Instead, I have my own plan. I wake up early, when the white glare of the sun edges through my windows, and eat a bowl of cereal standing up next to the sink.
I will not wallow. I will not look in the direction of my couch and television.
I shower, get dressed, put on my winter coat and gloves and hat and scarf; I bundle myself tight and heavy.
This is easy. There are children being shot in Darfur. We are a nation at war. This is nothing.
And then I go out the door, say Merry Christmas to the man who isn’t Robert, and start walking uptown. The cold air sneaks under my sleeves and burns my wrists.
One small thing you have to do. And that will give you strength for the rest. Get on with it.
I walk faster, follow the path of the 6 train, but aboveground, as it snakes its way up the East Side. Past Union Square. Madison Square Park. The Met Life building towers over me, measures my progress.
I make it to Grand Central, which smells like body odor and coffee and feels like a refugee camp in Miami. The heat is on full blast, and the air is heavy and humid. Families gather in corners, trying unsuccessfully to corral wandering children, wiping sweat off their faces with discarded scarves. There are shopping bags everywhere, tucked under arms, cradled between feet, red-and-green wrapping paper peeking out of the tops. Every once in a while an announcement is made, and groups disappear behind grand doors marked with numbers onto trains toward home. The black flickering billboard propels the day forward, pushing us nearer to our destinations.
I wait for the shifting letters to announce my train. I don’t think about what I am doing, certainly not where I am going. I just sit here, on the floor, eyes fixed to the board. If you happened to be in Grand Central right now, you would never notice me. I am one of a thousand people waiting for a train, blending into the walls. It feels like disappearing.
The train ride is uneventful. The voice in my head dissolves into the roar of the car as it moves along the tracks. I rest my head against the cold window, look out, but don’t see anything. Only bland landscape. I could be anywhere in the world.
When I get off at my stop, a taxi driver waits out front in an idling cab. It seems like he is waiting for me. I hop in the back, and though I don’t have an exact address, he knows the place. The driver has pictures of his children pasted to the clear plastic divider, and I examine and memorize them, like they are on the back of a milk carton. Identical twin girls, both with two braids skimming their skulls, the girl on the right showing off a lost tooth.
The driver drops me off outside a stone-wall entrance, and I realize I am just a couple of blocks away from my dad’s country club. I wonder if he is there, slapping people on their backs and shaking hands. Or maybe he is visiting Anne’s family, though for the life of me I can’t remember where she is from. Maine, maybe? She wears jeans like she’s from Maine. I give the driver a big tip, twice my fare.
“Thank you, ma’am. Do you need me to wait?”
“No thanks. Go on home to your family,” I say. “Merry Christmas.”
“Merry Christmas?” he says back, but he sounds like he’s not so sure. I nod at him again, and he drives off, leaving behind only the smell of exhaust.
I stand in front of the Putnam Cemetery and will myself to walk through the open metal gate and into the canopy of trees. There is not a single sound, not even the rustling of leaves. For now, I am alone.
I wander down the front drive and into the smattering of stones. The green grass is carefully delineated and contained by sculpted shrubs and a white fence. I have only been here once before, that first time when we buried my mother, and I’m not sure where her grave is. I realize that it sounds pretty horrible, that I’ve never bothered to get on the train before, to come here, to bring some flowers. But I haven’t, and I won’t make excuses like there just wasn’t time, or the years escaped me, or any of that crap. Since I don’t believe in an afterlife and have no other coherent theory that would make the piece of ground in which my mother is buried anything other than a piece of ground, it seemed silly to get on the train. Coming would have only been an exercise. Another reminder that a stupid stone slab is all that there is left. Which is nothing at all.
Today, though, I realize, coming here is all about me. This has little to do with honoring my mother.
I walk through the cemetery, hoping for clues to send me in the right direction. I read all of the stone inscriptions. I do lots of math while I walk, subtracting dates. I like passing by the graves of those who died old, especially the husbands and wives buried next to each other. I picture their bodies, deep in the ground, holding hands, extra support for the weight of the earth above them.
