Bright Precious Thing

by Gail Caldwell

  She had a coterie of friends, men and women, gay and straight, parents and teachers and dog lovers and rebels of various kinds, and though she could barely tolerate seeing more than a few of us at a time, we lined up to love her. Listened to her rail about the bond market or the crime of no universal healthcare.

  On the phone with Marjorie, when you mentioned a date coming up or asked a question and she had to put the phone down, she had one response: “Hold the wire!” she would say briskly, an anachronism from yesteryear, and I felt a little glee every time she said it. Caroline and I once confessed to each other that we both baited her, invented reasons to get her to say, “Hold the wire!” She took notes on everything, even our commonplace, feeble advice. It was the rest of us who should have been listening to her.

  I knew Marjorie for just less than twenty years, during which time I got dogs, got Caroline, had a lot of everything I loved and had to lose most of it. And Marjorie was unafraid of it all. She never flinched in the face of grief, never once diminished its reach or treated it other than the grand mystery it was. She had lost her mother when she was relatively young, and a sister when she was in her fifties, and she knew about losing what you couldn’t stand to lose. On this battlefield she was a warrior, and I can see her now: Striding into my backyard the morning of Caroline’s death, the first to dare to find me, her arms outreached and a huge smile on her face. Saying to me, weeks later, when I broke down on her front porch without warning, “It will come over you like a thunderstorm, and sometimes go just as quickly.” Counseling me to forgive the friends who fled pain or said the wrong thing or couldn’t help; she knew I had bigger things to tend than resentment. She stayed close while I buried my best friend, both parents, and a beloved dog, and somehow she taught me about staying the course. About accepting death not as an enemy, but as a natural end of the story—an outcome, insouciant and certain, like rain or night.

  Marjorie’s biggest regret was not having had children, and this made me sad because she viewed it as her wrongdoing, a personal failing instead of the dice roll that life can be. The truth is that she nurtured so carefully and widely—her students, her border collies, her friends—that I can’t help thinking we’d have all missed out a little if she’d had her own kids.

  In that sense she did have children, and the closest of them was Betsy, a former student and then teacher, former tenant and then housemate, finally, thoroughly, the friend and surrogate daughter Marjorie counted on. When Betsy married and had children, Marjorie rented the downstairs of her two-family house in Cambridge to the four of them, then converted the property into condominiums so they could all stay together.

  I have a picture taken the summer of 2008, the day after I had flown home with Tula when she was a nine-week-old Samoyed puppy. I had lost Clementine, my first Sam, a few months earlier, and now here was Marjorie, there for birth and death alike, marching into the backyard to meet the youngest member of our tribe. In the photo an aged Cory is sitting nearby, looking peaceable but alarmed at the competition, and Marjorie is sitting with her knees folded under her—past seventy, the old field hockey player with the straight back and legs of steel. She’s holding Tula, all eleven pounds of her, and appraising her with the cool eye of a woman who has known dogs for a half century. I remember her turning to me that day just after the photo was taken, just after she had put Tula on the grass and we were both watching her explore her new world. “Do you love her yet?” she asked me, knowing that the notion of instant love wasn’t guaranteed, but also that, if I didn’t yet, I would.

  She lost Cory two years later, and I took her a bouquet with a tennis ball buried in the middle, and we both cried. Because I couldn’t imagine her without a border collie, I offered to co-raise a puppy with her, a foolish idea but testament to what they meant to her and she meant to me. By then she had moved part-time to a Quaker retirement community in New Hampshire, and she had taken Cory with her for his last couple of years. Every dog she had was the one she loved most, and you got the sense that she was taking all of them with her into the great beyond.

  A place that she adamantly did not believe in. That’s me being sentimental again, imagining Cory and Marjorie in the next meadow, and I feel sure she would laugh and allow me that fantasy, enjoying it herself but not embracing it. She lived another three years, and the body that had been so strong began to fail her in alarming ways. Her last summer in Cambridge, she told me matter-of-factly that she wouldn’t last a year.

