by Gail Griffin
So, yes, I said, I’ll be there.
I could barely muster the energy to buy a bottle of wine. I sat in the middle of the festivities feeling like wizened Scrooge at the edge of Fezziwig’s party: someone formerly part of the joyful human community, now a ghost, a grayness at the margins. I couldn’t understand why no one spoke of Bob, and I prayed that no one would, lest I collapse in sobs. I kept floating out of my body, out of the picture.
With a sickening jolt I realized I had turned into Aunt Etta—my father’s aunt. She lived solo in Chicago and worked for her entire adult life in a bank, where she could never be promoted because of her sex. She would arrive some days before Christmas, hair in a bun, tweed-suited, wearing black square-heeled lace-ups and always carrying a lace-edged monogrammed handkerchief. Husbandless, childless, clearly beyond the pale. Some avatar of hers haunts many holiday gatherings. I’m sure single men of a certain age also suffer through the end of the year, but the unconnected woman is, still, a culturally and socially distinct creature from her male counterpart. A woman of a certain age, alone, represents something gone seriously wrong somewhere. She is a spirit of Christmas Past—residual, a leftover—and of Christmas Yet to Come, what the young dread to turn into.
When Bob and I were a few years into our relationship, I began for the first time in adulthood to relax into the holidays—precisely because Aunt Etta’s ghost had been laid to rest. One of the manifold ways I valued him was as a buffer against the terrible aloneness that lurks in the world, gathering in the corners of celebrations. Bob made me feel fully part of the human family for perhaps the first time in my life.
In a heartbeat he was gone, and when I looked into the mirror, there she was, Aunt Etta, clutching a bottle of wine by the neck.
*
As autumn of Year 3 leaned into winter, I once again took a deep breath. As far as I could manage it, I would don my gayish apparel and show up at my sister-in-law’s place in the spirit of Christmas Present. I shopped for everybody. I bought wrapping paper and ribbon. I bought several bottles of wine. And I offered to contribute to the feast. A casserole, said my sister-in-law. Something with vegetables.
So on Christmas morning I got to work. Making sure the oven was kibble-free, I punched it up to 375. Maybe the heat itself will drive him out, I thought, and the cat will get him. Hope is the thing with whiskers.
As the oven heated, it breathed smoke, but only moderately. The stink was muted. The thing just really needs a good cleaning, I thought, but I can’t do that until spring, when I can ventilate the house. I cranked open one kitchen window, turned on ceiling and furnace fans, baked my casserole, and bore it triumphantly to the party. I drank, ate, drank more, laughed, opened presents with the requisite enthusiasm and watched them get opened by others. Don’t wallow, I told myself. There are lots more miserable ways to spend Christmas. How’d you like to be at the Gospel Mission or the domestic assault shelter? Woman up. I reminded myself that “alone” is a highly subjective and culturally bound term; I dug until I hit gratitude for the love of the family Bob had brought me into.
So then, whence came the decision—by all legitimate measures insane—that I made around midnight that night? I can only conclude that it took more than I thought to pull off Christmas Present, and the effort had left me slightly deranged. I like that word deranged. Think of it as the opposite of arranged: I was out of order, jumbled. Despite the smooth and pleasant day I had passed, I was on some level a mess.
When I got home that night, I watched TV for a while. Around midnight I congratulated myself on another Christmas down and headed for bed. And then, with no inkling that I was about to take a strange left turn, I stopped in the kitchen and decided that the oven couldn’t wait until spring. It needed to be cleaned now. Tonight. Wouldn’t it be wonderful to wake tomorrow morning to a clean, smoke-free, smell-free oven? Wouldn’t it signify a new year, a new approach, out with the old, in with the new? It would. This is what I needed: to take control. So I cracked open the kitchen window again, punched the “Clean” button, and locked the oven door. Scout and I went up to bed.
