by Lisa Gornick
In another version, we go ahead and marry. We buy an apartment. By the time, though, that we paint the walls, sand the floors, select the Oriental, order the couch, frame the pen-and-inks, plant flowerpots for the terrace, and assemble the grill, we have lost the language of love, the cadences of tenderness permanently transformed into communications about deliverypersons and summer rentals. In this version, I pray for magic. I accumulate slim volumes of poems, piling them each night by the side of the bed, hoping that the words (arms encircling bellies, tongues probing palates) will find their way into our sheets. In this version, I keep trying to turn our story into that O. Henry tale in which she cuts her hair to buy him a watch chain and he sells the watch to buy silver combs for her lovely long hair. I keep trying to explain to you how our apartment is something like this, that in the story the lovers exit with even greater devotion to each other, only the analogy doesn’t make sense and, in the end, I take the rug, you take the couch, we divide up the pen-and-inks, and the gay couple who buy from us get the freshly painted walls and beautiful floors.
The real ending, though, is nothing like either of these. The real ending begins with the phone ringing in the middle of an autumn night. You reach to answer it and I hear you saying, “Who’s this? Who’s there?” You turn to me and say, “I can’t understand a goddamned thing. It’s some woman sobbing and sobbing.” I bolt awake. I know it is Corrine.
I grab the phone from you. “Corrine, Corrine, honey, what is it?” Already I am crying too. I struggle to grasp a word between her sobs. “Is it Lily?” For a long time, I can’t untangle any words. Then I think I hear, “Yes,” before it is again only wails. “Corrine, I’m coming,” I say, “I’ll be there as soon as I can.”
I call my father. For once, he is home. “Daddy, please,” I say. I am almost yelling. “It’s Corrine. Something’s happened to Lily. I think she’s in a hospital. Probably UCSF is where Corrine would take her.”
It’s been a long time since I’ve called my father Daddy. “Do something,” I whisper.
You telephone airlines for me and book me on the next flight. I pack some things, get dressed, and wait for my father to call back.
“You were right. She’s at UCSF.” My father clears his throat. “I’m there now. It’s not good. A vein burst in her head. It happened in her sleep. Corrine went to check on her and found her vomiting, with blood coming out of her ears.”
I can feel my bowels contracting. I hold on to the edge of the kitchen counter. “How bad? Is she going to live?” I can’t tell if I am screaming or not.
It takes my father so long to answer that for a moment I wonder if he’s still there. Then I hear his voice swimming toward me. “I don’t think so.” I rest my forehead on the counter. “They’ve still got her heart going with a machine but she’s brain-dead.”
“How’s Corrine?” I manage to ask.
“Hysterical. They just gave her some Valium to try to calm her down. She’s got some boyfriend with her who looks like he’s had a handful himself.”
You help me get a cab and kiss me on the cheek. You don’t offer to fly out with me and I don’t ask, not because I don’t want you to, I desperately do, but because of Corrine, because she will need me in ways I can’t manage if I am with you.
On the plane, I sit next to a rabbi whose job is to say the blessing to make horseradish kosher. He’s young, probably younger than I am, with skin that looks like it’s never seen sun. During takeoff, he prays, swaying forward and back, but after that he talks on and on about the convention of industrial rabbis he’s headed to in Oakland, about a childhood trip to San Francisco and a baseball game he saw at Candlestick Park. He refuses the meal, eating instead two meatloaf sandwiches he unfolds from a tinfoil wrapping. Although nothing about him feels holy to me, still I tell him about Lily.
“I will pray for the child.” He refolds the tinfoil around the remains of his sandwich and bows his head. I listen as he murmurs words I can’t understand. It occurs to me that I have not heard Hebrew since my mother’s funeral when my father nearly punched the rabbi who had been hired to appease my mother’s parents and who had slunk from relative to relative the hour before the service to learn something about my reclusive mother only to then bungle the eulogy by referring to her as a devoted wife who would be missed by not only her three children but the entire community.
