Everything I Have Is Yours

by Eleanor Henderson

  Mumps! We laugh and groan. What’s next? Maple Syrup Urine Disease? “Hot chocolate syndrome?” Aaron says. Did he catch it at the grocery store? Mumps, in the middle of a pandemic?

  Mumps, or whatever it is, hurts. He can barely swallow. Sores appear on the inside of his mouth. His neck aches. When I call the doctor and describe his symptoms, the nurse wants him to come in that afternoon. Aaron is seen behind the building in a shed, an actual shed, that looks like it was purchased out of the parking lot of Home Depot. The doctor is an older man we’ve never seen before, and we don’t really see him now: he is wearing goggles and a mask and gloves and a yellow get-up that is either plastic scrubs or a full-body poncho; it is drizzling outside. All we can see is the top of the doctor’s bald head, sun-spotted and vulnerable. When the doctor’s light won’t turn on, Aaron takes out his cell phone and turns on the flashlight and aims it into his own mouth. I watch from ten feet away, standing next to our parked car. It is a strange world we live in. Aaron doesn’t say mumps, but the doctor does, and takes his blood to test for it, though in all his years he has never seen it before. He also swabs his mouth for strep and asks Aaron to swab his nose for the flu. “I do it myself?” Aaron asks, taking the Q-tip. After the invasive gouge of the coronavirus test, after the ways both our bodies have been prodded and probed, this seems simple and infinitely humane: to allow a patient to test himself.

  We watch the doctor undress himself carefully before he goes back inside, stripping off his poncho scrubs. How many times a day does he have to do this? “Amazing, what they have to do,” Aaron says in the car, “putting themselves at risk like that.” The next day, the doctor will call Aaron with the results: all negative. Of course. Aaron will take more tests, for old diseases and new ones. He will go through the ritual of blood draws and disappointment. What matters is that the doctor calls and says, “I hope you feel better,” before gently hanging up.

  “What a nice guy,” Aaron says.

  * * *

  The extra hundred pounds, it’s alcohol weight. He knows it. It’s the same kind of weight from the bad time. He has pains in his liver, pains in his heart.

  “It’s going to kill me,” he says.

  He says, “I’m so scared.”

  “It’s been seven months. It can’t come back. I won’t survive if it comes back.”

  “I know I have to stop. I will stop.”

  “I hate being this big.”

  “But when I’m this big,” he says, “I don’t feel anything.” He has a layer of fat protecting him, like a polar bear. “I don’t feel anything moving inside me. No sensations at all.” Nico touches his back on the couch, and Aaron says he barely feels it.

  “That’s terrible,” I say.

  “No,” he says. “It’s fucking great.”

  * * *

  He starts, stops. Stops, starts.

  * * *

  Usually Nico is the last to wake up. But one morning he wanders into the kitchen first, where I’m writing at the table. He is barefoot, in a sweater and sweatpants, his hair sticking up in all directions. “Can I interview you?” I ask, and he takes a seat, smiling.

  “Do you remember that homework you did, the worksheet about feelings?”

  He looks confused.

  “You were in fourth grade, I think. It asked what you were anxious about. You wrote sick house family.”

  He twists up his face, amused at his former self. “Really? I don’t remember.”

  “When I came to you with it, you balled it up and threw it under the bed.”

  Nico laughs. “I do not remember.”

  “Do you remember feeling that, though? Anxious about Dad being sick?”

  He nods. He says he remembers a time Dad was really sick and I asked him and Henry to come into the bedroom and say good-bye to him.

  Now I twist up my face. “I do not remember that.”

  It could have been any number of nights. Bad nights, when Aaron would say, “I don’t think I’m going to make it.”

  “I don’t think I would have asked you and Henry to do that, honey. Probably Dad said he wanted to say good-bye. He was probably really worried.” I don’t insist too hard, though, wary of pressing my version of events in lieu of Aaron’s.

  Nico nods.

  “Do you still feel worried about Dad?”

