by Lauren Marks
Before we left, Jonah and I shared a bench in the Patersons’ backyard. My face was following the sun, and my neck was resting on Jonah’s collarbone. There was a strong sense of order inside me. I felt the intricate and ineffable everywhere. The same patterns that contained the bird on the ledge and the worm guzzling the soil were the same patterns that contained the weight of my head and the shape of Jonah’s shoulder. I couldn’t describe this sense of symmetry, but all was as it should be.
After a while, I broke my silence, mentioning something to Jonah that probably took him by surprise.
I am not afraid to die, I said.
My sentence structure was still very shaky. I doubt I was able to qualify or contextualize the comment much. But I didn’t feel I had to because I had never said anything that true.
It’s all going to be okay. You are not about to die, Lauren, Jonah said, while tightening his grip on me. You don’t need to worry about it anymore.
But I’m not worried at all, I said. That’s what I’m trying to tell you.
I wasn’t sure Jonah heard me, or if he understood that I didn’t need any comfort then. Quite the opposite. But his body relaxed a bit and he said: Wish we could stay in this garden forever. You, me, and the bumblebees. He sighed. Don’t get me wrong—I’m glad we’ll get to spend some time in New York together too. It’s just more peaceful here, more authentic somehow. But, then again, everything feels more real when you leave New York City.
• • •
Returning to New York didn’t much matter to me, but my mother thought it would be nice to pick up some things from my apartment, and maybe see some friends while I was in town.
Could be fun, she said. We can throw a brunch or something; make the whole day an open house. People can wander in and out to wish you well. I agreed to the plan and Jonah helped me write the e-mail.
My own apartment was being sublet, but my friend Rachel had offered up her place for us to use. She and her husband were out of town, but they had left a key and told us to use the house as if it were our own. When we arrived stateside, Jonah returned to his apartment in Brooklyn, and Mom and I headed to Rachel’s apartment on the Upper East Side, where we both fell into a deep—and much needed—sleep.
The next day I got up early, initially disoriented by waking up in Rachel’s bedroom. It was the morning of the party and still dark outside. My mom was asleep on the other side of the wide bed, and the sky over the East River was showing the pink thumbprints of dawn. It felt like a lucky day already.
Laura and BJ arrived with orange juice, baguettes, and a bouquet of flowers, and quickly got to work assisting my mom, who had decided to assemble a large egg scramble. Jonah appeared soon after that, looking a little groggy. I hadn’t thought about the details of the party beforehand, but once friends started arriving, I was overjoyed. These people. I had forgotten I knew these people. And even though I couldn’t remember many details of who they were or how we knew each other, the recognition was instinctual and reassuring. There was my best friend from high school, Grace, who had moved from California to New York to do her graduate work at Columbia. There was Michael Krass, the friend and former NYU professor with whom I stayed in Paris right before the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. In a bright yellow dress I borrowed from Rachel’s closet, I sat on the far corner of the couch, the end point of a receiving line of former classmates and castmates. Every kind word or touch sent me into tiny spasms of grace. There couldn’t have been more than ten people in the room at any given time, but the voices soared and tumbled around me in a blissful din. People looked luminous to me, better and brighter than themselves, more like constellations. I started to feel as if I were rising from the couch, hovering closer and closer to the ceiling fixtures, and when a friend lightly clasped onto my arm, I was thankful for his anchor because it felt that I might otherwise have drifted away in unspeakable delight.
However, as more people continued to arrive in waves, the aural bombardment became too intense. I went to Rachel’s bedroom to lie down. I still wanted everyone to stay, to eat, to talk, but I couldn’t appreciate the celebration unless I was behind the closed door. I splayed out like a pressed daffodil between the white sheets of Rachel’s bed, trying to stop my heart from racing. I didn’t mind if people entered the bedroom, as long as they knocked on the door, came in one at a time, and spoke quietly. For the next two hours, I’d doze in between visits. The bright, lucky party was happening just outside this room and that was just as I wanted it.
