Signs of Life

by Natalie Taylor

  september

  So we beat on, boats against the current, born back ceaselessly into the past.

  —F. SCOTT FITZGERALD, THE GREAT GATSBY

  summer is over and it’s time to go back to school. In some ways this is wonderful. I have to get dressed in the morning. I have to brush my hair and pick out shoes. I am so relieved that I had an entire summer to not think about my appearance, but starting each day with a direction and a destination is a good thing.

  In other ways it’s really, really scary. I have practiced not crying in front of people for two months and somehow I have convinced myself that I will absolutely not present any of my inner feelings of weakness while at school. But teenagers are a lot like dogs in that they can sense things that others can’t. They know, they know, when a teacher is not on sturdy ground. And the thing is, I teach at a lovely school. We have wonderful students, but they’re still teenagers. This year I decided to work part-time (Monday, Tuesday, Thursday) so I can stay home a few days a week when my son is born. I am teaching two sections of ninth-grade English and one section of eleventh-grade English. Ninth-graders are usually incredibly eager to please and try very hard to earn the approval of their teacher. I’m not particularly concerned about them. Eleventh-grade students, however, are typically very cynical and at this point in their high school careers are ready to question everything, especially the teacher and the text. They’re not dogs, they’re velociraptors.

  We start the year with The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Gatsby was published in 1925, but it didn’t achieve its fame until after Fitzgerald passed away. The story takes place in New York during the 1920s—the Jazz Age (test question). Jay Gatsby is this hotshot bachelor who lives on the new-money side of the bay, and five years prior to when the story starts he was in love with a woman named Daisy. She loved him too, but he wasn’t from her socioeconomic playing field. So he goes off to war. She is sad but then meets this other guy named Tom Buchanan and he’s filthy rich (but a real jackass, as we later find out). Tom and Daisy get married and have a daughter. Well, you guessed it, five years later, Gatsby shows up and he’s made himself filthy rich in order to win back his golden girl. I won’t give away the ending, but you really should read it not only because it’s a good story, but also because Fitzgerald is basically a poet who writes novels. He’s the Kobe Bryant of 1920s literature. Finesse, it’s all finesse. (Hemingway is Shaquille O’Neal, but Fitzgerald is totally Kobe).

  In chapters 5–7 of The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald introduces (or begins to heavily emphasize) the theme of time. Jay Gatsby has been in love with Daisy for “five unwavering years” and even though she is married and has a child, Gatsby still believes that they can make it work. Fitzgerald gives the reader all sorts of clues that Gatsby is living in the past. There are “period rooms” throughout his house. The only picture that Fitzgerald chooses to mention is of an old friend, Dan Cody, taken nearly twenty years ago. At one point the narrator, Nick Carraway, describes Gatsby as “an over-wound clock.” The most obvious reference to time is when Gatsby sees Daisy for the first time in the book. He is so nervous during their awkward meeting that he bumps into the clock on Nick’s mantel. It drops and Gatsby, the man who is determined not to let the events of five years ruin his dream, catches the clock and prevents it from breaking.

  One of the most blatant references to Gatsby’s desire to go back in time is when he describes to Nick his ultimate plan to break up Tom and Daisy and marry Daisy the way it should have been. Nick remarks, “You can’t reinvent the past.” Gatsby replies by saying, “Can’t reinvent the past? Why, of course you can!”

  In previous years I always got to this part and thought, wow, Gatsby needs serious therapy. How can an intelligent human being believe that you can actually go back in time? As one of my students today pointed out, it’s like in Napoleon Dynamite when Napoleon tries the time machine and the uncle wants to be a high school football star again. And it is. I always believed that Gatsby would, just as foolishly, try the time machine too. That’s how bad he wants to go back. Yet it’s one of the most basic laws of physics—the clock only goes forward; it is completely impossible to go back in time. And the people who want it to go back, or the people who think it can, must be entirely delusional. Gatsby, Napoleon’s uncle—don’t they know any better? Don’t they know that the past, present, and future can never collide?

