Death, I think, is not a moment. It’s a process. The body is a gestalt. It’s more than the sum of is parts. The cells can be alive when we are not. This must have something to do with energy. When does the process begin?
I go through the mail. Judi’s subscription to Martha Stewart Living has run out. She is invited to receive the next ten issues for just twenty-four dollars a year—a 39 percent savings over newsstand price.
In second grade, Sister Mary Michael told our class that dying meant going to heaven. Henry Belch wanted to know how far heaven was from Worcester. Sister said, Heaven’s wherever God is. Henry said, Where’s God? God’s everywhere, Sister said. Henry looked around the room. Thank you, Sister. He smiled.
In the schoolyard, the jump-rope girls sang:
Mother, Mother, I feel sick,
Send for the doctor, quick, quick, quick!
Doctor, Doctor, shall I die?
Yes, my dear, and so shall I.
How many carriages shall I have?
One, two, three, four . . .
Sister also said that the body is a tabernacle of God.
Death seems imaginary, abstract, speculative. Perhaps, then, we should not reflect on death at all, but on a person who is dying. Decomposition is singular enough, actual, concrete. It insinuates itself on the senses, and it will desecrate your tabernacle. Reflect on that, is this what we mean by death—this necrosis, this atomization that begins when gravity seizes the heart and the pumping stops? when tissues spoil and trillions of nuclei fail? when enzymes within the cells break loose and consume their hosts?
When I can’t sleep, I sit up watching evangelists on the all-night Christian network, wondering what it is they do to get their hair to hold such sinuous shapes. I’m surprised when I see Smokey Robinson sitting on a gold brocade sofa, chatting with the host about Jesus Christ, his personal Lord and savior. I don’t know why I’m surprised.
Christian TV is full of beautiful young, blond, ministerial couples. They schmooze with zealous guests, they sing, they testify to God’s mercy and love. I have my favorite couple, the Lovings. He’s the Reverend Wayne Loving, a preacher with exquisitely tailored suits and feathered, longish hair. She’s Recie, and she’s as pretty as her husband. She wears neo-Victorian long-sleeved dresses, blue ones, lacy and shapely, and she wears, perhaps, too much makeup. I detect this glint in Wayne’s blue eyes, a message meant for the gentlemen viewers, meant for me, saying, If you believe in Jesus, you too can get you something just this sweet, someone with a dove’s eyes, with breasts like roes that feed among the lilies, whose lips are a thread of scarlet, whose love is better than wine, under whose tongue lie honey and milk. And I think not someone like Recie, but Recie. I want to talk with her in the morning before she puts on her armor, before the mascara and the stiff hair. Recie, I want to say, what is it with this prosperity theology, with your trips to the mall, the seamstress, the car dealership? When I say this, I touch her hand. She’ll step toward me, rest her cheek against mine, and say, “You shall lie all night betwixt my breasts and my jeweled thighs in our green bed.” I must be out of my mind.
One night Wayne and Recie bring their baby girl onto the set and hold her so the camera can get a close-up. They have dressed little Paige in a frilly pink getup, which disappoints me. I figure this must be Wayne’s idea. They have put what looks like a garter belt on Paige’s head, and it’s like the baby’s whole life flashes before my eyes. I don’t know why, but I think about Martha then. Strange. When I snap out of it, Recie is telling me that Christian women are the most liberated women in the world. She says, We’re liberated from having to work for a living, liberated from civic responsibility. We can devote ourselves to the House of the Lord and to our own houses. Amen. Praise Jesus. She says, You can’t be halfway with the Lord. And I think, I’m too late to save her.
Dostoevsky’s Kirilov said there are only two reasons why we don’t kill ourselves: pain and the fear of the afterlife. I realize that an overdose of morphine would be painless. Even a gunshot to the temple would hurt less than chemotherapy, than cancer. As for the next world, that’s never been a fear of Judi’s.
I turn off the TV I decide to write. I brew coffee. I sit. I get up and look out into the blackness. Judi. I want to write about Judi. How do you tell a story about a smart, beautiful, young woman who is taken by surprise, who has her body attacked and her future snatched away? And if you tell it, what is it about? I want to write about this so that I can understand it, knowing I will never understand it. I decide I should shower, shave, dress for work, this writing work.
In the shower, I think how my life has changed so much so recently after so many years of sameness. I think how painful change can be to the brain. I feel lucky, and I feel sad. I miss Martha. I hope I’m smart enough not to call her.
