Ready to Fall

by Marcella Pixley

  “You took a picture of me loving him,” says Grandma, smiling.

  “I never like myself in pictures,” I say, looking back out the window. “I’m so skinny. I look diseased.”

  “You don’t look diseased,” says Dad. “You just aren’t used to seeing yourself. At that angle, with Grandma’s face so close to yours, you both looked like Mom. Can you see your reflections in the window? Look at that. With the snow coming down. It’s amazing.”

  He’s right. Both Grandma and I look like Mom. It is something in our eyes and foreheads, something in the set of our jaws. We are her future and her past without the present. Our reflections are missing the middle. Mom’s ghost looking back at us, through our own eyes.

  Grandma puts her cheek next to my cheek. “Baby boy,” she says.

  “I should take more pictures of the two of you,” Dad says. “I used to photograph Anna all the time. Do you remember? She never posed for pictures. Not like people these days with their selfies. She was always completely natural.”

  “She was beautiful,” says Grandma still looking at our reflections.

  “I wish I had taken more photos of her,” says Dad.

  As if on cue, all three of us turn to look at Dad’s family photographs on the kitchen walls. Framed memories taken through the years. Dad and Mom standing on the top of a mountain, kissing. Mom in a bathing suit, nine months pregnant with me, her hands on her round, planetary belly, eyes closed, smiling. Me at age five, back to the camera, holding Mom’s hand, looking out at the old Phillip’s rock quarry. It must have been shortly after her first diagnosis, because there is a sadness in the shadows, a heaviness in her shoulders, the darkening sunset in the distance, resonant even in black-and-white.

  Someone is knocking on the front door.

  We all come back to the world. Pulled out of our various sadnesses.

  Another knock.

  “You want to get that?” asks Dad.

  “Okay,” I say.

  Maybe it’s Fish.

  I go into the front hallway and open the door.

  Lydie stands outside our door with a big copper soup pot. The twins are at her side, shivering.

  “Hey, Max,” says Lydie. “I made some organic chicken soup. Can we come in?”

  “Of course,” I say. “Come on in. You guys look like you’re freezing.”

  “It’s Gloria,” says Luna.

  “You cooked Gloria?”

  “Yes,” says Luna. “She’s in the soup.”

  “Well, okay then,” I say.

  “She tastes like chicken because she is chicken,” says Luna.

  “Hey, Dad,” I call. “Lydie and Luna and Soleil and Gloria are here!”

  “Gloria?” calls my dad.

  “In the pot!” I call back. “Chicken soup.”

  Dad and Grandma come into the hallway to greet them. Dad hugs Lydie and helps the twins with their wet things, unwrapping scarves, peeling off hats and gloves, placing boots by the side of the door. Grandma takes the soup from Lydie and walks it with one hand on each handle back into the kitchen.

  “There goes Gloria,” says Lydie.

  “Bye-bye, Gloria,” says Luna.

  Soleil clucks and pecks and scratches. Then she runs around in circles like someone has cut off her head.

  “This is such a surprise,” says Dad. He tickles Soleil at her next pass, drapes Lydie’s coat chivalrously over his arm, and brings it to the closet.

  “We just made the soup and there’s way too much for the three of us,” says Lydie. “The storm’s not supposed to get really bad until later, so we thought we’d drop by and bring you dinner while the roads are still okay. I hope you don’t mind the visit.”

  “I don’t mind at all,” says Dad. “We love your company anytime. Don’t we, Max?”

  “Yup,” I say. “Did you kill the chicken yourself?”

  “You want me to lie or do you want to know the bloody truth?” Lydie asks, rubbing her hands together.

  She is a calm-looking woman. It’s hard to imagine her with a meat cleaver chopping off a chicken’s head. But her hands are hard and calloused and her fingernails are short and ragged. She has muscles in her arms from all that yoga. And there is something hard about her, something about how she always walks on the balls of her feet with her shoulders back that makes me think there is more to her than meets the eye. Soleil is bumping into walls and flapping.

  “You did it yourself, didn’t you?”