  But this year I feel like Gatsby and I have a whole lot more in common. We both had a dream. We both pictured our lives working out in certain ways. We worked and planned and spent years trying to build a certain style of life. We both had visions of future Christmas cards, he with Daisy, and me with Josh and the kids. Gatsby pictured himself and Daisy, sitting on a blanket enjoying the scenery of West Egg, talking about nothing, just relieved at the company. I had pictured Josh and me, sitting on the dock at Elk Lake, Josh swinging our baby boy into the water and talking about tying flies for fly-fishing and hunting for frogs. But like Gatsby, there comes a moment when it settles in that all the things we’ve pictured will never happen. And we both think, This is as happy as we can ever be. If this person is not in our lives then there is nothing else to look forward to. There is no image of the future on which we can rest comfortably. That person (me, Josh; him, Daisy) is the “incarnation” of our dream. For both of us, the dream dies almost as quickly as it came.

  You can’t reinvent the past. It seems so simple. But for me life has now been abruptly sliced into two categories. Before Josh died and after Josh died. And there are moments when I think that I can somehow go back. Until Josh died, I thought I understood what time was and how it worked. I thought I knew that you couldn’t go back. But death gives time a whole new meaning. I have days on which suddenly it will hit me, as if for the first time, and I will say to myself, Oh my God. I’m never going to see him again. Every time that thought comes to my mind, no matter when or where I am, it seems to be as painful as the first time. I can’t go back. I will never be able to go back. I know that even now, three months later, my brain hasn’t fully absorbed that concept. That’s what Gatsby and I also have in common. We can’t seem to swallow our own realities. Of course, it’s not like I’m cooking dinner for two and looking out the driveway waiting for his car to pull up, but I still don’t know if I get it.

  A few weeks after Josh died I ordered return address labels that only had my name on them. Instead of JOSH AND NATALIE TAYLOR they just said NATALIE TAYLOR. Around the same time, I took Josh’s name off of our checking accounts, and I immediately ordered new checks with only my name on them. Most notably, not even a month after losing Josh, I stopped wearing my wedding ring. I did this because I wanted everyone to know that I got it. I didn’t want anyone to think that I was in denial about his death (as if Consumers Energy or Comcast Cable care about whether or not I’m in denial). Months later, as I read The Great Gatsby again, I think about my return address labels, checks, and wedding ring. I don’t get it. I don’t understand what has happened. I just try to change things around me to help my brain along. But it doesn’t help.

  A week into school I talk to all three of my classes about how yes, obviously I am pregnant and will not be here the entire semester. I explain to them that I will be having a baby in the next few weeks, and once I leave, a long-term substitute will be with them until the end of the semester. This is really where you see the difference in age. The ninth-grade students sit frozen in their seats and the boys especially look scared to death that their female teacher, whom they really don’t know all that well, is talking about having a baby, you know like, delivering a baby. They seem to sit as still as possible and try to wait until the conversation is over. Once, Hales told me about when she was in the third grade and her teacher, Mrs. Sylvan, who was very pregnant, calmly announced to her room of eight-year-olds that her “water broke.” Haley said that immediately all the kids in class picked their feet up off of the floor, as if the water would soon seep under their desks. I have a strange feeling t
hat the same thing could happen in my ninth-grade class if I were to be so horrifically unlucky.

  The eleventh-graders, of course, approach the subject with a brash, arrogant tone. “Mrs. Taylor!” Steven McCain yells from the front of the class. I had Steven in class as a ninth-grade student. I have learned to seat him in the front where he is less likely to verbally assault other students. He is the type of high-school student who claims to be really good at “debating,” but seems to think debating consists of interrupting people who disagree with him and constantly saying overdramatized lines from Hollywood portrayals of attorneys like “Overruled!” or “Erroneous on all counts!” So here he is, weighing in on my current state of gestation.

  “Mrs. Taylor! I just want you to know I can drive you to the hospital if you have the baby in class.” This is the other thing: Everyone in the world except women who have actually had a baby assumes that childbirth happens with this tremendous sense of immediacy. It must always happen with someone speeding through traffic lights as the woman holds her stomach with two hands and practices breathing exercises from a decade ago.