  He thinks about it, hugging his knees into his chest. “I feel a lot less worried.” He’s eleven and a half, and his Rs are deliberate and sharp. “I mean, I wish he didn’t drink so much.”

  “Of course.”

  “It sucks, when he can’t pick me up from school ’cause he’s been drinking.” He flexes his toes back, palming the soles of his feet. “Then again, I’m not in school anymore.”

  “And you take the bus,” I point out.

  “Oh yeah.” He smiles. “Can I ask you a question?”

  “Of course.”

  “Why didn’t you believe Dad? About the parasites?”

  I sigh. It’s not the first time I’ve answered the question. “It was complicated, honey. It still is. When you see someone you love become someone you don’t recognize, it’s really scary. You know what that’s like, right?”

  Nico nods.

  “When the doctors said Dad was making them up, it was the only thing that made any sense to me at that time.” I burrow a little deeper into my bathrobe. “But I will always regret not believing him.”

  “Okay.”

  “To be honest,” I add, “I still don’t know what’s making Dad sick. But it’s best to trust people about what’s going on with their own bodies, to let them live their own lives. Don’t you think?”

  “Yeah.” He is already thinking about something else. “Can I ask you another question?”

  “Yup.”

  “Now I think I’m interviewing you.” He points a finger at my face. “Did you ever think about leaving Dad?”

  I wince. “Wow, you’re really asking the tough questions.”

  Nico smiles an apology. I remember him at a year old, his blond curls and brown sandals and the pacifier he was never without. I remember carrying him on my hip into my brother’s backyard. I thought it might be the two of us against the world. I was plotting my escape from the life I hadn’t signed up for. I remember sitting with my mother in that yard, crying the burdens of taking care of my husband. “That’s what marriage is,” she said. She was telling me to stay. How to tell my son that she was right, and also that there’s more? That marriage can mean plotting an escape all the time and choosing to stay anyway. That it’s the dreaming of another life that makes this one worth living.

  “Yes,” I say. “There were times when Dad and I thought we … wouldn’t make it. But I think most couples have hard times. And it was a long time ago.”

  Nico releases his feet to the ground, sits up straight. He is satisfied. “Okay. Good interview, Mom. Can I play Zelda now?”

  * * *

  I once thought that recovery was achieved only through purity—abstinence from alcohol, remission from disease—but our recovery, imperfect though it may be, has been defined by acceptance. “The point,” our RCA book says, “is that we are willing to grow together along spiritual lines.” Acceptance of our problems, our powerlessness, and our mortality. If my parents’ Puritan-Boomer generation, with its children growing up under the alcoholic wings of the war and the Depression, was defined by silence and suppression and avoidance, I will accept acceptance. Maybe I’d go so far to say it’s the most divine form of love.

  Aaron might say he’s not an alcoholic, not today. Years ago, when he was drinking to die, to sleep, sure. Now he is drinking to live, to stay awake against the nightmare of illness. I would say that the word “alcoholic” doesn’t contain nearly enough nuance. But as I understand it, from my side of the room, alcoholics drink to ward off all kinds of nightmares. Aaron’s is just a highly idiosyncratic one.

  “He likes it cold,” the boy in Stranger Things says, of the monster who tries to possess him.<
br />
  Aaron’s monster likes it straight, in a juice glass.

  But none of the words I choose contain enough nuance. If our house has been sick with three diseases—addiction, mental illness, and what I have taken to calling, inadequately, “chronic illness,” whatever has battled Aaron’s body for the better part of a decade—it is their comorbidity that makes them so difficult to parse. These diseases have fed upon, made necessary, the other. Alcoholism is, for him, for now, the parasite of his other illnesses.

  I don’t have the cure I hoped for Aaron. Our recovery from the sick house has not been realized through medical intervention. Aaron is just as sick in some ways, in some ways less sick, in some ways more. I feel sad about this, immeasurably sad. But I don’t feel the same pall of doom, the panic or rage. I no longer enter a room and fear I will find my husband’s lifeless body. I no longer dread the bad nights. And if he leaves me again, leaves himself, I trust he will come back. And I trust I will stay.

