Or Not to Be

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Or Not to Be Page 3

by Laura Lanni

I watch younger me, again, back in my old college apartment. I had no idea I was so cute in my good old days, even when sleep-deprived, unshowered, and free of makeup. Back on that rainy Saturday morning, more than two decades ago, my life was fresh when Eddie first stepped into my path. It was the time of the beginning of us.

  After Mr. Wixim, I mean Ed, left my apartment, consumption of too much raw blueberry muffin batter had turned out to be a bad idea. I took a giant slug of Pepto straight from the bottle, and fell into a coma on my couch under the flannel blanket to sleep away the afternoon. I awoke hours later with my toothbrush wedged into the back of my thigh and in severe need of coffee to clear the fuzz lining the inside of my forehead. I shivered and then hopped barefoot on the kitchen tile and watched each drip of my coffee as it gushed into the pot until my frozen feet demanded action. I pulled the pot away and shoved a cup under the drip. Snuggled back under my blanket, my feet thawed as I sipped from the warm mug and ate a muffin from the top down.

  The caffeine in my bloodstream crashed into my fogged head, and I remembered my visitor. After about four lucid seconds, I leaped off the couch in panic, sloshing brown liquid and blue crumbs onto the floor. I couldn’t go on a date with Ed Wixim. I’d never been on a real date before. I didn’t attract men; I scared them off. There were many I liked who were cute or smart or both, but they were always petrified of me, and I did not find that deer-in-the-headlights look particularly attractive.

  But this Wixim guy was brave. He came to my door. Unarmed. What nerve. What spine. I called my sister at her college three states away to agonize.

  “Michelle, I need help,” I said, instead of hello.

  “Yeah. I’ve been telling you that for years, girl.” My sister always had my back.

  “Shut up, jerk, and listen. A guy asked me out.”

  “What?” She nearly blew my ear off.

  “Don’t sound so surprised. I’m not that ugly.”

  “No, Anna, you’re not that ugly. You’re scary like a grizzly bear. I might be the only human on the planet not afraid of you.”

  “Huh. You are afraid of me.”

  “A little,” she admitted. “So, what’s he look like?”

  “Gorgeous. Tall. Older.”

  “How much?”

  “Two or three years, I think. He’s finishing his Ph.D. this spring.”

  “Good. Good. Mom will love him ’cause he’s smart. That’ll help her not hate him so much ’cause he’s cute.”

  “Do not tell Mom.”

  “I know. Don’t worry. You said you needed help?”

  “I guess just tell me what to do. What to wear? How to act?”

  Michelle snorted. “What’s the goal here? Do you want to marry this guy or just use him to learn how to kiss? I need to see the prize.”

  “Those are my only choices?” She stumped me. I didn’t have a goal beyond remembering to breathe during the date. I’d only been on two dates before, both set up by friends, both awkward as hell. I’d never been asked out directly by the guy before. “What was your goal with Danny?”

  A grunt. My sister made many noises. Soon she’d probably start whistling. She finally answered, “Honestly? I just didn’t want to get pregnant.”

  She was light years ahead of me. My sister could handle men. “Well, I don’t think I’ll have that concern. It’s just one date. But what should I wear?”

  “Do you like him?”

  “I don’t know. I’m a little nervous.”

  “Good. That means you do. So then it matters how you look. You should shower, Anna. And wear mascara and blush. And earrings. Then just concentrate on the kissing lessons. If he doesn’t kiss you, you fail, and don’t come crying to me.”

  “Slow down, will you?” I demanded.

  “Are you writing this down?”

  “Of course. Okay, keep going.”

  Michelle sighed before continuing. “Wear a cute skirt or dress. Sandals or heels. Shave those legs! And do something with that hair, will you?”

  “Okay, okay, I’ll work on it.”

  “First dates suck, Anna, but I’m sure you’ll be fine. Call me when it’s over.”

  “I wish you were here with me.”

  “Yeah, me too. Maybe we’ll live next door someday when we both have real jobs.”

  “I wish.”

