Joy

by Erin McGraw

  “Memory Lane!” Laurie says. Her face is shining, and if Sunny hadn’t been there, I would have kissed my wife.

  “That was some haircut,” Sunny says to me.

  “It wasn’t that bad,” I protest.

  “Honey, it was awful, but I married you anyway.”

  “What prompted this?”

  “I wanted one moment in this house that wasn’t about being sick.”

  My smile falls off my face, but Laurie is back to looking at my haircut and doesn’t notice.

  Since they look comfy on the bed, I go to the kitchen and put together a tray with soup and grapefruit juice—Laurie likes it now—and a rose from outside in a bud vase. Sometimes a rose makes her smile. From the bedroom comes another whoop of laughter, and for a piercing moment, I wish I could bring Laurie a glass of wine.

  “What is it this time?” I say at the doorway, after pausing to get my voice right.

  “Look at your face! Talk about a thousand-yard stare. You look like you just got a death sentence.” She holds up a picture of us at the altar, and she’s right—my eyes seem focused on something far away and frightening. I tighten my grip on the tray and set it gently over my wasted wife, willing her to look up and meet my eyes. Which she does, briefly.

  Soup (2)

  Sunny

  Both of us jerk a little when we hear his car in the driveway. I’ve seen Laurie do it in her sleep—the slight tightening, the unconscious smoothing of the mouth—and I know she’s dreaming of him. It’s not something to discuss.

  I’m getting as sensitive as Laurie, and when he comes in I can smell his lunch burrito and the Sharpie ink that has bled onto his fingers. Next to the bed he stands awkwardly, still holding his briefcase. Since the time she winced when he picked up her hand, he doesn’t touch her, but he asks her how today was. “A little better,” she says when it wasn’t too bad; “a little worse” when it was a lot worse. I’m not saying that she’s a hero. She’s just sick of questions.

  He has nothing but questions, and she understands that. How is he supposed to know, if he doesn’t ask? She does the same thing. “How was the phone conference? How did the meeting with Mitch go?” She closes her eyes while he answers, and then he tiptoes out of the room. In grief, his face is like a joint wrenched out of its socket. I ask if he remembered to bring home soup. There’s nothing wrong with that. We need soup.

  We need more soft bedding; everything now is hopelessly stained. We need better antiemetics. We need blackout shades in the bedroom. We need a decent place for me to sleep. We need a miracle, and somebody to say so. It’s not going to be him.

  “He wishes you weren’t here,” Laurie said once, after he left for work.

  “I know.”

  “So do I,” she said. That shocked me, and I started to protest, but she grinned at me and winked. “He wouldn’t let me say that. He thinks it’s rude. He loses track of what’s important.”

  “No shit,” I said.

  Was that before or after I started going with them to appointments? I should keep a journal that I’ll be able to refer to one day while I write about these muffled, beautiful days. Muted Light: A Friend’s Journey with Cancer.

  You say “friend” and “caretaking” and people assume a relationship that stretches back to kindergarten, memories of camp and proms and first cigarettes. I don’t know why a friendship that started at the office basement vending machine is less legitimate. The first month Laurie and I knew each other, all we talked about was Cheetos. Before she got sick, I didn’t know her husband’s name. I heard cancer and I came.

  Laurie caught me by the hand once. Even that small exertion just about undid her. “In case he doesn’t say it, thank you.”

  “Of course he says it.”

  She gave me a look that bundled up Oh, come on with Don’t make me say it. She’s perfected communication with a twist of the mouth and a tilt of the head; sometimes we go through whole days on only a handful of words. Didn’t somebody once say that real intimacy occurs in silence? I keep learning lessons, and I don’t know where to put them. Reaching Through the Silence: Accompanying a Friend with Cancer.

  On the good days, at first, she could sit up in bed and we would talk while she pretended to eat the soup I gave her. She was engaged to be married twice before she finally made it to the altar. Her eventual mother-in-law gave her a stack of baby clothes as a wedding present. “I tried to make a joke about it, and she said, ‘It’s not as if you’re young.’ I was thirty-one.”

  “How old are you now?”