But then I threw up. And I kept throwing up.
When my mother came to check on me, her expression quickly morphed into what I had come to identify as “worry.” I didn’t think my sickness was a major cause for concern or worth stopping the party for. I argued that I was fine, but my point was somewhat weakened when I leaned over to vomit again into an empty Duane Reade bag.
My mom called my old doctor’s office back in LA. She tried to remain calm, but when the nurse on call told her that vomiting could be an early sign of neurological crisis, she went into disaster management mode.
I tried one more time to find enough language to protest, to assure her that I really wasn’t feeling that bad, but my mom insisted we go to the ER immediately. She helped me out of Rachel’s dress and into some yoga pants. We hopped into a cab and several people from the party followed close behind.
When we arrived at the nearest hospital, my mother explained my recent medical situation and I was treated before anyone else there—express IV, express consult. After the exam, though, the doctors decided that I had most likely caught a strain of flu on the plane back from Edinburgh, nothing more. It was a common problem for people who had stayed in sterile environments for long stretches. The doctors asked me to stay for observation overnight, just in case, but my friends were still milling about the hospital waiting room with bagels and opened bottles of champagne. As soon as it was clear that I was in no imminent danger, they renewed their celebration with vigor. And my mom got herself settled into a hotel room next door.
Unfortunately for everyone who saw me that morning, enthusiasm wasn’t the only thing that was contagious. My bug proved especially virulent, and most of them quickly fell ill, no one as badly as my poor mother. When I was released from the hospital, she had planned to join Jonah and me on a trip to my Brooklyn apartment, but her illness kept her from going anywhere. Instead, she gave me explicit instructions: gather any clothes and items I might need in LA and hurry back.
• • •
My apartment in Greenpoint was a two bedroom that I was sharing with a journalism grad student from Australia. Built in the 1940s, the ceilings of the charming third-floor apartment were high, the walls were thick, and none of the windows faced the busy street. The living room looked out over an unused garden. It was the most relaxing home I’d ever lived in.
But for reasons I couldn’t exactly pinpoint then, this feeling of calm didn’t wash over me as Jonah and I opened the front door. All I saw was the pile of unwashed dishes in the sink and two lightbulbs out in the hallway. I felt sick all over again.
Maybe those stairs were a little too much exertion, Jonah said, concerned. Do you want to lie down for a while? No one is going to mind.
It sounded like a good idea initially, but I quickly fixated on the fact that a stranger’s sheets were on my bed. Everything smelled off. I didn’t feel I belonged there at all. I rushed to stuff a suitcase and did so with very little care about what I packed. I was going to California to recover. How many pairs of underwear would I need for that?
• • •
Getting to Los Angeles proved more complicated than initially planned. The bouts of sickness my mother and I battled through delayed our return, so we were still staying in the hotel near the hospital when Rachel returned to New York. She hurried over to visit us, catching a yellow cab straight from JFK.
Jonah and I were in the deli below the hotel, picking up more ginger ale for my mother. I cau
ght sight of Rachel getting out of a taxi, wrestling with her unwieldy suitcase. As soon as she spotted me, she dropped all of her bags in a heap and pulled me into a tight, perfumed hug.
There you are! she said. There’s the Lauren I know and love.
