Death and Other Holidays

by Marci Vogel

  List

  I’M A LIST MAKER, my whole life, I’ve been a list maker. Not when things are going okay, no, when things are okay, I go with the flow. I forget where I’m supposed to be when, put off errands left and right. I sleep late and drink tea, read the paper until noon.

  But when things are out of control, when I don’t know what I’m doing, I make lists, detailed, prioritized lists. I write them on three-by-five cards, it keeps the tasks from getting too out of hand. Only about twenty will fit on one side. Any more than that and my head would explode from unfulfillable expectations, so I stick with a three-by-five card and twenty goals, numbered, organized. I stick the card in a flap in my purse, and I carry it all around town, to the supermarket, cleaners, bank, post office, crossing off all my to-do’s. One Saturday morning, I got the car washed, the groceries bought, and my hair cut all before noon. It was an errand extravaganza. Big cross-off satisfaction.

  By the time I’ve reached the last item, though, it’s time to start over. The apartment needs to be cleaned, or the bills paid, or the laundry done. The dishes. And the milk. It’s always expiring before I can finish the carton, and yet I always need more. It’s the nature of milk, I guess. Libby says I would make a good TV commercial.

  The end result is, I’m stuck with this endless, repeating list. Sure, maybe there’s a minute of satisfaction between everything being done and something needing to be done. Life doesn’t rest, though. It’s always slipping into the future, right when I was all caught up. It’s always bringing me back into the thick of it, and I don’t want to be in the thick of it. I want everything done.

  Forecast

  JUNE IN LOS ANGELES is not what people expect. June is overcast, and the closer you get to the beach, the more overcast it becomes. We call it June Gloom, but the technical term is a marine layer. It can start as early as May and stick around into the summer.

  I’m no expert on the weather, but the coastal haze here has something to do with pressure systems, ocean currents, and an inversion of temperature. As the days heat up, the air closest to the surface of the Pacific gets trapped underneath the warmer layers above, until the sky becomes this big, white blur.

  All the tourists complain, but it’s not as if it’s thunder and lightning, it won’t strike out of nowhere. The problem is nobody bothers with sunscreen. It might not look sunny until noon, but you can still get a nasty burn.

  Pale

  I MET A FAMOUS RUSSIAN author once. I asked her about the sadness in her stories. “Bad things will happen to you in this life,” she said, “don’t worry about it too much.”

  It reminded me of this article I read about Moscow winters. Apparently, people get crazy with the lack of sunlight there in the winter months. The government pays millions for these artificial-light therapies, so the entire population won’t kill themselves with vodka or whatever else. Everyone is walking around with tan bodies, like they’ve been vacationing in Hawaii. I live five miles from the beach, and my legs are white as a nun’s.

  “Maybe I should go to your salon,” I tell Libby.

  “You could use some color,” she says. “Your legs look like Siberia.”

  “No,” I say, “actually, they’re all nice and tan up there. I read about it in the paper.”

  “Well, whatever. You need to build up a base for the summer. I’m booking us both appointments.”

  The next Saturday, I crawl into the tanning booth, lie on the smooth cool glass, pull the lid over my body, my eyes covered with little plastic cups.

  “Nothing’s happening,” I call to Libby on the other side of the divider.

  “You need to flick the switch,” she says.

  I do, and right away there’s a humming and a buzzing, an orange light warming, until it gets increasingly hot so that I start sweating and worrying about skin cancer and if my time is almost up. I shut my eyes tight under their plastic shields, and it crosses my mind that the same sun that bronzes the body also hastens its death.

  It’s unbearably hot now, and I’m thinking maybe I should get out early when the whole thing shuts off with a lurch. There’s a final, slight shake, and hours after I dress, I can still feel the heat, radiating underneath my clothes.

  Patrimony

  I USED TO HAVE two fathers, but now I have none. The first death was intended, he used a belt. The second one, Wilson, it was an accident of cells.

  Sometimes, when I’d talk about my mother and Wilson, people would ask about my real father, and I’d say he died, and that was usually enough to end it. Some people, though, they want all the details. “So young,” they remark. “Was he a heavy smoker?”

  I used to say heart attack, but after I heard about aneurysms, I started using that, it sounded so plausible. There aren’t a lot of details to fill in with an aneurysm.

  Once, though, a woman asked me where it happened.

  “His neck,” I told her.

  Things got quiet after that.

  Tilt

  IN THE MAGIC MOUNTAIN, Thomas Mann describes the astronomical phenomenon where, half the year, the northern hemisphere appears inclined toward life, the days stretching longer and longer until they reach their highest point of light, the summer solstice.

  The calendar marks the day as the zenith of sunshine, but what’s really happening is that from that point on, the North Pole begins moving farther and farther away from the sun, toward winter, and the darkest day of the year. It has to do with position. The moment your side of the planet reaches its peak, you’re already headed into the night. It’s one of those scientific facts everyone knows already, don’t they?

  Spark

  FOURTH OF JULY WEEKEND, Libby and Hugo host a barbecue, their first party together at the new house. Libby surprised him with a new charcoal grill for the occasion, he doesn’t trust propane.

