Another time in a surf shop in Santa Cruz, he stuffed himself into a full-body wetsuit, came out of the fitting room, and announced: “We’re moving to the Bahamas! We’ll have a synchronized swimming routine with the dolphins!”
I put a hand on my hip and said, “Are you trying to make me laugh on porpoise?”
Another time, he stopped dead in the middle of the sidewalk, turned to me and said, “I know, I know—a dinner theater slash bowling alley.”
“Spare me,” I said.
The ideas kept coming, but the niche never materialized. Then one day, sick of waiting, I stood up from the couch and said to Charlie, “I’ve got to find myself some meaning!”
“Religion?” he asked, looking a little worried.
“No,” I said. “School.” I bet Charlie was thinking clown school or acrobat school, but I was thinking more like writing school. “Stories, you know, of the bookish nature,” I told him.
“So, you want to be a book writer?” He paused for a second, looked down at the coffee table, and then he said, “Well, at least you’re using your imagination.” It wasn’t too much of a surprise. We were both writing majors in college. I wrote long, obsessive profiles about the boys I had crushes on; Charlie’s stories always baffled readers with the surreal. An odyssey about the boy who thought he was the embodiment of time. “I was smoking a lot of pot back then,” he once confessed.
In Pittsburgh, I had been writing essays about my childhood or about my and Charlie’s adventures around the country. I compiled a few of the ones I liked, slid them into brown craft-paper envelopes, kissed the seals, and sent them off to graduate schools. At the end of spring, after all my graduate applications came back, I told Charlie we were moving to Iowa, and the hairs of his curly eyebrows straightened out and stood up in full attention.
It just figured that Charlie would be excited for Iowa. It was like an empty canvas. It was unknown, unexplored territory, and with no obligations tying him to there, maybe he thought he could find his calling. But, as we finalized the moving details and bought new furniture, the more apprehensive I became. It took me hours just to decide on a couch. I was like a pendulum in the showroom, moving back and forth between the hulking upholstered beige beast and a spindly off-white loveseat that was sleek and easy to disassemble and pack.
“This one is crap,” Charlie had said, kicking the loveseat’s skinny wooden legs. “Let’s just get the sofa.”
“Ugh,” I’d said. “But this one’s so ugly. And it’s heavy. And it’s beige.” I tried with both arms to lift it on one side, but it would not budge.
“This one will last us for a while,” Charlie said.
“But what if we’re sick of it in a year? What if we can no longer stand the beige?”
“Moony,” he said, sitting back on the beige cushion and putting his legs up on a glass coffee table. “It’s not like this is the last couch we’ll ever buy.”
“Yes, Charlie, but it’s the first couch we’ll ever buy. This isn’t a futon we’re finding on the street or a hand-me-down from my brother. This is ours; shouldn’t we love it?”
“You’re reading way too much into this,” he said, as he called the salesperson over. He didn’t balk until we went to pay for the sofa, doing a double take at the total before saying, “This is the most expensive thing I’ve ever bought in my life.”
It wasn’t just what we were bringing to Iowa that worried me; it was also the place itself. Even though Charlie and I had seen almost all the states as we traveled back and forth across the country, I only remember seeing Iowa in glimpses. Flat lines of green that halved the windows. Nothing stopped here, not even the wind, which carried everything past these roads and swiftly through the plains and didn’t stop until it happened upon a mountain. After six years together, we chose this place to stop and put down our heavy furniture. What if Iowa could not entertain us? What if we got bored with it? With each other? I thought of Iowa as a stop on I-80 to get a quick bite before hopping back on the road, not as a place to plop down and stay a while.
As we drove along in the shaky truck, the east coast far behind in our rearview, I looked out the window and shook my head. But Charlie kept saying, “You’re not looking closely enough. There are beautiful things here.” He pointed out places on the side of the road where creeks cut into the grass to shape a valley and where a hill rose out of nowhere. “Like the hips of a woman resting on her side,” he said, a smiled slathered across his face.