By the time I get to the hospital, Lily has been taken off of the machine. Corrine is wild-eyed. A button has popped off the front of her shirt and her fine blond hair is tangled as though she has been pulling at it all night. Her brother, Marc, who lives in Connecticut but has somehow arrived before me, is there, and some guy who looks like he’s eighteen. Corrine won’t let me hug her. I take her by the shoulders and try to hold her still. She smells like vomit. “Corrine,” I say. I am struggling not to break into sobs. “Tell me what to do.”
“Get rid of him,” she whispers, pointing to the guy. “I can’t stand to have him here.”
I go up to the guy and walk him down the corridor. “Listen,” I say, “I don’t know how to tell you this, but you’ve got to go now. Now is only for family and close friends.” The guy nods. He looks relieved to be dismissed.
“Should I say goodbye to her?” he asks.
I pat his hand. “I think it’s best if you just leave from here.”
“I was there when it happened. I brought Corrine some pot, and she went up to check on Lily and then she just started screaming.”
“I understand.” I feel old. Old enough to be this boy’s mother. He nods at me and turns toward the exit.
When I get back to the waiting room, Corrine is standing in the middle of the room kicking one of the chairs. Marc is talking to everyone, the doctors, the nurses, people on the pay phone. I can hear him making arrangements, funeral parlor, flights for his parents who now live in Florida. He tells someone on the other end of the line to wait a minute, and then beckons me to come over. “Take her home, okay? They just gave her some more Valium and the doctor said she’ll probably crash.”
Corrine lets me hold her hand in the cab. With her other hand, she pulls at her hair. “Stop it,” I say. “Give me that hand.” I keep both of her hands between mine. When we get to her house, there are bloody dish towels in the hall. Corrine ignores them and heads up the stairs. I follow her into Lily’s room with the butterflies Corrine painted on the walls. The bed is clotted with vomit and blood. I try to strip off the lavender sheets but Corrine won’t let me. She climbs into the bed, shoes and all. She curls up on her side. I follow, fighting off nausea, putting my arms around her until we are spooned together. I hold her as she rocks and howls, low like a wolf, over and over, “My baby. My baby. My baby.”
When the Valium takes hold, I untangle my numb arms and go downstairs. I put the bloody towels in a garbage bag, and then call my father. “What caused it?” I ask.
“It was probably congenital. She was probably born with a weak blood vessel. It’s like waiting for a time bomb to go off.” I start to cry again, thinking of Lily walking around with her Popsicles and trolls and a time bomb ticking in her head.
“You mean it was in her genes.”
“Maybe. Or it could have developed from some fetal problem.”
I’m afraid to ask the next question but I force myself. “Did she have a lot of pain?”
“I don’t think so. Not more than a moment or two.” I want to say, Do you swear that, do you swear on your life that it wasn’t more than a minute or two, can I tell that to Corrine, that her baby suffered at most, absolute most, one hundred and twenty seconds?
After I hang up with my father, I think of calling you but suddenly I’m terribly tired. I go upstairs, back to Lily’s room, reeling at first from the stench of her vomit and dried blood, acrid now like a discarded menstrual pad, my eyes welling as I think how Lily never even had a period. I manage to get the sheets off the bed without waking Corrine, then crawl back in, pulling Lily’s quilt over the two of us. I listen to
the rhythms of Corrine’s breath, so different from yours, letting myself join her in sleep.
*
It’s the part about Corrine’s hair that undoes us. I tell you about it ten days later, the night I arrive back in New York, when we sit up until the sky turns slate, something we haven’t done since our beginnings, while I try to describe to you the days before the funeral.
Corrine begged me to tell her parents they had to stay in a hotel. “I can’t have them in the house,” she cried. “Lily might be trying to talk to me. She might not talk to me if they’re around.” So she and I stayed at her house, Corrine sleeping in Lily’s little bed, punching my arms and screaming when I insisted on washing the sheets before she put them back on, me in Lily’s Barbie sleeping bag at her feet.
