* * *
I ONLY KNOW ONE COUPLE my age that has adopted, a close friend and his husband. Maybe I should call him, I say to your brother-in-law, get a clearer picture of what it might look like.
You need a clearer picture? he says.
I don’t tell him that one afternoon in Safeway I see a little girl in a shopping cart, two or three years old, with hair that springs wildly in all directions, and I feel such a wave of fresh longing that I actually need to hold on to something, and clutch at the handle on a frozen food door. Maybe I could do it, I think, as she and her mother wheel past me. I could run away from all this, the doctors, these treatments; I could love and care for a child that didn’t come from me. I could make my body just a body again, rather than some kind of lonely spaceship, trawling the darkest spaces for new life.
* * *
YOU’RE THE ONLY BABY that I’ve ever found comfort with, still a baby to me, even though you were three years old. Picking you up was like breathing. I’d never had that before, growing up in the company of adults, and it was such a relief to finally understand the physical closeness of a sibling. It’s surprised me that this comfort has never transferred over to the children I’ve held as an adult, only magnifying the hollowness of my own body, how singular I am in its frame. I’ve mourned the missing comfort, that the mother across from me knows something I don’t. I’ve mourned that we never had you as an infant.
The image I keep coming back to is the apple tree that stood next to the deck in the backyard. Every year it would overproduce and you and I would compete daily with the birds, scrambling to eat as many apples as we could. Womanhood, as I used to see it, was that tree in full bloom, the fruit protruding from the leaves like a blush. Motherhood was the afternoons we spent pulling as much as we could from those branches, smacking away with the deep, simple pleasure of children. And what I’ve felt lately is akin to the afternoons I sat alone on the deck, listening to each apple fall to the ground, wasting its sweetness.
* * *
WHAT’S IT LIKE TO BE MARRIED, you’d asked me. To be married is to know the way he sits in his chair when he’s concentrating. His back hunches and his feet tuck under, as if his whole body is tightening to keep grasp on an idea. The sounds he makes in his sleep, how he’ll order off a menu, that he’d choke and die before sending anything back.
I’d say that to be married is to make peace with all you cannot see, as hard as you try. For instance, the gray space of his life before me, before our life in California, growing up on the other side of the country, raised in a city apartment with one brother and one sister. When we began dating and I asked him to tell me stories about his childhood, about three children on top of one another in a city apartment, he’d say that he didn’t really remember. At first I didn’t believe this, attributing the lack of detail to something unhappy, but soon I realized he was telling the truth. The few memories he keeps are often told out of order, his features strained, like a person who’s been tasked with describing the qualities of the air, or the taste of water. Sometimes I find myself correcting him based on some earlier version I’ve heard from his mother or sister. That’s probably it, he’ll say, nodding. He doesn’t seem obligated to the past, and this is what keeps him mostly mysterious to me, as if he could have been anyone before, as if anything could have happened, as if the old stories could still change, and he might recount them one day when we are old, with a shrug. His days as a pirate or a pimp, a king. I don’t know if mystery is the thing that holds people in love, though, or the way one sits in a chair. I don’t know if it’s the absence of familiar pain in a person, or the recognition of one.
To be married is to live with both things at once, the knowing and the mystery. One evening not too long ago, I had a heart monitor strapped to my chest, as prescribed by the doctor. I wasn’t allowed to shower but was embarrassed to go into work in the morning with the slick sheen of my hair. Your brother-in-law put a towel on the floor, filled up our pitcher, made sure the water wasn’t too hot or too cold. At thirty-something years old we leaned back against the floor as he washed my hair in the tub, the heart monitor protected under a sweatshirt. He leaned over with a look so concentrated I began laughing, a girlish laugh, because I’d known him and lived with him for years and never once had we crossed into this territory, stretching tremulously into the future, picturing ourselves old and sick, before hurrying back into our young bodies. And again I realized I had been crazy to think that marriage was not for me. He leaned over to pat my hair dry and I thought, thank God sometimes we are wrong about things.
* * *
FORTY MINUTES A DAY I ride one of the most expensive and problematic light rails in the country, spend time under the San Francisco Bay with a slice of the 400,000 people who must also succumb to this obstinate beast. While riding, I have watched people sleep, open to every kind of vulnerability. I have watched men and women apply their makeup, clip their nails; one night a gentleman gave himself a haircut in the seats reserved for the elderly. I have watched people watch porn, watched arguments, watched acquaintances try to keep conversation, witnessed crying; I have cried myself. Once a packed train got stuck underground and as the claustrophobia caved in I felt a hand on the back of my shirt, as if trying to pull me out of myself. I was embarrassed, mostly, that the shirt was soaked from the fear of being trapped down there, waiting for daylight forever. May I? an older woman said softly and I nodded even though I didn’t know what she was asking for. And suddenly she was rubbing my back, the circles slow and rhythmic, the comfort shocking, the woman whispering: There, there, almost there.
How to feel so close to her in that moment, and yet so desperately far from you?
* * *
DON’T YOU EVER GET SAD? you’d asked me.
