Joy Enough

by Sarah McColl

  My mother had stayed in bed all day. I climbed the stairs to her room, which sat underneath the sharp, pitched angles of the roof, and stood in the doorway, not wanting to enter. The smell was sour and fetid. I was feeling mean.

  “It smells bad in here,” I said. She looked up from her magazine, stunned, embarrassment and surprise on her face.

  “You’re rude,” she said. “Maybe it’s because I’ve been sick for eight months,” she added, as if we were talking about the flu. My heart beat hot with shame. And because she wanted me to leave, and because I wanted to, too, I turned back downstairs.

  Ten months later, I looked for something in her bedroom. She was no longer stretched atop the floral sheets with The New Yorker, but the smell was still there. It was from the dog bed, I realized, the thick mat of hair and oily skin rubbed into the plaid fabric and the rag rug beneath it, hot canine breath hanging close in the air.

  AT NIGHT, crickets sawed outside the windows of my childhood bedroom, and I read sixteen years of old journals, turning their pages into the early morning hours, as if I did not know what would happen next. There I was, same as ever, a linked paper chain of self-replication, continuously through time, the very same shorthand for a simple, happy life: muffin tins, cross-country skis, a desk by an open window. When had I made everything so complicated?

  Downstairs my mother was at the sink, washing dishes in yellow rubber gloves. My feet were bare. She leaned her hands on the counter and turned to me at the kitchen table.

  “Can’t you see yourself teaching English and having babies and inviting people over on Saturday night for dinner and dancing in the living room to the ukulele?” She looked at me, the plastic gloves drippy with soap suds, as if I were to answer. “Can’t you see it?”

  The yellow porch light brightened the window over the sink. Bugs circled the brass fixture outside. I could see it, I said.

  “It’s not too late to start over,” she said. “You don’t always have to be a good girl.”

  We spent the rest of the summer driving the long-way places, and when we arrived, sat in parking spaces with our seat belts on.

  Maybe I should apply to graduate school.

  Great.

  I’m afraid I’ll meet a man, and he’ll pay attention to me, and I’ll like it.

  That would be the most natural thing in the world.

  Should I start recording these conversations?

  We’re not saying anything interesting.

  In our talk, we were not faced with an end. We were present and entertaining the possibility of something beyond, as if we were crouched on a riverbank, dipping a toy boat into the current.

  “What if I expect too much of life?” I asked.

  She shrugged. “So what if you do?”

  I STOOD AT the kitchen sink rinsing a colander full of cherries, black-red and glossy. My stepfather’s car pulled into the driveway, returning from chemotherapy. The car doors opened, and my mother watched her steps on the uneven flagstones, or hung her head, I couldn’t tell. Sleigh bells, sewn to a leather strap and hooked on the front door, rang merrily as she pulled the door closed behind her. She had a thing for Santa Claus, she joked. Jim Morrison and Saint Nick.

  She declined a cup of tea. She wheeled her walker straight into the TV room. I poured the wet cherries in a bowl and followed.

  She sat on the couch, her bony knees pressed tight together and between her slim thighs a widening space of nothing. I eased beside her and placed the cherries on her lap. She was already crying, and she did not often do that.

  It was as if she confessed, the way she said it. Three pounds. Going, going, gone.

  The afternoon sun was bright on her collection of terra-cotta pots filled with leggy geraniums. The leaves smelled like dirt. Her writing desk stood in the window cluttered with recipes torn from magazines and letters that needed response.

  “It’s very simple, Sarah,” she said. “I love you, and I don’t want to die.”

  There was nothing else to say. We each ate a cherry, then spit the pits into the blue and white bowl.

