Years later, when she walked down city streets with Parker, when he always walked on the curb side like a Southern gentleman, when he took her arm as they crossed streets, she would imagine that he had been beside her on the hospital conference table. In that way, the memory was bearable. He would have taken her arm as she climbed the short ladder. He would walk between her and the hood-eyed doctor and, when she turned to walk back, he would cross to stay on the dangerous side, keeping her from the dirtying splash of those deep-set dark eyes. Parker would hold her elbow as she climbed back down the ladder and they would walk slowly, heads high, out the door. Perhaps he would tell her a joke and they would laugh just between themselves, leaving the scrutinizers to wonder how a girl so crooked could laugh so lightly.
By the time she'd met Parker, of course, she had strengthened her back and learned to twist herself straight, and if you didn't see how one hip rode high and one so low as to be flat, you wouldn't know how crooked she had once been. After lovemaking, Parker often traced her spine with his finger and felt it curve like a slowly undulating river. The flow of it mesmerized him, he said. It was like a gentle river of milk, as white and calming as the rest of her.
4.
The iguana was Sarah's idea. After the trip to the desert, where she'd lived for ten days with the freedom of all that space, surrounded by air, not things, remembered how it was to be as quiet as a rock, she bought a lizard and put him in a cage.
When she first brought him home, he was six inches of mostly tail. A slowly-smacking pink tongue that showed itself to be a hardworking muscle. Toes drawn by Michelangelo as an illustration of arthritis: knobby and curved.
At first he lived in a large glass fish tank with an elevated wire bottom layered with wood chips, a piece of driftwood, and his food dish and water bowl. Very young iguanas need live protein to augment their vegetarian diet. So Parker bought pinkies—newborn mice—and fed him, while Sarah locked herself in the bathroom, cleaned the tub, any distraction from the cruelty of infant devouring infant.
The iguana sat on her shoulder, or he sat on his branch while she stared at him. She drew him sometimes, but mostly she watched him blink and eat and look back at her. She watched her iguana instead of TV. She grew reverent around him, and when anyone questioned the wisdom of raising an animal that had no fur, couldn't purr, and didn't bark, she said, It's like living with a dinosaur, don't you get it?
He grew to be almost six feet long, still mostly tail. He would sit on the windowsill sunning himself alongside her cat. He gorged himself on beans and zucchini. He farted and he blew white residue out his nose, dotting his woodchip floor. Though she cleaned his cage regularly, her apartment took on a faint sour smell that she found oddly pleasant.
When Sarah became pregnant with Sam, she gave the iguana to the Staten Island Zoo. Imagining her baby crawling on the floor with the iguana—it seemed much too dangerous. The zookeeper said hers was the healthiest male iguana he'd ever seen in captivity. Sarah swore she would never keep another wild animal, but that was before her son begged for snakes and lizards and mice.
5.
Sarah couldn't take her eyes off the hotel workers at the island resort. They reminded her of Easter Island, Aztec paintings, ancient rituals: exaggeratedly slanted foreheads, broad noses, serene and still expressions above stocky bodies. Just two days before, she and the photo crew had left a snow-drifted city to shoot summer clothes on the deserted beaches of this island off Panama.
The afternoons were too hot for work. Sarah was strolling from the hotel through a small wood of scrub trees, a back path to the beach, when she came across a group of men and a giant sea turtle. A group of five small men were hunched over the animal, which lay on the sand. In the grove, the air was alive with minute insects and with a raw kind of energy. She was excited to see the immense and beautiful creature, then horrified to understand that it was dead. One of the men waved at her to join them. She moved forward, wanting to be closer both to the creature and to these men. She was glad, for once, to be small, to have left the earlier environment of six-foot women wearing strappy sundresses for a world where she, the men, and the turtle were all squat, solid, and covered. As they made room for her, Sarah gathered her long skirt and knelt beside the turtle. Her wide-brimmed straw hat cast an inverse halo over the turtle's head.
It's so beautiful, Sarah said quietly.