  She also asked, without a trace of drama, if I would help her figure out a way to die in the event of suffering. I don’t know that she asked anyone else, but I’d be surprised if she didn’t: Marjorie could be almost laughably pragmatic. She was trying to assign the right job to the right person, and she knew I was a diligent researcher and would not quake before the request.

  I placated her, fended her off. I knew she loved her physician in New Hampshire and told her to have a frank conversation with her, and then I went about doing my little online research, finding out what I already knew: It would not be easy, or simple, to check out swiftly, without the right medical team and laws to protect you. I half-prayed for death to come on its little cat feet and take her. With the same efficiency as the exquisite perennials in her garden, she had become frail almost overnight. What one hoped for now was a hard freeze.

  Indeed, she died in deep winter, during a bitter February in New Hampshire, where she had returned at the end of autumn. A constellation of conditions had caused an aspiration pneumonia that showed no sign of abating, and she handled this medical reality with a forthrightness that caught us all off guard but surprised no one. When Betsy got to New Hampshire, a few hours after her doctors had told her she wouldn’t get better, Marjorie simply announced, “There’s been a change of plan”—as though she were in charge of even this last task. She refused fluids and any kind of intervention, understanding that she would slip into unconsciousness within a matter of hours. Then she settled into her recliner with a photograph of Cory and with Betsy by her side. When Betsy asked if she wanted her to call anyone, Marjorie was firm on that, too. “No,” she told her. “I trust my relationships.” And then she added something else: “Tell everyone I wasn’t afraid.” Within the hour, she closed her eyes and died.

  It was a no-nonsense gift flung to us all, a last wave before she left the field. At the service at Shady Hill two months later, there was a large overhead screen showing projected images of young Marjorie, gorgeous Marjorie, the girl on a pony, the woman with her head thrown back laughing. She was stunning; she filled up the screen with what looked to be a brimming life. But the image I hold close when I think of her is from a day in her midseventies, one summer afternoon in Cambridge. We were on opposite sides of the little main street in our neighborhood, and she hadn’t seen me yet, so I had caught her in a state of unaware grace. She was wearing an old Arizona State University T-shirt (a place I doubt she had ever been), baggy shorts, a fisherman’s hat, and a pair of throwaway optometrist’s sunglasses—the plastic ones they give you after dilating your eyes. (She thought them perfectly serviceable, so always wore them until they fell apart.) Cory was at heel, gazing up at her as though she were the Queen of England, and she was smiling and talking to him as they loped along. She looked preposterously beautiful, and my heart filled when I saw her there—stripped of all encumbrances and useless vanities, as free in that moment as thistle on the wind.

  18

  “It is bound to be very imperfect,” Virginia Woolf wrote in her journal, when she was beginning work on the novel that would become The Waves. “But I think it possible that I have got my statues against the sky.”

  The image is pure Woolf, majestic and lonely even in a diary entry, and it captures something exact about the writer’s experience. I printed out the quote and taped it on the wall of my upstairs study, next to a pen drawing I did of Tula sleeping, next to the Post-it notes with writing ideas, next to
the telegram from my dad to my mother at the end of the Second World War.

  And yet lately the image has seemed sad. A frozen garden of perfection, impermeable only so long as no one moves.

  I created this room, this second-floor aerie, as a place where I could be off the grid, even from myself. My country house, I called it, when I bought the upstairs apartment of a two-family home and doubled my living space. I made a rule that here I wrote in longhand only. No cellphones, keyboards. Only a stack of clutter, a jar of pens and pencils, a few empty legal pads, far less majestic than Woolf’s statues but just as silently waiting.

  Now that you have your room, Woolf asks in her famous “Professions for Women,” “How are you going to furnish it…? With whom are you going to share it, and upon what terms?” I’ve not had to worry about this last question; the only people who come up here uninvited are my neighbor Peter and Tyler, and both are happy to be escorted downstairs as soon as I rise. As Tyler says, “Nothing’s ever happening up here.” When Peter comes up he is with his Belgian, Shiloh, usually rowdy and whistling for me and for Tula, and yet his voice always softens by the time they get to the top of the stairs. It’s not me; it’s the room. Like it’s absorbed years and years of quiet, and elicits the same.

