Her: A Memoir

by Christa Parravani

  “Let me make you dinner over the weekend,” he said. “And then breakfast and lunch.”

  He was confident I’d accept his invitation, though there was something else in his tone that was a bit uneasy, weary. “I’m an excellent cook,” he quickly added. “It would be my pleasure to prepare a meal for you.”

  “Only if I can bring a cake,” I said, knowing I’d find a recipe I could spend a few days and all my nervous energy on.

  * * *

  For a time in college I’d fancied myself a poet: I was a poet and Cara wrote fiction. We were a word team, a double threat, and competitors in a duel. In our shared dorm room we stayed up late scribbling in notebooks, imagining our romantically impoverished future selves writing side by side by the light of a single candle, cupboards bare. I’d make popcorn in an air popper and we’d write and munch until the snack was gone and we’d wrung ourselves of every last letter and punctuation mark. We were writing for our lives. Words were our way out of Albany, our family, our dual struggles. Sometimes we’d read what we’d written out loud. Nearly everything we wrote during those years could be boiled down to love notes to each other.

  We shared one story, and we argued over who would tell it first. These fights were like the ones we’d had as little girls. All of a sudden we’d break into brawl: hair pulling, rolling around on the floor, laughing and crying at the same time, biting each other, beating each other with our fists and with other weapons—a broom handle, a toy plastic horse with sharp hooves. I’d toss that horse at her like a throwing star. As children we’d fought for toys and attention. As adults we fought over memories and words.

  At first, Cara won. I didn’t think I’d ever have the chops to beat her. She would never have told me to stop writing, but she did instruct me about which subjects were off-limits to my poetry. Those subjects turned out to be almost everything that had ever happened to either of us. It was unspoken that there wasn’t enough room in the universe for two Parravani writers. During the summer before our junior year at Bard College, I picked up a camera and stopped writing.

  Then, in late April of our senior year, we were in our rusty black Saab, on the way to school to turn in our theses. We shared possession of the car, but when we were together, Cara always drove. On this afternoon, we each sat with a stack of papers cradled in our laps. Cara had written a novel and I had completed a paper on photography, a document that I barely cared about. Sitting with it, beside Cara and her novel, I saw that I hadn’t come near her accomplishment.

  “I hope you don’t mind,” I said, “but I need to go to the darkroom tonight and print some photographs. I’ll need to use the car.”

  “But there’s a party tonight in Tivoli,” Cara reminded me, flipping down the turn signal. She pulled away from the curb without looking for oncoming traffic. “You’ll have to go tomorrow. I’ve promised some people a ride to the party.”

  “Seriously?” I sneered. “Since when do you care about a stupid party with people you’ll probably never even see again?”

  “I don’t know, but I do. I care.”

  “Please?” I was tired of asking. We’d split the cost of the car, though I used it less than half as much. “We always go where you want to go.”

  “Nope,” Cara said. She looked down at the finished manuscript in her lap, careful to steady herself so it stayed put as she shifted gears. She’d positioned herself stiffly; her legs were the perfect table.

  “Fine, then,” I huffed. “Let’s see how you like having your hard work ruined.” I grabbed her thesis and hung it halfway out my window. Its pages bent and snapped wildly in the wind. “If you don’t let me go to the darkroom tonight, your thesis is toast,” I warned. “I will let it fly.”

  Cara looked at me in disbelief. “Grow up.”

  “Why don’t you make me?” I said, face flushed, hands sweaty. It wasn’t the darkroom or the car that moved me to hang her manuscript out the window; it was rage. Hadn’t she silenced me? I’d given up something I’d loved nearly as much as I loved her so that she might have it without competition. And as it turned out in the car that afternoon, my gift to her still hadn’t been enough. I was full of remorse for having so easily given up the chance at my own manuscript, as if it hadn’t mattered. And didn’t she now have something I would never have? A story she cared about and had told well and might possibly tell the world.

