Perfection

by Julie Metz

  Fear of change is the crippling thing. Because of this fear of change and death, we create fortresses we hope will protect us. I am about to let the last of my fortress go for a life that offers uncertainty, though I am also returning to a place where I have family and the prospect of a new life with Will. He tells me that he sees his life connected to Liza and me: that we can head forward as a trio. We will not be at sea in an unworthy boat.

  I want to live life unafraid of failure and success, though it will always be in my nature to worry and fret. I want to teach my daughter at least one thing I have learned with so much pain: Be prepared as best you can, make effort, but be prepared to not be prepared. In fact, it’s best not to get too attached to the idea of always being prepared. While still being prepared. Perhaps “being prepared” could be redefined as “paying attention.”

  At last, I pay my bill and gather up my purchases in their plastic sack, while I continue to contemplate the threads of cobweb on the cash register.

  At home I settle on an aqua blue velvet dress, one of my widow splurges, appropriate not for the meeting with my lawyer but for the PR event at Irena’s showroom that will follow in the early evening.

  I have just time enough to make some phone calls, read and respond to the morning e-mails, flip through my bills, and grab a book and a bag of knitting for the train. I drive to the train station and park my car. I fumble for a few dollars for the parking meter, choosing the meter on the left—the one on the right ate five dollars the last time I used it and I haven’t forgiven it yet.

  A few minutes later I am seated on the train, happily pulling out my knitting. One stitch at a time, I work, then doze until the train hits the tunnel at 125th Street, when I startle awake and, still bleary, collect my belongings.

  After the midtown real estate transaction, I begin my walk to Irena’s jewelry showroom. Snippets of conversation along Thirty-fourth Street, a singsong of world accents, blend into the modulated tones of a familiar melody that is my birthright. I feel at home again in my city.

  Irena’s showroom is lushly arranged with her beautiful jewelry, food and drink, and the women from fashion magazines in their This Moment’s Uniform of pointy spiked heels peeking out from under tight, low-slung jeans and trousers. I take a glass of Veuve-Clicquot from a waiter’s tray. I nibble a little chocolate cookie treat and wonder if I can negotiate a chocolate-dipped strawberry without dribbling on my velvet dress. I chat with Irena, friends, and colleagues and take a moment to enjoy the splendid view of the rooftop city from her high-up windows. The aroma of chocolate and strawberry mingling with the scents of women’s perfume diffuses in the heat of the overhead spotlights. In the midst of this moment of urban glamour, Will calls on my cell phone, and we arrange to meet back at Grand Central in an hour’s time.

  Back outside, on Seventh Avenue and Thirtieth Street, I pause after spotting a young guy with one of those new bicycle taxis. It is painted robin’s egg blue, like a bag from Tiffany.

  “How much to Grand Central?”

  “Ten dollars,” he replies. It seems extravagant to me for such a short trip, and I hesitate for a moment, admiring again the blue color of the carriage.

  “It’s really fun!” the young man adds exuberantly.

  I decide that fun is required. I hop in. A smile plasters itself on my face as soon as he pedals into the street, as if I were my own eight-year-old daughter on a ride at the small-town carnival we went to a few months earlier. The driver careens with verve and confidence through the traffic. It is a still tender fall evening, not too cold. The city looks glorious, the last sunlight glittering in the skyscraper windows, gilding the top of the Chrysler Building, the sky the deep, rich blue of a Magritte painting. I can hear strains of Leonard Bernstein’s dissonant ode to the city—It’s a hell of a town! I begin crying in the happiest way as we speed by pedestrians waiting on the curb corners. Sometimes they look at me, and, because I am smiling, they smile back.

  I arrive at Grand Central and wait for Will at the information booth. A black-tie event is about to begin in Vanderbilt Hall. The invitees stand milling in their fancy outfits: men in tuxedos, women in gowns. I feel a longing to be part of this other, glamorous New York City evening about to unfold, but I am also grateful just to observe it—to see and enjoy the details of my life again. This has been the real gift of everything I have experienced since Henry’s death.

  A tap on my shoulder. I turn away from the elegant scene to find Will looking at me. He has submitted to a radical haircut this very morning—shaving off most of the remains of his hair. He is wearing a black newsboy cap I gave him, and he takes it off to show me his clean-shaven head. I laugh because he looks so boyish. His blue eyes sparkle in the lights of the hall. He reports that his shaved head has gone over well at his office.