  * * *

  Judith Butler writes in Giving an Account of Oneself:

  As we ask to know the Other, or ask that the Other say, finally who he or she is, it will be important not to expect an answer that will ever satisfy. By not pursuing satisfaction, and by letting the question remain open, even enduring, we let the Other live, since life might be understood as precisely that which exceeds any account we may try to give of it.

  * * *

  Sometimes we talk about renewing our vows. Sometimes I have dreams about it. A chance to revise our wedding. Aaron in a tux that wasn’t tailored in 2003. Me in a dress I don’t have to fast to fit in. Bubbles instead of rose petals. A vegan cake, the top layer of which we will eat all by ourselves. In my dreams, there are people gathered to see us, we are running late, my heart is pounding.

  But if we did it again, I think we’d do it alone. We’d write vows, and no one would be there to hear them but us. They might go like this:

  “Can I know you?”

  “Sure. You can try.”

  DANBY ROAD

  2020

  You’re home with the kids, making spaghetti, making ramen noodles, all the revolting cheap starchy foods the children demand. You like to make a big batch of mac and cheese, two boxes at once, and the orange powder never really mixes all the way through. No matter. You keep the children alive. You watch Sponge Bob and The Simpsons and the show where they eat ancient expired food, which Henry loves. You feed the cat. You water the garden. On the deck, with Henry, you blow bubbles. You both love blowing bubbles now. It helps Henry calm down. It helps you calm down, too. You stand out there smiling in the sunshine with your quarantine-long hair and say, like a wizened old man out of a folk tale, “It helps me see the wind.”

  The country is slowly coming out of lockdown and for the first time in months I haven’t slept beside you. You let Henry sleep in our bed, on my side. “Sleeping with Henry is like sleeping with a kangaroo,” you text me, “but otherwise I slept fine.”

  At the arts colony, I’m in the studio with the rocking chair and the red quilt and the view of the field. It’s next door to the studio where you picked me up that morning while the kids were in school, when we hadn’t seen each other in days, when no one was around, where we made love on the bare mattress while the sheets were in the wash, then walked the field hand in hand while we waited for them to dry.

  This time, there is a basket of vegan treats, fresh baked bread and homemade granola and jam in tiny hand-labeled jars the size of a teddy bear’s fist. It’s all so sweet it makes my eyes sting just to behold it. In the fridge, meals in glass containers, polenta pie and strawberry rhubarb crumble and tofu marinated in something that makes it actually melt in my mouth. It’s the kind of food meant to feed to a lover, the kind of food we ate in our honeymoon suite, and because a husband is someone to text pictures of food to, I do. “I never knew tofu could be like this. Better-than-sex tofu.” You text me a picture of your dinner: a box of dried rotini.

  Yesterday when I arrived I sat in the armchair next to the window and read Darkness Visible straight through. You handed it to me when you finished it not long ago. You told me it described things perfectly.

  “Which things?” I asked. “Where?” I wanted the page, the sentence.

  “It’s all in there,” you said. “You’ll see. He describes how it’s—indescribable.”

  I sat by the window and as I finished the June breeze came in and brushed my neck, and the pleasure of it as I read the story of woe sent me into tears, because for once you were the one telling me how it was, not in your words but not in mine.

  Here in the woods the trees are denser than the wisp of trees in the cemetery behind our house. Those trees are old but younger than the crooked graves, a forest grown up from the fertilizer of skeletons. But the trees here are about the same height, strong and tender, and their branches rustle with the same sound, a distant applause, and their leaves look like busy little hands. In its sign language the wind says everything, Hello, I love you, I’m sorry, I miss you, thank you, it’s going to be okay. It makes me happy to think that the wind where you’re blowing soap bubbles might blow out here to where I am, not so far away.