“You should be writing this stuff down,” I told him.
We moved into the bottom floor of a split-level duplex. It was a cozy little joint with the windows posed high on the walls inside, but from the front of the house, they sat low and level with the ground. The hedges on the front lawn shaded the living room like natural curtains. Charlie and I hung our silkscreen posters of San Francisco up on the wall and placed plants in the corners of every room. While we felt snug there, the topographical positioning of our home disturbed my mother when she visited that summer.
“In the basement?” she said, her jaw dropping wide as if she were catching flies. She came in through a narrow entrance in the mudroom and walked beneath the low ceiling in the hall. I thought she’d like the compactness of the apartment, seeing as how she took up very little vertical space herself. “Why the basement?”
“It doesn’t feel like the basement. Look how much light comes in. The walls are clean. No water damage.” I pointed to the snow-white ceiling, the corner where we had stacked books alphabetically on a low shelf.
“But the basement?” she said, no less disgusted. She pointed with her chin to the hedges. “Close those windows. Aren’t you breathing in the dirt? Come"—she reached for my arm and slung her purse over her shoulder—"we’ll find you a new apartment.”
But I liked the way the sunlight came in through the bushes outside. The street we lived on was so quiet that we could hear the thin tires of a passing bicycle rolling over the pavement. The town was bright during the summer and fall, and the sidewalks were sprinkled with wispy trees with bicycles leaning on them. Undergrads lived loudly in small farm homes or they crapped up bigger, nicer houses by putting frayed, busted-out Goodwill re-cliners on handcrafted, hundred-year-old wraparound porches. These details were offset by more charming parts of the community: the family-run hardware stores, the food co-op, the bookstore. Charlie and I took long walks along the perimeter of town, where the grass was high and the horizon was a sharp line at the end of a cornfield. And sooner or later, I began to see those little dips and bluffs in the earth, where the land seemed to be moving.
School was not the shocking plunge into cold water that I thought it would be, either. It was intimate midday discussions about writing and literature around wooden conference tables. It was potluck dinners at friends” houses and evening lectures at the local bookstore. The most worrisome part of my first year was the teaching, a requirement of my fellowship. I was assigned to teach rhetoric to freshmen, and the minute I was assigned the course, I found myself secretly cracking open my Webster’s dictionary and looking up what the word “rhetoric” actually meant.
“You kind of don’t have to know what it means,” a woman named Beth said. She stood under a pavilion at the “Welcome New Grad Students” picnic holding a plastic cup filled with lemonade. I had been talking to her for most of the afternoon. “Trust me; you really don’t even have to like teaching.”
Beth was a year ahead of me in the program and didn’t seem to mind me asking her question after question. She just sat there in her peach loose-fitting tank top, hiking shorts, and the sensible shoes of a librarian. She had dark brown hair and exotic yet indecipherable features; I’d later learn that she was half white and half Korean. I had the feeling she was quiet and shy, even though she greeted almost everyone at the picnic with an obligatory smile. Every once in a while, I caught her rolling her eyes when someone she didn’t care for passed by. I could tell she hated teaching.
“So, what am I
supposed to do? Should I just pretend like I am an authority on public discourse and debate? Those kids will see right through me,” I told her.
“Listen,” she said. “Your job is to go in there and jump up and down about rhetoric. Yay, rhetoric!” she said, shaking imaginary pom-poms with her fists.
Charlie concurred when I talked to him about it later. “She’s probably right. Teaching is probably a lot like show business. You just have to keep them entertained. If you’re excited about it, they’ll probably get into it, too.”
On the first day of class, dressed in a skirt to make me look older and in heels to make me look taller, I looked out into an audience of twenty freshmen and told them that rhetoric was going to change their lives. “Look at all it has done for me,” I said, smiling and gesturing grandly with my hands. “A finely worded statement of purpose gained me admission into this school, my persuasive verbal skills and body language nabbed me a boyfriend, and with my captivating oratory, I have twenty new friends who are excited about rhetoric.” It sounded silly coming out of my mouth, but no one thought it was funny enough to laugh.
