As soon as they return, he has to leave for a business trip. He unpacks his suitcase, only to replace swimwear with business suits. For an entire week the young bride is alone. She washes the honeymoon laundry, the slinky lace lingerie still smelling of perfume and lovemaking, the string bikini still saturated with Coppertone and sunshine.
She cleans. There is nothing else to do. She sweeps, mops, dusts. She burnishes the sink faucets with an old toothbrush. As she works, the acrylic nails she had glued to her fingers for the wedding begin to peel and chip. She never wore fake nails before meeting her husband. Before, her nails had always been dirty with clay and chipped at the edges. The acrylic nails tell her that she had sold out, that something she valued has been lost. Her husband comes home the following Sunday to find her at the sink, weeping and trying to rip the nails off her fingers.
The story ended abruptly. I had never been good at conclusions. Reading over the ten pages, I wondered if the symbolism was overwrought and the conversation between the man and wife melodramatic. I knew about loneliness; I could only imagine loneliness in marriage. Of all the disappointments in life, the failure of marriage wounded me most deeply.
I saved my story and slipped off to bed, but I couldn’t sleep. I felt personally responsible for my loneliness. Zoë and Eli had both left because of me, because I’d flunked, on both counts, the principal rules of friendship.
“Maybe Zoë’s right,” I told the ceiling. “I spend more time planning my life than living it. I love the attention of men I can’t have. I really have no idea at all what I’m doing. I try so hard to be the kind of Christian I was raised to be, but I’m starting to wonder what that really looks like.”
I listened to the silence.
“Or if it matters at all.”
I didn’t know what woke me. The room was pitch black. As if from a bird’s-eye view I saw my body in a bed that stood in the middle of an empty room attached to an empty apartment. I mapped the trajectory to Eli, who slept blocks away. I flew over the town, past the cornfields and the checkered plots of farmland to the trafficked streets of the suburban fringe, to my mother, and farther into the busy city to my brother and then to Zoë in Chicago. My father was so far on the horizon he disappeared.
I had never been more painfully conscious of the fact that I slept alone, but the awareness of my solitude was followed by an equally profound awareness of an invisible Presence in the room, filling the corners, over my bed, protective and jealous. The knowledge that I was not completely alone comforted me, like the arms of a mother or the familiar nearness of a lover.
15
It has been my experience that when you ask God for help, He often responds by asking you to help someone else.
Since our conversation about her sister’s death, I continued to worry about Ashley Mulligan. Though she’d been a contributing member of workshop since the first half of the semester, her attendance was becoming a problem. She came to class late or left early. She crossed her arms and sank her chin down to her chest so that the red ball cap she now wore to every class concealed her tired eyes. She seemed intent on vanishing from sight.
The day her fiction piece was due, she managed to arrive on time. She walked slowly and silently through the room, dispensing copies of her story to fellow students, who said “thank you” more politely than was usual. I scanned over her story on my way back to the office. I was so struck by the elegance and simplicity of the prose, I didn’t put the manuscript down until I had read it all the way through to its end. The story followed a high school girl through the night she finds her parents have been in a car accident. She’s taken to the hospital to say good-bye to a father whose body is alive, but whose mind is dead. Between the night of the phone call and the funeral, she walks along the bay, trying to wrap her mind around the reality of his permanent absence.
… Natalie stood at the entrance to the hospital feeling her heart pound in her chest like a bird that could not escape its cage. She felt the walls of the hospital shrink back and the reflection of her face looked hollow to her as it stared back from the many windows of the long hallway. She did not recognize herself. She didn’t belong in this life. She had seen it before in movies and had read about it in books, but it was a life twice removed from reality, a world she had thought only existed for others and never for herself.
… They say time is relative. Natalie had even heard it said that any teenager knows this principle: four hours on a couch with a lovely girl is a second to an enraptured love-struck boy. Thirty seconds with your hands on a burning oven is an eternity.