  I thought I might go with Motorcycle Man, but he called last minute, said he had to work overtime. I went anyway. Libby’s parents were counting on me to take photos for the rehearsal dinner slide show, it was supposed to be a big surprise.

  “Scarab,” Libby said when she saw me drive up alone.

  “It’s fine,” I lied.

  Hugo’s cousin, Victor, was back in town, and he brought a package of sparklers. He lit one and put it in my hand. I was surprised how pretty it was.

  When I was little, we used to get together with the aunts, watch all the Joes put on a fireworks display. Now that the cousins are grown, they don’t bother with the pyrotechnics. “Even if it was legal, it’s much too dangerous,” Aunt Estelle says. “That bottle rocket in Garden Grove, a hundred people lost their homes.”

  I shot two rolls of film and stayed through Hugo’s watermelon skewers, then people started coupling up to make s’mores, so I grabbed my camera bag and told Libby I’d call her later.

  “A player like that, I promise he won’t last long,” is all she says, walking me to the car.

  My mother had wanted me to come by Aunt Arlene’s, watch fireworks on TV, but I went back to the apartment instead, watched reruns of I Love Lucy to keep myself from dissolving.

  Riverbed

  MY APARTMENT IS a half-hour ride to the beach, and I never go. Libby’s been lecturing me, she claims seawater is the surest antidote for heartbreak. “It’s the salt, makes up for all the crying.”

  There’s a bike path along Ballona Creek that leads straight to the ocean, but with all the rain this winter, the channel kept flooding. Now that it’s dried out, my gears needed adjusting.

  I would’ve called Joe, but I didn’t want my mother to find out.

  “I heard about that path on the news,” she tells me. She’s always hearing about bad paths on the news. “They attack you, take your money, take your bike. Thieves, rapists. You end up dead in the river.”

  “The river here is more like a concrete wash,” I say.

  “Don’t be a wiseass,
” she says. “I heard about it on the news. Just don’t go riding along that path.”

  She’d do anything for me not to die before she does.

  Want

  I WAS AT MY THERAPIST’S. I go Thursdays after work, my regular session since Libby suggested grief therapy might be a good idea.

  “What do you want to say happened?” she asks today, not about Wilson but about my real father. When I don’t say anything, she asks again.

  “I want to say, I wish he would have wanted to live.”

  She waits. When I don’t say anything else she asks, “What if it wasn’t a question of want, but of pain?”

  Assemblage

  LIBBY SAYS, IF ANYTHING, I think too much already, but lately I keep worrying about my brain. I seem to be having trouble speaking, finding the exact words I want to say. It’s like the spiritual advisor told me, a big gap in my head line where the words should be.

  Assembly line, for instance, the other day after reading about this performance artist who makes paintings like he’s working in a factory, the same shape, the same color, row after row. He lays out a grid of small wood panels, twenty by twenty, then paints a circle of yellow in each corner until he’s made four hundred suns. He dips his brush into blue, paints four hundred midnights, followed by four hundred swatches of green, four hundred white dots, four hundred strips of gray.

  After the paintings are finished, the only way you can tell them apart is that he numbers each one across the bottom. First and last, though, he spells out the words.

  Gut

  A MAN AT THE GYM was working out with this fitness gadget exactly like one my father used to own. He used to roll it across the linoleum floor of our den. We’d be watching TV, and during commercials, my father would kneel down, take hold of either side of a handle intersecting a small black wheel, and roll out a set of twenty.

  The man noticed me watching, and I told him I hadn’t seen a roller like that since my father died. He said it strengthened the abs and offered me a try. He was right. You need a solid core to make it go.

  He asked me how my father died, and when I said “He took his own life,” surprising myself, the man told me his father had done the same.

  So there we were, a son and a daughter of suicides, trying to keep our stomachs strong.

  Hydroponic

  HE TOLD ME HIS last name was Leaf, and he had this plantlike calm about him, so maybe I should have known.

  “But what does he do, this…leaf?” my Swedish neighbor asks, her newborn baby girl cooing at her shoulder.

  “He’s an entrepreneur. Growth industries,” I explain, repeating what he’d told me.

  She purses her lips, glances at her husband, the trumpet player. He raises an eyebrow. They speak at exactly the same time.

  “Drugs,” they say.

  I’d noticed him during my lunch breaks, strolling around the museum park in loose khakis, faded T-shirts, slipper-like shoes with thin rubber soles. He always looked caught outdoors by mistake, like maybe he’d just stepped onto the porch to get the morning paper and kept walking. By the time he asked me out, I was used to him, so I said okay.

  He owned a Volvo, but not the dependable kind. It was a racy P1800, white with a red interior. Twice in one weekend, we ran out of gas, once right in the middle of Wilshire Boulevard.

  He rented a large two-bedroom near the museum, and it had a peculiar odor, but I thought it was from the food. He’d unhinged all the cabinet doors in the kitchen so that everything sat out in the open. It looked like a secondhand grocery store, used packages on display. “See, nothing to hide,” he told me. Friday night, though, I flicked on the light switch to get a drink of water and saw about three thousand cockroaches scuttling across the chairs, the stove, the burners.

