During the day, Melinda invited me to come to her athletic club to go swimming, which was the most ideal way to spend time with Melinda—swimming next to her in an adjacent lane. Sometimes we went as often as five days a week. After our swim we’d eat lunch at the club café, which sold expensive sandwiches and sliced fruit in plastic boxes. I enjoyed our routine—we didn’t have to speak while we swam, and she couldn’t smoke or drink wine there, which meant our lunches were the right balance of short and sober.
When I first started swimming, my mind would flip to thoughts about Celia. I’d replay conversations, think about how I could have said something differently, said something more, said less, touched her more, repented. The thoughts would continue until I veered into another lane and collided with a swimmer, or hit the crown of my head against the pool wall. One time I hit my head so hard I thought I might faint. I held on to the cement staircase and let the black wash over my eyes. I passed my tongue across my lips to taste if any blood had mixed into the chlorine. When I realized I was fine—that my vision would return, that my head wasn’t bleeding—I pivoted and continued to swim.
The more I swam, the stronger I became. Each week I accumulated laps without stopping, and found it easier to turn and start a new set instead of clutching on to the ledge to catch my breath. I learned how to pay more attention. I counted strokes so that I knew when it was time to dive and twist and push my feet against the tiles. My breath became rhythmic—stroke, stroke, breathe, stroke, stroke, breathe—so that when I broke the surface, a buzz of oxygen lifted me across the water.
You and I still hadn’t become physically intimate, but after a couple more months we would find each other again, you would smooth the curves of my stronger body, I would kiss the freshness of your newly shaven cheeks. But for now, we were learning how to speak to each other. We spent the evenings lying in bed face-to-face, hands clutched, reflecting on the contradictory world we would return to in the United States. There would be no weapons of mass destruction. The Red Sox would finally win the World Series. New Orleans would be underwater.
During this uncertain time, Marta was an unwavering presence. She still arrived every day at 9:00 A.M., cleaned, cooked, ate lunch in the laundry room closet, listened to soap operas, and left at 3:00 P.M. wearing her church clothes. It was as though there was never a time before Marta, and there would never be a time after. She was the essential, the intangible, the very core of us.
Then one day I did see a change in her. She was vacuuming in the living room when suddenly she stopped and sat down on the couch. I glanced at her from the kitchen—she held her chin in her hands and stared out the window. This listlessness passed through her for days. I would catch her standing at the mirror or the kitchen sink, blank with thought, her eyes lost inside her mind, until she noticed me notice her and would snap back into place.
I looked for signs of malaise. I couldn’t find anything physical, but her uncharacteristic distraction continued. She left the iron flat on my blouse and burned a small brown triangle on the collar. Burning became a pattern—she left a casserole in the oven for three hours; she boiled coffee on the stove until it was as thick as molasses; she singed her forehead with the curling iron, leaving a red stripe above her brow.
Later that week I found her on the telephone in the laundry room, pressed up against the washing machine. As soon as I walked in she rushed to hang up, apologized to me repeatedly—desculpa, desculpa—and fled into the living room with her hands flying, explaining that she had to call her sister, that she didn’t have her calling card, that she never usually used the house phone but it was very important and that she would pay us back.
“I don’t care about the phone,” I told her. “What’s going on?”
“Nothing,” she said. “Family things.”
She didn’t say more and I didn’t pry. She cooked dinner and packed it into the refrigerator, then changed in her room. But before she left for the day, she approached me again, her arms tight by her sides.
“Okay. There is something.”
“What is it?”
“I have a tumor in my breast.”
At first I thought, hoped, that maybe she’d used the wrong word. Did she mean tenderness? Tension? No, she said. She meant tumor.
“How big is it?” I asked. I went to reach for her, but she didn’t respond. “How long have you known?”
“It’s very small. The size of a small stone. They will cut my breast and then I will be done.” As she said this she formed scissors with her fingers and motioned to the area where they would cut. “Not the whole breast. A piece.”
I tried to imagine the beige-pink matter growing inside her, a spiderweb of cells that had inhabited her while she cooked food and washed bowls and folded laundry.
“When is the surgery?” I asked.
“Next week.”
“That’s so soon,” I said, and we both paused, looked down at the floor.
“What day?”
“Wednesday,” she said. “Quarta-feira.”
“How long will you be gone?”
“I want to be back in three weeks,” she said and, perhaps sensing my panic, she clarified, “I will be back in three weeks.”
She gave me a short hug when she saw my tears, then took her bag and left. Her sister was waiting downstairs.
* * *
—
I noticed Marta’s absence in the presence of myself. I would put a dish in the sink in the morning and it would still be there at night. I went through a week of underwear until I remembered I had to do the laundry. So much of Marta’s power was untraceable to the naked eye. She had carefully maintained order in the apartment, erased our messy paths, so that I barely noticed we had one.
You received the news harder than I thought you would.
“What does she need? Should we give her money?”
“She wouldn’t accept it,” I said. “She’s being treated for free under the Brazilian healthcare system.”
“I’m going to miss her.”
