by Carol Hutton
But there would be no fish, let alone activity, today, she thought as she turned onto the North Road and began to drive across the rolling hills through Chilmark. Arriving at the village at 3:55, she drove the Explorer to the edge of the beach and noticed the lone truck that had preceded her. A woman with nearly luminescent white hair stood at the foot of the jetty with two young children—a girl and boy dressed in identical bright blue windbreakers trying in vain to chase down several seagulls attempting to perch nearby. The children appeared to be oblivious to the wind and cold. As the woman turned and waved to Anna, a ray of the setting sun glistened through her hair, creating a glow so bright that Anna blinked. Anna smiled and waved back. Even off-season visitors are friendly, she thought. She turned off the engine and got out of the Explorer.
The wind whipped across her face, so cold it almost smarted. Anna had trouble connecting the two ends of the zipper to her parka, so she turned her back to the wind. She put up the hood of her parka and pulled the little strings so that her face was partially protected. The sun was a brilliant red and barely kissing the horizon as Anna again turned toward the beach. In the glow of the sunset, she caught a glimpse of the now-familiar man pedaling his bike toward her.
He pulled up next to the Explorer and joined her as she braced herself against the wind.
“I knew you’d be here,” he said, “so I thought I’d join you, if you don’t mind.”
Together they braved the elements, struggling to reach the water’s edge. “It’s just too windy and cold out here,” she said, then reversed direction and scurried toward her vehicle with him following. She hoped he could hear her over the howl of the wind. “Come join me inside where it’s warm,” she said, hopping behind the wheel.
Once inside the Explorer, Anna turned on the engine so she could get the heat running and stop shivering. The two of them watched the sun in its final moments, a red ball slipping slowly into the sea.
“Endings and beginnings,” Anna said aloud as she looked over at her companion, “that’s really what life is all about, don’t you think?”
Those comforting eyes looked back at her, and he nodded and said, “Yes, but it’s really what happens between the two that makes a life meaningful. There really is only the moment, Annie, a perpetual now, if you know what I mean. So many people go through life focused on the openings and closings, goals and accomplishments, they miss the whole point of being here. We all have lessons to learn, Annie, and only a set amount of time in which to learn them. It could be five years, forty years, or eighty-nine years. Just look at what you’ve learned today since sunrise. In just one day, you’ve reviewed much of your past, and given yourself permission to feel both the joy and the pain of the connections in your life, and you’ve actually made some new ones—connections, I mean.”
Playing with the steering wheel, Anna said, “I’ve been thinking a lot about the transitions we have to make in life, not just following abrupt, unwelcome change, but the every-day, every-week adjustments that gradually remold us into the evolving adults we become. We really are just ‘works-in-progress,’ aren’t we?
“So many of my clients,” she continued, “come to me suffering from stress or burnout, really flip sides of the same coin, but they resist taking any time to reflect and focus because they are afraid of the view. I realized today that in my own way I’ve been doing the same thing. I never stopped after my own surgery. I continued writing, speaking, actually increasing my workload in the months before Beth died. In a way, the busyness dulled my pain.
“Even those last weeks when Beth and the girls, and then Tom, were in my river house, I kept working. I only stayed with her for her final two days. I wasn’t consciously avoiding being there, and Beth wanted me to go about my business as much as I could. I felt it best she have the most time with her husband and her girls. But today I realized I never really got to say good-bye to her. All the memories of a lifetime, and we never got to review them together.”
She looked over to him, somewhat surprised at what she had just heard herself say.
The lights went on in the truck parked next to her, startling both of them. It was dark now; the moment had passed. The ending of the day was gone in a brilliant blaze of light.
“I still have places I need to get to tonight, and people I need to see,” he said. “Could you drop me at Beetlebung Corner on your way back?”
“Sure.” Anna got out of the Explorer to help him with the bike, but it was already on the roof of the vehicle before she could reach the other side.
He was silent as Anna drove along the unlit road connecting the two sides of the island. She didn’t want to interrupt his thoughts, especially after he had been so respectful of hers. As if he were reading her mind, he turned to her and said, “Maybe it would help you to write down how you feel about what happened today, Annie. It used to work for me.”
She was quiet as they continued along the dark road. “I think I’ll write a letter to Beth,” Anna said as she pulled up in front of the old church at Beetle-bung Corner. “Are you sure you’ll be all right out here? It’s very dark,” she said, noting for the first time that his clothes were an odd shade of blue and didn’t look too warm.
“I’ll be just fine, Annie, and I think the letter is a good idea. It may seem strange at first, but trust me, it helps. I hope I will see you tomorrow before you leave, but, if I don’t, it only means I ran out of time.”
“Thanks for listening,” she said, and he had closed the door before she realized she again had forgotten to get his name. She thought it was strange that he seemed to be aware of her plans, since she didn’t remember saying anything to him about when she planned to leave the island.
As she pulled into the drive, she silently swore at herself for not thinking to leave any lights on. She flipped on the Explorer’s high beams and shined them on the back door. As she reached inside the kitchen door for the switch, she noticed that there were no lights on at the Duffys’ either.