  Lydie nods. “I did all three of them, actually,” she says. “It’s hard keeping chickens in the winter. I made pot pies out of Gertrude and Camille. But Gloria was always my favorite so she needed to be soup. Don’t look so shocked, Max. I grew up on a farm. Chickens are easy if you know how.”

  “Hey,” I say. “No complaints here.”

  “Or here,” says Dad, backing away. “But let’s not get on her bad side just in case.”

  Lydie laughs and pushes my dad just a little. He pretends to fall over. “Ow,” he says, rubbing his arm.

  “Oh stop it,” she says. “Let’s have soup.”

  In the kitchen, Grandma has already put out bowls and spoons. She has the soup pot on the stove and the room smells wonderful: salty, yellow, and warm, the scent of onions and pepper rising to the ceiling. Grandma is sitting at her place at the table.

  “How are you doing, Jean?” asks Lydie. “I haven’t seen you in a while.”

  “It’s snowing,” says Grandma. “And it’s nighttime.”

  “Yes,” says Lydie. “Isn’t it beautiful? There’s nothing in this world that’s better on a cold, snowy night than chicken soup.”

  Grandma doesn’t say anything.

  Dad spoons soup into everyone’s bowls. We sit together around the table. Me and Grandma. Dad and Lydie. Luna and Soleil. Gloria in our bowls. The tumor is quiet and I am strangely at peace. We drink soup. The snow falls outside the windows. Dad pours wine for himself and Lydie and they clink glasses and take sips and everyone watches the snow come down.

  After dinner, Dad turns on some music and pours more wine. He picks up his camera and starts taking pictures of everyone. He gets Lydie gazing out the window at the snow, and Grandma drinking tea and Luna twirling like a ballerina and Soleil jumping up and down and shrieking, and then he gets me with both girls in my lap and all of us laughing like crazy. Then he starts taking pictures of Lydie and the girls. He gets Lydie standing against the wall with her face in profile. She takes her long gray hair out of its braid. She twirls in circles. Click. Click. Click.

  “Beautiful,” says Dad. “Just beautiful. You are going to love these.”

  “I’m going to bed,” says Grandma.

  Everyone says good night to her, but she either doesn’t hear us or doesn’t want to respond because she keeps her eyes forward and just walks out of the room and then up the stairs. We can hear her footsteps over our heads crossing the hallway and then the door of her room closing.

  “This is pretty special,” says Lydie, holding her wineglass in one hand, “getting photographed by a real, professional photographer.”

  “Well,” says Dad. “I wish I had more work these days.”

  The music swirls through the kitchen.

  Lydie grabs the girls’ hands and dances with them.

  Dad is gazing at them and taking pictures from one angle and another, and Lydie and the twins are having so much fun that the kitchen is alive with the sound of their laughter. Soleil screeches and whirls around. Lydie is about to scold her but I am so happy tonight, I tell her it’s okay, and I laugh when Soleil grabs Luna’s hands and twirls her around the room. The two girls are beautiful, dancing together, like two yellow butterflies. They twirl and float right out the kitchen door and through the hallway into the living room where they lean back and spin in faster and faster circles. I follow, smiling at the way their hair cascades behind them like sunbeams and I stand in the doorway, watching them and wondering how two human beings can be so free.

  They are so
wonderful and so beautiful to watch, I want to show Dad and Lydie. I want them to see how the snow comes down outside the tall windows behind them, and Luna and Soleil are dancing around the living room like sugarplum fairies, and even though I’m not the kind of guy who usually goes in for things like sugarplum fairies, I run back through the hallway and into the kitchen to get them the way a little boy might if he wanted his parents to see something wonderful. I don’t think about it. I just do it. My mouth is already open, about to say, Dad. Lydie. Come into the living room, Luna and Soleil are dancing like sugarplum fairies and I’ve never seen anything so beautiful in my life.

  But the words never make it out of my mouth because when I get back into the kitchen Dad and Lydie are kissing, their hands in each other’s hair.

  Oh baby, says the tumor.

  The blue woman screeches her fury into my pocket.

