by Sarah McColl
People do not go to the Polynesian Cultural Center for the food. We wandered through a cavernous dining room—an authentic luau, someone boldly claimed—our brown plastic trays crowded with macaroni salad, roast pork, and tall red plastic cups with pellet ice and fruit punch. We sat across from each other. The long, communal tables were crowded with big groups of families. A kid spilled his milk and chairs scraped across the tile floors, echoing in a room loud with crying and benign talk.
Waiting for the big nighttime show, we sat in the grass near a tented pavilion that sold miniature ukuleles and magnets. It was getting dark. The tall lampposts lighting the cement pathways clicked on. Bugs swirled beneath them.
My husband began to tell me a story about the first time he’d been there. He pulled at the blades of grass while he talked. He was ten, he said. What he remembered was a couple sitting together on a bench. They had seemed hot and tired, but he watched them share a sexy glance, and then the woman shook her shoulders, side to side, he said, in a flirty little shimmy. He looked at me, sitting with my legs folded in the grass. “And now here I am, back here with my wife.”
I was hot and tired, too, but I knew it was my cue. I grinned at him, then shimmied my shoulders in the pale lamplight. He smiled back at me widely.
But blackness seeped into the car on the way home, blowing in on the air off the ocean. The dark edges of roadside palms leaned over the highway like crouched, menacing animals. Salt and hibiscus through the windows. We named our favorite parts of the day. Me: lying on the stiff, shorn grass in my wet bathing suit after paddleboarding, the quiet of the temple. Him: postcard view at Kailua, fire dancers.
“It’s funny,” he said in the quiet. “Yours are so small.”
“What do you think that means?” I asked.
“Isn’t it obvious? You love the small moments, and I love the big ones.”
“Yeah,” I said. “But what do you think that means?” The dash of our tiny rental car gleamed blue in the dark, and the headlights only shone so far.
“I don’t know,” he said, kindly.
HOME AGAIN, Saturday morning, still wrapped in sheets. My husband placed a white paper cup of thick dark espresso and foamy milk in my hands. “Cappuccino,” he said. I thought that the height of romance. My hair was a big red tumble, pink imprints of sheet creases on my skin and my eyes sleepy. “Thank you,” I said, though my intention was to coo. He sat on the far side of the room by the window. I had asked my mother for a white slipcovered reading chair, but I never did read in it. The chair would be more at home in a nursery.
He asked if I’d had fun last night. It had been a late and boozy one with girlfriends. My head hurt. I suddenly remembered the bartender, the free drinks, his smiling, sidelong comments. I wanted my husband in bed beside me and considered the merest joke of competition might bring him close. At parties, I liked watching other women flirt with him at the punch bowl knowing he would come home with me. My efforts had the opposite effect.
“If you want to sleep with other people, it’s okay with me,” he said.
Maybe I should have brushed my teeth, my hair. That was our bed, the Tempur-Pedic we bought several winters ago when we had less money. In the gray showroom, we lay side by side on the mattress, our hands folded politely over our belly buttons. Then we deliberated the purchase at a French restaurant now long out of business. We decided to go for it, and I opened a store credit card that day. Zero percent interest.
What I was feeling from him now.
Later that day, walking home from yoga, I sat on a stoop and called my mother. Her voice wavered with rage through the phone, like hot air rising from a tarred road. It is so damaging to a woman’s self-esteem, she said. If she wasn’t crying yet, she sounded like she soon would. Her reaction surprised me, until I realized it was a remembered one. We were not talking about me, we were talking about her. The refusals, the late-night absence, the Why-can’t-you-be-more criticism, the proverbial credit card receipt.
“No, no, no,” I reassured her. “I don’t think the problem is me.” Maybe I should have.
I heard her surprise through the telephone.
“Oh,” she said, and paused. “That’s good.”