  Soon, we’ll do our third step with our sponsor couple. A vision for our higher power. We’ll laugh about it. We’ll make dumb jokes. We’re supposed to visualize it, an energy that keeps us together, keeps us safe. It could be anything, our sponsors told us—the ocean, the stars, the sun. I know you don’t like the moon. To me, it’s as good as any of them, just a symbol of the mysterious power we don’t understand, a force that was here before we were. Mother Nature leaving the bathroom light on. But I think the wind might be the best face of our god, invisible but undeniable, sometimes placid, sometimes fierce.

  When I get home and park in the driveway, you’re above me on the deck, waiting. Romeo in reverse. You wave a wing of bubbles. The boys run out and hug my waist. Nico is nearly as tall as I am. Henry is still small enough to jump into my arms.

  After dinner, after putting the boys to bed, we go down to our room. Soon, we’ll move to another house, but this is where we are now. The bedside lamp is low. The air purifier hums.

  “Where do you want to go when you die?” I ask. I’m lying back against the pillows, one bent arm behind my head. You’re sitting at the edge of the mattress, elbows on your knees, back to me.

  “I want to be a bird,” you say, no pause.

  “No, like, practically speaking.” I put my hand on your T-shirted back. “You know I want to be cremated.”

  “You want your ashes spread in Vermont.”

  “Yes.”

  “I don’t want to be cremated.”

  “I know. But where do you want to be buried?”

  You think about it. “Not in the backyard,” you joke. But you know I’m asking because I’m worried you’re rushing yourself toward death. For a moment I can face my fright. I’ve spent so many nights trying to ease your suffering, so many years trying to stretch the distance before the grave. I’ve done that, I see now, because I didn’t want to be alone. I didn’t want to be without you.

  “Long Island?” I offer, helpfully.

  “Yeah, that sounds good.” You say it like I’m asking how much money we should give the mail carrier for the holidays. You don’t care, I guess, and I realize I don’t either. What we agree to without agreeing is that we don’t need to put our bodies in the ground together, or throw them into the same wind. That sharing a bed in this life is plenty. It is enduring. Maybe these are, after all, the only vows that matter, the ones we said to each other when we didn’t know what they would mean: to have and to hold, in sickness and in health. We can’t give each other everything, but I believe this is enough.

  “Come to bed, honey,” I say, and you lie down beside me, and I turn off the light. We face each other, foreheads touching, and your breath finds my breath. This time, this night, we fall asleep easily.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  It takes a village to write a
book, raise children, and stay married. So many people have supported Aaron and me through the writing of this memoir and the living of it.

  Ursula, Joan, Katie, Jaime, Joanna, Mary Beth, Jen, Jennifer, Penny, Anna, Emily, Demitra, Kathie, Callie, Kate, Rich, Theresa, Steve, Stu, Jennifer, Chris, Claire, Jen, Jen, Liz, Ed, Livi, Dave, Cory, Lisa, Julie, Jack, Raul, Jacob, Shaianne, Derek, Derek, Sarah, Sara, Gina, Emily, Rene, Nina, Nina, Adrienne, Margaret, Carol, everyone from Al-Anon and Recovering Couples Anonymous, and so many other friends: thanks for being part of my village.

  Sue-Je: wishing you peace.

  All the caregivers who treated Aaron with respect and compassion: thanks for being bigger than the system.

  Ithaca College, the family of Robert Ryan, and the Constance Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts: thank you for the time and space.

  My wonderful Flatiron team—Lauren Bittrich, Kukuwa Ashun, Sam Zukergood, Chris Smith, Mara Lurie, Henry Kaufman, and above all Megan Lynch: thank you for your faith in this book. Megan: thanks for holding my hand. Jim Rutman: thanks for holding my other one. I couldn’t have written this without either of you.

  All the writers whose voices are in these pages: thanks for making me feel less alone.

  Peter, Sam, Cameron, and Keri: thanks for being my first family.

  My parents, Ann and Bill: thank you for teaching me what radical acceptance looks like, even if we didn’t have the words for it. I hope you’re still sharing the crossword.