  What is in the room matters greatly to me, even though I placed everything here quickly and without much forethought. An old poster of a perilously long sentence from Proust, diagrammed, on the mantel over the black fireplace. Several photos in a line: Caroline rowing on a lake in New Hampshire; our two dogs looking out the window that same summer. An action shot of Clementine, lure coursing in Vermont. Another picture of Tula in my lap when she was a year old—she was in full winter coat, and the angle of the photo makes it look as though I am holding a lion. And a close-up of a muscled arm: Caroline’s bicep, a photo she thought was funny but that I so loved she gave it to me.

  Also: The saltcellar from the kitchen table at the farmhouse in east Texas where my dad grew up. A long piece of sweetgrass a friend gave me to bless the house. A rickety drafting table that Peter and I found on the street a decade ago, now covered with half drafts and books and notes to myself. Propped in the corner is a gingham doll that a novelist friend decorated for me when I moved my study up here. She is my totem, a geeky companion. She has a pencil strapped across her chest, weaponized, and Louise reminded me when she sent it that the doll was my muse. (In return I sent her a crimson red puppet with flowing silver hair.) And over the fireplace, blue lights. In the past year, a Buddhist prayer flag across the windows. But I’ll get to that soon enough.

  I flung the inkpot a long time ago, to go back to Woolf. Used it as a weapon on that iconic angel in the house, the one with the male-bestowed sainthood who feasted on the bones of the female creative spirit. She died hard, Woolf wrote, inspiring a century of women since. So: No demanding angels here, asking for dinner or self-sacrifice or fine etiquette. Just me. Me and the dog and a clock with no hands, a schedule based on when my body gets hungry or needs a walk. A spartan bargain, one with a few great moments and a multitude of stillness, some of it brutal. These days when I climb the stairs my mind starts to bend a little, unfold, toward some familiar clearing in the woods. Sometimes it’s scary; I can’t always take it. Some days I just sit in the chair and look out the window. Every so often, on winter afternoons, I dance.

  TYLER’S BIRTHDAY LIST,

  dictated by Tyler to Gail at age five,

  on occasion of sixth birthday

  (several months away)

  white standard poodle female or male

  porcupine hat with REAL quills!

  a ferret named Winky

  a banana

  a parrot named Polly who says That’s annoying!

  a chocolate cookie house

  flute or recorder

  saber-tooth tiger tooth if it’s appropriate

  (substitute: Tula’s baby tooth)

  possibility: generic necklace

  BIRTHDAY LIST, TWO YEARS LATER

  “What do you want for your birthday this year?” I ask.

  She seems uninterested in the question; she is separating the chocolate chips from a cookie, to save them for last. Finally, a benign shrug. “Nothing.”

  “Nothing!” I say. “You always want things! We usually make a list.”

  “OK,” she says. “You as a best friend.”

  I pause just a split, and say, “Well, that’s easy. Is that all?”

  She shrugs again. “I’m growing up.”

  19

  The first frost in Cambridge came late this year, and while I always have to scramble to haul in the garden’s survivors, it’s usually clear what goes and what stays. Dahlias get dug up and stored in the basement. Tuberous begonias and geraniums are cut back and moved to the sunporch. I strip the hibiscus, leaf by leaf, the way my friend Rocco taught me, and let them go semi-dormant until spring. My high-maintenance ferns I pamper, swear at, and inevitably give prime location, where they shed and annoy me all winter. The other flowering annuals are thrown out, their pots stored upside down before the freeze.

