“Still with the prostate. I’ll talk to you soon.”
“Love you,” he said.
“Love you,” she said.
It was an exchange he had stolen from Lauren’s talks with her mother.
“So what did she say?” Lauren asked.
He told her.
“I love the idea of life in the middle of all this,” she said.
He stared at her.
“I can’t help it. I do.”
“What about Richard?” he said.
“You sound just like your mother.”
His face crimsoned, and he gnashed his lip to keep from screaming at her.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “It’s just… remember how everyone thought their yoga group was a cult, and you had to keep telling them that at least Elizabeth and Richard weren’t selling off all their stuff, at least they were still materialistic. It took your family a long time to come around to the fact those guys weren’t brainwashed. Now it’s the one thing that’s saving her.”
“I just don’t think this idea is very realistic.” He was sorry as soon as he’d said it.
“Realistic? What’s realism got to do with it?” She went to the fridge and brought out a brick of cheddar cheese and unwrapped it and started chopping it angrily in narrow strips. “Cheese gum!” she shouted into the living room. Max came running, and from upstairs they could hear the race of Sarah’s footsteps. “We’ll talk about it later,” she said.
She had to call him. She didn’t want to, but after whatever she’d left on the machine last night, she had better. What to say? What to say? By the time she got to the end of wherever she was going, nothing would be left unsaid. It would all be out in the open and shrunken to corpuscles of grief and self-pity. Maybe she shouldn’t be allowed to call anyone anymore. Maybe that’s what this was all about, taking her privileges one by one. Was she so tender that one appointment could crush her so? Hadn’t she learned anything? She switched on the computer and entered e-mail.
“Send me the cassette,” she wrote him. “Then we’ll talk.”
She hit SEND. He wouldn’t get it for another day—he refused to have e-mail at home—but she liked how relatively immediate it was and how she needn’t risk getting his voice on the phone and having to go further than she wanted.
She had new mail. Her mother. Martha. Her oldest nephew. People tapping away at her from all over, tapping their little words of encouragement and companionship. Tap, tap, tapping. Once Martha’s son had had each child from his entire first-grade class send her a get-well card, and it had made her feel as if she’d already died. Not yet, she thought. Not yet. At first she’d saved the cards, with their bright crayon drawings and smiling faces and stick figures and their endlessly repeated song: Get well, feel better, get well. Finally she bundled them neatly and tossed them.
She didn’t like flowers either, and she couldn’t bear the smell of champagne.
But she felt great.
Only if she really rooted around inside herself, looking for it, could she find it and know it and understand it. But if she refused to understand, was that merely the mercy of denial, or the thin, impossible chord to wellness?
“Martin.” She tapped him another e-mail. “This sucks, sucks, sucks. Oh baby, it sucks.”
She hit DELETE and watched it evaporate.
“Those notes I saw you taking during discussion.” Annka wagged her pen at him. “Do you do anything with them?”
“All the time,” he said. He’d only gone to the board twice, for a total often minutes, in a seventy-five-minute class. “I try to create minilectures from the issues they raise. I try to meet them on their own points of engagement.”
“I see.” She squinted her eyes and offered him what someone who was drunk might have termed a smile. “Could I get a copy of one of those ‘minilecture’ notes sometime?”
“Of course,” he said.
“I mean, if it’s no bother.”
“No bother at all.”
She looked at him as they sat in the empty classroom, all the students long gone. He felt as if he was being kept after. She just looked at him.
“I guess I’d better get going,” he said.
“That’s fine.”
He packed up his briefcase while she sat there. What did she think behind those glasses, those blank but narrow eyes, under the dark brown sweater set, in that however-the-fuck-old-she-was body? Sometimes he wanted to shake her and shout I know, I know! about how she had fought their hire, how she hated them. But you weren’t allowed to do that. You weren’t even allowed to accost her in the hall and say quietly, Look, I understand you didn’t want us here and you don’t want us here and you’ll never want us here and you have to do what you have to do but we would like it to be—what?—civil, respectful, restrained, fair? Or could he say, Look, we’re going to humiliate you before you humiliate us, eviscerate you before you eviscerate us. God, he wanted to tell this blank face, this empty face, this wicked face, At least now I know what the fuck you do with all your time. He snapped the briefcase shut.
“See you.” He tried to smile easily at her. “Thanks for coming.”
“That’s fine,” she said.
In his office his hands still trembled. Fear made no sense here, there was so much else to fear. He tried not to think of it. But what was the point of serenity? What was the point of calm? He picked up the phone.
“How was it?” Lauren said, not even bothering to ask who was calling.
“She just sits there.” He tried to stop himself, knowing how fatigued she was by his review and how the process awaited her, too. “And then afterward she interrogates me. Do I ever use any other models? Do I ever use any approach besides observer-participant? Do I ever give substantial lectures? Do I ever do anything with the notes I take? Do I wipe myself after I take a shit? Jesus!”
“David Lazlo is leaving Cindy,” she said.
“What?”
“I stupidly called Mary again about getting someone into one of his courses for the spring, but it turns out he’s not teaching, because he’s got somebody out in Kansas and he’s taking the spring off to be with her.”