People often speak of eternity when they speak of the dead. But, Natalie wondered, why do they only speak of it in terms of the dead themselves? Anyone who has watched their loved one buried in the earth knows eternity. Eternity is the hours of the Sunday afternoons spent at a table without your husband of fifty years; it’s the long, forced cheerfulness of birthday parties without the little sister you shared a bed with growing up. Eternity is the way a minute becomes an hour and a lifetime becomes unbearable at the thought of being without someone.
I read the story a second time to provide criticism, but I forgot I was reading. In other words, this was a story.
Though Ashley had demanded that I treat her like the other students, I had yet to give her demerits for missing class. I noticed when she wasn’t there Monday, but, as usual, I didn’t pencil in the absence. Wednesday I was so distraught about Eli leaving, I forgot to take roll. Friday she didn’t show, even though we were discussing her story. Realizing she had been gone an entire week, I panicked. She’d never missed more than one class a week, and I’d never thought that failing to mark her absences would lead me to forget them entirely.
I e-mailed her directly after class:
To: [email protected]
From: [email protected]
Sent: Friday 3.16.07 2:24 PM
Subject: Class
Noticed you haven’t been in class the last few days. Was just wondering if you were doing all right. Please let me know if I can provide you with any information about what you’ve missed.
If you’d like someone to talk to, the offer still stands.
Sincerely,
Ms. Gallagher
Standing at the stove cooking dinner that night, I had a strange conviction that an e-mail was not enough. You hear about the professors who noticed their best students had missed one too many days only to read about the suicide later in the local paper.
I got Ashley’s phone number from the online campus directory. The phone rang six times, but no one answered. I hung up and worked on dinner, but couldn’t shake the nagging feeling that something was wrong. I dialed again, nervously tapping my pen against my thigh.
On the seventh ring, a girl’s voice answered. “Hello.”
“Hi. Um, I was wondering if I could speak to Ashley Mulligan, please?”
“Just a minute.”
The stranger murmured something in the background. “Can I ask who’s calling?”
“Tell her it’s Ms. Gallagher.”
“Ms. who?”
“Her English teacher,” I supplied.
“It’s your English teacher.” I heard amusement in her voice.
In the five seconds it took Ashley to cross to the dorm phone, I realized that (a) she was fine; (b) she was most probably not going to kill herself; and (c) she might actually be very uncomfortable with the fact that I’d called.
“Ms. Gallagher?” She sounded puzzled.
“Hey, Ashley,” I replied. “I’m sorry to call you like this, but I’d noticed you hadn’t been to class in a while. I just wanted to make sure things were okay.”
There was a pause on the other end of the line.
“I’m fine,” she said.
“I still have the story you turned in to workshop. It’s very good. The best I’ve seen all year, actually.” I was struck with a sudden inspiration. “We didn’t critique the story since you were absent, but I’d
still like the chance to talk with you about it. I think you could submit it for one of the upcoming student writing awards.”
“I didn’t know they did that sort of thing.”
“They have competitions at the end of every spring term. There are several categories: best argumentative essay, best expository, best fiction. I think there’s a money award. And they publish the best creative writing pieces in the school’s literary journal.”
“I’ll think about it.”
“Maybe we can get together after class sometime to talk about it?”
“I have another class after yours.”
“Just let me know. We can always make an appointment to talk in my office at a more convenient time.”
Voices picked up in the background. Ashley said something away from the receiver. Her roommate spoke back.
“I don’t want to keep you,” I said.
“Sorry. They were asking me something.”
I smelled something burning just before the smoke detector went off. “Well,” I said quickly. “I’ll see you in class tomorrow.”
“Okay.”
I ran to shut the smoke detector off. Staring at the blackened chicken plastered to the blackened skillet, I actually missed Zoë’s nonfat, vegetarian, organic cooking.