THERE IS MORE to marriage than weekends and vacations, my mother said, and there was more to our marriage than that, too. But it was the time free from the numbing habits of our everyday—of commuting home, ordering Chinese, and then rinsing the plastic containers for the recycling bin—when the friction of our misalignments began to chafe.
He liked to argue in metaphor. After watching a miniseries on John Adams, he admired aloud the partnership of a woman like Abigail. Her endurance of long separations had been fortified, he said, by the knowledge her husband was achieving something great. I no longer thought my husband about to achieve anything great, and the part I remembered was the miscarriage Abigail suffered alone one summer.
We argued, recurringly and bizarrely, about a hypothetical road trip to the Grand Canyon. I longed for scenic byways and roadside slices of berry pie. Why stop at the world’s largest ball of twine, he said, when we were on our way to one of the world’s wonders. We should drive all night just to get there.
We were arguing about how to love. We were arguing about how to live. Then we were arguing about how to die, and in the end, not arguing in metaphor at all.
“You’re in denial,” my husband said. “You need to prepare for the fact that your mother is going to die.”
I did not know how to prepare for her death other than to be witness to her life.
On Friday nights, when I boarded a bus at Port Authority and rode two hours into the Garden State, I watched strip malls thin into farmland. The evening sky changed over the countryside, streaked with clouds and color as the sun set. My mother and I sat at the table in her darkened kitchen.
She would not outlive her husband, she told me. She would not move into a condo by the ocean someday, or sew a slipcover for a loveseat in the tropical fabric she’d already selected. She would know only one grandchild. She would not, she said, grow old in the way she had imagined. She would not grow old at all.
“I need to be able to say these things to someone,” she said, and so I listened.
IT WASN’T LIKE a plane going down. It was more like a car lurching forward, then stalling out. Each new chemotherapy drug brought a burst of wellness—deep reserves of energy, a renewed appetite. With it, she painted furniture, picked basil, whipped up a batch of pesto and froze it in ice cube trays. She knit baby blankets and hauled out the sewing machine. After she died, one of her friends mailed me two blue-and-white-striped Easter outfits. A seersucker dress and a seersucker onesie, both lined in plain white cotton. “Your mother sewed these for my kids,” she wrote, “but I thought you should have them.” She attended marathon board meetings and lunches with friends that stretched late into the afternoon. She would gain weight, take long drives, send long, chatty emails. We would all relax.
Each new drug also brought a spate of new side effects. Mouth sores, loss of appetite, nausea, peeling hands and feet, retained fluids, the full array of digestive problems.
There are only so many cancer drugs. The protocol was to try each drug for three months, then test to see whether there had been any change. There was a list we would soon exhaust.
“Rick and I were surprised to learn the results of my PET scan today,” she wrote. We had been at this the better part of a year. “I guess I should be impressed I feel so good when I have been pumped up with ineffective poisons for nine months.”
Sometimes someone would tell me about a drug they thought was a “miracle,” and I would send my mother a message. Was this on our list? Had she already tried it? And she would reply the next morning.
“It makes me very sad to think of my precious, luscious daughter reading about drug therapies. Pursue happiness, pleasure, and sensual delight! Cook, ride your bike, pick out your spring clothes. Just live harder! That is the medicine.”
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nbsp; MY BOSS ORGANIZED a dinner at an Italian restaurant in the East Village. In a private room behind heavy wood doors, my coworkers and I sat at a long table set under dim chandeliers. The cost of one night’s privacy was one thousand dollars. Most of our tab was wine.
That night at the table, after the plates of squid ink risotto and sausage orecchiette had been cleared, when people began to escape outside to smoke cigarettes, when we were leaning back in our chairs having enjoyed ourselves and still draining the last of the wine, I remember someone began talking about wanting to lose weight. She pinched a handful of flesh above her waistband. There was murmured commiseration about thighs.
I had watched my mother age twenty years in the past six months, I said. We should enjoy our bodies. It’s only downhill from here, and fast.
I must have been tedious company.