I sit at the kitchen table with my writing tablet, my word finder, my dictionary, my clutch of pens. I try three of them before I’m ready Blue, fine-point rolling ball. Somehow I understand that this narrative about Judi will not be a short story.
Where to begin? It’s winter—the cold, the damp, the tattoo of sleet against the storm windows, the world reduced to grays and browns and white. How about a title? Breathing Through the Eye of a Needle or We Shall Not All Sleep, But We Shall All Be Changed. Maybe begin with a hallucination induced by pain and medication: Judi sees a helicopter outside her bedroom window. The helicopter gets louder, but not larger. It enters through the window and circles the bed. The noise is deafening. The helicopter begins to drop little people onto the bed. People from Judi’s past and from her past lives.
What if Judi tells her own story? She might begin with this: “Death is in my house, in the air I breathe. Each day he sings to me. Each day he sits closer to my bed.” I knew I could start anywhere, with anything, with a pair of salt-stained boots tucked under a radiator, with the click of the lock on a cellar door, with a fluff of Cottonwood seed dropping from a tree, lighting on a sleeping dog. I could start with anything because in anything, everything is implied. I knew I could start anywhere, but this was becoming unbearable.
I imagine Judi in her bed, on her back, eyes shut, wearing a cotton pajama shirt, green with darker green piping around the collar. I hear what she thinks, and I write it down: He has made my bed away from the windows. He reads to me at night, slides his hand under mine. Now I smell soup, onion, his favorite. He’s on the phone to someone, whispering. I open my eyes and see the gray light in the window. This makes me happy, the daytime, I mean. I’ll sleep with my eyes opened. This gives me the creeps. I stop.
I begin to yawn like crazy. I pour myself another cup of coffee. I open the dictionary and pick four nouns and a verb at random and let the words guide my writing for the next, say, ten minutes. I check the clock. I chose: sansevieria, panic, chrism, chlorophyll, genuflect, and immediately I see my grandmother Agnes, my mother’s mother. I see her standing by her desk, on the phone, chewing her Clorets gum with her front teeth, listening, tamping the soil of the sansevieria that’s planted in a ceramic St. Francis of Assisi planter. When she reaches to the floor to pick up a bit of vermiculite she’s dropped, she genuflects because of her bad back, the rheumatism. And then she’s in St. Vincent’s Hospital after her second heart attack, and she’s weak, and her voice has changed alarmingly—it’s thin, reedy, high, like a flute—and it seems to come from somewhere else, and she doesn’t recognize me, but she recognizes Father Hulot, who has come to anoint her, and she screams at him to get out, get away, don’t touch me, you bastard, and the nurses have to come and lead us out. And that was the last I saw of her, and I realized then that someone dear could die, that for the rest of my life my grandmother would be away.
I snap out of it. I wipe a bit of drool off my lip, chin. I hear Chet Nyberg start up his car. He’s a go-getter. It’s ten of six. Chet has a secret life. Just like Judi. I think of Chekhov’s Iona Potapov and his little horse. To whom shall I tell my grief? Let’s say you had a girlfriend, and that girlfri
end died . . .
58.
Archaeology
I WANTED TO FIND JUDI, TO KNOW MORE ABOUT HER. I LOOKED FOR JUDI IN the cellar, rummaged among the artifacts for biographical evidence. Some of the detritus, I supposed, was abandoned here by earlier civilizations, the red bean bag chair, for example, the yellow awnings wrapped in blue canvas, the Naugahyde club chair, the orange life jackets, the Flexible Flyer. Against a wall was an upright roll of nursery rhyme linoleum. Someone had planned a baby’s room. There were several old tin lard cans, a carton of uncapped Mason jars and an iron dumpling press that were probably older than the house itself.
On and under a workbench were the following appliances: an unused, still-in-the-box electric wok, a green enamel fondue pot, a steel fish poacher, a Mr. Coffee machine, a food processor. Wedding gifts, you would think. But I knew that Judi had never been married. (Martha and I once owned three fondue sets, two toaster ovens, six electric blankets, four irons, three electric carving knives. We gave the extras away as, you guessed it, wedding gifts. We also had a hot dog steamer, of all things, and an electric ice crusher.) No, not wedding gifts, I decided, just the Dubey family fondness for domestic conveniences. A fondness, I knew, that was grounded in hope.