Babies are buried here.
I walk passed a grave marked MacKinnon, and I wonder if it is someone in Carl’s family. There is a seventeen-year-old. A four-year-old. Lots of beloveds. A seventy-six-year-old. There is no pattern here. The stones are different shapes and sizes, some with elaborate etchings on them. Some matte, some shiny. A couple look like benches, and though I am tempted to sit down, I am not sure that’s what they’re for. There is no set distance between graves. No lines. Just a smattering here and there among the trees.
There are no rules.
There are Mothers, and Daughters, and Sons, and Husbands, and Wives, and Friends. I don’t see a single grave marked Lawyer or Banker or Pharmacist. I recognize some famous names. Some Bushes that, based on the American flags, I assume are The Bushes. I see at least one grave without a first name. Just Baby Girl Davenport.
I want to lie down on a patch of icy grass and close my eyes. I want to stay here forever. Today I don’t mind the quiet. For a while I forget that I am looking for one spot in particular and just wander around. Maybe this is my home. Among the stones, and the trees, and the dead. Maybe I could start a business right here, a little stand that sells flowers to people like me who forget to bring some. I would tell my customers not to feel bad, that it happens all the time. And at night I could sleep in a sleeping bag next to little Jenny Davis, who died at age fourteen in 1991. I wonder if she liked Madonna. If she wore braces, and if she did, if they took them off before they buried her. How do you die at fourteen? It seems a particularly cruel age to die. Old enough to know that it matters that you’ve never been kissed.
I find my mother among a bunch of graves from the late 1800s. She is set a bit apart from them, but I wonder how she got mixed up in this lot. It seems wrong somehow. There was a perfectly good spot next to Jenny Davis. I am glad, though, that my dad picked a simple stone for her. There are no elaborate etchings. Nothing that can go out of style. Just a vertical rectangle, with a big lawn around it, room for Grandpa Jack, for my father, and I guess, one day, for me.
Charlotte Haxby
1950–1992
I like that it doesn’t say Beloved, or Mother or Daughter or Wife. Nothing to pigeonhole her. I walk around it a few times, in a circle. I read the letters and do the math, though it contains information that I already know. I am not sure what to do now. Do I stand up and look at it? It feels condescending, this looking downward. Do I sit in front of the stone on the ground over which my mother is buried? Can I lie down here? That’s what I want to do.
I want to lie in the shadow of the stone.
I sit but don’t lie down, just in case someone comes. I rest a few feet in front of the stone, cross-legged, and wonder if I am being disrespectful or sacrilegious by choosing this spot, by adding weight to the casket. I figure it doesn’t matter, and if it does, my mom would understand.
Hi, Mom, I say in my head. Not out loud. If she can hear me somehow, I imagine it doesn’t matter if I say it out loud. In my head, at least, it doesn’t sound like I am talking to a rectangular rock.
Hi, Mom, I try again. Long time no see. You don’t call. You don’t write.
Okay, let me start over. I shouldn’t be making jokes.
Hi, Mom, it’s me, Emily. But you probably know that already.
Stop it. Do
this right. You came this far.
Okay, okay, okay.
I get up off the ground and circle the stone one more time to clear my head. I take deep yoga breaths. I can do this. I take my seat again, careful to sit in exactly the same spot. For some reason, I now think of that small piece of ground as mine.
Hi, Mom. I don’t know if you can hear me, or if it really matters if you can hear me, and I am sorry I didn’t bring flowers, and that it took me fifteen years, and that I spent time with Jenny Davis instead of coming right over to you. And I don’t know how this all works, but if you get a chance to meet Jenny, tell her I say hi, and I’ll be thinking about her. She won’t know me, though.