The night before the funeral, at the funeral parlor, Corrine’s mother whispered to me, “Louisa, darling, see if you can get her to do something with her hair for tomorrow.” Corrine had pulled up a chair so she could sit next to the coffin. She was holding Lily’s hand, talking softly to her. I knew that she was telling Lily not to be scared. From across the room, Corrine’s hair looked matted, as though it were knotted and then stuck to her head with something sticky.
In the morning, I laid out clothes for Corrine and told her to be sure to wash her hair. I heard the shower go on and then, a minute later, go off. When Corrine walked into the room, her hair was dry. I swiveled her around, back toward the bathroom, turned the shower on, and guided her under the water.
“Close your eyes,” I said, pushing her head under the nozzle. Something that looked like brown rust flowed over her shoulders. Jesus, I thought, is that Lily’s blood still in her hair?
I got into the shower with her, squeezed shampoo into my palms, and lathered her scalp. I rinsed, lathered again, and rinsed. Then I surveyed the mass of her hair. It was horribly knotted. I reached for a bottle of crème rinse, put a handful in, waited a minute, and rinsed. I could hardly see or feel any difference. I continued adding crème rinse and rinsing until I’d used the whole bottle. Then I took a washcloth and started washing the rest of Corrine: her feet, the back of her knees, between her legs, under her arms.
By the time I got her out of the shower, she was sobbing. I dried her off with a towel, wrapped her in a second one, pulled down the toilet seat cover, and sat her down. For fifteen minutes, I tried to comb the knots out of her hair. Then I went down to the kitchen and got a bottle of vegetable oil. I rubbed oil into Corrine’s hair and attempted again to comb. Slowly, I got out some of the tangles. She never stopped crying and I was sure that some of it was because I was tearing at her hair.
“It was awful,” I tell you. “I finally got a scissors and cut out the remaining knots. Then I had to wash her hair again because of the oil. I tried to make her look presentable by using mousse and hair spray to cover the spots where her scalp showed through, but by the time we got to the funeral parlor, she had undone all my work by pulling again at her hair. She looked like someone from the back ward of a loony bin. When her mother saw her, she nearly fainted.”
We’re sitting at the kitchen table. You’re drinking beer. I’m sipping tea. My suitcase is still by the front door. You’re staring at me as though you’re not quite taking in what I’m saying.
“How did you get in the shower?” you ask.
“What do you mean?”
“Did you have your clothes on?”
I look at you, trying to figure out what it is that you’re getting at.
“Answer me. Did you or did you not have any clothes on?”
“Of course not. I wouldn’t get into a shower with my clothes on.”
“You mean you were washing Corrine while you both were naked.”
“What the hell are you suggesting?”
You get up from the table and head to the bathroom. The toilet flushes, and then I hear our shower running. I bang on the door before letting myself in. “Listen,” I say. I am yelling. “You can’t make wild accusations like that and then walk out of the room.” I am so enraged, I’m near to tears.
You don’t respond. For a moment, I think you are singing. Then I realize that you have the shower radio on. “Who do you think you are? I’ve just come back from my best friend’s child’s funeral and you pull this shit!”
It’s not a song; it’s a dog food commercial. I pick up a bottle of your very expensive aftershave and hurl it at the side of the tub. The glass shatters into glistening green shards and a sickly smell mixes with the steam.
*
Of course, we make up. “I was tired,” you say. “You know how irrational I get when I’m tired.”
I buy you a new and even larger bottle of the aftershave. “I’m sorry,” I say. “I shouldn’t have thrown it no matter what you said.”
But I can’t shake it, the sense of something debased and dangerous between us, the feeling of betrayal that you used what I told you about Corrine’s grief against me, the sound of the bottle shattering, the shards of sticky green glass. What if you hadn’t headed into the bathroom? What if we had stayed in the kitchen? Would I have reached for the teapot filled with boiling water?