IN MANY RELIGIONS and philosophical traditions, the body is an obstacle, a liability. It must be controlled or overcome, and to reach enlightenment, it must be transcended.
For years I practiced a form of yoga based on Tantric philosophy. I am not a scholar of Tantra, but here is what I understand. On Tantric paths, everything is sacred. Rocks, tonsils, an octopus. The human body itself can be a gateway to the divine. If it happens here in earthly life, it’s called jivanmukti.
I cannot conceive of an enlightenment as a sustained state, static once achieved. But I have had moments of illumination as bright and flashing as a fish. They arrive unannounced, without fanfare—say, stepping off the Sixth Avenue bus or walking the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains. The sky turns lavender in the evening. Is that divine? I know it is the beauty of the material world, that I feel it in my body, and that it means something to me—that my breath will catch in my throat, that it fades almost as soon as it arrives, that I will be stunned again at its sudden reappearance.
THAT FALL I developed a new habit. Two blocks from our apartment was a storefront offering qigong tui na, a style of acupressure massage. Fifty dollars for sixty minutes. It was nothing fancy, but every week or two I returned to see a man who told me to call him Peter. He wore flowing black track pants, had broad shoulders and a wide, welcoming face. Sometimes when I swung the door open he was scooping rice out of a cooker under the low drop ceiling, but he would smile wordlessly, gesture toward one of the curtain doors, press play on the stereo, and I would undress in a bare room. It was always painful, the way he manipulated the tender knots tucked beneath my scapula with his elbow, or sunk his knuckles into the soft arch of my foot. I would allow myself to whimper, the face cradle growing damp, and he would whisper Shhh. When I returned to the waiting room, buttoned up again but also somehow undone, he would hand me a thin plastic cup of water and tilt his head with sympathy. I sat and slowly sipped, studying the charts near the register. They illustrated the meridian lines running through the body, how every area corresponded to another, and I would wonder about the original sources of all the hard places in me. When the cup was empty, I would sign the credit card slip and put on my coat. He would always stop me before I stepped back outside and give me one last adjustment. Pull my coat zipper higher beneath my chin or put both his hands on my upper arms and pat, as if warming me for the journey. And then, after several visits, he began to hug me, to fold me into his arms just as I was about to leave, and I would rest my head against him for a long, long moment. Bye bye, thank you, he said, and I would say thank you, too.
ONE OPTION FOR earliest memory: We have spent the day at the Highland Park Pool, where I lay my towel in the shade by the snack bar. Snow cones drenched in red and blue syrups, snack-sized bags of Fritos, hot dogs, the menu spelled out in black letters slid across rails like an abacus. My mother held on to the side of the pool, dutifully scissor kicking her legs and chatting with other mothers. Loud sounds of Marco Polo, the spring of the high board, the quiet pause, the punctuating splash.
In the hot late afternoon my mother drives us home on the tree-shaded streets by Turtle Creek in our red Suburban. I am sun weary, sinking into the scratchy gray upholstery, my limbs exhausted and the core of me cool from the water. It may be my favorite feeling in the world—the physical exhaustion after swimming that leads to a particular kind of hunger. It’s when I most want fried chicken.
At home, I wriggle out of my wet swimsuit and pull a dry cotton t-shirt over my head. It hangs to my knees for sleeping. That evening, I sit on one of the two wide windowsills in my bedroom. They are painted white. It is the hour when the sun bathes the redbrick houses on our street gold. My window looks out over the top of the honeysuckle bush in our front yard. I watch as cars pull up to the stop sign at our corner and turn right or left toward home, toward Bubba’s for biscuits and gravy, toward the Texaco around the corner to have their windshields washed, toward the evening bells ringing in the tower of the gray Methodist church. This is our neighborhood: Drexel Drive, Hillcrest Avenue, Mockingbird Lane. My mom has brought me chicken noodle soup, the kind from a red and white can, and because it was unusual to eat in my bedroom, this must be why I remember—how I ate it from frosted-opaque Tupperware, the noodles soft, the oil-splatched surface of the salty broth. It is the first time I can recall, with a certainty as indelible as bedrock, being within the envelope of my own skin. My senses surrounded my consciousness, vibrating like an electric fence. Outside my window, the whole world.