  We eat some pasta hurriedly in one of the downstairs restaurants and board the 6:40 train, packed with commuters. Too late, Will realizes he has left the black newsboy cap at the restaurant.

  A genius catnapper (a talent I envy), Will dozes for a while, his head resting on my shawl-draped handbag. I stroke the grayish velvet nap of his newly buzzed hair, play with his gently pointed ears, and pat his still brownish-reddish beard. Then we talk and kiss a bit. Some people stare, and I wonder if they find us tiresome. The woman just opposite us in the four-seat section near the doors moves after another space became available. So I guess we are tiresome.

  From the parking lot in town, we drive to pick up Liza. We walk through Tanya’s mural-covered house into the backyard garden, where she has arranged branches into fanciful fencing, topped with a plastic rocking horse she found discarded on the street. Her two cats and bunny roam the yard, dodging some of the neighborhood children. Liza and a half dozen other kids are squealing with delight on the trampoline, but Liza comes away cooperatively after a brief hunt for her shoes.

  Liza does not like Will’s new haircut. She pauses, screwing up her face before delivering her assessment of the situation: “It looks like a teenager haircut, but the face doesn’t match!”

  He laughs. “Thanks for your honesty, bub.”

  Back home, after dishes of fruit and ice cream, Liza asks if she can have a bath and if we will read to her. The full restoration of reading time in the evening is an unforeseen benefit of this new relationship. In the face of crisis, such niceties were discontinued for a time—there was laundry to do and work to catch up on.

  Upstairs, I run the tub and Liza steps into the water in her cautious way, easing into the froth of bubbles with a grateful ahhh. Will and I take turns reading. After the bath and teeth brushing, we resume reading in Liza’s bedroom, the three of us squashed on her narrow bed. Then I turn the lights out, Will heads for the bathroom, and Liza and I snuggle for a while. I feel tired after the day, afraid I will drop off, as I used to do when she was younger. But I want to have sex more than I want to sleep.

  I rouse myself and find Will still in the bathroom brushing his teeth. I brush my teeth, change into my warm flannel robe, and hop under the bedcovers while Will does his stretching exercises, recommended for a back injury some years earlier. I remind him of the first time he stayed over. I observed him doing his exercises on that evening with great fascination, intrigued and pleased that he was disciplined enough about his exercises to do them even when another man might have had more pressing desires, like getting my clothes off. We didn’t even have sex that night. It was part of the Plan to take things slowly. But now we are old hands, so to speak.

  Liza comes in briefly to tell me that she has finished Book 18 of the Boxcar Children. I congratulate her and give her another bedtime kiss. Will wishes her good night and tells her he loves her. She offers a muffled response. She is still finding her way in this new situation. It will take time for her to find out what will be good for her.

  I resettle Liza in her bed and return, closing the bedroom door, before climbing back into the warm bed. I am always cold, and Will’s body is warm under the covers. He’s a
good size for me, trim but not overdone in the muscle department. The legs of a cyclist taper gently to sculpted knees, well-proportioned calves, slim ankles, and well-defined feet. His torso is slim but filled out nicely at the shoulders. He has a slender neck, a small chin cleft, a large and angular nose with a dent from his days as a junior boxer. And those very blue eyes. And his elfin (or are they Vulcan?) ears. And now, not much hair. His arms are surprisingly strong for his slim build. He lifts me up into a playful toss—the brief seconds in the air are thrilling. I am relieved to land solidly on the bed with a bounce.

  Now we are facing each other with our legs overlapped under the covers. He is wearing a T-shirt and a pair of green Christmas boxer shorts, decorated with wee reindeer. I am still wearing my flannel bathrobe. He seems dreamy and tired, and I think maybe we’ll just enjoy this and we won’t make love. We embrace and draw each other tighter. His hands wander around under the covers, touching me on my waist and in the space between my lower back and the rise of my bum. We kiss and he sighs and I sigh. He says I am a sex bomb. This is a good thing for a woman to hear when she is forty-five. I am thinking dayanu—it would have sufficed—the refrain from the Jewish Passover prayer. If God had just brought us to the desert for forty years and not given us manna, it would have been enough. But he did give us manna. Life is good, even for a heathen Jewish girl, who can’t remember any of the other words of this Hebrew prayer. Off with the flannel robe, off with the T-shirt, off with the Christmas boxer shorts.