I wrapped my arms around your back. “She’ll be back. Marta will outlive us all.”
That night I studied my own breasts in the bathroom mirror. They had firmed from swimming but were still soft enough to droop. I pressed them up and let them fall. You touched my breasts so gently it sometimes tickled. Celia pressed them against her open mouth, hard, and I worried that she’d leave a mark. I put my shirt back on and folded my arms across my chest. I hoped that I would never need strangers to hold them, cut into them, throw them away in a metal can.
“I don’t want her to die,” I said to you the following morning. I had woken up thinking only about the possibility of Marta’s death.
“She’s not going to die.”
“How do you know?”
“She told you herself—the tumor is very small. They caught it early. She’ll have surgery and maybe radiation, and then she’ll be done.”
“I wish I could speak to the doctor,” I said, and leaned against the washing machine just outside her room, staring, until the coffee in my mug went cold.
We had decided that three weeks wasn’t enough time to recover. Still, three weeks after her surgery, Marta called the apartment. She wanted to return. She told me that she had this feeling she had forgotten something, but what it was she couldn’t remember. It was clawing at her thoughts, she told me, this forgetful feeling, and she kept waking up in the night wondering, What did I forget? Did I leave my purse? My keys? My Bible?
“It’s too soon for you to work,” I told her. “Your body needs time to heal.”
“I won’t work. I want to search the apartment, and then I’ll leave.”
I said she could come look, and she arrived the next day early in the morning. Her arrival coincided with Melinda and Eduardo’s departure for a series of conferences in Europe. The trip could la
st for as long as a month, they said, and I couldn’t go to the pool without Melinda. You and I went out together to buy flowers and a cake for Marta’s arrival and set them up decoratively on the kitchen table.
When Marta walked through the door, the first thing I noticed was how different she looked. Yes, the bandages had flattened her breasts so that she lacked voluminousness, but she also looked worn. Her face had formed new creases and wrinkles, as though something were sucking acutely from the inside. She turned without moving her shoulders—the slightest twist or bend could push open her incision.
I asked her if she wanted to sit for a moment, but she was anxious to begin looking for what she’d lost. She went first to the laundry room and I heard her shifting her belongings on the shelves, then she came back to the kitchen, opened cabinets, removed cutlery and coffee cups, replaced them when nothing surfaced.
“Maybe you forgot it on the bus?” I asked.
She bent down cautiously to rummage under the sink.
“I’m sure it’s here.”
Eventually I left her alone. I realized that, in this moment, it was more important that she be autonomous in the apartment than it was for me to stay by her side. I buried myself in a magazine, ignoring the clanging sounds of pots and pans, until a sharp smell hit my nose—it had traveled all the way to the bedroom—and I realized she had turned on the gas stove.
I watched her from the kitchen door as she boiled a pot of water.
“Marta? What are you doing?”
“I couldn’t find it,” she said. “I brought fresh vegetables from the feira in Atibaia that I thought I would cook.”
“But, the doctor says you’re not supposed to work yet.”
“I’m not working,” she said and poured a cup of rice into the water.
I hadn’t realized how much I’d grown to miss Marta’s lunches, the waxy fragrance of onions and rice, tomatoes and salt, black beans and bay leaves, until the smell surrounded me again. I even missed her margarine spread inside a dinner roll, as vibrant as a daffodil, that tasted both salty and sweet.
She arranged a platter with sliced tomatoes, chopped red onions, and yucca powder, which I mixed into my bowl of rice and beans. I ate without stopping. The only thought that passed my mind was how delicious the tomato was, so firm and flavorful, it barely even needed salt. When I finished she collected my plate and went to her room for a rest, she told me, before she headed home.
As soon as she got on the bed she let out a deep moan. It was more like a voiced exhale, an exorcised rumble, long and low but loud enough to hear through a closed door.
I peeked inside the laundry room.
“Was that you?” She was halfway sitting on her mattress, adjusting knobs on the radio.
“Yes,” she said. “I yawned.”
I told her that she should go home, that I would clean up after lunch and pack her a plate to take home.
“I don’t want to see you here for another two weeks. You need more time to recover.”
She agreed and, after a short nap, left for the bus station.
* * *
—
She returned the following week. You had just left for work and I assumed you’d returned for a textbook you forgot. I wasn’t expecting Marta.
“You’re back?” I said.
She was visibly shaken. I asked her how she was feeling.
“I feel fine,” she said. “I can’t sit at home anymore or else I’ll go crazy. I’m coming back to work.”
I didn’t want to debate with her. She handed me a bag of figs she had brought with her. I sat at the kitchen table and popped and peeled the fig skins while she swept the kitchen floor.
That was the second time I heard the moan. Marta tilted her head down and steadied her hands on her hips. I kept asking her if she needed to stop working and take a rest, but every time she insisted she was fine.
“Dennis, I don’t know what to do,” I said when you returned home from work.
“What’s wrong?” You opened the refrigerator door and stood in the cool air.
“It’s Marta. She’s in so much pain, but she keeps working. I’m worried she’s going to hurt herself.”
