“Exactly. I think that’s what people do with the holidays. They wrap it up all neatly with a turkey and clever gifts and lots of eggnog and laugh and laugh, but at the end of the day there are always people missing from the table. And you have to either sit with those empty chairs and laugh, or you can choose not to come to the table at all. I would rather come to the table,” she says definitively, like she is delivering her verdict. Guilty or not guilty.
“You’re saying I need to start coming to the table, right?”
“I’m saying you’ve got to go to the table, yes. But I’m also saying that eventually that laughter becomes real laughter, if you let it. You can’t be afraid of that. You have to fight for it. And there are always going to be empty chairs, and that’s okay too. Emily, I have to tell you something,” she says, and I think, Here it is, she is going to tell me she is dying.
“Okay,” I say, and take a deep breath to calm myself. It will be okay. You can do this. You have done this before.
“Jack is getting worse. I think we’re losing him.” I am confused. I know that we are losing Grandpa Jack; I was there when he disappeared. But I want to make sure I get what she is saying, since the first time she tried to have this talk with me all those months ago, I couldn’t hear her.
“What do you mean, exactly? You can spell it out.”
“He’s dying, Emily. From something else. He’s not eating very much. They think it may be colon cancer. But they don’t know.”
“I’ve been calling every day, and he didn’t say anything. He said he felt fine.”
I look down and play with my napkin. I rip it into long white shreds.
“You spoke with the doctor?” I stick with the technical details first. Always the easy ones first.
“Yeah. She stopped by a couple of days ago when I was sitting with Jack. Apparently your grandfather refuses to get a colonoscopy, so they don’t know for sure that’s what it is. But that’s what everything points to.” My napkin is now no longer a napkin. It is a pile of a hundred pieces of a former napkin.
“Okay,” I say. “Okay.”
“Do they know how long?” I ask because it seems like what I am supposed to want to know. Though I am not sure it matters. Grandpa Jack and I are past formal good-byes and counting time. I have stored a lifetime of him, and that will have to be enough. It is enough.
“They think soon. Probably not tomorrow, but soon.” Her eyes rest on mine; they are warm and maternal. She wants to take care of me, and she wants to make it hurt less. But it is her look that hurts more than anything else, because it is the one I will keep, the one I will return to like an old photograph. I memorize her face, the lines that crisscross at random, her beautiful wrinkles, the kind that are disappearing as a whole generation is introduced to Botox. I want to copy them with tracing paper. I want to run my finger through their grooves. I want to feel that look forever.
I will not shovel dirt, I realize now. If or when, I will think of this look. This look will be her eulogy. No more, no less.
“Thank you for telling me. Like this. In a way that I can’t run away from.” I dump my pile of shredded napkin onto the table, making a baby mountain of useless paper.
“Of course.”
“Do you think I should call my dad and tell him?”
“He knows.” She aims her eyes downward so they don’t have to catch mine.
“He knows?”
“He has been by every night this week. He must know.” Ruth looks through the pile of lifeless napkins.
“But why didn’t he call me? Why didn’t he tell me?” I ask, though she is not the one I should be asking.
“I don’t know. When I didn’t hear from you this week, I figured your dad just couldn’t do it,” she says. “I hope I didn’t overstep my boundaries here. I just thought you should be told.”
“Thanks. Seriously, I can’t tell you how much I appreciate this.” I get up and walk around the table to give her a hug. She feels tiny in my arms, a stack of bones under her thick wool suit.
“This is for the best, you know. Grandpa Jack going this way. It’s what he wanted. He said so.” It feels wrong to say it like that before it is true. Like I am already counting Grandpa Jack among the dead.
“I know. This is better.” Ruth rests her hand on top of mine, and it feels heavier than I would have imagined. Solid.
“Yeah,” I say, “I know.”
I take a deep breath and exhale in a rush. The napkin pile scatters to the floor, like kamikaze butterflies, but neither of us bends down to pick up the pieces.
