by Jamie Quatro
Not a chance, she says. I’ll get us lunch.
In the kitchen she makes sandwiches. Turkey, heirloom tomatoes, avocado, Havarti cheese. She licks Dijon from her fingers. Sun on the water, depth of green in the trees on the opposite shore, laughter breaking the silence like shattered bits of glass—behind the peace of this moment is a new happiness. Whenever she thinks of it—of him—her present surroundings electrify.
At dusk they take the boat out for a ride up and down the lake’s narrow channels. They pull into a small cove and drift. Thomas has brought his fishing gear. I’ll bet there’s some great bass in here, he says. And bluegill. Your favorite, remember, Katie?
I thought it was blue girls till I was probably fourteen, Kate says. I was always bummed they never turned out to be blue.
Maggie remembers the stocked pond at the golf course—the children seven and five, crouched together at the water’s edge, a fish flopping between them in the grass. Thomas showed Kate how to lower the fish into the water and move it back and forth a few times, to circulate oxygen through the gills. You don’t want to throw him in, Katie bug, he’ll get confused. You have to help him remember where he lives.
You want to give it a try? Thomas asks now, holding out the pole to Kate.
Sure, Kate says. But if I catch one, you’re taking it off the hook.
Hey, guys—say, Blue Girl, Tommy says, holding up his phone.
Potholes appear in the driveway. Flagstone pavers on the back patio flake off around their edges, leaving exposed patches of dirt where weed and moss appear. Invasive plants encroach, privet and wisteria, thistle and honeysuckle. The backyard steadily shrinks. The latch hook falls off the gate to the chicken run and a possum squeezes through, climbing the plank and entering the nesting box. The following morning the wife finds one of her hens dead, another still alive but with its crop ripped open. The rest are huddled on the roost. She removes the dead chicken from the coop and wraps the injured one in a beach towel, holding it steady against the grass while the son, stoic and wincing, stretches out the neck, one hand covering the eyes. The husband uses garden shears to cut the head off. I’m so sorry, he repeats, until the body beneath the towel yields to stillness.
From: James K. Abbott
Date: July 23, 2014, 9:56 AM
To: Margaret Ellman
Subject: RE: poems attached
Dear Maggie,
I didn’t know you played! Next time we see one another—whenever that might be—maybe you could play that piece for me. We have a little upright, a Yamaha. Caroline took lessons for a while but it didn’t stick.
The poems. I insist we speak about them real-time. I can hardly remember what your voice sounds like.
Do you read much apophatic literature? I’m thinking of The Cloud of Unknowing. I’m deeply interested in poetry or music—any art form—that finds, or tries to find, God in this negative way. I mean by describing what God isn’t. The Western cataphatic modes don’t appeal to me anymore.
Sorry, rushing out, we’re taking Caro dorm shopping (!)
Yours, in haste,
JA
p.s.: let’s not talk about our spouses?
From: Margaret Ellmann
Date: July 25, 2014, 3:25 PM
To: James K. Abbott
Subject: RE: poems attached
Dear James:
I’ll do better: mp3 of me playing the Bach attached. But I’m a bit terrified to speak to you on the phone, about the poems. Maybe I don’t want to hear what you have to say!
I read a good deal of Western apophatic theology in grad school, but I’ve forgotten much of it. Somehow it doesn’t stick in the brain. Well, the Summa Theologica, of course. (I had a great Aquinas professor.) Also Meister Eckhart, and yes, The Cloud of Unknowing. I do remember I came away with the idea that what distinguishes Eastern mysticism from Western is the concept of the self. I mean, in Buddhism the existence of the self—the illusion of the self—is a source of suffering. But in Christianity it’s not that I exist, but that I exist in separation from God. We long for a perfect, noncontingent existence, not for the annihilation of existence altogether. Resurrection versus Nirvana. We see this in the natural order, in human relationships. Far from losing myself in … well, say in you, in these talks, I feel I’m discovering, or recovering, a deeper self, something at the core of my being. If it’s true of human relationships, why not of something beyond humanity? Of course, this line of thinking wouldn’t hold a drop of water for an atheist.