  “Fine.” Cara sighed and forced the car into fifth. She narrowed her brows and angrily grabbed my thesis, thrusting it out her window. “Don’t play a game of chicken with me. You’ll lose.” She gunned the gas. We flew past a cornfield on our right. Our car swerved over the median and back, toward a shallow ditch at the roadside. I held on to her pages as best I could, screaming at the top of my lungs, bracing for a crash. Cara’s pages flapped frantically outside at high speed, dangerously close to scattering—I didn’t really want to let them go. She knew that. She held the steering wheel with one hand and my thesis in the other. My pages whipped back and forth against her arm.

  “Stop the car!” I yelled, but she drove on. “Slow down!” I begged, but there was no stopping her. I pulled up hard on the emergency brake to the loud gnawing of grinding gears and squealing tires. Our bodies slammed forward against our seat belts. We fishtailed and screeched to a halt. Thick hot white smoke billowed in a cloud from the pavement. Neither of us had held on.

  I see now it was never the car we were battling for. We were fighting for the privilege of having an individual voice and of living a life apart from the other. I finally had those chances, with her death, but then I wanted nothing more than to be trapped inside our bubble together, finishing each other’s sentences. That day in our halted car we sat silent, the stench of burning rubber wafting in. It took some moments, but we turned to the other and smiled sheepishly and apologized. Our pages fluttered in a trail on the road behind us, all mixed up together, blowing beautifully toward lush farmland.

  * * *

  A year after my stay at Payne Whitney, I’d been admitted to the graduate program for Poets and Writers at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst with the poems I’d written while in the crazy hospital. I was granted a full teaching fellowship, just like Cara. After Cara died, I found myself mingling our words, just as the pages of our two manuscripts had been mixed together by the wind.

  It is very difficult to explain the thing that happened to me through writing. It did what time and therapy and lovers never could. I knew that to write I must have a clear mind. And because writing was the only way to be with Cara, to move again in tandem, writing won hands down over my grief. To write I knew I would need sleep and nourishment and sobriety. At one point in those early writing days, I’d almost practiced my way into a better life.

  Soon enough, though, writing became increasingly difficult, and then almost impossibly hard. I’d fuss with a single page for days, unable to say what was needed without sounding exactly like Cara. Was I a fraud? I wondered. Was I hiding in her words, mimicking her, because I couldn’t write for myself? That’s when Valium became my best friend, when it softened my frustration until it had gone soft as a pillow, diffuse as a dandelion puff.

  I became so reliant on pills that if I went without one for a certain number of days, withdrawal set me off into worse panic. I had tremors, and I saw things that were not there. The hallucinations disappeared only if I took more drugs. I’d fill my prescription at the middle of the month, then look down, worried, into an empty bottle two weeks later. D had always helped by giving me his pills to get me through. But finally, I couldn’t stand to ask him; I couldn’t bear the shame.

  I tried to quit.

  I sat naked at Cara’s desk in the middle of the night, the quivering blip of a passing ambulance sounding on the street below. I traced my fingers over the small carving of her initials in the center of the desk; scratched there crudely by something blunt, like a paper clip. I wondered if she’d been in my place before, trying to kick the drugs. Could the carving have been a smok
e signal or SOS she’d made for herself? My half-finished manuscript sat to the left of the carving, Cara’s to the right; our words flanked her graffiti.

  Withdrawal pounded an iron mallet against my bones. And it froze me: I shivered, shrouded beneath the down comforter I’d pulled from the bed and onto my shaking body. It was high summer, hot and sticky and relentlessly still. Yet I knew no warmth. And I couldn’t sleep. I’d read that it would take five days to clear the drug, and five long days I waited, wrapped in the comforter, wide awake at Cara’s desk, until the need for those pills left me, like a ghost.

  I slept.

  I began to write again.

  One night I had a beautiful dream: Cara and I sat together in a tree house, looking up at the midnight sky. “What if I’m a star hurtling through the atmosphere?” I asked her.

  She considered my words carefully, and then she smiled bright as the moon. “You’ll get stardust in your bra,” she said, and took both my hands into hers and kissed them.