  Later, we drift off to sleep, pulling the warm covers back over and nestling in tight like furry, hibernating animals. Sleep is overtaking, my eyes are closing, and my final thought is yes. A big, bold word in bubble letters with outlines and drop shadows in shades of hot pink, red, and orange, and an animated John Lennon prancing in Pepperland, the people waking up from their paralyzed, gray sleep, and the Blue Meanies relenting at last with the opening trumpet blasts of the sampled Marseillaise, and then the music softens, the letters collapse softly, and the room is peaceful darkness.

  seventeen

  2005–2007

  We don’t have much truth to express unless we have gone

  into those rooms and closets and woods and abysses

  that we were told not to go into.

  —ANNE LAMOTT,

  Bird by Bird

  Many days after that perfect one were full of difficulty. One evening during the spring of 2005, my mother called me. She’d felt unwell, and her physician had found fluid in her lungs. My dad had taken her to the hospital for a biopsy.

  “It’s cancer,” she said with her trademark frankness. I was devastated. My parents, in the tenth year of a well-deserved retirement, were about to leave on a long-planned trip to France.

  My mother didn’t want to talk long that evening. After she said good-bye, I did the only thing that felt useful. I Googled “mesothelioma,” carefully typing out the unfamiliar word, and arrived at a BBC website. In the course of thirty minutes, I learned that mesothelioma is an unyielding cancer. After exposure to asbestos, even a tiny amount, small tumors grow in the patient’s lungs over many years. The disease is therefore usually diagnosed in a late, inoperable stage. While other lung cancers respond to chemotherapy, mesothelioma is unresponsive in most cases. Life expectancy from the time of diagnosis is twelve to eighteen months. After this brutal crash course, I felt like I had been kicked in the chest. My mother was going to die from this disease. The question was only how soon.

  My mother, a refugee from Hitler’s Austria, was a tough survivor, and she tackled her treatment options with determination, though she was already weakened from the growing tumors. My parents canceled the trip to France and consulted specialists. When surgery was ruled out as a possibility, my mother’s oncologist urged her to try chemotherapy. He talked about life extension and quality of life. After my research, I wasn’t convinced, but I accepted my mother’s wish to try anything that might help. My father took her for months of chemotherapy treatments, which only depleted her further and had little effect on the tumors.

  Meanwhile, I packed up my house slowly, waiting out the last of Liza’s school year. Our family drew closer during this time, even as we watched my mother fade away. When my brother and I visited my parents for the July Fourth holiday weekend, our worst fears were realized. My mother was wasted and pale, her bald head wrapped in a scarf, her hands shaking. I had seen those advertisements for antinausea medications featuring Grandpa or Grandma chasing grandchild on a gorgeous soft lawn. In my mother’s case, the antinausea drugs were mostly ineffective. On a good day she sat in a chair, got down a bit of food and tea without vomiting, stared into space, read a few pages, drifted in and out of sleep.

  Her life during chemotherapy was like pressing the Pause button during a disaster movie when you need to use the toilet. When you return and press Play, you are right back where you left off. The plane is still going to crash; you just froze the frame for a short while. None of us who witnessed her ordeal would have called this a good quality of life, and neither did she.

  “What did I do in my life to deserve this?” she asked my father. He told me this later, when it was almost over.

  Moving Day, June 30, 2005, arrived in the midst of this family crisis. The real estate transaction I’d attempted had gone seriously south, which meant we’d all be moving into Will’s one-bedroom apartment till we could find something else. After the moving trucks left us behind in our empty home, a couple came over with their kids, which softened the hard edges of the morning. Liza took a last swim in the pool, where she’d attempted her first doggie paddles as a three-year-old. I took a photo of her, dripping wet, her swim goggles perched on her forehead like the flying goggles of a World War I flying ace. The image captured her brave cheerfulness as we prepared to head off to a new life that very afternoon. She was losing a lot—friends, belongings we’d had to pass on, a school where she had been nurtured, and now the home she loved. She had repeatedly made it clear that she was not happy about our move.