  “Love you, Anna.” And she whistled a line from “The Rose” as she hung up.

  | | | |

  Friday, the day I agreed to go on a date with Ed Wixim, came way too fast. I tried to do everything Michelle said. I even remembered to shave my legs, and I got my hair cut and permed for the first time in my life. But I was nervous when Eddie knocked on my door, right on time. The only thing I felt confident about was my new look. My haircut made me look so much older and mature. I loved it. Something unexpected happened to me during that week. I admitted to myself that I wanted this guy to like me. I would do my best to make him the second person in the world not afraid of me.

  I opened the door and tried a new tactic. I smiled at him instead of emitting my normal growl. It didn’t work. His face fell, and he said, “Your hair.”

  That reminded me that I at least looked pretty. I touched my hair and said, “What?” in that impish tone, just like those goofy girls who wait for compliments from guys. I hated myself for a minute. Until Eddie spoke. Then I hated him instead.

  He said, “I liked it better the other way.”

  The hell with him. I changed my mind. I wanted him to fear me. I slammed the door and stomped in circles in my tiny apartment like a caged bull. I puffed like Ursula with indignation as I imagined the pain I could crash down upon this idiot man who had the nerve to knock on my door and insult me.

  But Eddie didn’t leave. He kept knocking on my door and asking me to come out. He even suggested a sweater in case I got cold, which popped my Ursula shield and made me like him again. Drats. I didn’t know the social protocol for this—being insulted and yet still being expected to go on the date. My stomach, the bottomless pit, answered for me when he mentioned being late to the steakhouse. I grabbed a sweater, kicked myself in the head, and went on the damn date.

  And it wasn’t that bad. He was more nervous than I was, which made me think that maybe he liked me. This hot guy liked me. That’d never happened before. And he wasn’t just gorgeous—he was funny and not very much afraid of me. I thought I might use that to my advantage for a while. This could get interesting. Maybe Michelle was right. I might use this guy to try out the kissing thing.

  The date lasted forever, and, hours later, Eddie somehow got me pinned under his giant arm and trapped on a bench in the rose garden. From this captive position, I considered my situation.

  The cold stone of the bench met the hot backs of my thighs and did what every cold object does when it encounters a warmer one—kinetic energy was neatly transferred by elastic collisions between the frenetic particles to their sedater neighbors. The smell of the flowers, produced by vaporous bulky molecules colliding with receptors in my nose, made the air literally heavy on my cool skin. Those smelly molecules were an order of magnitude heavier than the nitrogen and oxygen in the cool air.

  The light from a lamppost illuminated only half of Eddie’s face, leaving the other half hidden in black shadows. Though I knew the missing half of his face wasn’t actually gone, I entertained myself with imagining “what isn’t seen does not exist,” a fun mind game I almost mentioned out loud and would have if only my brain could have made my lips function. But Eddie’s large hand on my waist had somehow alerted a colony of my eager neurons to start a chain reaction that made me lightheaded. And then, by a series of moves not under my control, perhaps only understood by males of the species, Eddie managed to get his lips close to my paralyzed ones.

  Really close. Closer than any lips had ever been to the molecules of me. His molecules exerted an inexplicable force that mine found irresistible.

  For a full minute, I held my breath. For sixty seconds, maybe more, I existed
in an idiotic state of self-denial from completely free, available, and fresh oxygen. I like oxygen. It’s one of my favorite elements. Its absence was not helping with my lightheaded situation.

  And then he did it. Eddie Wixim, my teacher, touched his lips to mine, and for the first time in my life I wasn’t thinking with my brain.

  | | | |

  In June, mere months after our first kiss, he went and did it: Eddie proposed in the drive-thru line at McDonald’s on a Tuesday in June. He paid for our Big Macs, and while we waited, he sucked hard on the straw of his chocolate shake and asked me to get a cassette tape out of the glove box. I opened the box and saw nothing like a cassette tape. A top layer of papers and wrappers and newspapers peeled away to reveal a baseball, a wad of napkins, one red and one green tube sock, a comb, a dozen pencils, and even more entropy below.

  “Eddie? What the heck? It’s a disaster in here.”