We’re college shopping here, too. Never thought I’d spend so much money on goose down.
Agree about our spouses.
Yrs, ME
They stop going to church, except on holidays. Sundays the only chance to sleep in. The husband and wife pass one another in hallways, weary of trying to keep everything up. They live in the house helplessly, as if they’re invalids. The son makes them laugh, shows them clips on his phone at dinner, people falling, failing. Walls are clustered with drawings, paintings, maps, photographs. One evening the husband stands on the landing of the staircase, looking at the artwork reaching almost to the ceiling. The wife pauses beside him. No one ever hung anything I made, he says. It’s beautiful, what you’ve done for our kids. I don’t say thank you often enough.
The gathered years: grains of spilled salt brushed from a table into an open palm. Each a nothing, barely noticeable—yet if you were to examine a single grain beneath a microscope, you would see a bright expanding flare: the daughter’s agony over a college breakup, her stunned silence in the car on the way home from the airport, formal dance photos embossed with Greek letters shoved into a corner of her closet shelf. You would witness the son’s outbursts of anger about limits placed on his video game time, his computer time. He throws his calculus textbook against the wall and it makes a parallelogram-shaped hole. He hangs a Japanese manga poster to hide it and the hole won’t be discovered until he leaves for college. Hidden in the back of a drawer in the son’s desk is a one-hitter a friend showed him how to make out of a fat highlighter pen, the buds stored in a baggie inside an old VHS cassette. A tiny red Bible sits on his nightstand, piece of gum folded into the downturned corner of a psalm.
From: James K. Abbott
Date: July 29, 2014, 6:12 AM
To: Margaret Ellmann
Subject: RE: poems attached
Dear Maggie:
Thank you for the music. Beautiful. The fact that you can just sit down and play like that. I envy you that talent.
It is indeed humanity’s Great Failure, that we go on trying to exist apart from God …
Listen, I hardly meet anyone, anymore, who thinks this way. You were raised evangelical? I can hardly believe it. You seem—how to put this—open to ways of thinking that move beyond personal ethics. Our collective moral collapse far exceeds the personal. Evangelicals go around saying Christianity’s about a personal relationship with Jesus, but they don’t talk about rebuilding the ruins of the world, about getting politically active. An entire continent dying of AIDS, massacre in Syria and Sudan, reefs dying, global temperatures soaring—and most right-wing Americans are hunkered down trying not to commit any gross moral failings.
Tell me more about your kids. Do they use Snapchat as their primary means of communication, as mine do? And your family, growing up. Siblings? Pets? Paint me the full picture of Little Girl Maggie. I want to know the child who became the naked mind I hope to find in my in-box every day. It’s a mind I’d like to keep close. For a lifetime, if possible.
Yours—Yours.
From: Margaret Ellmann
Date: July 29, 2014, 12:10 PM
To: James K. Abbott
Subject: RE: poems attached
Dear James:
Yes, this Snapchat thing—Tommy loves it. I’ve got the app but I don’t know how to use it. I’ll probably have to learn, if I want to stay in touch with him once he leaves for college. He wants to apply to NYU and Columbia, by the way. We were hoping he’d check out scho
ols in Boston but he’s got his heart set on New York. Funny, we started out up there and moved down here and now the kids are migrating back. If he winds up in the city, maybe we could figure out a way to see one another. I’d love to have coffee, or lunch.
And I don’t need to tell you, what it was like to grow up in the desert! Though I imagine Phoenix and Santa Fe had very different flavors …
Do you want to talk live? Do you ever Skype? I’m home if you want to. Magselm72.
Yours, yours, too.
It’s the summer that destroys. The hot exhaled breath. Like the Angel of Death in the old cartoon the children used to watch. It gathers force. It knocks over an Adirondack chair and shoves together the long bamboo wind chimes strung from a branch, leaving in its wake a hollow Ohhh. At sunset the old black Lab barks hoarsely at the bright plate of moon above a lit cloud, a storm system that will erupt overnight. His ears draw back, he sniffs the air and blinks, as if listening.