“Please stop,” I heard someone in the back left whisper.
Fall came and went faster than i imagined it would. i had been so busy with schoolwork and weekend dinner parties that I hadn’t noticed the weeks flying by or the air getting cooler and grayer.
Charlie was keeping busy, too, starting new jobs and quitting them after he became bored. He worked in a windowless office that drove him crazy, at a Goodwill donation center where both the workers and donors were surprisingly rude, and at a school for delinquent boys where the rules he was asked to enforce seemed too cruel. “At every door, they have to ask, ”May I please pass through the threshold?” I wanted to tell them that in the real world, no one talks like that,” he said.
He finally found a job in the university’s mailroom, driving a van and delivering big boxes of mail to different buildings on campus. I think he liked it because he was in perpetual motion all day, seeing the town and getting outside in the fresh air. He also liked his co-workers, who were mostly macho Romanian guys who told him dirty jokes and taught him how to swear in their language.
By January, I was getting used to teaching and being a student again. I signed up to teach early morning classes in the spring semester just to get that part of my day done, hopefully leaving room to concentrate on my writing. I showed the same energy and enthusiasm during these early classes as I did for the afternoon ones in the fall, but this time my freshmen were even less amused. They sat at their hardwood desks and fell asleep in the crooks of their elbows. I hadn’t taken into account how they would fare with the dark winter mornings in Iowa. Though I was getting used to it, I realized that my students had trouble waking up, let alone functioning coherently, in the bleakness of the morning.
I hadn’t noticed such desolation myself until one day in late January. I stood at the bus stop in front of our apartment at 8:00 in the morning. It seemed like I was the only person awake, and I took advantage of the quiet to review the lecture I was about to give. I stood on the snowy sidewalk reciting my key points when I felt all the muscles in my body tighten. I rolled my neck and took a long breath of cold air through the thick wool of my scarf. I shivered from the weird sensation and tried to shake it off. At first, I blamed it on the weather.
The lawns and the roofs of the houses were covered with white. Snow moved in thin gauzy sheets across the road. The wind kept trying to push me off the sidewalk and onto the street, but I dug the heavy black soles of my boots into the snow. I was mummified, wrapped tight under layers of thermal underwear, fleece, and corduroy and nearly suffocating in a parka, scarf, and knit cap. If there was one thing I learned in Iowa, it was that you could never wear enough layers and that those layers couldn’t be thick enough. And yet, six layers deep, it still felt like the cold air passed through me as if I were a sieve. Then, oh no, I thought, suddenly feeling as if the molecules I was composed of were breaking apart. I didn’t know if the feeling was running through my blood or if it came from my gut or if it was me trying to doom myself with a bleak prophesy, but I just knew, standing there at that moment, that something was wrong with my kidney.
I’d seen this day coming across the horizon for a few years now, and I’d been given fair warning by the doctors that a transplant wasn’t a cure for kidney disease, just another treatment. The original disease could come back in the transplanted kidney, or my body could start to reject it. Or it could just stop working, like a heart tired with age.
I knew what had to be done now. I had to call the nephrolo-gist, who would probably order some blood work and maybe a biopsy of the kidney. Seeing as how I was now fresh out of siblings, I just hoped that the kidney would last me through to the summer, until the school year was over and I could better focus on the problem. I looked down the snow-covered road, and all I could see was a succession of tests, appointments, prognoses, and diagnoses, and as I had done for the cold Iowa winter, I braced myself for it.
The nephrologist I’d been seeing since we’d moved to iowa was a mouse of a woman with grayish brown hair and a nose that was too small for her face. She kept a close eye on me all fall because I was a new patient, not necessarily because she saw the rejection coming.
“That’s what it is, right? Chronic rejection?” I asked her as we sat on the couch in her office. She brushed her hand against my back and confirmed my self-diagnosis. “We should start thinking about dialysis,” she said.