“Wow.”
“It’s been going on for months.”
“I thought all that crap he pulled with you was harmless. I thought Cindy was the one who made him tolerable,” he said. “Why is everybody falling apart? It wasn’t like this in Atlanta.”
“Sure it was. We just didn’t know about it.” Max squealed happily into the phone. “Anyway, Max has a low fever and is on Motrin. Not too listless. Sarah’s at Grace’s. I’ll get her around five. Should we bring you anything?”
“No, not with the fever.” He had a bowl of soup waiting for him in the department’s fridge, then he taught from six-thirty to nine, then he walked home. “I’ll be fine.”
“Okay.”
He hung up. David Lazlo was a force of nature, all right. Martin feared, envied, and loathed him all at once. Fuck him, he thought. Just fuck him. He clicked on his e-mail. Buddies from graduate school sending their rants from Oregon, New York, Arizona: funds cut, classes underenrolled, tenure tracks dissolved, colleagues knitting nooses in their honor. Elizabeth wanting the cassette back. Martha telling him what kind of computer to buy for Sarah. “I’ll call you soon,” he wrote Elizabeth.
From four to five his freshman advisees wandered in to review next semester’s selections. It was hard for him to believe that he could be allowed to think about next semester, all that time eaten away, all that time survived. When the last of their unprepared faces had left, his head felt punched in from gazing at the computer and trying to determine which course after which course had any empty seats left while the little sons and daughters of bitches had just sat there without any plans or predilections at all, willing him to choose their futures. Outside his window the sun sank. There were still two and a half hours of disengaged and disinterested students to face. At least it made him hold off on his drinking. He felt a li
ttle delirious.
He was just getting up to go warm his bowl of soup when the door opened. Instinctively, he shrank from it. The children came giggling in in their pink and green overcoats, followed by Lauren with her arms full of Tupperware.
“I thought…,” he said, plucking up Max and squeezing him, setting him down and hugging Sarah, who seemed torn between looking at him raptly and ignoring him altogether.
“Well,” Lauren smiled, “we were going out anyway.” She set on his desk containers of rice, chicken, and broccoli. Always at least one antioxidant.
“Thank you so much,” he said.
“All right, children. Daddy has to work.”
She began to herd them back through the door; they were being ridiculously cheerful and well behaved. He just wanted to hold them all. But he had to work.
“Good-bye,” he called, his eyes glazing, all that weepy sentimentality lurking just below the surface. If he ever let it out, he’d need a bucket and a mop. “I love you,” he said.
“Love you,” Max called over his shoulder.
“Bye, Daddy,” Sarah said.
The door shut behind them. They were gone.
He looked at all the Tupperware set on his desk. Whenever it was his turn with the children, he never did this. The fact was, Lauren had been nursing him on and off since Elizabeth’s diagnosis had seemed to bury him in his own self-pity and fatalism. At first he could not will himself out of bed, and she took the children each morning until one of them had to go to work, and he could not remember what he said in class, he couldn’t bear to talk on the phone to anyone except Elizabeth, he couldn’t bear to do anything except scour the medical books and the Internet for her. In his obsession to do something—anything—when everyone told him there was nothing to be done, he’d taken Lauren for granted. All gone. She was gone. She had taken the children. He had an hour in the darkening boxcar of an office until he had to teach. He was weepy, just weepy. He just loved her. He just loved them. He couldn’t make all that love mean anything, because he couldn’t express it satisfactorily. Beneath the complaint and the trauma they made him happy and glad and full. Why couldn’t he say it, say it all, say it the right way? He swatted at his face. Had to eat. Had to warm the nice food, teach the nice class, walk the nice walk home, kiss her once so primly on the lips because she’d be exhausted as well from the day with Max and the evening with the two of them, and then he’d go and pour the wine and they’d sit on the sofa while he dumbly watched the sports channel or she’d sit in the kitchen catching up on Sunday’s news and at eleven or eleven-fifteen, after two glasses for her and three or four glasses for him, they’d trudge upstairs, check on the children, slide into their pajamas, brush their teeth, floss, turn out the light, turn once groggily to each other and kiss a last perfunctory or sometimes tender kiss, and drop into sleep. And he’d never say it. He’d never express it. Today would become another missed day in a year of missed days, of climbing out of bed into the daily slog, of projecting energy into the void, of the endless tick against the endless tock, when he couldn’t say, when he hadn’t said, when he needed to say, how much he felt her.
I am keeping a journal, she wrote, so that no one will have to hear how afraid I am, how being afraid of death is not good enough, how you can’t give in to it and let it rule you, how exhausting it is, how careful you have to be in everything you ever do. I am keeping a journal only when I want to keep it and I am keeping it away from anybody else—even Richard, even Martin, even Martha—and when it’s done and I am somewhere else, it will be like a rock that never existed and no one will have to even know how awful it is and no one will have to know what it means to die and why it should matter how they die, how they take it, because I will not be the sick sister, I will not be the sick wife, I will not be the sick daughter. I will not, I will not, I will not. I will not be mad and I will not be miserable and I will not be afraid and I will not be pitiful. I will follow my God because that is part of whatever the healing can be, and I will not think only of the numbers and I will not hold back what shouldn’t be held back and I will be. The difference being the difference between being and doing. I will be. I will do whatever can be done, but I will also be.