  SHE WANTED A burger at the Stockton Inn. We sat on the front porch with a view of the bridge across the Delaware River to Pennsylvania. The traffic was very close. Silver-haired men rolled by in red cars with the tops down. Each had a woman as a passenger, usually wearing what seemed like too much makeup for a hot day. Motorcycles passed through the small town intersection with their guttural roar. I drank a gin and tonic. Did she have a drink, too? She’d sometimes order bourbon and ginger ale, which is what her father drank and her mother drank, too. The waitress seemed preoccupied and kept returning to our table to provide a forgotten menu, an omitted fork. Maybe she was new. Maybe she was heartbroken. I once absentmindedly wandered away from my shopping cart in the fabric section at Ikea to look at lamps. I returned to find the cart had stayed put but the purse inside it had not. I sat in the front of the store canceling credit cards and crying, because I was now not only heartbroken but also a fool. A man approached. “I’ve been looking all over for you,” he said, “you walked off without your purse.” I never got to tell my mother that story. She would have said, See? There you go, as if she’d known all along the outcome would include a good deed performed by a handsome stranger. This is one trickiness of grief. How can I “mourn” the “loss” of someone I can still summon? We ate our burgers and kept talking. The waitress refilled our water glasses, and a group of Italian men arrived, sat at the table beside us, ordered wine. They made a comment to my mother, and everyone laughed. The appliance store across the street was closed and washing machines stood in the darkened front windows like undressed mannequins. It was August, and the sun was low and golden, so it must have been around seven or eight o’clock when my mother said, “Who knows how many more summer evenings like this we’ll get?”

  fall

  HOW ABOUT A last-ditch vacation? I had been asked to cover a food event in Hawaii, and we could make the most of it, I suggested. On the plane, most people looked like my husband: relaxed, happy, at least half Asian. The flight attendants walked up and down the aisles in maxi dresses printed with island blooms like Luau Barbie, then one leaned close to hand him his chocolate-covered macadamia nuts, and a sheet of glossy black hair fell around her face. He shared with me, 23A and B. I fished my fingers inside the slit of the shiny silver pouch and looked down at brown Colorado, rugged as a cowboy’s calloused hand. The view gave me hope, as if I might be able to sort my life from cloud distance and then on island time. Hawaii, my husband had said in the days leading up to our trip. Hawaii, like an incantation. I looked at him now in his seat, munching macadamias pleasantly, engrossed in a game on his phone.

  We lowered our heads for the front desk clerk at the hotel who draped long, muted necklaces strung with brown shells the size and shape of small beetles around our necks. Our room was seashell pale and sounded just the same, filled with orchids and a basket of exotic fruit. We stood at the railing of our balcony above two pools and countless palms, hushed by the curling ocean waves below. Who were all these people, I thought, reclining below us on chaises, lazily turning magazine pages and sipping rum. A thin strip of white shoreline stretched to Diamond Head, rising like a promise.

  “Hideous,” I joked.

  He had been to this island before with another woman and here’s what I knew about her: She was rich from her father’s line of convenience stores and accordingly difficult; she had orgasmed most reliably with the light tickling of a feather, which she kept in her bed-stand drawer. I entered stage left on a romantic set piece. Blooms nestled on the crushed ice of a mai tai, the crisp bed linens in boxy rooms with windows pushed open to the ocean, the idle slide of slack-key guitars. New character, same motivation. Birds do it, bees do it. Let’s fall in love. That evening we transformed into the strangers we had observed from our balcony. We ate plates of tuna soaked in inky soy and pushed aside the paper umbrellas in our drinks for a sip. Three men with ukuleles sang in swaying harmony wh
ile two hula dancers moved beside them. The women swirled their hands like conjurers, playing the air close at their hips like stringed instruments and then twirled their hands up into the darkness, smiling at some skyward beneficence, as if they could harness it from the atmosphere and tuck it back in their pockets. Maybe they could. “You would make an excellent hula dancer,” my husband whispered to me. Later, my heels dangling from one hand, we walked the stretch of sand in front of our hotel. I stumbled ankle deep into the salty waves. That night we went to bed together in the dark, the balcony door open to the ocean sounds.

  The sun felt like a menace, the way it bore down on us all day with its unrelenting intensity. I smeared my skin with SPF 70, sweat it off, reapplied. Pimples emerged. One of us was a natural to this climate, but it was not me. Beyond the Hard Rock Cafe and California Pizza Kitchen, the streets of Honolulu did not seem designed for pedestrians. We waited at streetlights for traffic to subside, then rushed across intersections without striped painted lines. Platters of hamburger patties and pork, with slices of orange cheese on top, ice cream scoops of white rice, everything covered in thick brown gravy. I wanted a vegetable. My husband had self-diagnosed a gluten allergy, and having forgone the macaroni salad, chatted merrily about his improved digestion as we ate at a plastic picnic table lacquered bright red beside a sun-dull road.

