The Age of Grief

by Jane Smiley

  Stephanie had been asleep since about eleven. I opened the curtains of her room partway, and shook down the thermometer by the streetlight outside. I opened her drawer and took out a fresh nightgown. The house was quiet, and I was fully awake somehow, though I hadn’t had a full night’s sleep in six days, or slept the sleep of the innocent in weeks. The darkness, when I closed the curtains, seemed a presence in the house, sensible, like heat. I let it envelop me where I sat on Stephanie’s bed. I might have said that it pressed against my skin, got under my clothes, filtered into my hair, coal dust, blackness itself, sadness. I reached out my hand and put it on Stephanie’s small hip under the covers. It submerged her, too, pressed her down against the dark pillow so that I could barely see her face. Even her blond hair, coiled against her neck, moist with sweat, gave off no light. Now the darkness felt as though it were getting into me—by osmosis through the skin, mingled with my inhalations, streaming into my eyes and up the optic nerves to seep among the coils of the brain, replacing meditation. It pooled in my ears. My pulmonary arteries carried blood into my lungs, where it was enriched with darkness, not oxygen, and then it spread through the circulatory system, to toes and fingertips and scalp. The marrow of my bones turned black, began spawning black blood cells. And so thought was driven out at last. Meditation, the weighing of one thing against another, the dim light of reflection, the labor of separating thread from thread, all gone.

  I ran my hand gently up Stephanie’s back and jostled her shoulder. “Time, sweetie,” I said. “I need to take your temperature.” I jostled her again. No response. Now I put the thermometer on the night table and lifted her in my arms. Her head flopped back against my shoulder, and I put the thermometer into her partly open mouth, then held her jaws closed. I was glad she seemed to be getting sounder sleep—she had been restless for two nights now. I counted slowly to 250, then took out the thermometer and laid it gently on the night table. Then I unbuttoned her nightgown and slid her out of it. Her skin was so damp that it was hard to get the sleeves of the clean one up her arms. I stretched her out on the mattress, smoothed the blanket over her. Then I carried the thermometer into the bathroom and turned on the light. 105.2. My hand was still on the switch. I pushed it down and submerged myself in darkness again.

  I did not have a thought, but I had a vision, or an image, a fleeting memory of the stars as they looked the night I drove out on the interstate, as many stars as worlds as eras as species as humans as children, an image of the smallness of this one gigantic child with her enormous fever. When each of them was born, Dana used to say, “There’s one born every minute,” but she was grinning, ecstatic with the importance of it. “Isn’t it marvelous what you can do with a little RNA?” she would say, just to diminish them a little. But they couldn’t be diminished. So, however many worlds and species and children there were and had been, I was scared to death. I crept to the phone and called the clinic, where, thank God, they were wide-awake. I said, “Is it possible to die of the flu?” They put a nurse on right away. Was she very sick?

  “What does that mean? She has a temperature of 105.2.”

  “But how is she acting?”

  “She’s not acting any way. She’s asleep.”

  “Is she dehydrated?”

  “She urinated at around ten thirty. We’ve maintained lots of fluids.”

  “Is she hallucinating?”

  “She’s asleep.”

  “Is she lethargic?”

  “She’s asleep, goddammit!”

  “Is it possible to wake her?” Her voice was patient and slow. Now I had another image, the image of Stephanie’s head flopping back on my shoulder and the utter unconsciousness of her state. I said, “I’ll try.” She said, “I’ll hold.”

  And then I went in and I sat her up and I shook her and shook her, and I said, “Stephanie! Stephanie! Wake up! Wake up! Stephanie? Listen to me. I want you to wake up!” She groaned, writhed, protested. She was hard to wake up. I reported this to the nurse and she left the phone for the obligatory hold. After a while she came back and told me to bring her in. Her tone was light enough, as if it were three in the afternoon rather than three in the morning. I began to cry. I began to cry that my wife was unconscious with the flu, too, and that I didn’t dare leave the other children in her care, and pretty soon the doctor came on, and it wasn’t Dan but Nick, someone whom we know slightly, in a professional way, and he said, “Dave? Is that you, Dave?” and I of course was embarrassed, and then the light went on and there was Dana, blinking but upright in the doorway, and she said, “What is going on?” and I handed her the phone, and Nick told her what I had told the nurse, and I went into Stephanie’s bedroom and began to wrap her in blankets so that I could take her to the hospital, and I knew that the next morning, when Stephanie’s fever would have broken, I would be extremely divorced from and a little ashamed of my reactions, and it was true that I was. They sent us home from the hospital about noon. Dana was making toast at the kitchen table, Leah was running around in her pajama top without a diaper, and Lizzie had escaped to school.