THREE
Attempt to go back and locate her earliest sexual yearnings. Suspicion that an explanation for Chicago—if there is an explanation—lies in the past. A recurring dream, when she was ten or eleven: a dusty Sunday school classroom at the back of a church. She was alone, lying on a cot, looking up at a high window cut into adobe brick. Typical desert construction, windows sized long and rectangular to let in light but keep out heat. A slurred sunlight came through the window—red-orange, just-rising or just-setting—while somewhere far off, on a tinny piano, someone played “The House of the Rising Sun.” A death song, she thought when she woke. A song they might play at a funeral, possibly hers. She was on the cot—though sometimes, in the dream, she was slung into a wheelchair—her legs were spread, she was unable to move while the old light shifted down the wall and along the floor toward her; a deep pleasure in the paralysis, the inability to fight off the color now sliding up her thighs.
Go back further. Outcomes, Maggie thinks, lie in the exigencies of the past. The fifth-grade friend, Karen, who showed off her new bra, then told Maggie to lift up her own shirt so she could see Maggie’s chest. Anika, in third grade, the way her fingers felt when they played hospital, giving Maggie a shot, or wrapping her broken leg in toilet paper—the way Anika’s touch made Maggie’s lower stomach quiver.
Maybe all desire begins this way, she thinks. With friends, moving outward.
Further back. Cleveland, 1955. Her father and his brother, the rich uncle, eight and ten years old. They take turns playing the piano all afternoon and evening while their mother, her grandmother, keeps time with a pencil. Tap tap tap, tap tap tap. On the top floor, her mother—their grandmother, Maggie’s great-grandmother—is dying. She wants to hear the piano, the sound of young fingers on keys drifting up the steep carpeted staircase and down the hallway into the dim room with the giant four-poster bed and dusty afternoon light. The boys play Bach. When they tire, one boy does the left hand, one the right, trying to match tone for tone, until the grandmother calls down Irish love songs a sonata a nocturne for God’s sake play something else so one digs for music while the other tries to play by ear, as loudly as possible, not for the grandmother’s sake but to drown out the guttural sounds she makes when her medicine begins to wear off. Their wrists aching, fingers growing stiff into the night—the price her father paid to grow up in that house, to finally leave and get married to her mother and raise Maggie, paying for her piano lessons, sending her to UCLA and, eventually, out into the world so she could get married and have her own children and give them a happier, a more stable life than he had.
Every morning, her father once told her, I woke up hoping she’d died while I slept.
Bucket showers, Kate says at dinner. And the water’s hot only if you’re lucky. Americans have no idea.
January, 2017. Their daughter is just home from India, two weeks in a tiny village on the border of Nepal doing her field research project over the holiday break. She’s an anthropology major, studying educational opportunities for young girls in the Tibetan refugee community. She has her hair twisted up in a scarf, wears a cropped T-shirt and balloon-shaped pants printed with lotus flowers. She’s barefoot, her toenails painted light green. Thin, Maggie thinks, but she looks healthy. They’re having dinner, stew and bread. Candles and wine, to welcome her home. Thomas has lit the fire in the dining room. Wiggins lies beside him, next to the hearth. Every so often he lifts his head and licks Thomas’s hand, hoping for a bit of bread. Lately he’s been dragging his back legs. Maggie keeps examining his paws for cuts, thorns, bruises, but can find nothing.
It’s an amazing country, Kate says. All the color, and the just, I don’t know. Life. I saw a monkey riding on a pig with a bird sitting on the monkey’s head. Puppies everywhere. In Varanasi, on this one street—well we’d call it an alley—I got trapped between a cart of cow dung and a dead body. It was wrapped up in orange but a foot was sticking out, right next to my face. Hindus want to die there, if you die in Varanasi it’s automatic moksha. Oh, and we took boats out on the Ganges to watch the Aarti priests at night, you float these candles and flower petals out and offer a prayer to the goddess. And Gangtok—Kanchenjunga is right there. Third highest in the world, you can’t believe anything is that tall, it makes its own weather and when the wind blows the snow it looks like clouds. The air is clear, and the Tibetan people are so happy. I can’t wait to go back.