Eventually, Ruth and I feel revived enough to face the rest of the store. We link arms again and walk through the crowds of people, barely noticing as they nudge us with overstuffed shopping bags. “Silent Night” plays just above the din, and a few of the shoppers subconsciously mouth the words. We get accosted by a few perfume-pushers, but other than that, we are left alone to wander about. We circle the cashmere scarves and indulge our fingers with the soft fabric. I buy gloves for Kate and Jess. Ruth buys a hat for her son and a Burberry shawl for herself.
As we continue walking together, I wonder if people assume that Ruth and I are grandmother and granddaughter. I hope so. I would like for people to think that I have someone that special to link elbows with in Bloomingdale’s. Today I am not envious of the rest of the department-store pairings. Having Ruth at my table is more than enough.
Thirty-two
To: Emily M. Haxby, [email protected]
From: Doug F. Barton, APT
Subject: Work
Hello, Emily. Happy holidays from the APT family. I didn’t know you knew Ruth Wasserstein! What a small world. I clerked for her straight out of law school, and she has been my mentor for the last twenty years. Anyhow, she mentioned that you had decided to start looking for a new job and that you couldn’t be convinced to come back to APT. So, long story short, I sit on the board at the ACLU, and they are looking for a new staff attorney. Unfortunately, the pay cut will be significant, but Ruth thought you would be interested. If you are, please get in touch ASAP, and I will arrange an interview for you.
Best,
Doug Barton
To: Emily M. Haxby, [email protected]
From: Miranda A. Washington, APT
Hey, Emily! I didn’t know you knew Ruth Wasserstein! She’s my hero. I clerked for her out of law school, a million years ago. Smartest woman I have ever met. Anyhow, she got in touch and said that you were looking for public-interest work. I sit on the board at Legal Aid. Any interest in working there? I know the pay is shite, but you would get to do great work. It seems right up your alley. They can interview you on December 27, so let me know if you are available. They are desperate for help.
Happy holidays,
Miranda
To: Ruth Wasserstein, [email protected]
From: Emily M. Haxby, [email protected]
Subject: Thank you!
THANK YOU, RUTH! THANK YOU!!!
You are my fairy godmother!
Now, do you happen to know of any cheap apartments available in Brooklyn? If I take a public-interest job, I can’t afford to stay in my place without selling my organs on the black market.
To: Emily M. Haxby, [email protected]
From: Ruth Wasserstein, [email protected]
Subject: Re: Thank you!
That’s what Craigslist is for, my dear! Sell your organs! Much better option than selling your soul.
Thirty-three
Maybe this is one of those times in life where you just go for it. Put your heart on the line. Let it hemorrhage. I have nothing to lose. Worse comes to worst, I find myself trapped back in a couch vortex. Unlike Meatloaf, I am hitting three out of three here—want, need, love—and there is no running from that. Enough is enough. Dr. Lerner would tell me to just do it: This, Emily, is living your life. And so I e-mail Andrew and finally say what I want to say.
To: Andrew T. Warner, [email protected]
&
nbsp; From: Emily M. Haxby, [email protected]
Subject: Couldn’t help myself
Hi, A. Know you don’t want to hear from me, but couldn’t help myself. I want to say a few things:
I love you.
I miss you.
Let’s try again.
To: Emily M. Haxby, [email protected]
From: Andrew T. Warner, [email protected]
Subject: Re: Couldn’t help myself
You have got to be kidding me. An e-mail? Grow up, Emily.
Please just leave me alone.
Thirty-four
Why do you think things turned out the way they did with Andrew?” Dr. Lerner asks at our next session. We have been through this routine before, and though we have “breakthroughs”—which is just another way of saying the good doctor made me cry—I don’t know if I am getting any better. She can’t stop Grandpa Jack from dying; she can’t make Andrew love me again. She can, however, make me go bankrupt.
For the umpteenth time, we play the game: Dr. Lerner asks why things are the way they are, and I say I don’t know.
“I don’t know.”
I look down at the Persian rug. I concentrate on the design, but I can’t make out a pattern. There are circles within circles, and teardrops within teardrops. It is mostly burgundy, the color of dried blood.