  “Just dig in there. I know the Doobie Brothers are in the back somewhere.”

  I dug my hand in because I trusted him, this competent, sweet, intelligent man who liked me in spite of me, or maybe because of me. I never understood that part. My hand felt around for the sharp corners of a cassette case and just came up with more sticky wrappers, which I tossed in handfuls over my shoulder into his back seat. The McDonald’s chick handed Eddie a huge greasy, salt-encrusted bag. He dragged out french fries, two at a time, and shoved them the long way down his throat. I don’t even think he chewed

  “Hey,” I said, “don’t eat mine.” He always ate my fries.

  “I won’t,” he lied.

  I was still up to my elbows in male disorganization. It was making me twitch. “There’s no cassette in here, Eddie.”

  “Anna, come on. This is easy. Just reach in the back.”

  That’s when my fingers landed on the square velvet box. I pulled it out and was about to toss it over my shoulder with the other crap when Eddie’s hand caught my wrist. He said, “Oh, yeah, I forgot about that. It’s for you. See if you like it.” So nonchalantly, the man ate a few more of my fries.

  I looked down at the blue box and suddenly understood that there was a ring inside. Holy shit.

  Unable to breathe, I choked out, “What are you thinking?”

  “That I want you to come with me,” he managed to say around a mouthful.

  “Why?” It came out in a whisper. I couldn’t pull in a full breath.

  “Because I don’t want to go without you. I can’t go without you.” I’d been dreading the time when he would leave me when he started medical school. I’d never even considered going with him. I was headed to frigid upstate New York for my own doctoral program in the fall.

  Eddie put the bag of fries on the dashboard and turned to me. He took the little box from my clenched claw and popped it open. He looked from the box to my eyes and said, “Oh, look Anna. It’s pretty. Just like you.” He pulled the ring out and wiggled it in the midday sun to make it catch the light.

  I was mesmerized by the sparkle of the tiny diamond. Graduate students are poor. It’s a requirement.

  I could barely breathe, but I heard myself ask, “You want me to come with you? Wait. You mean you want me to marry you?”

  “Yes, Anna, I do.” He leaned to me and touched my lips with his salty ones.

  And that’s how Eddie Wixim, my hot teacher, asked me to marry him without ever saying the words. Without actually asking. Just the same way he loved me during our marriage—without actually saying the words. That man got away with a lot of crap because I was so crazy about him. After the tiniest feather of a kiss, he slipped the ring on my finger without my verbal consent, but I let him because my answer to the unasked question was clear when I kissed him back. And why bother answering a question that was never asked? Logic prevailed. The car behind us beeped loudly. Just like that, I was engaged to marry the best guy I’d ever known—my favorite person on the planet—and all of my future plans succumbed to an entropic scramble.

  | | | |

  Our wedding day arrived seven weeks later. My vintage dress didn’t fit me. It was too big in the boobs and three inches too long. I wore heels and held my shoulders back. Mom, who sniffled behind me, helped me get into the dress.

  “Mom,” I asked, unable to see her face in the big mirror, “are you crying?” I think it’s genetic: my mother doesn’t like to cry in front of anyone.

  “No, of course not, Anna.” But she was. She’d made it clear all summer and even the night before the wedding that she didn’t want me to go through with this. I couldn’t convince her and was tired of arguing, so I just stayed silent and let her stew. But I didn’t want her crying.

  “I’ll come visit, Mom. You know that, right?”

  “No, you won’t. You can’t afford it. And in a year or two you’ll have my grandchild and you’ll never finish your education.”

  I didn’t argue. I didn’t want to fight with her on my wedding day. But in the end, as always, my mother was right.

  Daddy walked me down the aisle, which was just a path of grass between two blocks of twenty chairs. Eddie waited for me in front of everyone, beaming like he was the luckiest man alive. I was dizzy and relieved when Daddy transferred my hand from his arm directly to Eddie’s so there wasn’t an instant during which I had to support my own weight. This was good because during most of the ceremony I was certain I would pass out.