Yes, beautiful, one of the men said. He had knelt beside her on one knee, and now placed his hand gently beside Sarah's on the shell.
How did it die? Sarah asked, and all at once she realized that they had captured and killed it. She saw that one of the men was holding a large knife, a machete. And then she saw the huge copper cauldron and understood that they would cook and eat this creature, parts of it, and she imagined then that their wives and mothers, the ones left at home in other countries while they made meager wages at this island resort, might be cooking and eating another creature in another grove far away.
She knew that Sam would be having his afternoon snack right about now. He would have organized the pile of Cheerios on his high-chair tray into a neat row ready for sacrifice to his hunger. Sarah had been concerned, when she was pregnant, that Parker would have a hard time with the messiness of a child. She needn't have worried. If it's true, as the Buddhists say, that babies choose their parents while between lives, then certainly Sam had chosen well, either out of kindness to Parker or out of his own leftover craving for order. Parker, who she knew would be bone-tired at this hour of the day, would be watching from a nearby armchair.
Sarah became aware of the ground under her knees, sand and dirt mixed together, cool through her thin skirt. A breeze caused stippled shadows to sway on every surface, and it seemed for a moment as though the shadows were the air itself made visible. Sand and dirt mixed here, a little away from the sea, and death and love—her quick love for the turtle and these small men—and hunger.
That afternoon, on the steaming-hot day of the turtle, Sarah had called Parker before setting out for her walk on the beach. I'm scared, she'd said, and what she'd really meant was that she could hardly breathe, that she couldn't bear another minute of being here while he was there. Will you be home on Thursday, he asked, and she knew that was the deadline, that if things hadn't improved by then he would have to go back into the hospital. Yes, of course.
How could she last until then? Debating the importance of whether a model sat on that beach chair or this poolside wearing something that meant nothing while her own husband was dying. She had taken this one last job because they needed the money. His treatments were expensive and only partly covered by the only insurance they could afford with her freelance earnings. He hadn't worked in over a year and Sarah had turned down too many jobs in the last few months, not wanting to leave him. When the call had come from this old client, Parker had answered the phone and had accepted it for her. His sister Jane had already moved in with them, helping with Parker and now with Sam too. He would be fine without her for a few days, he had said, and then she would come back shiny and warm from the tropical sun.
That evening, the evening of the turtle, Sarah sat at a table with six people she hardly knew while the hotel staff served them colorful drinks with little umbrellas and glasses of wine, blackened fish and skewered lamb. A small mariachi band in white shirts played festive music and everyone in the dining room stared at the beautiful women and beautiful men who sat at Sarah's table, who talked of Paris and Africa and of other beautiful women and beautiful men, whom they would see when they flew off this island to their next job. Sarah did not talk about the turtle or about Parker. She watched a waiter place a bowl of brilliant purple soup in front of her and then place a gleaming soup spoon on the white cloth with the same brown hand that had earlier held a large knife.
6.
Parker was embarrassed by the radiation burns on his face, but Sarah said they made him look like a warrior. Red stripes that slashed his temples. I don't think I can fight any more, he s
aid, and she said, That's all right, but she didn't mean it. She was secretly angry with him for giving up. Even though the doctors all agreed that there was nothing more that would hold the tumor at bay, even though with each day he grew weaker. A year later, Sarah would describe his last days as “noble.” In those last days, however, she longed for him so much that her skin hurt. She looked at him so hard, drinking in every detail, that she developed double vision.
During those days, Parker meditated and he slept and from time to time he would smile at Sarah, who whispered to him story after story of their life together, as if needing to push back into his heart memories that seemed to be slipping from his brain. And always, Can I get you anything? Can I help? Can I make it better? And not said: Can I make you stay? His last request was for something small that he could hold while meditating, something to help him focus. The joy of being asked for something that would help! Sarah rushed from his room and told his family that he wanted something. Quickly, they agreed that Parker's mother would stay with Sam, asleep and cradled in his portable car seat. Sarah thought for a moment, in her double vision, that he was sleeping in an upside-down turtle shell, and that he looked so safe and embraced.