But I couldn’t sleep. I kept my eyes firmly closed, trying to let my breathing deepen, but my alertness wouldn’t abate, especially because the smell was now wafting upstairs. Finally, after maybe forty-five minutes, I opened my eyes. Even in the bedroom darkness I saw that the air was thick. I turned on the light and found myself in a fog. I went downstairs into thick white smoke and stench. I could not see the other side of the dining room. The smell was ghastly. I turned off the oven and began yanking open windows. The clock read somewhere past 1 a.m. When all the downstairs windows were open I went back to the second floor and opened those. I switched on the furnace fan and ceiling fans as the cold night rushed into the house.
Scout seemed to be fine, following me around as usual, but I had a sudden, clenching fear: this miasma wouldn’t hurt me, but what about something much smaller? The cat’s vulnerability seemed urgent. I took him in my arms like a condensed version of my own anxiety and carried him out onto the porch, closing the door behind me. The porch windows were shut tight; a baseboard heater warmed the small space. I settled into a glider chair. The air was much clearer, but the smoke was rolling out under the door, rising like water. Nothing for it but to open a window out here too. Scout wandered around a little, confused, but as the porch grew colder he sought the warmth of my lap.
And there we sit, as you first found us. The house exhales its smoky breath, breathes in the winter night. This is when I give thanks for temperatures in the twenties instead of the teens or worse. I quiet down and sink into the moment: you’re safe, be still, just breathe, just wait. But I feel like a refugee in my own house. From my own house. The cat and I are trapped out here where we originally trapped the mouse (or so we thought), who has now driven us out. This is the last habitable corner of my house, and it’s getting colder by the second. My house, my haven in a world where a cold wind howls ceaselessly. Now even my house, polluted and toxic, has expelled me.
What about calling someone? Wouldn’t a normal person in such a situation call a friend? I think about it. But what would I say? I don’t know a language to make anyone understand my situation. And what would she do? Ask me to come to her house for the night? What about Scout? What is it I really need from anyone at this point? Everyone is too far away, worlds away. I scan my neighborhood and the field across from my house. Everything is dark. Everyone has had their Christmas (except for the rabbi’s family on the corner) and gone to bed. They lie under comforters and blankets, breathing clean, warm air, with other people nearby. Scout and I are the only wakeful beings in the world. Or maybe we have left the world entirely.
In the 1960s, when space flights were always news and astronauts often ventured outside the capsule for some kind of maneuver, I used to imagine being cut loose in space. The horror wasn’t asphyxiation. It was being alone out there, left behind, floating unmoored in the cold, dark immensity. In the middle of this blue-black Christmas night, I am as far from the human species as I have ever felt in my life, and as close to the heart of despair. My earlier performance as Christmas Present was brittle and brief; this is reality. This is the Alone I have dragged around forever, as long as I can remember. If Bob were here . . . He was a fence around my life, fending off that Alone. For the past two and a half years I have managed to keep it at bay with hard work and good friends and weekly therapy; I have drowned out its howling with booze and TV and books and films and teaching; when I have felt it coming I have refused to look it in the eye. But tonight there’s no way around it. The smoke rising from an utterly ridiculous situation has driven me right into its arms.
I rock gently, cradling Scout, warming my hands in his winter-thick fur. I hold him as tightly as he’ll permit. “We’ll be okay,” I murmur. “We’ll be okay.” After an hour or so I can see the living room ceiling through the glass in the door. I unfold the cat and myself and reenter my house. The smoke is mostly gone. I close wind
ows, turn off lights. As the house begins to warm, we climb the stairs again.
The next morning, the smell is a mild and quickly fading ghost.
A month later I am sautéing something when a tiny brown body shoots out from behind the oven—exactly as Scout walks past. Mouse swings right and makes a good run for it into the dining room, but Cat has got this one. By the time I catch up, the neat little corpse is headless.
“Finally you earn your keep,” I tell Scout, gingerly enveloping the body in paper towels.
He eyes me. And yet you begrudge me the spoils.