  I tell Steven that I would rather walk to Beaumont Hospital but thank him for the offer. Then an argument quickly erupts between Steven and Anthony Myers, who sits on the opposite side of the room (for a good reason), about who would be the better driver.

  “I’m in the parking lot on Sunnyknoll, Anthony, and you’re all the way over in the Trash Lot [student name for the parking lot on Catalpa]. It would be ridiculous for you to drive.”

  “Steven, you just got your license a month ago—you think you should drive a pregnant lady to a hospital after driving for a month?”

  I pick up the handouts for today and get things going. Like most conversations that Steven McCain initiates, this is a stall tactic.

  “I saw you roll right through that stop sign at Catalpa and Henley yesterday, Anthony,” Steven pipes back.

  “You didn’t see me! I didn’t roll through that stop sign, and if I did, there’s no way you saw me.”

  “You can’t prove if I didn’t!” Steven looks up at me and changes the tone of his voice, “Is that the type of guy you want driving you to the hospital, Mrs. Taylor? A guy who rolls through stop signs?” Anthony tries to counter, but I cut him off before he can form a rebuttal. I tell the front row to take a handout and pass it back. Steven shoots a look to Anthony that says, “I rest my case!” I tell Steven he can take his argument in the hall if he’d like. He looks at me and says in a way that assures me someday he actually will be a very smarmy lawyer, “Mrs. Taylor, I just want to make sure you are taken care of.” I say thank you and move on with the assignment.

  No matter how rowdy my students are, no matter what kind of ridiculous arguments I have to referee, it is nice to think about something other than the pain of grief. I feel okay at school. It’s like getting some fresh air. But aside from those eight hours of structure and distraction, it’s tough.

  Sometimes I debate with myself as to what is now the worst time of day. I used to think it was first thing in the morning. Right after the accident, I would dream about Josh almost every night. He would be there, vivid, and everyone else in the dream would know what happened except him. In one dream I was at work and insisted on leaving early to get home to see Josh. I made a big scene—“No, I really have to go!”—and I stormed out. One time I dreamed he walked out of the hospital room, good as new. “You’re alive!” I said. He smiled like nothing happened. In my dream, I started to call all of my friends. “Josh is alive! Yeah, he’s right here!” In the dream I thought about how I had to cancel my appointment with Dr. G. Lately I’ve been dreaming that Mathews and I are trying to figure out where he is. “Has he responded to your e-mails?” I ask Mathews in the dream. I’ve also had the one where I try Josh’s number and he doesn’t pick up, or I haven’t seen him in a few days and I start to worry. I know why I have these dreams. Deep down my brain is saying, “This is too horrible to be real life. This didn’t really happen to me.” Then I wake up and realize that it did, which is why I used to think waking up was the worst part of the day. It isn’t.

  You might think the evening is the worst. Especially when the sun goes down and it starts to get dark outside. This is the time when families cook dinner, when people come back from practice or long meetings. I also quickly realized that this is when Josh always would have been home. I call my friends, but they’re in for the night. They’re with their fiancés eating dinner or watching TV. My mom and dad are washing dishes and Entertainment Tonight is on in the background. But I am alone. The dogs are quiet. The house is quiet. This used to scare me, when I would feel the sun setting. But ever since August, I’ve been listening to my radio shows in the evening. Dr. Joy Browne and Ira Glass fill the empty space of my house. I turn on the Tigers if there is a baseball game. Last night I watched the U.S. Open. So the evening is not as bad as it was. It’s still bad, I should say, it’s just not quite the monster it used to be.

  But today I realized that after school is the worst time of day. This is my first week of school and while I am relieved to be busy again, I have also found that all of my actions throughout the day somehow used to involve Josh. He used to leave me funny voice mails on my work phone. I used to call him on my prep hour. I always called him at lunch or on my way home from work. Oftentimes if he didn’t work late, he would be home around four. Some days we would be so tired from work we would both take off our work clothes and just lie in our bed at five o’clock in the afternoon talking about our days. I can see him so clearly, hanging up his suit in the closet, wearing his boxer shorts, telling me a funny story from work.