With Jane and the nieces and nephews, she rushed to a park on the hospital grounds. A scavenger hunt! Uncle Parker might like this piece of bark, don't you think? Here's a green acorn! They delivered their finds to Parker an hour later, but it was the perfectly round white stone Sarah presented that he held at the last. While the children had raced from one object to another in the park, Sarah had spotted the stone from fifteen feet away, gleaming at the base of a flowering pear tree, sitting serenely in the midst of fallen white blossoms. She wondered, when Parker took it from her, whether he remembered the earlier stones.
In the early days of their marriage, Parker and Sarah had spent a weekend with friends at their new house on the north shore of Long Island. They'd gone shopping at garage sales and architectural salvage yards for furniture and fixtures. The house was on a small inlet off the Sound. The shore had rocks, not sand, and Sarah was fascinated with them, their subtle but infinite variety of yellowed white, their smooth surfaces, their almost uniform size. The domes of bird skulls, she thought, in a sacred burying ground. If I turn them over, will there be tiny beaks and eye sockets? While Parker and their friends arranged furniture and made salad, Sarah watched the stones in their anchored solidity as water gently washed over and over and over their surfaces. Only the ones at the very edge lost their footing. Every day, she collected a skirtful of the roundest ones and brought them up to the house, where she laid them out on the deck to dry. She and Parker drove back to the city grounded by the weight of a hundred stones and, once home, Sarah spread them over tables and shelves. For a dinner party, she used them as place mats. She rearranged them constantly, and Parker would come across a neat pile in a corner of a hallway looking like stones on a grave. Or he would follow the single line from the bedroom to his studio, early-morning light illuminating them like markers on a runway. He finally tired of them. The cats knocked them off surfaces when they jumped, or a stone would gouge Parker's instep as he hobbled to the bathroom in the middle of the night. They're blocking my every move, he said. Sarah removed them reluctantly, a few at a time, and rearranged them on the sidewalks surrounding their loft building. It only took days, she noticed, for their whiteness to become soiled.
After Parker died, after she took home his few things from the hospital—the cards, his last faded jeans, his small statue of Buddha, and the little white stone; after she slept in the old corduroy-covered chair in their bedroom, not willing to go near the bed that first night of never-again; after waking to rain and cats still wanting to eat, Sarah walked through their apartment. She hadn't cleaned in weeks. The cat litter was pungent. Parker's studio was a still photo of what he had last touched. From the doorway, she scanned the room. On a shelf above his drawing table, next to pots of sharpened pencils and pens organized by point size, sat one of her sculptures, a miniature tent mounted on wheels. She had given it to him on their first anniversary, and he'd always said it was a reminder to him not to hold on too tightly, to try to let go of controlling too much. Sarah had laughed every time he said it. Maybe you could let go of alphabetizing the cereal cabinet, she would say.
The tent was one of the first pieces of hers that Parker had commented on when they met. They'd been in a group show together, had gravitated across the gallery to each other's work. Sarah had run her fingers over a Plexiglas box that encased the outrageous universe that Parker had trapped inside. It seemed to her that he had stolen energy from everything that was alive.
He, across the room, had been struck dumb by her work. Tiny white bones and soft feathers, sticks and leaves and bits of tree bark, minutiae of the natural world arranged, it seemed to Parker, in homage to decay and death. One piece in particular captivated him. It was a two-inch replica of a Mongolian Yurt, a gypsy tent woven from strands of moss and mounted on golden wheels. Peering inside, he saw a single tiny white bone suspended like a hammock by golden thread. This was what made all the rest bearable. One could pick up and move on in this little mobile home.
7.
The horse's skull arrived by FedEx as Sarah was leaving for a birthday dinner with friends, her first real social outing since Parker's death a few months before. It was packed in bubble wrap, sent from Arizona by Jane. Sarah fingered the open crevices of eye sockets and ran her hands over the smooth swells of cheekbones as she had countless times caressed Parker.