  He was meticulous about nutrition. There was a chart on the refrigerator detailing optimal protein combinations and recommended intervals for eating. For two days, we consumed only eggs, toast, tofu, and a particular angel hair pasta from Trader Joe’s.

  It was Sunday, late afternoon, when he opened the closet in the spare bedroom. He’d just finished describing his dream house, a geodesic dome in the desert. Everything you’d ever need would be built in, delivered, or cultivated. There’d never be any reason to leave.

  It was a whole setup. Recirculated water system, sprayers on timers, fertilizing trays, the healthiest plants I’d ever seen. I was impressed with the ingenuity.

  Libby calls him Leaf Man, but what she doesn’t know is what he told me about these connections in nature where possibility, probability, and reality are separated only by what people imagine to be true. “What we need to do is look behind everyday happenings, start seeing their real meanings,” he told me. Some philosophy he called The Transformation of Natural Properties. I knew Libby was right, there was no future in a man who grew plants without soil, but I really did want to believe.

  Regime

  I ALWAYS ROMANTICIZE beauty treatments. Lavender massages, paraffin dips, European mud facials, every pore well tended and cleansed. I save money for weeks to indulge, but the truth is the pain always gets to me whenever I undergo anything more than a haircut, and sometimes even then.

  “What’s up with your forehead, April?” Libby asks when we meet for brunch, and she sends me to this aesthetician she swears by, Anka. “She’s Ukrainian, she takes her work very seriously. Those Slavic women, their skin is clear no matter how bad things get.”

  It started okay, me relaxing under hot steam, until I felt a sharp pin dig into my cheek, forcing open a blemish. I clenched my fist tight, pressed a thumbnail deep into my palm to distract myself from the pain on my face. I made marks that stayed a week. Finally, I told Anka she’d better stop or I was going to pass out.

  “The skin needs to be handled,” she told me. “Some people, they are afraid of the skin. Myself, I am not afraid of the skin.”

  After all the redness went away, my complexion looked great, every inch radiant. I still had a few problem spots, but Libby says it was because I didn’t let Anka finish her job properly.

  Yesterday, Libby and I wandered into this little shop on Montana, where I fell in love with a slender silver bracelet, filigreed, very delicate. The saleswoman took it out of the case, and I slipped it over my wrist. “You could use a manicure,” Libby said, noticing my uneven nails, but I lifted my hand to the light, heard myself say, “I’ll take it.”

  Physics for Poets

  WILSON TOLD ME ONCE that in every couple there’s always one who loves the other just a little bit more. “Don’t worry, April,” he said, “you’re the image of your mother. It won’t be you.”

  I made sure to tell this to Math Man on our first date so he wouldn’t make any wrong estimations. It’s true my mother and I share the same face shape and sometimes, when I see photos of her at my age, it’s like looking in a mirror. But the likeness ends there. My mother knows better than to take up with a man she can’t live without.

  Math Man solved equations for a living. He was taller than I am by almost a foot and a half, so sometimes when we kissed, I’d stand on the coffee table in my apartment to make up the difference.

  Around the time we met, I was reading A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking, the famous physicist. Everybody thinks he won the Nobel Prize, but he didn’t, I don’t know why. In the book, Hawking explains how a star can get more and more compact until, finally, it collapses in on itself. If a star gets squashed like this, then it becomes a black hole, which means that anything passing by gets sucked into it forever.

  The thing is, sometimes astronomers would see light that they thought was coming out of these black holes. What Hawking proved was that this light doesn’t come from inside the black hole, but from stuff on the outside, going in.

  It’s like this, I think: Sometimes atoms travel together in pairs through space. What happens when the coupled atoms pass by a bl
ack hole is that only one of them gets pulled in. The other is propelled in the opposite direction. At the exact moment of separation, there’s a bright flash of light from the ripping apart. It’s like the whole universe is shocked at the new arrangement.

  This might not be exactly how it’s explained in the book, but I’ve been thinking a lot about it lately because a week after Math Man and I slept together, one of my four-pearled earrings fell down the drain of my bathroom sink. It happened in an instant, dropped out of my hand, into the hole, and straight down the pipe. My mother had brought me the earrings from Hawaii. They were my favorite pair, the only fourteen-karat gold jewelry I owned.

  I wasn’t sure how to get the pipe off without a wrench, and it was too late to call anyone who would know, so I covered the sink with a towel to remind myself not to use the tap and went to the kitchen to brush my teeth.

  The whole time I knew Math Man, which wasn’t so very long, he was working on some complicated formula in which past information is used to make future predictions. If, for example, you knew someone’s height and weight and a bunch of other details, like if they smoked or drank, you could predict that person’s blood pressure. My guess is, if a person had unhealthy habits, their blood pressure probably wouldn’t be very good, but Math Man’s formula could give you exact numbers.

  Math Man also talked about these chaos scientists who look at patterns and then make certain assumptions about how things work. His opinion was that such theorists are only making predictions about stuff that’s already happened, but it seems to me if you’re really paying attention, there’s not much dividing what’s happened from what’s going to happen, or even from what might have happened, had things been different.