  “Thirty-eight.”

  She looks fifty. But then, I do, too, and I’m forty-four and healthy as a horse. I’ll nurse everybody I know, and I’ll outlive them all. My job is to be the one who lasts.

  After he comes home one night, I meet him in the kitchen, where we can talk. “Have you made plans about a funeral?”

  His face goes white. “What did Laurie say to you?”

  “Nothing. What has she said to you?”

  “We don’t have to think about that yet.” It isn’t the first time a man has looked at me with hate. I lost my job at Laurie’s company because the man in the cube next to mine didn’t think the office was a place to chew gum or listen to light classical, even with earbuds. I kept a log of his non-work calls, but in the end no one let me produce it; I came back from a meeting and found a box on my desk with my pictures and MP3 player in it. “We’re downsizing,” my manager said, though no one was fired but me, the unmarried woman who knits. Laurie didn’t call. Much later, when we became Facebook friends, she said she hadn’t known, and that might be true.

  “Just pay attention,” I say. “It won’t hurt to think about songs she especially likes. Not hymns. She doesn’t like those.”

  “No,” he says. His tone is humble, and I smile at him.

  He shakes his head. “No.”

  “He thinks he’s strong,” I say to Laurie the next day, and she looks at me with surprise.

  “No, he doesn’t. He always says I’m the strong one.”

  “Then he wants to look strong.”

  Laurie shakes her head. “Where do you get this stuff?”

  That night she sits up and smiles when he comes home. He’s brought pasta e fagioli from the good Italian place, and she makes a big deal about the rich smell, spangled with basil, as if he’d made it himself. “Why don’t you take some of this, Sunny?” It takes me a moment to recognize that she’s sending me home. He’s sitting on the bed, looking at her with a cocker spaniel’s pure adoration.

  “Thanks all the same. I don’t like beans.” I might as well have said that I didn’t like carburetors. When Laurie starts to cough, he holds his hand half an inch from her shoulder. Touch her! She’s already broken!

  “Thank you for everything, Sunny,” he says.

  I will be back tomorrow. The Endless Present: A Friend’s Slide to Death. In front of the coat closet, twenty feet from Laurie’s room, I slip on my coat and softly hum a bit of the aria that was just on the radio: il nome mio nessun saprà. It’s the only line I can remember, but it’s beautiful when Pavarotti sings it, and I could have worse songs in my head.

  Soup (3)

  Laurie

  Hearing steps in the hall, I straighten my legs under the covers and close my eyes. I am just on the lip of remembering, every cell straining, like the edge of orgasm. In front of the door, the steps stop, then back silently away while my brain reaches in every direction, almost touching the thing I want.

  And then falls short again. I spend hours like this, dancing at the brink of a memory that teasingly winds around me. The things I used to know flicker like fireflies, and I clumsily lunge and clutch at them. Probably I am the dog chasing the car; what would I do if I caught it? While my body busies itself with dying, my mind is bright with what it used to know.

  I became a good ice-skater once I got my own skates, and could sharpen the blades. They hissed over the ice and I felt dangerous. I never hurt anybody else, but once
I sliced my own leg while I was lacing up and needed four stitches. When I was thirteen I broke my ankle, and that was it for skating, though now, if I try, I remember the scrape of metal on ice, and the high laughter of the girls with elaborate hair who wobbled at the side of the rink. The salty grease of the cheese fries. The screechy video game music bouncing over the ice.

  In college, I saw a plum tree in bloom, the first time I’d ever seen one. I collapsed at its base and gazed at the blue sky behind the screen of pink blossoms for an hour, straight through my geology quiz on sedimentary rocks. To this day I don’t know what breccias are, and I’ve done just fine.

  Except for the nausea, which is almost constant. The doctors told me that antiemetics are good now. I’m lucky, they told me.

  The footsteps come back, and I close my eyes again, though the trick won’t work twice in a row.

  “Don’t you want some soup? You need to eat something.”

  “No.”

  “Please? For me?”

  I open my eyes. “I’m tired of throwing up.” Sunny’s face is warped into a caregiver’s look of concern, as if she’s being graded on her performance. “Smile,” I say.