“But, wait, it’s not that bad yet, is it?” I had a feeling that the kidney was changing, but I hadn’t recognized any symptoms yet. No swollen ankles, no remarkable fatigue. Even my blood pressure was holding steady. I had called this one on a hunch, nothing more. I was just grasping the concept of actually being right; I didn’t want to talk about what was going to happen next.
“Your kidney function is at about 50 percent now, but it’s not getting any better. We can hold off putting a dialysis fistula in your arm for now. But that’ll probably need to happen soon. I know you want to finish out the semester before you start any treatments, but I can’t make that call right now. I suppose we can hold off and just watch your creatinine level every week,” she said reluctantly.
I trudged through winter in a daze, trying to stay ahead of the schoolwork and the teaching just in case something were to happen. I should have been excited that my freshmen were finally looking more alive in class as the mornings became warmer, but no matter how well things were going in school or how much closer spring was getting, it always felt like I was still under the cloud of winter. After teaching my Monday morning class, I took the bus from the university to the hospital and had my blood drawn per Dr. Mousy’s orders. I again put off her recommendation to have the surgery that would enlarge the vein in my arm—a procedure that would allow me to start dialysis treatment immediately after my kidney officially failed. I couldn’t take a week off to recover from surgery right when my students were finally paying attention.
“Not yet, please,” I begged her. “The semester is almost over.”
One day, I sat in the kitchen of Beth’s tiny bungalow staring at a shadowbox that held her collection of miniature things: a tiny hairbrush, a tiny glass pitcher, a tiny red harmonica. She was making a spinach cream sauce and stirring the pasta in a giant pot over the stove. “Should we have bread, too?” she asked me.
When I stood up to get a baguette from the counter, I caught a glimpse out the window. It was late spring, and Beth’s backyard was getting into shape. She’d planted yellow flowers that now blossomed and curled along the edge of the yard; an overgrown tree that seemed menacing all winter was now trimmed and handsome. She had hosed down the white-painted iron patio table and chairs so they were free of leaves and dirt. Summer was going to be beautiful for her: quiet barbeques in the back, Saturday mornings tending to her new vegetable garden. I wondered what summer would look like for me. I didn’t know if I’d be right there with her, or if
I’d be in a hospital room trying to get better. I wanted to feel as hopeful as that bright backyard, but I had no clear window into my summer.
I must have been staring at the garden for a while because I heard her call, “Hello? Hello?” She grabbed the baguette from my hands and put it on the table. She looked at me through her black-rimmed glasses and said, “Clearly, you need a distraction. And so do I.”
Beth was in fine physical health, but her love life was currently requiring her attention. She knew it, too, and she was trying to be cautious with her steps. She was a recent divorcee, ending her first marriage right after coming to Iowa. This was a fact that she didn’t share with me until several months into our friendship, and even then, I had to grill her for details.
“I was too ambivalent,” she’d said once, shrugging ambivalently.
“What does that mean?” I asked her. “Isn’t the whole idea of marriage that you’re making a choice? You pick someone and promise that you’re going to be with that person for the rest of your life?”
“Yeah, I guess,” she said. “We were dating, and everything was fine. And when he wanted to move here from Chicago, I told him I’d go. When he asked me to marry him before we left, I just sort of went along with it.”
“I guess you didn’t want him bad enough to try to work it out.”
“I don’t know. There’s a point in a marriage when you can’t go back to the beginning.”
It had seemed she was ready to be single for a long while, not really mentioning anyone she was interested in and not really making an effort to meet anyone new. But then I’d heard reports that she and a professor from the media department were seen talking extensively with each other at two different parties.
“Beth,” our friend Erica said at one of our many department potlucks, “you were spotted in a red car with a man.” Everyone in the room turned to listen to her response, but Beth didn’t make a peep. She sat in the corner rocking chair and stuck her nose deep into her wine glass, her cheeks visibly turning warm.
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