  I sat Stephanie at the table, and she held out her wrist bracelet. They had spelled her name wrong, Stefanie Herst.

  “That’s the German way,” said Dana. “It’s pronounced ‘Stefania.’ Shall we call you that now?”

  Stephanie laughed and said, “Can I have that one?” pointing at the toast Dana was buttering, and Dana handed it to her, and she folded it in two and shoved it into her mouth, and Dana buttered her another one. They were weak but in high spirits, the natural effect of convalescence. I went into the living room and lay down on the couch. I looked at my watch. It read 12:25. After a moment I looked again. It read 5:12. It was not wrong. Across the room on the TV, Maria and Gordon and some child were doing “long, longer, and longest.” Leah was watching them, Lizzie was erasing and redoing her papers from school, and Stephanie was coloring. Dana appeared in the doorway, wiping her hands on a towel, then smiled and said, “You’re awake.”

  “I’m resurrected. Are you sure I was breathing all this time?”

  “We had a nice day.”

  “How do you feel?”

  “Back to normal.”

  “How normal?”

  “I’m making fried chicken.”

  “Mashed potatoes?”

  “Cream gravy, green beans with browned almonds, romaine lettuce.”

  “The Joe McManus blue-plate special.”

  “I set a place for him at the table, just like Elijah.”

  The ironic middle. We were married again, and grinning. We’ve always made a lot of good jokes together. I heaved myself off the couch and went to the shower. Not so long ago, Lizzie came home and said. “You know when you let the bathwater out and there’s a lot of little gray stuff in it?”

  I said, “Yeah.”

  She said, “That’s your skin.”

  I stood in the shower for about twenty minutes.

  And then it was Friday, everyone in school, day care, work, all support services functioning, the routine as smooth as stainless steel. I was thirty-five, which is young these days, resilient, vital, glad to be in the office, glad to see Laura and Dave, glad to drill and fill and hold X-rays up to the light. In our week away, the spring had advanced, and the trees outside my examination room window were budded out.

  As soon as the embryo can hear, what it hears is the music of the mother’s body—the lub-dup of her heart, the riffle of blood surging in her arteries, the slosh of amniotic fluids. What sound, so close up, does the stomach make, the esophagus? Do the disks of the spine creak? Do the lungs sound like a bellows or a conch shell? Toward the end of pregnancy, when the pelvis loosens, is there a groan of protest from the bony plates? Maybe it is such sounds that I am recalling when I sit on my chair with the door to my office half closed and feel that rush of pleasure hearing the conversation in the hall, or in Dana’s office. Delilah’s voice swells: “And then they—” It fades. Dave: “But if you—” Dana: “Tomorrow w
e had better—” The simplest words, words without content, the body of the office surging and creaking. Dana’s heels, click click, the hydraulic hum of her dental chair rising. In my office, I am that embryo for a second, eyes bulging, mouth open, little hand raised, little fingers spread. I have been so reduced by the danger of the last few weeks that the light shines through me. Does the embryo feel embryonic doubt and then, like me, feel himself nestling into those sounds, that giant heart, carrying him beat by confident beat into the future—waltz, fox-trot, march, jig, largo, adagio, allegro? I don’t sing, as Dana does, but I listen. Jennifer Lyons, age fourteen, pushes open the door, peeps in. “Hi,” I say, “have a seat.” And I am myself again, and the workday continues.