The teeth, though loose, were almost entirely intact. It was comforting to know how firmly they held after a lifetime, after death. Through these nostrils hot breath had once streamed on cold nights and through tiny ivory channels signals had run between hoof and belly and brain.
Sarah had always identified with animal tribes that traveled on out of necessity as their dead members stayed behind. As far as she knew, animals kept no mementos of their dead. Sarah, however, had thought more than once that having a bone of an ancestor would be more tangible proof than fading photographs in an album that she was part of something more, something longer and deeper.
When it finally came down to it, though, she didn't keep a piece of Parker, but gave him a parting gift when he died. At the funeral home, when Sarah said her last private goodbye, she placed the small sculpture, the tiny tent mounted on wheels that worked, under his right hand, hidden in the folds of satin.
She kept his last little white stone in her pocket, in what would become a lifelong habit. At any moment she remembered that she was alone, she would finger the stone. She would look around for something beautiful to focus on. If that leaf is there and that stone is there, she would think, then I must still be here.
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Unzipped by Steven J. Dines
We could have died from a blink in that godawful desert heat. So we did not blink, or we blinked in our tents with nobody to watch. I thought it was a ball. You came along and spotted it lying in the hot sand. You pointed at it, giggling. You did that funny crablike run all kids your age do when their legs are new, rushing over to it, scooping it up, grinning, and looking around for grown-up approval. You shook it, held it to your ear, listened to its innards. Maybe you had a sister with a pull-string doll. Maybe she went out to play with her friends and you sneaked into her room to hear it talk. Maybe you were sad and no one talked to you the way her doll did. The ball had something to pull, too, didn't it? You pulled it because you wanted to hear it talk. And it talked, all right; it fucking sang—to you, to me, to the other nurses and doctors roaring, rushing, reaching toward you. I can't get over it, kid; can't steer my mind around the fact that I saw it lying there in the Iraqi dust and sand a few minutes before you picked it up. I blinked.
Back in Chicago, I avoid driving by playgrounds on my way to darkened rooms that creak and crack to swings and nine-tails. I don't think about you as seven-inch spiked heels needle my balls; I think about the pain.
But Mistress only walks all over me until my time is up, and then I walk out. I always walk out. There has to be a way to lock that door forever.
Tonight, it's on to the mall, where it usually takes me an hour, sometimes longer, to buy a carton of milk. I like standing in front of the convex security mirrors; I like how they make me look different ... flexible.
When I arrive back at our two-bedroom apartment, Laura is in our room talking to her girlfriend Angel on the phone. Angel is a nurse, too. But the closest thing Angel has ever seen to a war zone is chronic diarrhea in a seventy-two-year-old patient who cared not where he shat. BFD. Big Fucking Deal.
Laura sees me then bye-byes Angel until she finally hangs up. She sits on the edge of our bed and sighs heavily as she watches me step out of my clothes.
"I need a shower."
"How many is that today?"
"As many as it takes."
The rushing water feels like a hundred cold baby-fingers drumming against my head, neck, shoulders, and ... balls; my balls ache. The water's touch there, instead of soothing, feels strange, making a choppy sea in my stomach. When I step onto the bathmat and Laura asks if I'm feeling refreshed, I hear myself say “Go hump yourself” a moment before our five-year-old son Darren appears in the doorway.
He's clutching a ball in his left hand. Suddenly I'm measuring the distance to the toilet.
"Give me that,” I say.
His smile melts. “Mommy?"
"Give it to me. Right now. Hand it over.” I'm trying to sound calm, trying not to rush him or yank his arm off as I confiscate the thing in his hand on my careening path through the bedroom, into the living room, and onto the sofa, pursued by shocked and inquiring looks. I don't need to turn around to see; I know them well, I know this well. They're holding their breath like they're afraid I'll take them too.
GUD Magazine Issue 1 :: Autumn 2007 Page 6