  I stumble out of the room, away from the kitchen, away from my father and this woman who is not my mother, kissing, breathing into each other.

  On my way out I trip over a chair.

  They jump apart.

  “Max,” says Dad.

  “Oh my God,” says Lydie.

  I stumble backward into the hallway.

  Luna and Soleil are still dancing in the living room.

  “Max!” Dad follows me, his face red, his eyes filled with shame.

  I grab his plaid jacket, which is hanging on the hook, while the tumor pounds his fists against my eyelids, while he rattles the bars and kicks the walls and the tiny blue woman on the blue shard in my pocket shrieks in her fury. I get the hell out of there.

  I slam the door and disappear into the night like a drunk man, blind with fury, blind with the snow that swirls in chaotic, unbelievable circles until everything I can see before me and behind me is swallowed in the audacious irony of pure and untouched white.

  PERCHANCE TO DREAM

  If I were Dr. Who, I would stagger into the night, eyes wild, hair outrageously unkempt (devilishly handsome, of course), and there, waiting outside my front door would be my trusty TARDIS in the form of a British telephone box, waiting to zoom me into some other dimension.

  All my attractive friends would be inside, waiting for me.

  They would put their arms around me and pat me ceremoniously on the back. Someone would say something glib and clever (we are British after all), then we would grin at one another, and off we would go into the post-BBC universe made of Styrofoam and cheap computer graphics, the Weeping Angels close on our heels.

  Cue Moog synthesizer.

  But this is not Dr. Who. This is my life.

  So when I stagger outside into the snowy winter night and lurch down the street like a madman, there is no TARDIS.

  I slip and slide down the street, using my flailing arms to balance myself, farther and farther away from that house that suddenly seems unfamiliar: where Dad has kissed a woman who is not my mother.

  We have enjoyed soup made from the corpse of a feminist yoga hen named Gloria, who was beheaded on a chopping block and then drained into a metal bowl.

  Lydie killed the chicken with her own hands. It’s easy to do a chicken.

  I imagine my footsteps in the white new snow filling with blood.

  I run behind the houses and through the aqueduct where the snow cloaks the branches of trees, weighing them down so they look like beggars on some ancient road.

  I’m suddenly thinking about Hamlet’s question: to be, or not to be. I’m not so sure whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune or to die, to sleep … perchance to dream.

  For the first time in my life, I’m thinking that maybe it is not nobler.

  Not nobler at all.

  To suffer.

  Because slings and arrows hurt like hell.

  And so does cancer.

  And so do lonely fathers and organic widows who smile at you and then go make you chicken soup out of corpses.

  And so do four-year-old girls who could almost be your sisters if you let yourself love them.

  And so does Gregor Samsa, looking into the mirror one morning and realizing his life has been meaningless the whole time.

  So maybe Hamlet is right.

  Maybe it would be nobler to just end it all.

  To die, to sleep—no more.

  The snow comes down like ash falling in the spaces between the trees. I wonder how long it would take to freeze to death out here. If I just sat here all night and didn’t move, if I took off my shoes and my socks and my coat and lay down in the snow, how long would it take for my heart to stop?

  I wonder if the tumor would die before me.

  Would there be a moment when I would be finally free of him?

  All I would need is a second or two, where I could take a deep breath without him. Or maybe he would linger after I was gone, waiting on tenterhooks, as he must have done when Mom took her last breath, for the next rube to come along and take pity on him, some unsuspecting dog walker, maybe, or a jogger out in the morning, passing by my frozen face, eyes wide open. The tumor will leap from my brain into the jogger’s ear and burrow his way into a new pink host.

  Not to be.

  That is the answer.

  One hundred percent. Not. To. Be.

  I take off my coat.

  I take off my shoes and socks.

  I lie down on the icy ground and let the snow fall on my face.

  I will myself to die.

  This is not an easy thing to do.

  There is no coffin above me.

  Snow is cold.

  It hurts my skin.

  I squint my eyes and move my face to the side and curl my toes and clench my fists and try to stop my heart, but it is too cold to concentrate, even in a fetal position, even with my hands over my face, even breathing into my cupped palms.