  “As soon as you agree to soup.”

  “No deal.”

  She stumps away, making sure I hear her annoyance. That makes two of us. Left uninterrupted, wobbling on my unsteady raft, I am nearly happy.

  Pain keeps me company, patiently gnawing. The pain is a lap-sized creature with rich fur and spiky teeth constantly growing in. The only way the animal can stop its own discomfort is to gnaw. One of us has to hurt, and I see no reason why it shouldn’t be me.

  “The new drugs do a good job controlling pain. If it ever gets too much for you, we can help,” say the doctors. Right now, I’m interested in the creature. It’s been a while since I’ve had a pet, and I like the plush, velvety fur.

  I crave, of all things, cheesecake. This is not something to tell Michael, who would bring home four of them when I can’t even hold down a soft-boiled egg. But while my brain is ranging amid the glittering memories like a boy with a stick, I imagine thick, sweet cream cheese and imagine that I want it.

  When I was a girl, we had a piano made of brown wood. Our kitchen walls were yellow, and my mother washed the white café curtains twice a year. These are not the memories I’m reaching for, though I hold on to the unexpected smell of bleach in the kitchen that lasted a day or so.

  A cloud spied through skeletal trees, billowing like whipped cream. A tendril of music, not quite pretty. The smile of the first man I went to bed with. None of these.

  During the day it’s Sunny in the apartment; at night it’s Michael. They try to hide their quarrels from me. The day I married Michael, my shoes pinched. I don’t remember the day I met Sunny.

  My mother had hatboxes. My sister drowned when I was eight. She had lumpy braids and wore drugstore cologne, and she taught me cat’s cradle. There is no reason for that to make me cry.

  Sunny must be hovering just outside the door; at the first sniffle she bursts in. “What’s wrong? What hurts?”

  “Everything.”

  “Do you want me to call the doctor?” And then, in an unexpected blossoming of something like insight, “Are you afraid?” She leans in, ready to take my fear away. Once, somewhere, I watched water fall over a stone.

  I dredge up a smile and paste it crookedly on my face. I’ve sat at sickbeds, too, and it isn’t easy. I should be nicer to her. “If you go away, I’ll eat some soup later.”

  “No, you won’t.”

  For that I give her a real smile. “I’ll try.”

  “You need to fight. You’ll win if you just fight.” Her broad face is fiercely cheerful, stupid as a cabbage, and my eyes brim again. She doesn’t understand a goddamn thing.

  I’m still crying when Michael comes home, and I hear the whispers at the front door. Next to my bed, he says, “What changed?”

  “Nothing.”

  I watch him keep himself from saying, Sunny said. We smile at each other, and I wipe snot from my nose.

  “Do you want me to sleep next to you tonight?”

  “Yes.” He wants me to make a choice, so I do. Eventually, after carefully not making any noise, he will drop off to sleep. Then I’ll be free to turn my back on him and push my mind harder while my back arcs against the pain that’s generally worse at night. Gritty sand on a linoleum floor. The shock of ice against skin. A baby’s shriek cutting a room in half. Dizzying, almost sickening honeysuckle.

  The slam of a car door. My skating coach’s whistle. Library’s clean must.

  Cold ashes. Cat’s sharp whisker. Petals.

  Sesame seeds. Gravel. Perfume. Water. Light.

  Light.

  Song

  I overreacted, I admit it. I flew across the kitchen at my eleven-year-old son Nathan, who was playing with my phone and had found his way to “Moondance,” and I knocked the phone out of his hand so hard the phone wound up in the living room and Nathan on the floor. I held my boy on my lap for the next half hour, apologizing and crying until his shirt was spotty with my tears.

  If Roger hears, he’ll be furious, but Roger doesn’t have to hear. Nathan won’t tell him. By the time Roger comes home from work, Nathan will be singing, and Roger will leave again. Insurance never sleeps, which is Roger’s good fortune.