Luminous, Maggie thinks. Radiant, at twenty-one, the years of fighting through anxiety melted away. Was it the medication, therapy, biofeedback exercises? How did she come out the other side?
She and Tommy are the reason for my existence, Maggie thinks. The reason all of this exists.
When love is present in a home, the children almost always emerge beautifully into adulthood, Dr. Pierson said to them at Kate’s last session. It’s been a pleasure working with her, he said, shaking their hands. And with both of you. Whatever you’ve been doing, keep doing it.
Mom, Kate says. Let’s go this summer. I could get Deepak to pick us up in Delhi and then Tenzing could meet us in Siliguri. We could do a trek from Yuksom, it’s this charming little village. There’s even a nice hotel, with electricity.
I’d love to, Maggie says. I’ll think about it. I have this trip to Chicago coming up.
I meant to tell you, Thomas says. That company in Chattanooga I’ve been working with—they’re doing a corporate retreat in Turks and Caicos in April. Spouses are invited and the CEO wants us to come along. It’s at The Palms, Mags. Scuba diving off a reef, private yacht …
I committed to Chicago a while ago, Maggie says. I thought you were going to come with me?
They really want me there, Thomas says. But you’re right, Chicago was first. Let’s keep talking about it.
Damn, I’ll go if Mom can’t, Tommy says.
On his walk the next morning, Wiggins collapses at the bottom of their street, legs splayed. C’mon, you lazy boy, Tommy says, pulling the leash. Wiggins pants and swallows, over and over, saliva pooling on the concrete. Each exhale sounds like a roar.
Let’s go, Wiggins, Tommy says. You can make it.
The dog lays his head on the pavement.
Tommy runs up the hill, gets the car, and drives back. Wiggins hasn’t moved. He lifts him into the hatchback. You need more exercise, old buddy, you’re out of shape. For a moment he puts his face against the wiry gray fur around his muzzle, letting Wiggins lick the stubble on his chin, the way he likes.
Laryngeal paralysis, the vet tells Maggie. There’s a surgery to tack open the larynx, but the risk of aspiration pneumonia is high. Anyhow it’s a neurological condition, progressive. There’s an oral medication that seems to work in some dogs, for the short term.
The vet pauses.
Many owners decide to wait before they make the decision to euthanize, he says. Others make the decision right away, to prevent any needless suffering. It’s a very personal choice.
But he’s happy, Maggie says. He never stops wagging.
It’s his bree
d, the vet says. I had a Lab in here last week that was hit by a car. Broken bones, fractured skull, sections of skin missing—he was still wagging when I put the IV in.
At dinner—Wiggins panting, upright and eager—they discuss the timing with Kate and Tommy. Both children are home from school for a few more days, able to say goodbye. Maggie notices Tommy’s face is flushed, his eyes bloodshot. From crying or weed she can’t tell. The mixture of boy and man, his expression attempting to locate itself somewhere in the middle, fragility and stoicism shifting across his face.
It’s not fair to let him suffer, Thomas says.
Can’t we do the surgery? Kate asks.
It’s risky, and it wouldn’t help for very long, Maggie says. He’s had an incredibly long life for his breed, Thomas says.
Pets are a fucking waste, Tommy says, chin quivering. They’re just ticking time bombs of sadness.
Two days later, when Thomas comes home with the ashes—Wiggins’s collar wrapped around the embossed container—Tommy stands up from the computer.
We should bury him, he says. I’ll dig the hole.
June 6, 2018
Dear James,
I can’t remember the last time I wrote to you. I’ve lost the old journal …
That’s a lie. I threw it out. Where did I learn that the word repentance, in the Greek, connotes more than just admission of fault—that built into the word is the idea of a 180-degree turn, a deliberate facing away from the wrong? Throwing out the journal was my attempt to make such a turn. I regret it now. Regret it because I can’t look back to see if I’ve made any progress, and because reading the old letters to you ignited in my body, again, the feelings only you have ever accessed—little aftershocks, nothing like the eruption but sometimes approaching it. Connection points that could, if I allowed them to, take me from here to there.