Rachel didn’t mean to upset me, but I found her statement profoundly jarring. I didn’t jerk away from her embrace, but inwardly I was recoiling. I had woken up from brain surgery changed—there was me, here and now, but I sensed there was another shadowy character in the mix here too: The Girl I Used to Be. I couldn’t easily access the memories of this girl in any complete way and wasn’t actively engaging in her senses of attachment or desire. I didn’t know if I wanted what she used to want, or if I cared about what she used to care about. And, strangely enough, I wasn’t mourning the loss of that past self. She was simply gone, which was neither a good nor a bad thing. The life I was living suited me fine. But somehow Rachel hadn’t seen the chasm between those two people at all, and it was the misidentification that wounded me. Under this unforgiving spotlight, it became clear that this issue of “not belonging” wasn’t limited to my experience being inside my old apartment, it was also permeating my interactions with my family and friends. The Girl I Used to Be was someone I didn’t know, but with whom everyone else was on intimate terms. I felt a kind of warmth between Rachel and me, an unidentifiable affection that must have been forged in years of friendship, but I certainly was not the Lauren who Rachel knew and loved. And I might never be that person again. Wasn’t that transformation obvious? Didn’t it radiate off my very skin? In that moment, though, I wasn’t able to explain to Rachel how I was feeling. I didn’t even try. Only later, I confided my concerns to my journal.
Rachel. “There’s soul.” “Youre
right here” Why?
Thats is no there?
I tried to transcribe my interaction with Rachel, word-for-word, into my journal. I had graduated from scratching isolated words onto a page to some fragile sentence constructions. I wasn’t able to know how fractured these sentences really were, but somehow I did sense I wasn’t able to put down Rachel’s words exactly.
I had acquired this other woman’s family and friends, her boyfriend and apartment. What to make of this familiar unfamiliarity? I was not the girl who had built this life and shaped it to her personal preferences. Though I didn’t have any major complaints about what I had encountered yet, I also didn’t know how to interact with it, or what my obligations might be to the system I had been inserted into. Did I just accept this inheritance, with all its fearful and joyful dimensions? Did I have any say in the matter? Would I ever feel anything like The Girl I Used to Be? And was that something I should even want?
I didn’t know how to know. I didn’t know how to remember.
PART TWO
HOMECOMING
I have a feeling I’m falling / on rare occasions / but most of the time I have my feet on the ground / I can’t help it if the ground itself is falling.
LAWRENCE FERLINGHETTI
1
The disorientation might have begun on the freeways that crisscrossed Los Angeles or on the streets that led up into the hills of Altadena. Maybe it began in the driveway of my parents’ California Spanish home, lit from within. Whenever it began, the feeling could no longer be ignored as I walked out of the mild September night and into my family’s kitchen. The smell of roasted chicken in the stove curdled against the tang of bleach coming from the laundry room. A host of chrome appliances ticked and chirped as electricity buzzed through them. The pale wood floorboards and the still life on the wall suddenly seemed like co-conspirators against my sense of balance. The entire house was humming.
My dad and grandma were there, waiting for me with open arms, but I couldn’t fully match their embraces. I needed a place to situate myself again, to reconnect with the Quiet. The bathtub upstairs seemed ideal. But as I lowered my body into the steaming water, vague memories of every bath I had ever taken in that room started to populate the tub. There was the time with the inflatable white pillow, and another time, long after the pillow had popped. There were baths when I’d kept my feet planted on the floor of the tub, and others when I’d let my legs float. Some when I submerged my head with my hair swaying like seaweed, and others when I hadn’t wet my hair at all. This was not the relaxing dip I had hoped it would be. The bath was too damn crowded.
I focused on the garbage can, which began to shape-shift before my eyes. What was it doing? Where was it going? Its unanticipated animation was unsettling, but there was a terrible beauty in the hallucination, too. The only thing I came to fear more than the kaleidoscopic display was the possibility that the splendor might one day stop.
Over the next few weeks, in search of silence and to subdue the clamor, I preferred to be alone in the house. I kept the TVs and radios off. I didn’t pick up a ringing phone unless I had to. I sat in undecorated hallways or lay in the backyard, beneath the sprawling net of tree limbs. With my ears in the rough grass, I’d single out the blades that had been spared by the gardener. Then, the Quiet would find me.
