. I can count on myself with him.

  I live in a cozy house with pretty furniture. Time passes here. There is a fireplace and two acres and the dogs run around and dig big holes and I don’t care. I have a twenty-seven-inch TV and lots of movies. The telephone rings often. Rich is lodged in a single moment and it never tips into the next. Last week I lay on his bed in the nursing home and watched him. I was out of his field of vision and I think he forgot I was there. He stood still, then he picked up a newspaper from a neat pile of newspapers, held it a moment, and carefully put it back. His arms dropped to his sides. He looked as if he was waiting for the next thing but there is no next thing.

  I got stuck with the past and future. That’s my half of this bad hand. I know what happened and I never get used to it. Just when I think I’ve metabolized everything I am drawn up short. “Rich lost part of his vision” is what I say, but recently Sally told the nurse, “He is blind in his right eye,” and I was catapulted out of the safety of the past tense into the now.

  TODAY I DRIVE TO THE wool store. I arrive with my notebook open and a pen.

  “What are you doing?” Paul asks.

  “I’m taking a poll,” I say. “What is the one thing that stays stable in your life?”

  “James,” says Paul instantly.

  “And I suppose James will say Paul,” I say, writing down James.

  “No, he’ll say the dogs,” says Paul, laughing.

  “Creativity,” says He
idi, the genius.

  “I have to think,” says a woman I don’t know.

  “The dogs,” says James.

  RICH AND I HAD A house together once. He was the real gardener. He raked and dug, planted and weeded, stood over his garden proudly. Decorative grasses were his specialty. He cut down my delphiniums when he planted his fountain grass. “Didn’t you see them?” I asked. “They were so tall and beautiful.” But he was too busy digging to listen. I lost interest in flowers. We planted a hydrangea tree outside the kitchen window. We cut down (after much deliberation) two big prickly bushes that were growing together like eyebrows at either side of our small path. We waited until the birds were done with their young, then Rich planted two more hydrangea trees where the bushes had stood. I don’t want to see how big they are by now, how beautiful their heavy white blossoms look when it rains. “I love what you’ve done with the garden,” my friend Claudette says, looking at the bed of overgrown nettles in my backyard. I weeded there exactly once. I want to plant fountain grass out there, but first I need a backhoe.

  RICH AND I DON’T HAVE the normal ups and downs of a marriage. I don’t get impatient. He doesn’t have to figure out what to do with his retirement. I don’t watch him go through holidays with the sorrow of missing his absent children. Last week we were walking down the hall to his room, it was November, we had spent the afternoon together. “If I wasn’t with you and we weren’t getting food, the dark would envelop my soul,” he said cheerfully.

  He never knows I’m leaving until I go.