  It was not hiking food, but we hiked. Pedestrians on their way to the Diamond Head trailhead must pass single file through a dark, narrow two-lane tunnel toward oncoming traffic, then across a parking lot where a truck sold shaved ice painted with syrups.

  “How is it different from a snow cone again?” I asked.

  The ice was finer, shaved, soft, he said.

  The sun pressed down on us like a sandwich griddle while we wound through ochre dust and scrub brush on a cement trail. We drained our little bottles of Poland Spring. Halfway up our ascent, a woman had scrambled off the trail. She sat on the bald face of a short hill between two large boulders. She leaned between her knees to vomit. Her face was tear streaked. We stood below her on the trail, and I hollered.

  “Are you okay?”

  “Can we get you some water?” my husband added.

  She raised her head from between her knees and stared at us with narrowed eyes.

  “Please leave me alone.”

  So we climbed. My t-shirt was wet at my lower back, and the elastic of my underwear rubbed the crease of my thigh. My mind was scorched blank as the crater we climbed. The sun had ablated my consciousness. What was left was the wet rind of my body and a will that seemed to exist without volition; this is what moved me toward the top of the volcanic cone. Up 74 steps, up 99 more, then out of the sun to the final 43, enclosed in the tight spiral staircase of an old military observation deck. The task at hand was my imperative, but I understood the pull to rest between rocks, to give up before the payoff of the final view.

  Here is what you see after the 560-foot ascent. Dry blond grasses that arch in the breeze; mesquite with brittle branches called kiawe; the crisp, long pods of haole koa, hanging like cicada husks from a tree; a red lighthouse on the shoreline that looks like an impostor; an abandoned bunker from the Fort Ruger days, salt bleached and battered, its squared shoulders huddled against the dull landscape and wind. More commanding is the wide view: the rising silver city and winding stretch of Waikiki, slim as the penciled eyebrow of a wizened barmaid beneath a distant domed sky. It is not just the sun that is unrelenting but the view itself—its insistent, bald-faced pronouncement, swaggering and unsubtle as a beauty queen. Let’s do it. Let’s fall in love. For a long time, we stood together at the railing of an observation deck, looking out. I wondered why I was so unmoved.

  Good morning. There was coffee on the night table for me, a forehead kiss. My husband carried a plastic bag from the gift shop across the street filled with floral purchases. A blue polyester Hawaiian shirt for him, a rust-colored, one-size-fits-all dress for me. It was sweet, I could see that, but the color of the dress made me sad. It looked funereal, like late-season chrysanthemums.

  “Do you like it?” he asked.

  “I do, thank you.” I got up from the bed to brush my teeth and pulled a cotton sundress from my suitcase.

  “No, wear your new dress,” he said, holding it out to me, limp in his hands. “I’ll wear my shirt, too,” he urged.

  We walked the bright sidewalks of Kalakaua Avenue looking like employees on our lunch break in amusement park-issued costumes. A camera dangled from my husband’s shoulder, and he stopped in front of a kiosk with a paper sign handwritten in black marker: WAIKIKI’S OLDEST LEISTAND 1928. The first owner’s name was Kapela, somehow mangled into Aunty Bella; she had strung the garlands of fresh, fragile orchids by hand. Then her daughter took over, then a granddaughter. Such ephemera seemed expensive to me, but he insisted. He selected a pale lei of flowers whose essence, crushed and contained, comprised my favorite perfume.

  He draped the ring of plumeria, tuberose, and gardenia across my bare shoulders and we kissed there on the groomed sidewalk of the Royal Hawaiian Center. A Japanese tourist took our picture. In it, my husband needs a haircut and I need sunglasses. I am squinting at the camera.