  * * *

  On Friday, I met Tony at his cottage in the Catskills. The meal he cooked was delicious, as promised: short ribs braised slowly in a luscious red wine and homemade beef stock with an accompanying creamy, peppery potato fennel gratin. I made a coconut cream four-layer cake with a salty butter cream frosting. Before we ate a single bite, we gazed at the clear night sky full of stars, hundreds of shining specks of light. Cara had crossed into the afterlife alone; this was her fate. There are places even a twin can’t follow. I stood transformed on a cold night in September, four years after she’d died, my heart pumping warm blood, face flushed with something unexpected: hope. How had I managed to live without her? Tony and I stood together on his rickety porch hand in nervous hand, sipping wine, feeling about as small in the universe as a human should under the magnitude of the heavens.

  I was a woman entirely humbled. I’d been spared by the wrathful grip of grief, and not because I hadn’t been willing to be stolen into her clutches. I was thrilled and terrified. I was alive.

  This seemed such a curious and rare thing, the gift of life I’d been given. I was going to hold on to it as tightly as I could. I had something before me that Cara would never have: years. I would try to cherish each one. They were so hard-earned and they were solely mine, just as Cara’s death was hers.

  Drunk on pinot noir and thankfulness, I looked at Tony, who was trying his best to find Orion.

  “How about we try again tomorrow night?” he asked and smiled timidly.

  “That sounds perfect,” I said and squeezed his hand.

  This man had seen so much suffering: war, loss, dashed hopes. I decided that I would never, if it were in my power, add to the troubles in his pack.

  We were married three months later.

  Part III

  Chapter 32

  Cara had gone the way of our grandmothers, and I had won the name Josephine fair and square.

  Tony and I knew we wanted a family together; it was only a surprise that it happened so quickly. Four days after we married, on the eve of the New Year, the test was positive. Our Josephine was coming. I was often worried during my pregnancy that I’d birth Josephine into a life of my tribulations and losses. There was also the worry of resemblance. I didn’t wonder whether or not she would have my eyes or my smile, or the small Sicilian ears with points at their tips like my mother, sister, and I. I worried that she would look like Cara.

  I grew round and robust in pregnancy, looking more like Cara than I ever had, even when we were girls. The sight of myself, my new body, was a jolt. It was hard to trust a body that looked like Cara’s. I showed both the promise of life and the fact of death; I tried not to conflate the two.

  Toward the end of my pregnancy I stayed up nights imagining Josephine. She had blue eyes like her daddy’s and hair like peach fuzz. I didn’t go beyond those features in my imagining. There was still a sensation during my pregnancy that Josephine was other, that she was mystery. Although she was clearly living and rumbling inside of me, she was a question mark; she eluded the fantasy of detailed description.

  Tony and I played a guessing game. We’d move our hands over my belly and feel for our daughter’s arms and legs and head. She bounced around when we tried to tickle her.

  “She’s got tiny wrists just like Mommy,” Tony would say, and loop his fingers around my wrist. Since the week before we’d married, his name had been inked there. It was a crazy lover’s impulse we had, tattooing each other’s names just over our pulses, as if it would be possible to forget the other without the cursive black letters that ran across our wrists. Tony had gotten my name tattooed first, a game of loving chicken he played with me, a dare I took.

  Only eight months later, our daughter floated peacefully in my womb. At night, she’d kick out her foot or wiggle her elbow as Tony read her poems before bed. He was careful with each word, tender and steady, as if a single word or sound had the power to convey to his Josephine how much he had wanted to learn to love her. Poetry was his nurture, his promise. Sometimes she’d hiccup and I’d feel our girl rapping, a quiet, insistent rhythmic knocking. As she grew and moved, my belly rippled with her like a windy lake.

  The pregnancy had been easy. I still enjoyed hikes and read and wrote every day. There was very little of the morning sickness or fatigue I’d heard about. I did have heartburn, but the old wives’ tale that heartburn meant a baby with lots of red hair had won me. With each flame of the burn, I imagined braiding, washing, or brushing the orange hair from her eyes as she looked at her first great crayon drawing.