As it turns out, there are people who, for a very reasonable fee, will clean cat kibble from ovens. The one I find says he’s done this more than once, which makes me feel slightly less ridiculous. He quickly removes the oven floor and calls me to bear witness to what one mouse is capable of—which, I must tell you, is formidable, especially considering how much kibble I have previously swept and vacuumed, plus whatever the mouse actually consumed. Having discovered the perfect den, the mouse did not kick back and snuggle in. He relentlessly shored away sustenance against future famine. He found his safe place, but it wasn’t safe enough. It would never be safe enough. There is not enough kibble in the world, and the Cat always lurks.
*
Four months later, on a June morning, I was on the porch reading, drinking iced coffee, relishing the light filtering through the newly lush trees, looking up now and then to watch the birds flutter around the feeder. I recalled myself quavering in the same chair, willing myself away from existential panic. December momentarily swallowed June and I shuddered. That night had bloomed darkly into one of grief’s monstrous moments, a garish clown in a ghastly dream. These moments colonize you, convincing you that they represent some ultimate reality, the dreadful funhouse asylum to which you are now consigned for life. When you wake the next day, or the day after, to a familiar world where things are the right size and don’t want to eat your heart, you are overwhelmed by relief and gratitude, even as you still navigate grief’s river. I think this is why people who have lived through a traumatic experience often speak of a new appreciation for small things in small moments: it’s not that they’ve been chastened by life into settling for less; it’s that against a backdrop of surreal distortion the quotidian reveals its glory.
Of course I had been wrong that night, thinking myself alone in the universe. But of course I had also been right. It’s not that isolation and belonging are two halves of one truth; it’s that they are separate, coequal truths. That’s the hell of it. We are no more alone than one of fifteen sparrows crowding the feeder. We are as alone as one field mouse hunkered down in an oven.
Silky air floated in through the windows, all wide open save the one covering the swinging cat door, now permanently shut. Said door’s former user was outside, keeping the chipmunk population in check. How unwontedly quiet and tolerant he’d been that night, curled into himself on my lap. Something in him had comprehended that this was where we had to be for a while, that it was best to be still and wait it out.
It was late morning. Soon the heat would close in over the day like a dome and stay put until 8 p.m., when the blazing western sun would finally begin to melt. Western Michigan is the far edge of the eastern time zone—nine hundred miles west of Boston yet operating on the same clock. We were approaching the summer solstice, when light streaks the sky past 10 p.m. On Christmas night, we had just crossed the winter solstice, the longest night. Even then the dark was beginning to draw back.
Each thing disappears; everything goes on.
—Mark Doty, Heaven’s Coast
Toward Water
In mind I go to that stretch of Coster Road out past the county line,
where its shoulders drop off into swamp, the dead
trees stretching their wracked arms up from the water—
the land of hopeless trailers, walls of plastic sheeting,
ducks and chickens running in yards, a plaster Virgin or small
American flag in a circle of painted stones. At every other driveway
an Exit Realty sign or some threatening scripture—
not much on mercy, mostly hard choices, immutable fate.
Posted, the trees at intervals declare, No Trespassing.
Folks have their half acre of the north and not much else.
When I picture that part of the road, I usually move on
past the alpha and omega, the day care and the nursing home,
where we joked we’d wind up, to where the road narrows,
dropping down to the river, over the small bridge called Rainbow Jim’s,
the tunnel of pines, and then our driveway curling back
past the weeping fig we planted, hunched and thin
like a starveling refugee landed in the wrong country.
But today I remembered driving the other way, toward town,
that day you spotted the turtle, making its way from water to water.
How you swerved, passed it, slowed, pulled over. How you got out,
walked back, lifted it, carried it across, put it down on the bank.
As we drove off, I wondered: does it feel like a god’s hands
seizing you, speeding you across the asphalt faster than
you’ve ever moved, setting you lightly down at the very edge
of your obscure turtle desire? Is it terror you know then,
flying over the ground, or does a nothingness come down
like a shell, stilling you until your webbed feet touch gravel once more?
And then life starts to move again, toward water.
The turtle slid into the rest of its life, as we did. That day
we were out for a three-store grocery haul, a good lunch, check out
the whitecaps on the bay and home by dark, beyond which you
were headed for the river, the mindless river that gulped you down.