In one corner by the bulkhead door were garden tools—a small hand cultivator, a pitch fork, a spade, a bulb dibble, a trowel, a green hose on a white trolley, a galvanized watering can, and a metal lunch box designed to look like a suitcase with facsimiles of old travel stickers on it. Inside the lunch box were packages of flower seeds: gold-laced primroses, Dark Beauty asters, Imperial Blackberry Rose pansies, meconopsis, hollyhock, and dicentra, whose bloom looks like an icy-white, comical heart. Once, then, Judi had wanted a garden. I decided I’d plant the flowers in the spring. I wondered, would Spot eat them.
Mostly old clothes in the attic. Overcoats in storage bags, boxes of blouses, slacks, and sweaters. Handbags, tote bags, shopping bags. A stack of old forty-fives, Motown mostly, Beatles, Monkees. There were two aluminum tennis rackets. The most interesting attic find was an accordion in its case. The accordion was jade-green with a white fingerboard and a filigreed grille.
In the bedroom, in the top left-hand dresser drawer, a jewelry box, and in the box a silver charm bracelet with four charms: a heart, a fourleaf clover, a Statue of Liberty, and a seashell; Judi’s class ring from UMass, 1979; and a pair of earrings made from Frostie root beer bottle caps. In the right-hand top drawer was a plastic basket with wave clips, hair rollers, and bobby pins. I came across a familiar silk camisole, smelled it. Nothing unusual.
I hunted through Judi’s jacket and coat pockets and discovered a single business card for one Leah Rose Ditmore-Gordon, L.M.T., Massage and Aromatherapy. There was one surprise in her address book, an entry for Kris Kristofferson, with a phone number, Nashville area code, but no address. I dialed the number. A woman answered. I asked for Kris, please. She hesitated, said, May I ask who’s calling? I said, Lafayette Proulx. I’m with Apocalypse Records. She had me repeat what I said, asked me to hold on a sec. I heard her say, Kris . . . I don’t know. Some guy named Proust. I hung up. Judi and Kris. There’s a story there.
Judi’s high school yearbook, the Messenger, sat on a shelf in the linen closet. Holy Name High School, 1975. There she was, between Edmund Doyle and Vincent Druzialio. Judi was the only student in the senior class who did not face the camera for her portrait. That’s just the kind of gesture that can get you in deep trouble at a Catholic school, get you labeled as rebellious, intractable. I wondered was it Judi’s idea, turning her right shoulder to the camera, or was the photographer feeling rambunctious. Judi looked off to her right without a smile, but with a look of benevolence. She was quite serene and stunning, and quite out of fashion with her short, wavy hair. I imagined that Doyle and Druzialio cried themselves to sleep over their enormous good fortune. Beneath her photograph, this: Senior Religion Project, Ushers Club 3, Cheerleading 2, Spring Musical 4, Health Careers Club 2. She was in one other picture, a candid, with a boy named Ludy Bukys. The two of them are in chemistry lab, staring at a petri dish. The caption reads: A new love potion for Sister Monica John.
Judi kept no photo albums in the house, but she did have a White Owl cigar box crammed with loose photographs. A black and white print of Judi and Stoni in a playpen, both of them clutching the bars with hands and mouths, looking into the camera while brother George, in a white shirt and tie, watches them. Judi with Santa Claus. Judi with the Easter Bunny. Judi’s First Communion. Judi at a prom in a blue gown with a boy wearing a madras tuxedo. Judi on a beach blanket with two girlfriends. Judi at ten or so, sitting on a picnic bench looking sad. Behind her on the table are a plate of hot dogs, a jar of tea or juice or something, and a large white bowl. There’s a photo taken through a car windshield of a cow lying on an asphalt road, another of the St. George’s Church fire on Wall Street, flames curling out from under the eaves. I was at that fire, and I wondered if I’d seen Judi there. I wondered if she was one of the girls standing on the roof of a tan Chevrolet. There’s a black and white snapshot of five-year-old Judi wearing a straw bonnet, holding a tiny box purse in her gloved hands. She’s standing in a patch of dirt in front of the Quonset hut. She’s smiling or she’s wincing.
59.
Constant Companion
JUDI SAID, I’VE THOUGHT ABOUT THIS, LAF, AND I KNOW I DON’T WANT TO SPEND however much time I have left trying to avoid what’s, after all, inevitable and natural. I’m not being brave at all; it’s not that. I just can’t stand being so tired all the time that I don’t know who I am, can’t remember my own name, so sick that I don’t care. I’m not giving up. I’m not.
I said, I understand. I touched her knee.