  As the afternoon drew to a close, we piled our last luggage into Will’s Honda CRV. We pressed our four complaining cats into their carriers. Loaded to the rooftop, we pulled out of the driveway for the last time and headed to Brooklyn.

  It was not the glorious reentry I had hoped for. I wished we were moving to the new apartment I had tried to purchase, but New York City is always a wondrous creation on a clear summer evening. We crossed the Triborough Bridge, and I admired the sparkling sunset over Manhattan. Despite my disappointment, I was happy to be home, almost ready to kiss the grimy sidewalk on Seventh Avenue.

  From that first night, as we unpacked at Will’s apartment, I was relieved by the possibility that I would never have to see Cathy again. I hadn’t realized how pervasive her presence had been, even though I rarely saw her in town after the Halloween parade.

  I had forced myself to drive by her house a week before our move. Will sat next to me as I piloted onto her street. I saw her, reading a book in her hammock, just as she’d been the July morning I had confronted her. She looked up, our eyes met. She turned away.

  “There she is,” I remarked sullenly to Will. And perhaps there she will stay. Maybe now I can leave the ugly thing they did together behind me. Perhaps one day it won’t be the first thing I think about as I wake each morning.

  The rest of the summer passed in a blur.

  While getting Liza settled in a new school that fall, I tried to juggle parenting, work, apartment hunting, and visits to my parents, but plans frequently deteriorated—sometimes just doing the minimum was too much. During that time, it was helpful to remember that life could offer flavors other than sour and bitter.

  What I had was companionship. During the first and the subsequent move and my mother’s illness, Will managed to find lightness on dark days while tirelessly schlepping our stuff to and from storage units in rented vans. He parented with pleasure, eagerly attended parent-teacher conferences, and helped Liza with her math homewor
k. While feeling upended and homeless, I also felt supported.

  By December, my mother had had enough of the chemotherapy. “I don’t want to play this game anymore,” she remarked with gallows humor. “I don’t really want to leave, but I’m ready to leave.”

  Her last family Christmas dinner, at our new apartment, was a bittersweet meal. At least the chemo was over. She enjoyed the lamb stew I made, a glass of good red wine, and some chocolate truffles. I hadn’t seen her eat with such pleasure in months.

  During a brief respite before the inevitable final decline, her hair reappeared as short gray fuzz and the color of her skin refreshed. She could walk with effort to a local restaurant, or sit on the porch of their weekend house and enjoy a summer breeze. By the end of July, she had grown weaker again, and in early August she decided she wouldn’t get out of bed anymore.

  She died on October 22, 2006. At the end, she was just a ghost in the bed, cared for by two hospice nurses who traded shifts during her last three months. She left peacefully, and we were grateful for that. But I still wish I could rewind the movie. In my version, she would refuse the chemotherapy and head instead to the jetway for the night flight to Paris, to enjoy a last adventure with her partner of fifty-nine years.

  In the days after she died, we began looking through her drawers. I found a well-used child’s toothbrush, three metal diaper pins, and two pieces of enamel jewelry I had made for her at sleepaway camp. I found a bag containing my childhood hair ribbons and the white cotton gloves she made me wear when we went to concerts or to see The Nutcracker at Lincoln Center. My brother found a leather tube with straps, something like a finger glove. He recognized it after a few puzzled moments as the protective covering he wore in 1965 after I squashed his left ring finger in our toy cupboard door, “accidentally on purpose.” I remembered getting in big trouble for that one. In one of her coat pockets, I found a small black pebble, like the ones I have collected on Maine island shores. In a yellowed plastic bag, I found what was possibly her wedding bouquet—the dried roses disintegrated on contact—and a small keepsake book filled with notes in German from friends and family in Austria. The entries were from 1938 to 1940, dark times in Vienna. My father and I wondered how many of the signers had made it out alive; my mother’s escape with her family in 1940 was already perilous and miraculous. My father said he’d never seen the book before. My mother had her secrets, though I wish I could ask her about that little book and her childhood friends. As a mother, I know why she kept the eclectic mementos of her childhood and ours. As Liza once said, memories are good, even painful ones.