  This year, though, I couldn’t give it up. I meant to be ruthless, but things changed after dark. I repotted coleus on the back porch, where it was 38 degrees, even though the plants were already leggy and dropping leaves. I scooped up a calibrachoa and took it into the kitchen, where it lost half its vine as soon as I got it inside. I made bouquets out of the trimmings and created a fern hospital for the five scraggly ones I couldn’t toss. I hung on to pitiful plants I couldn’t even name, and there was no room now for the scarlet-red cyclamen that usually hauled my heart through winter. I would make room, tomorrow. But tonight the low living room lights made everything look so green and alive and not yet cold, framed by the dark outside.

  I did all this because the thing I most wanted to save I could not, and she lay dozing on the back porch while I came and went. Tula had turned nine in summer with quiet fanfare, which is to say I had cooked her a little hamburger and put a candle in it, and we had lived through another day. She had been diagnosed in January with inoperable liver cancer and given a matter of weeks to live—weeks, I had been warned, in which I would have to be vigilant, in the event she collapsed from an internal bleed. I slept with my phone in hand, carried driving directions to two veterinary hospitals in my wallet, and calculated on every short walk how far I could go before I was out of range of help. By June she had outlived two prognoses; by autumn, a good friend was calling her Lazarus. But I knew. She had dropped a few times, always at home, sagged when her blood pressure plummeted and then leaned up against me, taken a two-hour nap.

  She was in no pain, this I knew and had been assured. She was in fact living the life of Riley, eating noodles with chicken gravy and being fussed over by every kid on the block. She was not looking at her baby pictures, like I was, or weeping in the next room, or messing around with spent plants in the freezing dark. She was a born Buddhist and knew how to let go. Me, not so much.

  “Deciduous” is from the Latin decidere, to fall down, also ephemeral or not lasting. “Perennial,” also from Latin, meaning to last the year through, as well as abiding, enduring, unending, unfailing, undying. A resurrection from the earth each spring, different for flora and fauna. We attach ourselves to lion cubs but are happy to settle for the rebirth of yarrow or peonies, flowers merely related to their origin, not the thing itself. Yet another argument for the charity of impermanence.

  And “annual,” from the Latin for year, and “mortal,” the origin of which is death. Only one of these words is not about time, but rather about the end of it, or the eclipse of it. The dog will die and I will love her perennially, until I fall, too.

  I got the green thumb from both sides of the family, though being able to grow things in Texas was a given, especially if you came from farming families. There is a
picture of a wee me in my father’s lap sitting in his backyard garden, sometime in the 1950s, and the corn and tomatoes are so high I look like a foundling. He could make anything bear fruit and taste good enough to spoil you for life. My mother’s gift was color, a hallucinatory magic. Her pansies bloomed at Christmas and looked as though she’d fed them psilocybin. As she aged and grew slightly addled about her gardening skills, she swore the only treatment she gave her four-foot jade plant was to whack it with a broom once a month. No water, she said. I didn’t believe her, but her ninety-year-old irrationality about what worked was still admirable in its conviction.

  By mid-autumn I was steeling myself for saying goodbye to what seemed like everything at once. Peter and Pat, whose dog Shiloh had grown up with Tula, were moving to Northern California. We had co-raised two generations of dogs together, and for fifteen years wandered in and out of one another’s nearby houses as though life were one big college dorm. And Shiloh, now twelve, had just been diagnosed with heart failure. They were hoping to get her to her new home before she died.

  Pat and I spent the end of the summer walking the neighborhood at night. “You can’t leave now,” I said, preposterously, sounding like Tyler when she hollered NOOOOO about something she didn’t like. “If you leave now I can’t take it. It will be a quadruple assault.” Our two wolflike dogs walked ahead of us in step, content and beautiful, ebony and ivory, into the waning light of late August. One evening Pat found a baby rabbit in the street, far from any greenery or possible nest. In an instant she had scooped it up and placed it in the crook of her elbow, and then carried it the mile back to our houses. She made it a box, put it in the hedges of the park next door, fussed over it, moved it, revisited it, worried. There were probably hundreds of newborn rabbits that week within a half-mile radius, but this one, this tar-and-concrete renegade, had our attention. If fretting and caretaking guaranteed an auspicious future, that rabbit could have gotten into Harvard. She couldn’t let it go.