  We had married in a boxwood-trimmed garden. He had not lifted a veil, though I knew he would have liked the drama of it; I wore a net at the crown of my head that cascaded to my waist like Rapunzel’s hair. On my way down the aisle, I had stumbled over the uneven grass, and both my parents had gripped my elbows at either side. The photographer caught my laugh, my young shoulders shrugging, my eyes in a half roll at my own lack of grace. Nobody’s perfect, my look says, though perhaps I expected others to be. It did not occur to me to kiss my parents when the three of us arrived before the groom standing between two large brass candelabras. When they dropped their arms, I stepped up to him like a woman about to win her carnival prize. In the picture of us leaving the reception later that night, a friend said my husband looked like the cat that ate the canary. Each of us thought we were the lucky one. I do, he said, and back then, I did, too.

  On our honeymoon in Mexico, I trotted out seven nights of cheap polyester lingerie. Day three, emerging from the bathroom in the barest of all and bearing a beer. “Let’s just watch TV,” he said, putting an arm around me. I learned mira from dubbed Woody Allen that night. Look!

  We spent a day at Chichen Itza, where I carried a large black umbrella to block the sun, like Mary Poppins on holiday. On the way back to the hotel, after passing the bright, swinging hammocks for sale by the side of the road woven by women and inmates, was a vast cenote, an Indiana Jones swimming hole secret. The ceiling of the cave arched over the opaque water like the dome of a cathedral with a light-flooded opening at its apex. Bats swooping. Someone took our photo there, too. In that one, my husband’s hand on his tanned hip bone, me in a red swimsuit, we look happy.

  But before climbing into the van for the final leg of the return trip to the hotel, he had slipped into a dry change of clothing. Decades of swim practice made him adept at the deck change, practiced perhaps more out of habit than modesty. Even at home, he wrapped a towel around his waist, stepped into his underwear and jeans, and then whipped the towel away to rub his hair dry, all without ever having revealed himself.

  The windward side of the island was dense with water-thick rain forest foliage. In the rental car, my husband turned the radio to a pop station. I dangled my hand out the window on the highway, and examined my face in the side-view mirror. New pimples. We had three agenda items that day: visit a Buddhist temple; attend the Polynesian Cultural Center; and see the beach at Kailua, which he remembered from the last time he was on the island and in love with another woman.

  We parked in a bleached, palm-lined lot, the sun-soaked pavement hot as a range, then walked a narrow sandy path past lush, low-growing sea lettuce and down to the waterline. I picked up a kalanchoe flower that had fallen onto the path and tucked it behind my ear.

  The pale sand of Kailua Beach rings a turq
uoise bay, bookended between the high volcanic peaks of the Ko’olau Range. The sky arches to the water, the convex curve of blue meeting blue and then our bare feet sliding into the hot sand. I wore a black string bikini under a white linen dress, the skirt made of widening tiers like a cake, swirling fiercely around my legs. His hair stood on end in the wind, his eyes squinting in the brightness. We walked up and down the beach, its beauty like an impenetrable wall. We never seemed to arrive. I looked for a break in the landscape, for a loophole, something set askew. The sound of the wind at my ears was like traffic. I reached to rearrange the flower.

  “Congratulations!” warbled through the wind to us. A man with a naked torso, as tan as a nut, his hulking hand holding a black ribbon leash that led to a perky Chihuahua, was beaming at us.

  My husband shouted back, confused. “What’s that?”

  “I said, ‘Congratulations!’ You’re in this long white dress, you got the flower behind your left ear like a wedding band. And you,” he looked at my husband knowingly, as if they shared a secret language. “You’re newlyweds, right?”

  We looked down at our clothes, and then back to him, laughing.

  “Look at that,” my husband said. “You’re right.”

  Was that all it took? A plane ride, frozen drinks, a wide white expanse of beach unspooling to the horizon? One of us thought it did, more present in paradise than in our days making the bed, clearing the table, rinsing the dishes in the sink. The other preferred the ordinary hours, felt here in the tropical sunshine as empty as an abandoned shell.

  The temple was set inside the deep shade at the foot of the Ko’olau Mountains. I rang a peace bell, watched sparrows dive past the lacquered Buddha, and then sat alone under a small red-roofed pavilion. I counted my breaths, then kept breathing but forgot to count. Then I started over.