Once the kitchen was illuminated, she turned off the Explorer’s lights and gladly retreated to the house. Looking at the clock, she saw it was a little past seven o’clock. Suddenly, as if the time gave her permission, she realized she was ravenous. But she was also feeling quite sandy, so the shower came first.
Anna stood in the huge, glass-enclosed shower and let the hot water beat onto her back. She turned very slowly, slid down the wall, wrapped her arms around her legs, turned her face toward the pulsating stream, and began to contemplate the day. Anna had always concealed or camouflaged her deepest pain, keeping it very private. As she reflected on the day, tears filled her eyes, then dropped, becoming one with the water streaming down her face. Anna sat weeping under the waterfall, wondering how many people retreated to a shower stall hoping the warm water would wash away their pain.
Why is it that we only let go in private? Why are we so afraid of going public with our pain? she wondered as she stood and turned off the faucet.
Anna had spent years helping her male clients connect with their feelings, and working with women to understand theirs. She found men and women to be different in so many ways but so similar when it came to the important things. After all these years, Anna had come to the conclusion that we are all just struggling souls stuck in these funny-looking physical forms, trying desperately to make some sense of it all. That is, those who allow themselves to think about or question the meaning of life, let alone death. Thinking back to earlier in the day, she remembered how the stranger had wept along with her as she exposed her soul. He had touched her heart in a way that no one ever had. Who is he? she pondered, drying herself with the big white towel.
The bathroom had more mirrors in it than Anna had in both of her houses combined. Staring at her reflection in this room of mirrors, all Anna could see were her three scars. She had two barely visible incisions, one on each breast, while the fiery pink “bikini” line was just starting to fade. These scars, like pain, were permanently etched into her body, ye
t expertly concealed from view.
Anna knew all too much about cancer. She had been through the drill more than once, undergoing mammograms yearly since her early thirties. Her first breast biopsy was the hardest, and that scar was the longest. Kind of fitting in an odd way, Anna felt. She was too young, she had thought at the time, to be dealing with this. She remembered how her sweaty hands had trembled as she sat in the sur-geon’s office listening to his litany of cancer statistics and treatment options. The experience had left her shaken to the core.
The second biopsy on the opposite breast had been performed when she turned forty. This time it was done as an outpatient procedure, a testament more to the ever-rising cost-consciousness of medical care than to significant advances in technique. However, she had had a different surgeon, a slightly better-looking scar, and no cancer. She had gone alone to the hospital, had taken no medication except for the local anesthetic during the procedure, and had gone against hospital policy and the nurse’s judgment by driving herself home.
Anna had struggled for more than a decade trapped in that limbo of uncertainty suffered by so many women. Like most in her shoes, she courageously endured and faced the ever-present reminder of her mortality utterly alone. She never talked about it, rarely thought about it, but all the time she was conscious of the threat. Every once in a while, Anna would find herself in a restaurant or a department store, mentally calculating the numbers of people present who were struggling or suffering with cancer. That reality infuriated Anna more than it scared her. She told herself it was morbid and unnecessary to entertain such thoughts. So she pushed those thoughts out of her head, except for the one morning each month when she slathered her hands with soap and carefully examined each breast for lumps.
Despite it all, Anna always figured the odds were in her favor. When the ovarian tumor was discovered during a routine doctor’s visit, she wasn’t so sure. Of course, it didn’t help matters any that two of her friends had died from ovarian cancer in the previous ten months. It was now round three for Anna. Her mother had not said that good things happened in threes. More importantly, her mother was dead, so Anna had no one to ask.
Anna had always been more terrified of cancer of the ovary than she was of breast cancer. It made no sense, really; she just was. Perhaps it was because of Gilda Radner. Both Anna and Beth had been devastated when Gilda died. It was almost as if they knew her, maybe because in a way they did, and Anna, in particular, felt it was so unfair for someone like that to die so young.
Beth had been the only one who knew how terrified she was of ovarian cancer. Beth certainly had more than Anna’s fears on her mind at the time, leaving Anna to sort through her feelings on her own. Anna felt it was the strangest week of her life, that week between tumor detection and tumor removal. Despite all her practice with living with dread and fear of cancer, this was different. If someone like Gilda could die from this silent killer, at so young an age, then so could she. Again, Anna thought, cancer changes everything.
“It won’t be malignant, Annie,” Beth had said over the phone, “you have too much left to do.”
Beth had been right. Anna ended up having painful abdominal surgery and she lost all her reproductive organs. But she did not have cancer.
It wasn’t that Anna didn’t think about her good fortune; she did, all the time. She still couldn’t imagine going through all that surgery and having it be only the beginning of treatment. It was that she never focused on the hysterectomy part at all until after Beth died. Anna figured the odds had been in her favor three times now, but, as any woman who has experienced this surgery will tell you, it hurts. It hurts like hell for a while, and it hurts in your heart for a long time.
People say the stupidest things, Anna thought to herself. As a psychologist, she figured she had the right and the credentials to believe this to be true. After all, she had spent years counseling victims of stupid, hurtful, even cruel, verbal attacks from mothers and fathers, husbands and wives, children and siblings, teachers, bosses and co-workers, nurses, doctors, and religious and political figures. As she got older, Anna was less and less convinced that people were really as stupid or clueless as they tried to appear when caught hurting another person, or a group of human beings, with their words.