“You don’t know?” Dr. Lerner asks. She does this, too, from time to time, repeats what I say, to keep me talking, to highlight that I am avoiding answering her questions.
“I screwed things up. I tried to fix them. That obviously didn’t work. Game over.”
“Game over?”
“Yeah, game over. I tried. I broke my own fucking heart, what, like three times now? It’s time to get over it. Andrew doesn’t want anything to do with me. It couldn’t be clearer.”
“Okay. ‘It couldn’t be clearer.’ Right. Tell me, why do you think your father hasn’t told you that your favorite person in the whole world is dying?”
“That’s not a very nice way to put it. I thought you were supposed to be empathetic.”
“No, I am supposed to be honest. So why hasn’t he told you?”
“I guess we don’t do that in my family. Clearly, communication is not my dad’s strong point.” I notice some gold in the carpet in the shape of small diamonds.
“How about you? Is it your strong point?” I can’t quite read her tone. Today Dr. Lerner wears a robe and a white turban, with her hair twisted up into a knot. The turban gives off a sense of moral or religious authority, an unambiguity, so I assume she is not being sarcastic.
“Not really, but I’m working on it.”
“With your father?”
“What am I supposed to do? Call him up and tell him to please start informing me from now on when one of my grandparents is going to die? It doesn’t matter, anyway, because there are none left. Call him up and tell him that, though I completely sympathize with the impulse, canceling Christmas makes me feel even more alone than I already am? Call him up and tell him that I quit my job and broke up with Andrew? That Andrew hates me now? That I feel like a fucking orphan?” Who is Dr. Lerner to pass judgment? With her fake turban and unpatterned carpet. What does she know?
Dr. Lerner lets my questions hang there for a few moments and uses the dead air to convey her message. Yup, that’s exactly what you are supposed to do.
“It takes two people to have a conversation.” I know I sound like a spoiled kid, but I’m exhausted. Dr. Lerner just shakes her head at me and rests her wrists on her knees. She looks like she is meditating. I am tempted to remind her that I am paying her to help me, not to reach spiritual nirvana.
“He doesn’t hear me. It’s like talking to a brick wall.”
“Who says that he has to hear you? This is not about him, Emily. This is about you. You can’t change other people. Only yourself. You need to learn how to communicate,” she says, all in italics, like she is delivering the punch line to a New Yorker cartoon.
“Uh-huh,” I say, intentionally inarticulate, intentionally depriving her of the satisfaction of a real word. A private joke with myself.
“Uh-huh,” she parrots back, and smirks. Her look says it all. You’re not smarter than me.
I wish I could talk with my eyes the way Dr. Lerner can. Then I wouldn’t have a communication problem.
“Okay, I get it. I need to communicate more. It’s just easier said than done.” She is right, of course. She is smarter than I am. That’s why I keep coming back. “I tried with Andrew. I really did. I laid out all of my cards in that e-mail. And he shot me down. It was like getting run over by a tractor.”
“Yup, sure sounds like you tried hard. With that e-mail. You tried.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“You know what it means. So tell me what happens. What keeps you from saying what you want to say?” Dr. Lerner asks, reverting back to doctor-patient speak. I stare at the carpet again, but it still looks like a bunch of different rugs stitched together. “Please look at me, not the ground. I want to know what happens to you, what causes you to shut down.”
“Sometimes, when I want to say something, the words just don’t come out for me. It’s like there is a space and I know I am supposed to fill it in. But I can’t.”
Dr. Lerner merely nods, sensing that I am not quite finished with the thought.
“But I guess part of the problem is I don’t know what to say. Sometimes I can’t even put a label on it. Like with Andrew. I couldn’t tell him what I wanted, because I didn’t really know. I get that I should dig deeper or whatever. But I have always felt like there is nothing there to pull from. There was nothing there,” I say. I lean back into the couch and close my eyes. The room is completely silent. This is where I start from, I realize in the pause. You start from quiet and you build the noise. You build yourself up from empty. You create that something to pull from. It’s like eating.