  After he changed into comfy clothes, Josh would usually have a lot of errands to run, or so he claimed. He would want to go to Margaret’s (his grandma), or his mom’s, or want to “see what my parents were doing for dinner,” or he’d want to go to English Gardens or to Best Buy, and I would complain that I hated English Gardens and I hated Best Buy. But we would always get in the car with only a few things on our list and it would take us hours to get home. But we were together and he made everything fun.

  Today I come home from school at three thirty. I lie down for a minute because my feet hurt. I think to myself how I have nowhere to go. I have no errands to run. It’s too early to work on stuff for school, and besides, what’s the point? Everything is just an excuse to not sit in the quiet and think about how he’s not here. I just sit there and stare at the closet and I listen to the sound of my own deep breaths as the tears come out unexpectedly. He’s not home, Nat, I tell myself. He’s not home.

  Jason ended his biweekly dog-training sessions at the end of August. I have been trying really hard to keep it cool on the walks when the dogs get a little jittery, but I’m not good at it. Every walk gets worse. I get worse so they get worse. Today’s walk is a huge disaster.

  Relaying the details only makes it more painful. They are horrible. They lunge at every stupid squirrel, chipmunk, or leaf that sputtered across the road. Louise pulls on the leash almost the entire time and the more frustrated I get the farther forward she moves.

  Finally, we get home and I proceed to emotionally explode. I rip off my sunglasses, throw their water bowl on the ground, and tell both of them that I don’t even want to look at them. I am dripping with sweat. I tear my clothes off and get in my bathrobe. I hate my life.

  I get in the shower. I sit on the floor of the shower. Sitting on the floor of the shower is the ultimate act of surrendering. It’s where I go when I have been defeated. I think about nothing and everything at the same time. I stay there a while, just staring at my feet, feeling how when I lean forward, just a little, my belly can touch every part of my body.

  I get out of the shower. Louise and Bug are lying in their bed. I turn to walk to the bedroom and there in the middle of the floor is a large pool of urine. I let my head drop.

  I clean up the mess. I sit down and start to talk to them. I tell them that we still have to try. I know
I’m not great at this, but we still have to try. A major realization hits me as I sit on the floor talking to Louise and Bug. Sometimes I reach a point, like on the walk, where I think my life is so unfair that there should be some magical divine intervention to help me. I should be able to go home, throw a fit, and after my shower, Louise and Bug should magically become Lassie and Old Yeller. But this doesn’t happen. If fact, the pool of urine was an official announcement that this will probably never happen. I used to think that because of my tragic situation, everything else in life should somehow be easier for me. I used to think that I got a free pass, that I would never have to really work again, that someone should just send me money, and that if I ever needed anything, someone could get it for me. But with Louise and Bug I am constantly reminded that there is no easy way out.

  Tonight I am taking a class through my hospital called Beginning to Breast-feed. It is, as it implies, a class designed to explain how to breast-feed, why to breast-feed, and to cover any problems that may arise while breast-feeding. The informational packet that was sent to my house encourages fathers to attend. I know that I will be one of the few single people in my class.

  I walk down the halls of the building. The walls are lined with posters of moms and dads doing various parenting poses. One poster is about what the coach should do during childbirth. There is a picture of a husband holding his wife in various positions. Another poster reads INFANT SAFETY and includes pictures of a dad holding his baby supporting the head and neck. PARENTING A TODDLER is accompanied by a picture of mom, dad, and child all looking happy, the child with a cooperative smile on his face. DAD’S ROLE IN INFANT CARE depicts a man with a sleeping child nestled on his shoulder. I feel like walking down the hallway with both of my middle fingers exposed to both walls, which are suffocating me. Or maybe I should just periodically spit on some of them, the ones that I find most disturbing. I am annoyed with the assumption that all of us are here with a man. This is a ridiculous reason to be annoyed, I realize, and it is not the general pattern to be a widow at the age of twenty-four. But I still feel the burning desire to vandalize these posters, which are clearly mocking me.