She knew in the scheme of things she had been pretty lucky. So when some of her very educated, quite intelligent friends, colleagues, and even her family rendered their unsolicited opinions about the uselessness of the organs she had just lost, Anna pretty much dismissed it as anxiety over the situation, or relief that she did not have cancer. But now, as she stood full face looking at her body with its scars, Anna started to feel quite angry, then hurt, and finally very, very alone. No one could ever know the meaning of this event in her life. That was not what bothered her. But were they really so stupid that they thought there was none? As she traced the scar with her fingers, tears fell like raindrops on the cold white tile floor.
“Beth, you never did tell me what it is that I have left to do,” Anna said through her tears.
A loud ring penetrated the silence and, since Becky and Michael had a phone in the bathroom, Anna instinctively reached for the receiver. By the time she picked up, the answering machine had kicked on, so Anna very carefully replaced the phone back on the hook. She didn’t want to talk to anyone anyway.
Anna blew her hair dry, then pulled on a pair of blue tights and her favorite baggy, fleece-lined sweatshirt. By habit, she put back in the small white pearl earrings she always wore, and went downstairs to fix herself something to eat.
The message light was flashing on the answering machine on Michael’s desk. She made a mental note to check it before she went to bed. She changed the discs in the CD player, and started toward the kitchen when the sounds of Smokey Robinson filled the room. Some people never age, she thought as she began moving along with the rhythm.
As she opened the refrigerator to get the wine, the bottle of capers caught her eye. That was when she knew what she’d make for dinner.
“What would you like for dinner, Annie?” Beth asked, once they had been seated at the restaurant recommended by the young American tourist. They relaxed on bistro-style chairs with bright blue-and-white-checked cushions. The menu was posted on a blackboard directly above Anna’s head.
They had never expected to find such a delightful café on the ground floor of the Louvre. But they had, after an exciting but exhausting afternoon meandering through the west wing. It was one of those times when Anna wished she had paid better attention in college. She and Beth had taken an art history course in their last semester at the University of Maryland to fulfill some requirement, and Anna had relied on Beth’s notes and memory for detail, as she’d rarely attended the lectures. Springtime was not to be wasted, Anna would tell Beth as she went off to the driving range to practice her swing.
Unfortunately, the final exam consisted of slides, not questions, and most of the photographs the professor showed were his own and not from the text book. The credit was all Beth’s. It was totally due to her extraordinary eye for detail and gift for description, and her dedication and insistence on making her friend study at all, that Anna got a C. At the time, Anna’s only concern about getting a decent grade had been to ensure her entry into graduate school.
Back then she had never anticipated having an interest in, let alone a passion for, art. But here in Paris, the City of Lights, how could she not? Anna now regretted that she was so ignorant of the culture, the background, and the artists’ stories that lent color and life to each masterpiece.
It had been Beth’s suggestion to tack Paris on to that special British retreat the two had enjoyed just three years ago. They had weathered the hectic drive on the M-2, pausing to ramble through the sites they had read about in The Canterbury Tales as they hurried on their way to the hovercraft that would take them from Dover to Calais.
Anna and Beth rode the train from Calais to Paris, where they would be staying in a very posh hotel on the R
ight Bank. Neither of them had been to Paris before, and Anna had been prepared not to like it. So many stories about the French people, from both her British and American friends, made her wary of the trip. Once they were settled in at the hotel, however, and started walking down the Champs Élysées, Anna fell in love with Paris. No matter that it was bitter cold and overcast, hardly the April in Paris depicted in all the brochures; Anna absolutely adored the city. While London had theater, Paris had—well, everything else.
Anna and Beth wandered around Paris from dawn to midnight for three days, seeing more in that time than most people do in a week. They were debating whether their legs would carry them a few more hours so they could venture to the top of the Eiffel Tower. It was six o’clock on their last evening in the city. As they sat in the small café in the Louvre, they acknowledged that it was a bit early to dine by Parisian standards, but as Beth reminded Anna, who cared what people thought?
That morning Anna and Beth had gone to Notre Dame Cathedral. It was magnificent. They’d spoken in whispers, or not at all, as they walked on their tippy toes like the two ten-year-old Catholic schoolgirls they once had been. Beth took off on her own while they were there, and Anna saw her kneeling at the foot of the statue of the Virgin. Neither one of them practiced Catholicism anymore; in fact, Beth had raised her girls Episcopalian. As for Anna, well, she meditated instead of prayed, and had her own concept of how and what to believe. But inside Notre Dame, Anna thought, everyone must feel Catholic. Anna found an alcove harboring the figure of Saint Francis of Assisi. There were no candles lit in front of his altar, so Anna settled in a chair and looked up and into the eyes of the towering figure. “I don’t know if I’m here to keep you company, or because I feel badly that no one has lit a candle in your corner, or because you were my favorite saint when I was in the seventh grade. But I’m here, and that’s all that matters,” she told him.