Yesterday he finally called. We talked about what the children were doing and we talked about the usual shit about Mom and we talked about what it means to complain, how complaining is okay, how everyone complains, how everyone has something to complain about. I could hear him getting tired and I said, “I don’t want to drag you down with me,” and he said, “You’re not.” But I heard it in his voice and I lied and said, “Look, I’ve really got to run. There’s someone at the door.” And I could hear the relief in his voice as he tried to offer up a resigning “okay.” We hung up. He is the one I am closest to and I’ve told him that and not to tell anybody else that, and he said of course not but why does it matter who I’m closest to? Why am I being like this? Why am I pitiful? Why am I doomed? Why can’t matter.
Maybe I won’t write in this journal again.
Was that really her? She’d always distrusted journals, she’d always felt they kept you from living, that while you wrote in them life went by, and you rose afterward still heavy from seeing inside yourself, and you were slow to catch up. She didn’t have time for slow.
In the kitchen she put away spoons and bottles, hearing the hollow echo of her tending to herself. When they’d first gotten beyond the shock, Richard had suggested a dog. A dog. As if she were blind. As if she were an old woman living alone looking for any constant company to extend her time. He was only thinking aloud. A dog wasn’t it. Every now and then Martin or Martha would dare, Are you sure you don’t want to move back? She didn’t want to interrupt Richard’s and her life like that. She’d only move back if she was afraid. She refused to be that afraid. He’d murmured about it again on the phone last night. No, she’d said, I don’t think so.
I have to run, she’d said. There’s someone at the door.
She shut the journal and winced with pain as she pulled on an overcoat. For a while she stood under the dangling crystals and took deep breaths. All she felt was a new pain blooming in her shoulder.
At the spa she walked the treadmill for twenty minutes, stretched for twenty minutes, swam for twenty minutes, and then sat in the juice bar watching the sun on the wooden tabletop, dozing and then waking to the low grind of the blender, drinking two glasses of apple-ginger juice. At noon the bar began to fill with corporate exercisers in their ironed white togs. She drove to a row of clothing shops and found a pale blue sweater to go with Richard’s eyes. She had to keep holding it up to the light to make sure, as if her eyes were thinking of failing. By two-thirty she had popped another fifty vits and made it in time to art therapy. Four men and five women, all sick in ways she didn’t want to hear about, sat in a straggly circle, huge easels in front, oversized sheets of paper shielding them from one another.
“I want you to paint,” Marge said, looking at them and then looking out one of the many-paned windows that brought in the last of the day’s northern light, “something from your own history, something that was so deep inside you and so much where you’d been and who you were and even who you’d become, that sometimes—maybe even often—you’d forgotten it was there. Until just before now, when news of your own struggle hit you, and you began to work at unpacking yourself and putting you back together, to get it right, and there was this thing that you’d somehow forgotten about, and you understood it was a most essential piece. What is that thing?”
Elizabeth started with pink, which became pale red, black for hair and eyebrows and even lips, blue for the dress, pale red for the legs, black for the shoes. What kind of shoes were they? She could only remember her mother in fat, white high heels, but it was too late for white. She didn’t want to make up anything. She wanted it to be true. She added blue to the black. Navy blue heels. Now another face, white outlined in black, tufts of hair at the ears, a line of mouth in pale red, black-outlin
ed neck. She could not remember what her father wore. Yellow, she wanted it to be yellow, but it wouldn’t be. Sometimes he had worn suits. Dark suits. When was it worst? When he didn’t have to wear a suit? That didn’t seem right. Blue for the legs: jeans. Red and yellow and black for a plaid shirt, what he wore when he helped them up to the roof to claw leaves from the gutters. White for sneakers.
“Your father and mother,” Marge said easily.
Elizabeth nodded.
She pointed at the woman. “Your mother’s that much larger?”
Elizabeth shook her head, but she had drawn her mother at nearly twice the height of her father.
“Well,” Marge said. “It’s a lot of red and black and blue.”
“Pretty obvious, huh?” She pathetically wiped a tear out of the corner of her right eye.
“I don’t know. You have a brother and a sister, too, but they’re not in here.”
“No.”
“You’re not going to put them in.”
“No.”
“Are you finished?”
Elizabeth shook her head.
“I hope I haven’t said too much.” Marge eased on to the next student.
Elizabeth dipped into the black paint and began in the background, almost blotted out by the oversized figures, the structure of a house, five windows wide, the furthest right over brick, the middle two above a porch, the two left above downstairs windows. The porch had a black roof. The roof above the second floor was all black, the chimney white. In the windows she wanted to paint their small faces, but they were hiding, terrified, the house soon to rock with their mother’s voice as she spied the broken kitchen window and pounded up the stairs. I’m going to let you have it! she shouted. I’m really going to let you have it. How old were they then—nine, seven, and three? Don’t, they would beg, as she swung the belt. Don’t.
I’ll never know, Elizabeth couldn’t help thinking as she watched the painting of her mother, I’ll never know what kind I would have been.
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