Every Tuesday at noon I get sad, when an alarm goes off in the city, a fifteen-second wail followed by a voice that says, This is a test. This is a test of the Outdoor Public Warning System. This is only a test. The entire office can hear it from our desks, and sometimes I watch the new hires, their eyes shifting to the rest of us to gauge the danger.
During World War II, fifty sirens were mounted across the city to warn of air raids and have been going off every Tuesday ever since. Today there are 109 perched on the poles and buildings of San Francisco, Treasure Island, and Yerba Buena, ten of which are solar-powered. The siren call has its own Twitter feed and nineteen decent reviews on Yelp (average four out of five stars, only open on Tuesdays). I’ve been at this job for five years now, next to siren 92, which means in the last five years I’ve felt sad at least 260 times.
* * *
I AM WAITING, and everything around my waiting is stricken with unreality, Barthes writes. In this café, I look at the others who come in, chat, joke, read calmly: they are not waiting.
* * *
WHEN DO YOU THINK you’ll have kids? you’d asked not long after I had started the treatments, unaware of the drama backstage, that your sister was trying and failing already. I don’t remember how I answered.
What do you think it’s like to be a mom? you’d said.
I had some clues, like the cards our mother used to send when I moved far away. I love you! sometimes was all it said, in her cursive. I kept them in a box under my bed, where I imagined each one glittering in the dark.
I always had the feeling growing up that life before children was like some kind of cloud you couldn’t see through, some kind of city obscured by the morning fog. On the other side, I imagined, the sun was outrageously bright, warming or burning your chest, shoulders, hands, depending on the day.
* * *
AM I IN LOVE? writes Barthes. Yes, since I’m waiting.
* * *
TODAY EVEN STRANGERS CAN SEE that your bride is happy. She’s wound her hair back into a sophisticated knot with two dark pearls pinned in her ears. It’s the first time I’ve seen her in lipstick and the deep shade illuminates the rest of her face, almost as if theater lights have been held up to it at
all angles. Young beauty, I’m reminded, is always so shocking. When our mother and I knock on her door this afternoon, she greets us with a smile but I can see that she’s frightened. Come in, she says, and we walk into her hotel room, where a few of her bridesmaids sit quietly on the bed. How about a little music? I say, and she nods, pulling me aside. I’m not nervous to marry your brother, she says, just so you know. I’m nervous for all the pictures. Just wait until you put on the dress, I say. Our mother and I sit with the other girls, snipping tags and tearing price stickers off shoes, while your bride gets her hair and makeup done. Then finally, after an hour or so, we bring the dress over. Our mother helps her with the lacing at the back and only then does the reality of the day present itself in the mirror, and your bride can see that she has never been more exquisite.
It’s good, right? she says.
It’s perfect, our mother says.
* * *
OUR MOTHER collects the bride’s train and we process along the corridor, the additional bridesmaids following. The girls’ faces are as soft as the petals gathered in the basket, waiting to be tossed out to the wind. The bride has chosen a beautiful pale blue for the dresses, and I see only a cast of young Virgin Marys in front of me. I lean in and whisper to our mother that I am the only bridesmaid old enough to have birthed the entire wedding party and she says very seriously, That’s mathematically untrue. We stop downstairs at the hotel entrance, where Noreen waits, our site coordinator for the day, who runs around with a clipboard and headset as if she is directing the Rockettes. She waits for the cue and then opens the doors, and we make our way down to the beach, not far from the spot where you proposed.
Ahead of us are fifty white chairs, twenty-five to each side, with ranunculus and baby’s breath strung along the aisles. The sand seems to glow in the five-o’clock light. We have most of the beach to ourselves, except for the stranger fifty yards away who’s photographing the scene with an iPad. My dress tucks under my feet in the sand and I suddenly become so fixated on not tripping up the aisle that I forget to look at you. How do I forget to look at you? I take my place to the left and peer over the other bridesmaids’ heads and from the side I can see you in your suit, next to your brother-in-law and your best man, who ended up making it to the wedding, after all. I look out and see our aunt and the familiar faces of friends and cousins. You’re giving the crowd your toothy smile reserved for school photos, a nervous smile. How did I forget to look at you as I walked up?
Then the music changes and your bride is here and the teeth are gone from your smile. You look at her with reverence, like fireworks coming up over the hill, just for you.
* * *
OUR PARENTS never got to see you walk down the aisle when you finished college because you forgot to fill out the commencement form. This, after you’d ordered the cap and gown, after our parents had the hotel reserved, the restaurant where they would take you out to dinner. You’d called to tell our mother the day before, as she was packing the banner she’d made, the words screaming from the inside of her luggage CONGRATULATIONS GRADUATE! They canceled the trip and you promised to mail them the diploma.
It ended up being one of those moments, though, your rare ability to turn it all around, to still make them so happy. You drove home a week later and told me to meet you there; we stacked a few chairs in the backyard and hooked up your phone to a portable speaker. It was a ninety-five-degree day in Petaluma but you ran upstairs and put on your gown and cap and when you called our mother outside I turned on YouTube’s most popular rendition of “Pomp and Circumstance.” And down you processed through the lawn chairs in your gown, and our mother snapped a picture as I handed you the Saturday edition of The Press Democrat, since your diploma wasn’t set to arrive for another six weeks. Our father took the chair next to our mother and they clapped while you accepted the paper, threw your cap up to the sky.