  And continued. And continued. She made lasagna for dinner. Saturday she got a baby-sitter and we went to the movies. Afterward we stopped at the restaurant next to the office and had a drink. She put her arm through mine. I watched her face. Now I could speak, but what would I say? If there was not this subject between us, I could have talked about the news, our friends, the office, our daughters, but now I could say nothing. We sat close, she put her hand on my knee. I drank the odor of her body into the core of my brain, where it imprinted.

  On Sunday there was laundry and old food in the refrigerator. We mopped the floors, and Dana was seized with the compulsion to straighten drawers. I raked mulch off the flower beds and got out the lawn mower and climbed the ladder to clear leaves out of the eaves troughs. Lizzie and Stephanie spent the weekend obsessively exploring the neighborhood, like dogs reestablishing their territory. Leah took this opportunity to play, by herself, with every one of their toys that she had been forbidden over the winter. I liked her touch. She didn’t want to damage, she only wanted to appraise. I thought of my temptation to speak on Saturday night with horror. Each of these normal weekend hours seemed like a disaster averted.

  Monday at noon Dana and Delilah were late, did not appear. Dave was surprised at my surprise. Man to man. He didn’t look at me. He said, looking at the floor, “Didn’t you know that she canceled everything?” Man to man. I didn’t look at him. I said, “Maybe she told me and I wasn’t listening. It was a busy morning.” Man to man. We glanced at each other briefly, embarrassed.

  She was not at home at three, when I got there to wait for the big girls.

  She was not at home at five fifteen, when I got back from the day-care center with Leah, or at five thirty, when I put in the baking potatoes and turned on the oven.

  She was not at home at seven, when we sat down to eat our meat and potatoes. Lizzie said, “Where’s Mommy?”

  I said, “I don’t know,” and they all looked at me, even Leah. I repeated, “I don’t know,” and they looked at their dinners, and one by one they made up their minds to eat, anyway, and I did, too, without thinking, without prying into the mystery, without taking any position at all.

  She was not at home when Leah went to bed at eight, or when Lizzie and Stephanie went to bed at nine.

  She was not at home when I went to bed at eleven, or when I woke up at one and realized that she was gone. At first I considered practicalities—how we would divide up the house and the business and the odd number of children. These were dauntingly perplexing, so I considered Dana herself, the object, the force, the person that is the force within the object. In the confusion of dental school, of fighting with my father, of knowing that my draft lottery number was just on the verge of being not high enough, of taking out a lot of student loans and living on $25 a week, I remember feeling a desire for Dana when she first appeared, when she paused in the doorway that second day of class and cast her eyes about the room, that was hard and pure, that contained me and could not be contained, and I remember making that bargain that people always make—anything for this thing.

  No doubt it was the same bargain that Dana was making right then, at one in the morning, somewhere else in town.

  She was not at home at three, when I finally got up and went downstairs for a glass of milk, or at four, when I went back to bed and fell asleep, or at seven, when Leah started calling out, or at seven thirty, when Lizzie discovered that all the clothes she had to wear were unacceptable, or at eight forty-five, when I checked the house one last time before checking the office. Dave caught my eye involuntarily as I opened the door, and shrugged. At eleven the phone rang, and then Dave came into my examination room between patients and said, “She canceled again.” I nodded and straightened the instruments on my tray. At two my last patient failed to show, and I went home to clean up for the girls.

  She was sitting at the dining room table. I sat down across from her, and when she looked at me, I said, “Until last night I still thought I might be misreading the signals.”

  She shook her head.

  “Well, are you leaving or staying?”

  “Staying.”

  “Are you sure?”

  She nodded.

  I said, “Let’s not talk about it for a while, okay?”

  She nodded. And we looked at each other. It was two thirty.

  The big girls would be home in forty minutes.

  Shall I say that I welcomed my wife back with great sadness, more sadness than I had felt at any other time? It seems to me that marriage is a small container, after all, barely large enough to hold some children. Two inner lives, two lifelong meditations of whatever complexity, burst out of it and out of it, cracking it, deforming it. Or maybe it is not a thing at all, nothing, something not present. I don’t know, but I can’t help thinking about it.