I am not sure what to say. Is it wrong to tell you all about me? I could tell you about how much I miss you, which is more than you can ever imagine. I could tell you about how I think about you every day. Not always about you you, which I am sorry about, but I don’t remember you you as well as I should. What I do remember, though, I hold on to tightly, maybe too tightly. And then there is the idea of you, and how you were everything, and how you were my mother, and that you are not here anymore. That I think about every day.
If you can hear me, I wouldn’t mind sometime if you could give me your voice back. I would love to hear it in my head for a little while. Just some of your noise. I lost it a few weeks after you died, and I can’t seem to get it back. No matter how hard I try to hear it. I hear you stopping breathing. That horrible space between sound. That’s what I hear, and I would prefer not to hear that anymore. If you could do that—send me some of your noise—that would be great. If you can’t, I understand.
I’m also sorry that I didn’t remember you when I had the chance. I should have done a lot of things that I never did, and I wish I could do all of it all over again. Just press restart. I think now that it’s better to say things that you can’t unsay than not to say anything at all. I should have learned to ride a bicycle. I should have told Dad not to cancel Christmas, that we have to try to be a family, that it’s no good to keep pretending. I should sometimes say out loud, Enough is enough.
I will. I am now.
I guess I wish I had known to remember everything, because I think that would have made letting go of you a bit easier. Then you wouldn’t really have been gone gone, right? You would have been inside me somewhere, and I wouldn’t feel so empty now. Sometimes I try at night to picture your face, but all I see are photographs. It’s not the same thing. You should know, though, that you look beautiful in the one right before you got sick, the one where you’re all dressed up for my birthday party. My thirteenth. I remember you made a big deal about my becoming an official teenager, complained that I was growing up too fast, that you were losing me too soon.
In the picture, you look like someone I wish I could be.
It would be great if I could tell you Dad and I are just fine. I mean, we are, of course. Of course we are. But you can probably tell we are both a bit broken and haven’t done such a good job of picking up the pieces. We’re trying, though. I think we are both trying, and hopefully we’ll get better at being a family. A two-person family is still a family. And I think it’s time I fought for us.
Grandpa Jack is dying, which, if you can hear me, I imagine you know already. I am going to go see him later today and spend some time with him. I want to make sure I am there when he goes. You’ll take care of him, if I am wrong and it’s true that he actually goes somewhere, right? I like to think of you, and Grandma Martha, and your parents too, though I didn’t get to know them so well, all of you together laughing and eating turkey around the old oak table. I’m sorry that I don’t really believe you are all somewhere together, though; I think these things just to comfort myself. Much like how I think you can hear me right now.
Does it matter? I can hear me, which is something. It’s time I started hearing me.
I’m doing all right. Sometimes I feel tired, even when I haven’t done anything at all. I have screwed some important stuff up lately, but I am getting myself sorted out, I think. I came here, which is more than a start. I made friends with a woman named Ruth, whom you never got to meet. She is a friend of Grandpa Jack’s, and you would have loved her. She’s smart and funny and looks after me. Is it okay that I still want looking after even though I am almost thirty years old?
When do you become who you are supposed to be? Or am I who I am, who I am?
I know I sound like a little kid. In real life, outside the walls of this place, I’m not. Well, only sometimes. Or maybe you are always a child around your parents? God knows I am still a child around Dad, and Dad is one around Grandpa Jack. I lied to Dad recently about a bunch of things, and he has been lying to me too. It is all very stupid and not worth rehashing now. Put it this way: We need to work on communicating.
Sometimes I think when you died, someone pushed a mute button inside me too and trapped the real me somewhere in here.
I quit my job, which I think was a good thing. And I broke up with Andrew, whom you never met but would have loved. He’s pretty fucking special. I know now that you have to hold on to the people you would give your kidneys to. You don’t just let them go because you are too fucked up to understand what you’ve got. Or too scared. Because the truth is, I was scared. If we kept going, I knew he could have chopped my heart up into a hundred little pieces. He could have eaten me alive.