She said, I can’t fight this cancer if I’m wasted with poison. I’m not afraid of dying . . . well, all right, I am. But I’m more afraid of the pain. I’m afraid of not being able to think clearly, afraid of not knowing what’s happening around me and to me.
And what was I afraid of? I had the expectation of a future, at least. Let’s say it’s ten years from now, twenty, and I get sick like this. Who’ll sneak the cognac into my hospital room? Shit, I didn’t want to think about this. What will you leave behind, brief candle? Heat? Light? Smoke? Ashes?
We were sitting on the living room couch, Judi and I, eating bananas—good for the recalcitrant digestive system—and drinking vodka martinis, Judi chasing hers with a glass of milk of magnesia. We had the heat jacked up to eighty. The radiators clanged. Judi asked me if I would bleed them in the morning. I didn’t know what she was talking about, but I said I’d take care of it. Judi had wrapped herself in a pink blanket, put on two pairs of wool socks.
Trixie and Hervey had gone home, Trixie in a huff because Judi had told her no more chemo, no radiation, no immunotherapy, no more experiments, no nothing. Trixie cried, said, You can’t just lay down and die. Judi explained that her chances of surviving even five years were less than seven percent with the chemo. Not much worse without it. Trixie said, But the doctors told you forty percent. They lied, Judi said. It’s easy to lie. I’ve done my homework. I know the score. She told Trixie how the chemo drugs, heavy metals, were damaging her heart, her lungs, her kidneys, her liver, and God only knows what else. Trixie said, You’ll come to your senses in a few days. You’re going to be all right, I just know it.
Judi said, Wonderful martini, Laf. She kissed my cheek. I asked her how she was feeling. Not bad. Her jaw hurt and her fingers; her fingernails were tingling. And, of course, her mouth was still ulcerated, sore, and her throat was raw. A little queasy, but not bad. Just normally sick. We were waiting for Stoni to drop by. Judi said, I’m afraid of the dark. You can fool yourself in the daytime, but not at night. She looked at me. Why is that?
I didn’t know, of course, but I guessed. You can’t distract yourself so easily at night, in the dark, I said. It’s so quiet. All you’re trying to do is slip away into dreams. It’s just you and yourself. And maybe you haven’t
listened to yourself all day and now it wants to be heard. I said, Shouldn’t you be explaining this to me? You’re the therapist. Anyway, it’s good you don’t live in Alaska.
Judi wondered what blind people made of the night. Can they feel the darkness out there approaching? The end of the light? Do they even understand light?
The phone rang. It was my brother. I said, How’s Mom, thinking why else would he call me. He said, Who the hell do you think you are, Laf? Huh? You fucked up your life, so now you’re going to fuck up mine. I said, Edgar, what are you talking about? I heard our back door open. Stoni waved to us from the kitchen, took off her coat, boots, gloves, scarf. Edgar said, Don’t give me that shit. You know what I’m talking about. I swore to him I didn’t. Delores, he said. I said, What about Delores? Stoni kissed me on the cheek. She smelled like outdoors, like leaves, I guess, and like clothes drying on a line. I could feel the cold air around her body.
Edgar said, Did you hear what I said? I got off the couch and Stoni sat by Judi. I sat on the floor, leaned back against the Morris chair. Judi and Stoni chatted. I listened to my brother tell me that Delores was leaving him after all these years and all because of a little talk she had with me. He said what right did I have to interfere in his marriage. I told Edgar I was sorry, but I did not tell Delores anything. I gave no advice. I listened to her. Edgar said, That’s not how she tells it. I said, I don’t know what to tell you. Edgar was quiet. Stoni lit up a joint, passed it to Judi. Judi made a silly face at me and inhaled. I said, Edgar, are you still there? Edgar?
I found out that Delores was in their bedroom, that she had not, in fact, left Edgar at all, that they’d had a family meeting after supper where Delores laid out her feelings in front of him and the boys. She said she was unhappy. This was news to Edgar. One of the boys said, So what, we’re all unhappy. What’s the big hairy deal? She told them she was going to look for a place to live, and the boys were welcome to come along if they wanted to. I said, Where are the boys now? Edgar told me they were watching TV He was out in the garage on the cellular phone. I told Edgar that it sounded to me like Delores was giving him a chance, that she wanted him to stop her from leaving, to give her a reason to stay. Edgar said, You think so? I do, Edgar. Why don’t you go talk to her now. He said, What if she’s packing her things? I said, Talk to her. He said, I will. I said, How’s Mom? Edgar told me she was fit as a fiddle.
Love Warps the Mind a Little Page 25