It seemed to me I stopped then, but I was only moving
in another layer of time, so slow it felt like stillness.
I was creeping across a long, straight road, a roaring
bearing down on me, no hands to lift me, carry me over.
Singular Bird
A Discovery Log
1959
My mother saw a great blue heron on the way home from the grocery store. Unremarkable on the face of it; Ardea herodias is adaptable enough to live wherever it can find shores and wetlands, Atlantic to Pacific, from as far north as Prince William Sound in Alaska to the Galapagos. So it was not a miracle to see one on the outskirts of Franklin, Michigan, in the 1950s. That didn’t keep it from seeming singular.
Franklin was one of the northern suburbs of Detroit born of the first wave of white flight from the city in the early 1950s. They were so new that they contained vacancy: empty lots and fields that didn’t yet qualify as lots but for children did qualify as Wilderness, full of cattails and poison ivy and unnamable dry stalks that left you covered in burrs. The real wildness in the vicinity lay in us. We took our adventure where we could find it, and we needed all of it that we could find, for the burgeoning culture of the burbs had as its aim the removal of chaos, the chastening of chance, the settling of the frontier. Our lives were regular, quiet, supervised, enormously privileged and highly predictable. In other words, safe. We knew some fundamental truths: the main course at dinner would come from a limited list of known entrées; we would take piano and dancing lessons; we would be Brownies and then Girl Scouts; for sixth grade we would get either Mrs. Koch or Mr. Polkernowski (aka Mr. Poke, so they rhymed); there were four channels to choose from—2, 4, 7, and also 9, from across the river in Canada; fathers drove off to “the office” in the morning and returned just before dinner; and anybody’s mother could be relied on to doctor scrapes, answer questions, hear our news, or drive us home, if she wasn’t at the grocery store.
The safety of this disciplined world allowed us to run remarkably free. In summer we flew out the door in the morning and wer
e not seen again until dinnertime. We made the rounds of the neighborhood on foot and bike. But only as far as Fourteen Mile Road, Franklin’s northern boundary, which we never thought to cross. Maybe we were under orders from above, or maybe it just would have been like leaving the world behind. There be dragons, in the form of unfamiliar dogs and other obscure dangers.
On the other side of one stretch of Fourteen Mile lay wide acres of dark, dense marsh. This is where one day, driving home from Kroger, my mother spotted the heron. She stopped the car and watched until it flew off. She came home transported. “A heron! A great blue heron!” What happened then was that we mocked her, as we often mocked her enthusiasms, probably encouraged by my father, assisted in turn by an entire culture that consistently presented female enthusiasm as ridiculous.
Why does that afternoon stick in the mud of memory? I keep seeing her, seized by a vision in the middle of her housewifely day, in the middle of her highly prescribed life, in the middle of a marriage that had curdled years ago, to a man deeply invested in his personal patriarchy. Smack in the middle of the century, in the middle of the suburbs of Middle America, an epiphany of sorts. She sits and watches as the tall, thin creature bides its time, waiting for a stray frog, then suddenly unfolds its six-foot wingspan and awkwardly, beautifully flaps the earth away.
1967
Maybe an unremarkable childhood landscape, like a hostile one, attunes you to the remarkable, the irruption of the mythic. I know that I felt it when, at the end of my seventeenth summer, my plane was descending into Portland, Oregon, and I saw through the left window the sharp peak of Mt. Hood—fierce, gleaming, alarmingly close. For the remainder of my visit with my brother and his young family, I kept seeking it on the eastern skyline, presiding like some transcendent, mysterious power.
The Pacific Northwest offered a landscape that spoke a new language. The titanic powers of mountains and ocean in close proximity; the giant firs serrating the sky; the Willamette yielding to the broad, serene Columbia—the vistas were rugged and lyrical at once. I usually visited in summer, so I never saw the legendary drizzle of the other eight months, only the dense greens and florid blooms it generated. I smelled some newness in the air, some openness that encouraged a deep breath. I felt some residue of what the white pioneers might have felt a century earlier, reaching the end of the trail: that life could be reimagined here, as far as you could get from the past.