Apparently, I had underestimated the power of a roommate’s presence. In my office, Ashley was an entirely different person than she had been on the phone. She was excited about the prospect of seeing her work published in the school lit magazine. Timidly, she fished for compliments.
“Do you really think it’s good?” she asked.
“More than good,” I said. “It could use revision, but it’s wellpaced and full of rich detail. Despite the subject matter, you manage to avoid being melodramatic.”
“Thank you,” she said, genuinely grateful.
“I was disappointed that we couldn’t workshop the piece in class,” I ventured. “In fact, I’ve noticed you’ve missed a lot of classes lately. Is everything all right?”
She averted her eyes, twisted the cap of her Fiji water bottle. “It’s all right. I’m getting by. It’s hard, you know, but I manage.”
“Do you have anyone on campus you can talk to?”
She shook her head. “My roommates know, but they don’t bring it up unless I do. I go home every weekend, so I see my dad a lot.”
In a freshmen dorm, weekends determined social status: If you braved every weekend on campus, you passed the litmus test. Those who went home frequently to medicate homesickness or to be with high school sweethearts were eventually looked down upon for their confused loyalties. Added to her frequent trips home, Ashley was quiet, a personality trait frequently mistaken for snobbery in pretty girls. Unfortunately, it was not hard to imagine her roommates disliking her on every count.
“Do you have other siblings?” I asked, wincing to hear myself say “other.”
“I have an older brother and an older sister.They’re both married and have kids. They come home for Christmas and summer breaks, but we’re not real close. Mostly it’s just Dad and me.”
I decided not to ask about the unmentioned mother.
“How’s he doing?”
“He’s okay. He works a lot. Do you think we could maybe not talk about this?” she said. “I came to talk about my story.”
“Of course. Let’s talk about the story.”
I was grateful to get back on a subject on which I was proficient. I couldn’t tell Ashley how to alleviate her depression, but I could tell her how to make the imagery of a metaphor fit its emotional context. I could teach her how to organize sentences for improved rhythm. I could show her how to take the mess of emotions in her head and create a work of art, a thing she could control and craft, though the grief itself remained unyielding.
We read through the story aloud, discussing my suggestions for revision page by page. At first, I worried that certain sections would surface emotions neither of us would know how to handle, but she remained the aloof and divested artist, picking at the presentation of emotion while completely divorced—at least momentarily—from the emotion itself.
“Why don’t you rework it as we’ve talked about,” I said when we’d finished. “Then we can meet again before you submit the application. I’ll e-mail you the guidelines for the competition; you can fill all that information out yourself.”
“Thanks, Ms. Gallagher.” She buttoned up her coat, picked up her bag.
“Ashley …” I hesitated. “I don’t mean to catch you off guard with this, but if you ever want a place to get away, to find people to talk to, I go to this church—the one across from the local library. We’d be happy to have you.”
She said she’d think about it. She didn’t seem at all surprised by the invitation.
It had shocked me.
I dreamed about Eli. We were walking along campus. He asked me to come to his place. “What about Jillian?” I asked. “Oh,” he said. “She died.” I went to the visitation with him, but the person in the casket was not Jillian at all: It was my father. “I wasn’t ready for this,” I told Eli. He was juggling bowling pins. I was angry with him for not caring more. “Nobody is,” he said.
Oddly, I felt no sorrow at seeing my father in a casket. I only felt a slight twinge of regret. How sad for someone else; his girlfriend, I knew, would miss him.
Outside of my conversations with Ashley, I took efforts to avoid my students. I made myself scarce in the office. I graded at home and did my lesson plans at The Brewery. If I needed copies, I sent my work orders through Everett to keep from interacting with Lonnie. Since the fateful Copenhagen Campus Chronicler interview, he’d begun leaving things in my mailbox: copies of the newspaper, fliers announcing student activities in which he participated, Hershey’s kisses. These gifts came with the fifty handouts I’d requested for ENG 102 or with the Greenberg story I’d needed copied for my creative writers. Eventually, they came of their own accord. One day a pack of Orbit gum, another day a follow-up installment of Neil C. Barker. I took the gifts without saying thank you or even acknowledging their presence. It was like being courted by Boo Radley.