And in my journal, I wondered: Would this house ever stop becoming?
every rgorm. different.
make kaleidscope. new sparts
every time. will this house
keep on becom eimg. How many
rime can i surprised by the
trasht can
From the kitchen table, I could see my grandmother tottering down the driveway from the little house in the backyard. She had a round, heavyset build; her gait betrayed her arthritis and the subtle pain in every step. But while her body had lost its fortitude, her mind was as keen as ever. She had been a nurse for fifty years, and now into her early eighties, she remained an avid reader, easily finishing a book a day. She would enlist family members to make weekly trips to the local library to keep up with her demand. To join me in the main house, my grandmother needed only to go up the single stair that entered into the kitchen. But it was not so simple for her. She would have to grip the doorjamb with one hand and use her free hand to balance her book, her cup of coffee, and whatever else she was carrying around. She moved like a seesaw and entered most rooms sideways. I didn’t get up from my seat while she enacted this elaborate procedure in front of me because, even when it was a very unsteady day, she didn’t like people to help her.
Not long after she retired from being a nurse in rural Montana, my grandmother moved in with my parents in Los Angeles. That little cottage in the backyard, sometimes referred to as the “granny shack,” had been built specifically for her relocation. Though she was my maternal grandmother, my father never treated her like an in-law. As soon as he would wake up every day, he’d freshly grind dark roasted beans, and would usually hand-deliver her morning cup of black coffee.
Hey punkin, she greeted me warmly, lurching toward the sink, where she deposited her coffee cup.
As my grandmother joined me at the kitchen table, she surveyed the contents of the care packages that had amassed there: a stuffed elephant, a box of markers, a plastic jack-o-lantern full of microwave popcorn, and romantic comedies starring Sarah Jessica Parker. And there were so many letters, many from people I hardly knew, but all addressed to me. Gram patted my arm, her touch soft as a peach.
It’s like Queen for a Day in here, she said. How does it feel to get so much attention, honey?
Feel? I didn’t feel anything about it. Was I supposed to? I’d left most of the gifts unopened and the cards unread. They all said the same thing anyway: Get well soon. The whole concept was baffling to me.
In general, I was a bit unsure if I was using the right words, in the right order, whenever I was speaking. But it was different whenever I interacted with my grandmother. She always managed to understand me. Why do you think people keep sending me these things, Gram?
It’s because you are a miracle, she said.
But I haven’t done anything, I protested.
Well, she said, and thought ab
out my statement for a little longer. For being a survivor then, she concluded finally.
I looked toward the cards again. Get Well. The phrasing sounded odd to me. Like: Get a Seat or Get a Spoon. Was well something you could get? And didn’t these people know that I was out of the hospital and that everything was clearly fine?
But I am well already, I told her.
She considered my comment carefully. You know, punkin, you don’t seem too upset about being uprooted from your boyfriend and school, and your whole life on the other side of the country. And that’s good. I’m so pleased you’re not letting this whole situation get you down—proud that you’ve got the grit and constitution for this kind of thing. Still, I’ve got something gnawing on me, she said. She fixed her gaze squarely on me and I could see my reflection framed perfectly in her owl-like glasses.
The only thing that really concerns me about your case is that it doesn’t seem to concern you.
2
The last moment I had shared with Jonah in New York was just outside my mother’s hotel room. We had gone to the elevator together, and as we waited there, he leaned over and kissed me. I tried to follow his lead. Considering our pre-rupture timeline, Jonah and I had shared thousands of kisses through the years. Some tender, some joyful, some illicit. But I didn’t feel the weight of our history then. Also, I was about to leave the state for an indefinite amount of time; I could easily have worried about our future or felt concerned that this might be our final kiss. But this also wasn’t the case. It was astonishing how unpracticed I felt while kissing Jonah, and mainly I just kept hoping I was doing it right.
And the next day, I was three thousand miles away.
On a morning in late September, my mother was darting around the kitchen, trying to rush out to work. She snatched a file of papers from the counter, but an idea bubbled up in her mind that quickly registered on her face. She dashed to consult the family calendar hanging on the pantry door.