Or maybe you do lose them, because when you are as fucked up as I was, giving away your kidneys doesn’t mean all that much. But now it does, now that I understand what I lost, now that I understand I was running away. Now that I’ve started regenerating my lost parts. Now that I have kidneys to give, it means a hell of a lot. And if you have any pull with that one, I could use all the help I can get, since he has made it clear that he doesn’t want anything to do with me. I am going to fight for him, anyway. For real, this time. Even if it means I’m too late. Even if it means I get fucking pulverized in the process.
Sorry about the cursing. I do that a lot now and should probably stop. I am a lawyer and a grown-up, for fuck’s sake.
I wish I knew if you could see me or hear me, and when you could see me or hear me, because I am not sure I want you to see everything. But I guess if I could choose, I would pick everything over nothing, as embarrassing as that may be. But obviously it’s not up to me. If it were up to me, you would be standing next to me right now, and we would be visiting some other person’s grave, someone we liked but weren’t going to miss all that much.
If it were up to me, I would rewind, at the very least to this morning, and come back with some flowers.
This is just a long way of saying that I love you. And I miss you. And I am going to try to do things better. I owe it to you—and to me, to me also—to at least try. And I love you, even though you are dead, and my love for you has no place to go now. And I love you even though I can’t hear you anymore. And I love you, without any “even though”s. I want you to know that I’m going to be okay. Everything is going to be okay. Right? Right. It will, because it has to be. Enough is enough. I am going to fight for me.
I stand up, for emphasis maybe, and to tell myself that I am done. Good-bye, Mom. I circle the rectangular stone one more time. Put my fingers along the grooves of the letters and memorize the feel of them. I close my eyes to isolate the sensation. Then I touch my fingers to my lips. Kiss them. Touch the stone again. Not quite flowers, but it’s something.
I take my time leaving the cemetery. I walk by Jenny Davis one more time, kiss my fingers again, and touch her stone. I’ll try harder, Jenny. For both of us.
On the way out, I notice there are a couple of other people here. But no one looks at me, and I don’t look at them. This is a place to be invisible. This is a place where, for just a little while, the lack of noise is soothing, expected. I walk under the canopy of trees again and out through the front drive. I pass the stone wall. I tap it lightly with my fingertips. And then I walk out of the Putnam Cemetery and leave the silent and t
he lost behind, once and for all.
Thirty-six
Merry Christmas, Dad,” I say, when my father’s home number comes up on my cell phone. I am about a block from the country club, and from this distance I see a parade of Mercedes leaving the driveway. I pull my hat down further over my ears, partially to keep warm but mostly to keep from being recognized.
“Merry Christmas, sweetheart,” my dad says, and then there is an awkward pause, neither of us sure where to go from here. He still hasn’t told me about Grandpa Jack.
“Hey, Dad? What are you doing?”
“Nothing much.” I wonder what that means: “nothing much” like solving Connecticut’s budget crisis, or “nothing much” like fighting off an addictive love of his couch. Since I am talking to my father, who rarely sits down—not even to eat breakfast—I imagine it means the former. “Just listening to some music. The oldies station.”
“Are you alone?”
“Yeah. Anne went to visit her family in Maine.” So it’s confirmed that he is dating her. I knew it. I knew she was from Maine.
“Listen, I’m near the club. Why don’t you come pick me up there and we can go spend the rest of Christmas with Grandpa Jack?”
My dad doesn’t say anything for a moment, and I hear Frankie Valli telling me to “Walk Like a Man” in the background.
“Okay,” he says, and coughs. “I guess. Yeah, I guess I can do that.”
When my dad picks me up, I don’t comment on the fact that he is unshaven and wearing sweatpants, and he doesn’t ask why I am in Greenwich or how I spent my morning. Neither of us volunteers any information. You can’t change years of habit overnight.
The Opposite of Love Page 23