THE KINDS OF people who prefer to be naked, to stand at the kitchen counter fixing a sandwich in the nude, are still not dressed at their desk later, phoning the cable company. “I need to reeroticize my body,” a friend told me on the telephone after her partner had grown accustomed to the sight of her long legs, bare and languid, draped about their apartment.
When the time finally came at the end of college, and I began to lie beside another body all night long, I was surprised at my own sexual ease. It was not because I believed my worth seated there, though I felt worthy of fun, desire, playfulness. What I cared about was meaning, and the pleasure of sex was another place it lived. It is mysterious to me, in the way faith can be. It seemed such a simple expression of self and an all-consuming act of presence, like a prayer, but one said in tandem.
I HAD NO male friends, no male coworkers. “You need more men in your life,” my mother said. “They offer a different perspective.” Maybe I would call up my old college roommate and ask if he wanted to get a beer.
“And you should try to smile at a man in the street every day,” she added, like homework. This had never occurred to me. I had only ever been interested in the man whom I married, his hairline launching at me like an arrow.
In crosswalks and on the sidewalk, I let my eyes wander to bald heads and tattooed biceps. They were everywhere, and they looked back. I began to smile.
IF YOU WANT to understand partnership, take a dance class or go canoeing. Hold me tighter, I said on the dance floor. Paddle when I say or just stop, my husband instructed from the stern.
Sitting at a karaoke bar after Friday night swing, we once had a conversation we forgot to have before exchanging vows.
“Let’s each write what our definition of marriage is,” I said, handing him a stubby pencil and a song request slip.
I wrote: Marriage is physical and emotional intimacy.
He wrote: Life is a boxing ring, and marriage is my coach, wiping the blood from my face and squeezing cold water into my mouth.
Whatever that means.
THE POLICE OFFICERS in line before me at 7-Eleven were buying a day’s worth of car snacks. Cellophane pouches and drinks were piled on the counter by the cash register, and one of the officers was still racked with indecision.
“Cheez-Its or Goldfish?” the one asked the other, who then looked at me.
“Go ahead,” his partner said, waving me toward the cashier. “Slurpee’s on me.”
A week later, walking in Prospect Park, a squad car pulled beside me and rolled down the window. I worried I was in trouble, and then I recognized the face.
“How was the Slurpee,”
he asked.
It had been a very hot day, and it was great, and that was so nice, and thank you.
“I didn’t know if you were married or what,” he said, trailing off.
I wore a diamond ring and a gold band, but I don’t think they ever look. Before stating what I thought the jewelry made obvious, I enjoyed the simple fun of that brief moment. A girl in a pair of wide 1940s-style shorts that fluttered in the hot breeze, a man in uniform, a summer day.
“Well, you have a beautiful smile,” he said.
A FRIEND HOSTED a rooftop party. Guests wore feathers and eyeshadow and caftans. We drank dentist cups of whiskey, and my dear old friend introduced me to his new friends. After a toast, I called one of them a gorgeous man.
“Minnie, here, is a lady,” my friend clarified.
Later, sitting on a low brick wall, a photographer touched my shoulder. He was a man. He asked if he could get me a beer from the ice chest, then told stories about midnight bourbons in Southern juke joints, about the pagans who pilgrimage to Stonehenge in spring and dance with wreaths of flowers, about a woman he once met at a trailhead who offered him a blow job when they reached a peak. I wondered how these stories usually went over. I wondered how it would feel to kiss him. But more so, especially in the days that followed, when I began to imagine myself at the end of a dark bar on a red stool, aglow in the light of a Wurlitzer, alone in another state, I wondered what it would feel like not to meet a man like this but to be him.
When he finally asked, I said I worked as a food editor at a big company.