  By the middle of September I was a week overdue. The signs of her birth were near. Practice contractions had been coming for weeks. My belly had dropped. I wept at my prenatal appointment, begging the midwife to induce the birth. But she shook her head and laughed; she’d seen this bargaining every day of her professional life. “It’ll be time soon,” she assured me and closed my chart. “You’ve both been working very hard at bringing her here.”

  The afternoon before Josephine was born I stood in front of my television screen and attempted the routine of the prenatal yoga video that Tony had ordered for me months before. I’d put on fifty pounds, and I rolled around on the yoga mat grunting and sweating after only five minutes. At Namaste and prayer pose, I’d already given up. I sat and watched the round-bellied women stretch, rubbing my sore legs.

  I tried again to join them.

  The instructor on the tape asked us all to squat and hold and then to roar like lions. “Stick your tongue out and call to your babies, get them ready to join your pride.” I looked around for my husband and didn’t see him and roared as quietly as possible, the sound no louder than the growl of a tummy. I thought of my own mother as I did this. She was a wallflower. Even if music fills her, her legs won’t allow her to dance. Did mothers teach shyness? I wanted Josephine to be able to cut a rug and twirl and give herself over to joy. “Roar again,” the yoga instructor commanded her troupe, and I did. I roared and stuck my tongue out and panted. I growled for Josephine, lifting the lights on all the parties she’d ever attend.

  The next morning, early, I lay on my side in the hospital bed and closed my eyes as each contraction bore down. A fetal monitor to my right blinked her heartbeat and charted her movements like a seismograph. Tony stood to my left and held my hand and head. Josephine’s beats flashed in white numbers that spiked with each contraction. My own beats pounded hard in my chest, and my breathing was shallow. A nurse fitted me with an oxygen mask.

  At first the contractions pulled me in, a relentless undertow. Again and again the cresting of each wave took me down, crushing me. I abandoned all worry over decency and tore off my paper hospital gown. A nurse quickly presented me with a softer gown of worn cotton printed with pretty blue polka dots. I didn’t want that, either.

  “I can’t breathe. I can’t do this,” I screamed out.

  Mary, our doula, put her hands on my back. “You were made to do this very thing,” she said.

&n
bsp; Mary had magic hands. She was able to halt the cramping in my back just by laying her hands on me. She escorted me to the shower and stood beside me as hot water washed over my swollen belly. She steadied me as I tried to stand. The contractions were falling one on top of the other.

  “I want my sister,” I said like a child asks for her mommy. Mary took my face in her hands and held it as the water beat down on me.

  “Of course you do,” she said. “She should have been here.”

  I lay back down on my side in the birthing bed, moaning, waiting for another contraction. I’d taken castor oil, and it had brought on freight train labor, and Josephine protected herself by slipping down into birth position quickly, her little spine on top of my own. We gnashed like unaligned gears.

  I screamed for a nurse, begging for the epidural I’d requested not to be offered. I looked at Tony and he smiled. He thought it a man’s job not to show his cards. He was hard to read and had been since our drive to the hospital. He tried his best to calm me by treating this event like it was any other thing we did. But his eyes gave him up. There was a world of panic and love in them. He’d been waiting his whole life patiently to meet me, and now his daughter was coming, too. He’d been in war, and he’d lost nearly everything afterward. He was unshakable, and he was in awe.

  We had this in common, our wars. His had been in Iraq’s endless desert, and though twenty years had passed since then, he still jumped at gunfire and explosions in movies, spilling popcorn or soda and a bit of pride. We were two people who’d found each other at the bottom. I’d recognized his weariness even before our first dinner.

  “You’re strong and you’re healthy. You can do this,” he urged me, and ran a cool cloth over my forehead.

  He had said this throughout the pregnancy, assuring me that I was growing a healthy baby and doing a good mother’s job right from the start. He’d not been with me through the hardest years, I’d think. How did he know I wasn’t going to go back there?