* * *
THE DAY after I got engaged you called and asked if you’d have to make a speech. I’d forgotten this until recently, how you’d asked about the speech before offering your congratulations. I pushed the question away, cranky about being asked anything yet, telling you instead not to worry, that you weren’t on the hook if you didn’t want to be.
When the day came almost two years later, my husband’s sister spoke, my husband’s brother spoke, then our father and my best friend spoke for me. I could tell when you came up to me later that you regretted not volunteering, or resented that I hadn’t pushed, that the speech signaled something important and to be excluded had not provided relief but the certainty that you’d been cut. I had told you it was really no big deal, that I hadn’t wanted to overwhelm you, but I’ll admit now that I didn’t push because I wasn’t sure what you were going to say. What would you write about me?
Instead I’d asked you to sign as witness on my marriage certificate and you practiced your name three times on scratch paper first: Danny Larsen, Danny Larsen, Danny Larsen, still hardly legible on the final document, the letters small and unruly.
I’m sorry now that I didn’t ask you to speak at my wedding, that I was too caught up in the guest list, the dress, the food, the kind of person I swore I’d never be. In the months leading up to your wedding, all the same details passed between me and your bride.
Had I had a guest book? she said. Had I had a cake? He’ll just want whatever you had, you know.
* * *
AREN’T YOU JEALOUS you can’t have a tan like me? you’d said once, when we were on vacation. You held your arm against mine and we examined my ugly blue veins, interstates across my wrist. You smiled, pleased with yourself.
What’s it like to be grown up? you’d asked, but we were still kids then, and thankfully I didn’t have to answer.
You never asked me if I thought your birth mother was beautiful. This was a question reserved only for our mother.
I used to write about your birth family sometimes when I was younger. They were strange little stories that always filled me with shame. One started with your sister ringing the doorbell looking for you, pushing past me into the house, leaving her fingerprints all over the photographs.
Do they stand there with us today, as palpable as the fog, as a flock of birds netted over the sky? The sun sits complacent while the wind battles the dresses and hair spray, the ribbons attached to the seats. The locals nestle into their chairs with coats and sunglasses and the visitors wonder what kind of summer beach wedding this is. But they can’t say the scene isn’t beautiful: the water is tinsel on the horizon, and closer in, just framing the bride and groom, it’s a deep, restless blue.
Why don’t you call me more often? you’d asked.
But the bottom of our feet match, you’d told me once, long, long ago. You whispered it in my ear like an old secret between us.
I miss you, you’d said.
* * *
A MAN WALKS DOWN THE BEACH while the officiant winds his way through Corinthians: Love is patient, love is kind … For God is not a God of disorder but of peace. The man is holding a metal detector, following it obediently along the shore. I’ve left my glasses off for the pictures and squint hard to get a better look. As he approaches I realize that it’s not a metal detector but only a small dog on a leash, but the mix-up dizzies the moment, like a dream, like the poorest of comparisons.
This morning, hours before the ceremony began, you called our mother and asked what exactly a vow was. You came to our mother’s room and when I knocked on the door with pastries I found the two of you on the hotel love seat, hunched over a legal pad. Can I help with anything? I asked, and you’d said, prideful, No. So I shut the door and went downstairs where I found our father sitting alone at one of the breakfast tables. I took a seat across from him and he said good morning and then we gave each other a long look.
* * *
WHEN YOU WERE ACCEPTED on that mission trip, twelve countries in twelve months, our father was the first to tell you to go.
You needed to raise all tha
t money, and somewhere along the way you’d left the job in Reno, so you took a position at one of the vineyards north of Petaluma, working for their website. You moved back in with our parents to help save and wrote an appeal to every family member and friend to donate to the trip. You’d never left the country, and now you’d be returning to Thailand for the first time on your own, you’d be visiting some of the poorest corners of the world to build houses and take part in other charitable activities. I offered to help you with the letter, but you declined, and the three of us never saw what you sent. Apparently what you had written was effective, though: soon there were more people invested in the hope that the return would fulfill something, change something, and even those who didn’t have much to give contributed, believing in the greater cause, which was actually not the poorest corners of the world but you. Eventually our parents offered to match what you raised, and then there was an entire community of people who felt like they were some small part of sending you on your way. Perhaps we’d aligned ourselves with those notions of charity after all, with those who thanked us for our service for so many years.
All of this had started as a way to support your return, and as it built on itself I kept trying to see it as our parents did, because if you were curious to see where you came from, how could they not help you get there?
Maybe they thought it would set you up better for life, for relationships, for interviews, for work, because with each passing year there was a larger question about how you would fare in the world on your own. At some hazy point in the timeline, things seemed dicey with your future bride and we all feared the trip would be canceled. She was still living in Reno and driving to our parents’ house on the weekends to see you. But you insisted you would still be going without her, you would do long distance; the proposal happened just weeks before you left.
Immediate Family Page 13