“I know it’s hard, but that’s her decision to make.”
“If her only choices are between work and sitting at home, that’s not much of a decision.” I left to take a cold rinse in the shower.
As I placed my hand under the running shower water, trying to feel for the right temperature, I thought about the first time I had to give my father a bath. By that point he had no memory of who I was—before I arrived at his house, depending on his mood, the hospice nurse would either explain that his daughter or a kind young woman was coming to keep him company. Of course, I remembered everything about my father. I remembered how, as a child, I could grab on to his forearm with both my hands and swing. I remembered how he drank beer with pasta. I remembered him suspended on a power line, high up in the air.
Now his bones and skin were light and loose, like the underside of a dog’s snout. I was embarrassed thinking that I would have to see him naked, embarrassed for him and for me, and I kept trying to come up with maneuvers in my head so that I wouldn’t face him front-on. When I arrived, he was on the sofa watching M*A*S*H. The hospice nurse, Philomene, had to leave to take her daughter to a school dance. I gave her a hug goodbye and sat next to my father on the sofa. We were silent for a while, staring at the television, and then I told him that I was going to draw the water. I was nervous. He looked frightened too. I turned to him and stroked his hair, fine like corn silk, and told him that it would be all right. Everything was new to him again, but not new with a childlike wonder: new with a very adult sense of anxiety and paranoia. I rubbed the tops of his bumpy hands, traced with blue veins, until he initiated standing and we walked to the bathroom together. I helped him step out of his pants, pull his shirt over his head, and folded them neatly on top of the toilet seat, as he had done since he was a boy. Then he stepped into the tub himself, looked up at me with his smoky green eyes, and told me that the water felt fine.
Though his memory had all but vanished, his body still remembered how beautiful it feels to be cared for. He laughed and smiled when I took the sponge and squeezed it onto his back and over the top of his head. He stood up and I wrapped him in a towel, as he had done for me when I was a little girl, and he let me brush his hair. I gave him a pack of Junior Mints and he ate them as I massaged his shoulders, which had bowed into slender arches over the years. It’s a moment I’ll remember for the rest of my life, whether I actually remember it or not.
The next morning, before Marta arrived, I set up a line of tea candles along our bathtub ledge. I laid out my bathrobe on the sink and dripped eucalyptus oil into the white porcelain tub. I drew a hot bath, so hot the room filled with a fragrant steam. I set up a radio in the corner and turned on the classical station, which was playing a Bach violin concerto, then laid out a tray with cookies and cold green tea. When Marta arrived, the water had reached a golden, refreshing temperature. I led her into the bathroom.
“Soak for hours,” I said. “For as long as you want. If the water goes cold, drain it and start again.” I told her to call me if she needed anything else.
At first she hesitated, in the way of polite refusal. But when I shut the door I heard her laugh. And then, an hour later, when she was still inside, I heard her laugh again. It made me laugh too.
I heard you shout from the kitchen, “The taxi isn’t coming.” You were on the phone with the Provost, who had called between meetings to make sure we were on schedule for our flight home. We had shipped our belongings the week prior. All we had left were two suitcases and our toothbrushes resting on the bathroom sink.
“I called three hours ago to reserve it and it’s still not here,” you said into the receiver, and then, Okay, okay, and hung up.
Marta was with us cleaning for the next residents, an oncologist from Switzerland and her wife, who were due to arrive in a few days.
“I don’t know what to do,” you said to me, exasperated, holding one hand to your forehead. “The Provost is going to try and find us his driver, but at this rate, even if he came immediately, we’d still miss our flight.”
We had had little opportunity to digest our departure; the last few days had been cluttered with logistics. We kept misplacing everything we needed: our passports, the keys to our house in Hartford, your leaving papers from the university, my immigration documents. Marta kept us organized as best she could, stacking the essentials by the door as soon as they were found. Her incision had healed and she was waiting to hear from the doctors whether she needed radiation. She had a checkup the following week, and I made her promise that she would call to tell us what she learned. Her niece had already begun to stock wigs at her salon, just in case. From what I could see she moved ably, perhaps more ably now than she had before. Her walk had a particular lightness, a starry buoyancy, as though the physical loss had made her spiritually new.
You and Marta had developed a special bond in the final weeks we were together. I listened to your conversations from the other side of the wall, how she spoke about her relationships at home, with the church and with her family. You told her you were nervous about forgetting the small pleasures that you had grown to love in Brazil, pleasures that would surely evaporate with time. The rich tang of the coffee, the wisp of a storm wind on a humid afternoon, the students who shared with you their personal histories, how beer in São Paulo was served so cold the cans would burn your lips.
Your nostalgia, already clearly formed, made me wonder why we were leaving at all. Why not stay? The Provost would, without a doubt, hire you full-time. I could contact Simone—maybe I could take Celia’s old job at the theater. We would find a way. Why did we have to leave? The issue with the taxi seemed like the last opportunity to abandon this destiny, and for a moment I thought maybe it was a sign that we weren’t meant to go, that the country wanted us to stay.
It Is Wood, It Is Stone Page 18