So Friday when I checked my mailbox and found a manila envelope merely marked Amy I was more horrified than pleased. I picked it up with forefinger and thumb, threw it in my bag, and returned to my office to open it in the dark.
To my surprise, the envelope contained artwork, a delicate intaglio print of a young woman walking a narrow path through a forest, her gait sprightly despite the enormous white cast on her right foot, her hair billowing up in intricate curls, which mimicked the stylized patterns of the surrounding trees’ leaves. Eli had titled it, Amy Takes a Break.
On the back in pencil he had written:
It was my fault so please don’t punish yourself. Guard your ankles; beware of ice. ∼ELI
Between the office and home I read the note a dozen times, trying to tease meaning from between the lines. Did this count as an apology? And if so, was he just sorry for betraying Jillian or was he sorry it happened at all?
Distractedly, I put my key in the back door only to find it had already been unlocked. Someone had turned the kitchen light on. Zoë was sitting in the living room, waiting for me.
“Hey,” she said, standing. Her cheeks were streaked with tears. Balled-up Kleenex lay scattered on the coffee table. “I’m so sorry.”
I set the collage down on the kitchen table, my bag on the floor.
“No,” I said. “I’m the one who’s sorry.”
“It’s my mom.”
Something cold washed over my head.
“What happened?”
She began to sob. “They don’t think she’s going to make it.”
16
When Fay’s doctors stopped telling her what she wanted to hear, she went to another oncologist for a second opinion. With frightening conviction, he recommended she transfer to palliative care immediately and enjoy the weeks she had left with family and friends. Fay returned to he
r previous team of physicians; she returned—stubbornly—to chemotherapy.
Of course, in a fit of solidarity, Zoë shaved her head.
She e-mailed me a picture, her and her mother wearing colorful scarves wrapped about their heads.
I wrote back:
You know, you really are the most darling bald person. Like a Halle Berry. Like A Midsummer Night’s Dream. A freckled Navy Seal.
Zoë had an aversion to cell phones that even rivaled Eli’s. We corresponded by e-mail. She wrote:
… no one who knew my mom would have thought she cared a great deal about appearances. She tanned easily but the sun imprinted her skin in irregular patterns, white lines at her arms and legs, a halo of her gardening T-shirts and high-rise shorts. her nails were always dirt-stained from potting and tending houseplants, and her hands were always dried out from hours washing dishes at the food pantry. she hated makeup. sometimes she’d dab a bit of Vaseline on her lips for shine and pinch her cheeks for color—that was it. but she LOVED her hair. i’d never noticed it before, but even in my earliest memories, she wouldn’t leave the house unless her hair was neatly braided and pinned. i didn’t recognize this as vanity because it was so unstylish. it was a good braid—thick as climbing rope—but a waste of hair, I thought. but she had to have it just so. not a strand out of place during her first chemo treatments, Dad and I went with her to buy her first wig. she hated that thing. said it looked nothing like her real hair. for a week, she refused to leave the house. she washed that wig, she tried ironing it into submission. no matter what she did, she couldn’t get it to braid like her hair did. Dad finally told her she was coming out with him. his new book was out and she was coming to his book signing, whether she liked it or not. of course, everyone praised the new look. The wig was more stylish than she’d ever been. from then on it was an obsession. she collected wigs like some women collect purses …
Zoë ranked the doctors according to attractiveness and availability, promising to give my number to anyone worthy of me. She praised the nurses’ kindness. She reported the conversations she and her dad had about the general state of things. Both were avowed pessimists, and the world provided no lack of things to criticize. They talked long into the night every night, distracting each other from the inevitability that as pessimists they were obliged to accept, but as family could not discuss.
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