“Exactly,” Dr. Lerner says, as if she can hear my thoughts. “Exactly.”
We sit in silence some more, but now it’s not really silence. My head is buzzing with words and with sentences, and I fill myself with them. It’s not quite energy, but it’s something. It’s a start.
I walk home from Dr. Lerner’s office, even though the temperature has dropped into the single digits. The streets are empty. Manhattan has unloaded its contents again, squeezed it through bridges and tunnels or packed it up into planes and cars, leaving behind a skyline in a rearview mirror, a handful of tourists wearing fanny packs, and a couple of bartenders to serve them. This is what happens every year on the eve of Christmas Eve. Most people leave Manhattan to go “home,” whatever that may mean, or maybe to be anywhere else but here. The effect is a muffling of sound, as if all of the distinct noises of New York, its sirens, its taxi horns, its footsteps, are being smothered by a large blanket. It’s not quite peaceful, more damped down.
Since my father decided to skip Christmas this year, I never considered the possibility of heading to the house I grew up in for the holiday. I don’t really think of it as home anymore, anyway, since I associate the place with a rush of disorientation. It’s not the same house once the insides have been taken down and rebuilt, the contents dispersed around the neighborhood via garage sale. I am pretty sure it’s no longer mine.
When I feel like I do tonight—weightless and afraid that I may scatter into nothingness—I make a mental list of all the people in this world who love me. Today that includes: Jess, Kate, Ruth, maybe Mason (in his own way), and my father (also in his own way). Grandpa Jack is on there too, of course, but when he time-travels back a generation, I think it’s cheating to count him. He can’t feel left behind, he can’t miss me, he can’t love me, if he doesn’t realize I exist. It’s like that picture of my mom on the beach I often think about, a picture of a woman whose biggest concern is getting an even suntan. It is not a picture of a mother at all because it was taken pre-me; there is nothing pinning her in place. She, too, looks like
she could float away.
Now I know sometime soon Grandpa Jack will be switching columns over to the tally marked Dead People Who Loved Me. That’s a separate list, for self-explanatory reasons.
Andrew, you might have noted, is also not on the list. Again, self-explanatory.
I do this frequently, this counting. I take comfort in the statistic, the ability to use some form of measurement. Does everyone do this? Count their love—their weight—in human units? I hold on tightly to my small single-digit figure, my five or my six, depending on how I count, repeating their names in my head as I walk down the city blocks. A mantra forcing me to take in breaths with each word and to lock a part of it in my abdomen. Each makes me heavier, more whole. A starting place.
Twelfth, Jess, Jess, Jess. Eleventh, Kate, Kate, Kate. Tenth, Ruth, Ruth, Ruth. Ninth, Mason, Mason, Mason. Eighth, Dad, Dad, Dad. Seventh, Grandpa Jack counts. Grandpa Jack, Grandpa Jack, Grandpa Jack still counts.
When I reach my building, I don’t recognize the man standing guard at the door.
“Where’s Robert?” There is a new person here, wearing Robert’s uniform, wearing Robert’s cap.
“With his family in Staten Island for Christmas. I’m covering for the next couple of days,” the man says, and holds the door open for me. He looks about fifty, with a boxer’s face of lumps and broken blood vessels, a face that says You should’ve seen the other guy. “Good night, ma’am.”
We don’t know each other’s name, but his voice is the last voice I will hear tonight.
I miss Robert.
“Good night,” I say, just after the elevator doors close. It doesn’t matter if he hears me.
Thirty-five
I know I didn’t have to be alone today. Right now I could be in Providence, Rhode Island, or Short Hills, New Jersey, with Jess’s or Kate’s family, drinking eggnog and opening last-minute presents picked out by their mothers when they found out I had no other place to go. Ruth invited me to join her in D.C. with her kids and grandkids for a day of movies and Chinese food, and Mason suggested I fly down to Texas to experience my first deep-fried turkey. Though I was tempted by everyone’s offer, I think it would have been lonelier to be the family mooch, to pretend to be a part of something I am not. I would have felt like a foreign exchange student.
The Opposite of Love Page 22