  A giant oak provided shade, yet I sweated through my heavy silk dress. Eddie wiggled his eyebrows at me and nodded to my left shoulder as my too large dress began to slip off. I hunched it back up and grinned right back at him.

  The professor who married us had little to do during the ceremony except to welcome everyone, ask that ridiculous question of the spectators about whether anyone wanted to object to our union—as though that would have had any impact on our decision to marry each other—and pronounce us man and wife at the end. He did his part to start us off. I held my breath and waited for my mother to object, and when she did not—Daddy must have gagged her—I took my first full gulp of oxygen in almost twenty-four hours. Then we took over.

  Eddie went first.

  He looked alternately from my eyes to his wrist, where he had scribbled some notes, and began, “Anna, since our first date, I have been unable to think of anything, anyone, but you.”

  I smiled. My mother sobbed. Eddie’s stomach rumbled.

  He winked at me and continued, “You, my Anna, are my other half. Your amazing mind, your sense of humor, and your feistiness make you the missing piece that makes me whole. Though I worried I might scare you away, it didn’t take me long to realize that you fear nothing, and to know you are the one I need beside me for the rest of my life.”

  He reached into his pocket and took out the tiny gold ring, looked back into my eyes, and asked, “Anna, will you take me as your husband, to have, hold, love, and support; do you promise to bake cookies for me, rub my back, kiss my lips, and cherish me and us together until death parts us?”

  One renegade tear dripped down my cheek. Eddie caught it on his thumb as I said, “Until death parts us, I do.” He slipped the ring on my finger, and I sniffled.

  Then it was my turn.

  I took a tiny note card from my poufy sleeve and said, “Eddie, on our first date, I was certain that we would never speak again, let alone date and end up married. But you, my friend, did grow on me.”

  I heard my dad laugh.

  I glanced at my notes and continued, “It wasn’t your green eyes, your broad shoulders, or your smile that won me. It was your humility, your intelligence, and your effortless way of caring for me. You chased me down. You made me realize I was lonely when I’d never noticed before. I want you beside me for the rest of my life.”

  I took his ring from the cleavage of my gown, and he wiggled those eyebrows at me again, which made me laugh as I asked, “Eddie, will you take me as your wife, to have, hold, love, and support; do you promise to change my oil, take out the trash, rub my neck every day, and cher
ish me and us together until death parts us?”

  He squeezed my hand, gave a sharp nod, and shouted, “Until death parts us, I do!”

  I put the ring on his finger, and when I looked up, his face was in my space, stealing my air, and he caught me breathless in a kiss. Everyone cheered.

  The professor announced, “I now pronounce you husband and wife. You may continue to kiss your bride.”

  He did. Eddie kissed me and kissed me some more. Our wedding photo album is full of pictures of that kiss. When we came back down to Earth, the guitar dude had finished his recessional song, and the guests were on their second drink.

  | | | |

  And there you have it. Losing Eddie’s affection felt like dying before I died. I couldn’t have lived my life without him anymore than I could have lived without water or oxygen. I would’ve continued to suffer right alongside him for the rest of my life. Though dying relieved me of having to face our problems, the pain of our separation stings.

  6

  Wandering and Guidance After Death

  When I died, I surrendered everything—my family, my life, and all control. Now it seems I am being tossed around randomly, riding on the whim of an unsympathetic universe, back and forth in time, only able to wallow in sadness and regret.

  It’s hard to get a grip on my perspective from the dead side. From here, as I watch my family, I feel their agony, but not in my heart as I always thought I did when emotional things hit me in life. In death, I feel their pain everywhere, within me and without me.

  I have no arms or legs or organs, no ears, eyes, or skin, and yet I can still sense everything. The materials of me—my proteins and DNA—were stolen away by death. My well-used carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen allowed me to exist on Earth and live my life and take care of my family, but were merely a minor part of me. Without my molecules, my family thinks I’m gone from them. But I keep coming back, remembering the past, and somehow I’m maintaining a level of voyeuristic interaction with them.

  This is a remarkable surprise. When I considered in life what death might be like, I never imagined that I would lose only the use of my atoms. My power to think and love has survived my death.

 

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