  As soon as Nathan finds a song he likes, he memorizes it. As soon as he’s memorized it, he sings it, a lot. Nathan sings very, very badly. He doesn’t have the ordinary kid’s wandery voice that is content to land somewhere in the neighborhood of the right note. He finds profoundly wrong notes, notes so wrong they feel vindictive, and then he reproduces them at unbelievable volume. Once I was walking our dog Sadie and heard him from a block away. I had to drag Sadie into the house, where she hid under the bed like a cartoon dog.

  Roger tells me to be patient. He tells me to support our son. Then he leaves the house to go to work, and Nathan stays home and sings with a voice that sounds as if it’s peeling sound from melody like skin from a potato.

  I think it was My Fair Lady two years ago that turned the key in Nathan’s lock. I was watching in the family room by myself, happily wrapped in the melodies and gowns and accents of some stage-set London, when I heard a sniffle behind the couch and uncovered my saucer-eyed nine-year-old son. He’d never seen a musical. “They just start singing! Like it’s normal!”

  “A lot of people are surprised by that.” At this point Eliza was fantasizing about killing Professor Higgins, and I patted the couch and told Nathan he could watch with me, but he had to be quiet. The next day he remembered the soundtrack with stunning precision.

  “The boy’s a genius,” Roger said, his voice filled with relief. He was leaving the house in which Nathan, hopping from couch to ottoman, was bellowing about lots of coal making lots of ’eat. Nathan sang the soundtrack nonstop for a week and I thought I could outwait him, but then he discovered Adele and I understood with despair what my future held.

  “He’s never been so happy,” Roger said this morning before kissing me good-bye, before I tackled our son. Nathan was standing at the back window, bouncing back and forth between “Ticket to Ride” and “Rolling in the Deep.” “I like the ones where I can get really loud,” he told us, his face alight.

  Something is not right with Nathan. Nuances elude him, as if his brain is a net designed only to hold big, blunt ideas, and not the quicksilver ones that turn A to A-flat, laughter to complicated laughter. So often Nathan is the last one in the room to finish laughing at a joke. He has been tested and tested and tested—not autism, not Asperger’s, simply “on the spectrum,” as if the spectrum is a lane where my son has a tidy cottage.

  “Try to keep his life stable. That’s how he’ll do best,” the tester told us. Isn’t that true of every child?

  We tried hard to believe he wasn’t special. When he was five years old we said, “He’s five. Give the kid a chance.” Then he was six, eight. Now he’s eleven, and Rog
er’s kiss skims off my cheekbone before he leaves the house. If Nathan were suddenly to start singing like Andrea Bocelli, Roger would still need to work early, late, and often. There will not be another child, or even a shared bed. Walk far enough, and you can’t retrace steps anymore. There are too many turns, and the path is confused, and the lookouts that were once arresting have turned dun and cold.

  These are the thoughts I entertain when Nathan’s at school, singing for his classmates and teacher, who sends home a note. These are the thoughts I can have when the house is quiet enough to contain thoughts.

  Here is my thought for today: I must find Nathan another song. I cannot bear to hear him sing “Moondance.”

  John didn’t last long. A few months so overheated and hectic and dizzyingly sweet, the memory still makes my heart trip. Roger had someone then, too: hence John. When Roger told me that he had broken things off, he looked at me pointedly until I picked up the phone. Afterward I went to the bathroom and vomited. Roger was in the living room with Nathan. When I came back out, wiping my mouth, he handed our son to me as if Nathan were a toddler, and left the house to go back to work. We were keeping things stable.

  John managed the produce department of our Publix. At first we just smiled at each other until one day he handed me a beautiful peach, heavy with juice. Then it was just a matter of time.

  “Moondance” happened one afternoon we had sneaked away. We sat in his car and he played the song over and over. To this day the song means gray fabric upholstery and the long burn of bourbon from a flask and low winter afternoon sun directly in my eyes, so I could see nothing but light. He told me he wanted to see me at night. I said, “That can’t happen.”

  “I know. That’s why I play this. I imagine you with me, and I cry and hate Roger and hate you. Then I play it again and think about what your shoulder might look like at night. Then sometimes I hit something. Every time I end by thinking about the first time I noticed you, standing in the store looking lost. I wanted to save you. That’s when I still thought you’d let me.”