  I realize, with a kind of grim disappointment, that I am not capable of suicide.

  Cursing, I bolt upright, pull on my socks and my shoes and my coat and scramble to my feet and blow on my fingers and rub my arms and stomp around from one foot to the other. I plunge my hands deep into my pants pockets. In my left pocket, I can feel my cell phone. I text Fish and she doesn’t answer. Then I put my hand back in my pants pocket and I feel the shard and my wallet and remember the business card Cage gave me at the Panda Wok. The one with his number. I pull it out of my wallet and start to dial.

  I am so cold my fingers almost do not work.

  “Max!” screams Cage. “Max! Oh Max. Oh, you wonderful foolish person. I didn’t think you would do it. Bravery abounds. What’s going on?”

  “Not much,” I say looking up at the sky.

  “Hey. You don’t sound so good. Are you okay?”

  “Not really. I was kind of wondering. You said I could call you anytime and we could meet. Is this a good time?”

  “Is this a good time?” Cage shouts into the telephone as though he were ninety years old or drunk or both. “Are you kidding? This is a perfect time! Where are you? What’s wrong?”

  “Well,” I say, “I’m in the aqueduct and it’s snowing, and I’m kinda thinking about whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune or if it is better to just sleep: perchance to dream. There’s the rub at the current moment. As long as you were asking.”

  “Wow,” says Cage. “That’s deep stuff, Hamlet. So I gather from this line of thinking that you are experiencing a bit of existential angst, am I right?”

  “Yeah,” I say. “I guess you could say that.”

  “You know what’s good for existential angst?”

  “No,” I say. “What?”

  “Steamed dumplings.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah. Clinically proven. And spareribs are pretty good too. Also chicken wings, but not quite as good.”

  “I don’t have any of those things with me,” I say, shivering.

  “Well, of course you don’t, you silly depressed person. Chinese food doesn�
�t just grow on trees. What do you think I am, some kind of ignoramus? You need to get your sorry self out of the aqueduct and down here to Panda Wok pronto. And you need to share a pupu platter with yours truly and you need to look at this gorgeous waitress named Maia who is talking with me right now, and you need to chat with your shit-faced advisor about literature and all things magnificent and then I promise you will be a happy camper once again. Depression gone. At least for the night. Money-back guarantee. Do you trust me?”

  “Yes,” I whisper. “I trust you.”

  “Foolish yet fabulous!”

  “You’ll wait for me?” I ask him.

  “Will I wait for you? Max! My boy! My apprentice! My soul mate! It’s only eight o’clock. I usually close this place. They know me here. This business would fall apart without me sitting like a manatee on this very stool ordering tropical beverages night after glorious night. You think you’re depressed? You ain’t seen nothing yet. So come find me, my confused little dude. I’ll be the fat mammal at the bar with the big fruity drink.”

  “Okay,” I say. “I’ll be there in about ten minutes.”

  “If you’re not, I’m coming out there to find you. No funny business before you get here, understand? No hanging yourself from a tree or jumping off a cliff before I get some good Chinese medicine inside you. Is it a deal?”

  “It’s a deal,” I say, feeling myself smile. “See you in ten minutes.”

  “I will count the seconds,” says Cage. “One one hundred. Two one hundred. Three one hund—” And then he hangs up.

  I plunge my freezing hands into my jacket pockets and trudge out of the aqueduct and into the center of town. Every once in a while, a truck drives by, windshield wipers going, as the snowflakes are falling down, and my heart quickens because I think it’s going to be Dad coming to take me home, Come save me from myself, Dad. Tonight I need to be saved, but it is never him so I keep on walking. I pass the library and the ice cream parlor, and then I pass the Episcopal church, the boutique clothing shop, the bank and the juice bar, and then finally there is Panda Wok, all lit up, windows fogged from the cold, smelling heavenly, and inside there is a fat mammal at the bar with a fruity drink in his hand waiting to give me fried food and bad advice that may not change the world, but will make me feel better for long enough to make it through the night.