I play this scene over in my mind. You say, You mean you were washing Corrine while you both were naked. I say, What the hell are you suggesting? Your hands rest palms down on the table. I reach for the kettle. You track my arm as it moves through the air.
*
Once, during the month before I pack up my things, you say about Lily that it was God’s will.
We’re sitting in an Indian restaurant. You’re dangling a forkful of vegetable samosa next to your mouth.
“God’s will? It was God’s will to have a blood vessel burst in her brain?”
You bite and then put your fork down with a clank. I watch you chew. “Yes,” you say. “That’s what I believe.” You set your jaw and stare at something behind me. I can’t tell if you really believe this or are saying it to provoke me.
The waiter arrives with a tray of chapatis and chutneys. A doughy mist rises between us.
If I had to put my finger on when I decided to leave, it would have to be that moment before the chapatis when you evoked the possibility that reasonable people, and perhaps even you yourself, could view Lily’s death as redeemed by her ascent into heaven, whereas I could see only the dumbness and bruteness of nature—the only redemption if I excise that dumbness and bruteness in myself. And, for me, this bruteness has been most bald-faced with you, in this love of ours that had become, if we are honest with ourselves, an exchange of cruelties.
Your father bequeathed you this God when you were a child and I think this is what you love most about him, that he gave you this idea you might turn to later in life of a God who could shepherd you, as he believed he’d been when he stopped drinking—an inheritance richer than all the T-bonds and blue-chip stocks you gather now in your portfolio. My father has no God. No stories of Jesus washing the feet of Mary Magdalene or throwing the money changers out of the temple. What my father has are concepts, concepts that, despite his own failings with my mother and then me and I suppose now Juanita to imagine another person’s experience, he did try to teach me: tolerance, compassion, justice. For the most part, he succeeded, and, for the most part, I have learned to be grateful to him for showing me that one can fashion one’s life at whatever ethical level one chooses. At other times, though, it seems that my belief in the origins of human life in a primordial soup leaves me with only my bestiality. At these times, I understand why the fundamentalists have fought so hard to keep the theory of evolution out of the schools—that what’s at stake are not the scientific facts but how we see ourselves and what we aspire to be.
*
You already know that at first I went back to New Haven because when I sent you a letter asking you to forward my mail, you did. What you probably don’t know is that I’ve since moved back West, into Corrine’s house by the ocean, and that I’m living alone there now since she’s in Puerto Rico with a man she met wh
en her brother and I insisted she get away for a few weeks. Her parents have been a wreck, calling me when they can’t reach her, and I spend a lot of time reassuring them that the change of scenery, not living here where Lily died, is good for her.
I never finished my degree. “ABD,” as my father says, “Louisa’s All But Dissertation.” It just seems unnecessary for my work (I’m now the manager of the bookstore where I worked when I lived here after you left me in Ocean City and I then left Andrew in New York), which, unfortunately, involves more time handling accounts and dealing with salespeople than reading books. “What I need,” I tell my father, “is not a PhD in English but a bookkeeping course.” In the little spare time I have, I’ve been working on some poems, a handful of which I’ve published in journals that no one except other poets ever read. From time to time, I hear from Andrew. He’s married, though the way he writes about his wife makes me think that the marriage won’t last long. Don’t worry—I know better.
I’ve heard through someone who knows someone who works with you that you have a serious girlfriend and that she is tiny and smart and some sort of doctor. The news hurt (actually, it hurt a great deal), but it came also as a relief, a relief to know that you have moved on and that somehow that must mean that I have too.
As for me, I have friends, some of them men who I know pine for more, and on the rare occasion I go to bed with one of them. I am for now, though, too frightened of my capacity to pour boiling water on someone’s hands to do more than a one-or two-night sort of thing.
What I miss most is sleeping with you. Not sleeping with you as it was at the end but sleeping with you as it was at the start, before we hurt each other, when you adored my smell and I could see your angel wings.