Joy Enough

by Sarah McColl

  What is it like to be a man, I asked, and when he answered, I replied that maybe I would like to be one. We ate free popcorn and white flecks settled in his beard. He paid such close attention when I talked, he forgot to close his mouth while he listened. A person will tell you everything within the first twenty minutes of meeting them, my mother had said. The trick is whether or not you’re paying attention.

  He said, Fish or cut bait.

  He had kind eyes, and people have gone on less before.

  You haven’t made any promises, my mother would say to excuse any behavior in a relationship that was not a marriage. Only now I had promised. In our own selfish ways, neither husband nor wife had upheld their vows.

  What if a man pays attention to me, and I like it, I had asked my mother.

  And she had said: That would be the most natural thing in the world.

  The wind tunneled down Third Avenue, icy from the waves of New York Harbor. He said, Let me walk you home. We made it three blocks up the hill toward my house before I stopped on the cold, dark sidewalk. I no longer wanted my own life, did not want to return to its quiet rooms and blank walls. We had never framed a single wedding photo.

  His studio was filled with Walter Benjamin books and DVDs of dark Scandinavian police procedurals, a guitar, an easel, and paintings I didn’t like. He spread a sleeping bag on the floor like a picnic blanket. With the lights off, he played the trumpet. Then we laid side by side like train rails. I felt blisteringly alive, and relieved I could still feel that way.

  “It is so nice to look at someone else’s face up close,” I said.

  I knew, at how true the words felt in my mouth, that it was my cruelest betrayal.

  MY MOTHER CALLED it the end of puppy love. My husband agreed but struck a word. It was the end of love, he said. Once named, our terms defined, at least he could be honest. I kept my secret.

  I consider it our last date, the night we sat in a dim neighborhood wine bar. It was the same place we’d celebrated Valentine’s years before. I had given him a handwritten card, poorly but painstakingly designed. After he moved out, I found it among electronics manuals and a stack of junk mail. But that night long ago, he had arrived at our table with a bouquet of orange tulips. We drank in low candlelight that cast heavy shadows. An elixir of bourbon and admiration traveled the distance between us.

  Now it was truth serum. “What would you look for in your next partner?” he asked, and the question took me by surprise, though my answer was as ready as his, both of them knee jerk and reactionary and mean.

  “Sexual enthusiasm and someone really, really fun,” I said. “What about you?”

  He looked at me hard, level, dead-eyed.

  “Loyal,” he said. “Someone loyal.”

  WE BOTH SEEMED more buoyant on the walk home, unburdened from our postures of hope, from being on our best behavior. When I emerged from the bathroom, drying my face with a towel, he already had a black bag in his hand. For years, his signature fighting stance was a sudden, wordless departure. I didn’t mind the leaving so much as the silence. Just say you need some time, I’d ask, or a walk. Don’t just go.

  This time, he remembered my request.

  “I want to leave,” he said.

  “I don’t love you,” he added. “I don’t even like you.”

  I SAT WITH my mother one winter afternoon in her kitchen. The snow was banked under the bay window by the table. It was easy to spot birds from our seats there, their colors vivid against a white canvas and the thin dark lines of tree branches. We saw a cardinal that day, and a blue jay. Blue jays are the bullies of the bird world, she said.

  “You need to make a list of what you learned from your marriage,” she said. “That way, when you meet the next guy and your mind goes blank, you’ll know what to look out for.” A magnet held an index card on the refrigerator. “Good judgment is based on experience,” she’d written in black Sharpie. “Experience is based on bad judgment.”

  At the time, I wrote a list of vague qualities. Sense of humor, it said. Someone who is present and not postponing joy, it said. But what did I learn?

  Events occur in time and space, singular alignments of a moment, a choice, a chance. To search for a lesson in the timeline is to pretend it is, in fact, a line—that life progresses in linear fashion, with its subjects gathering an accumulation of knowledge and wisdom applicable from one occurrence to the next. That is the effort to moralize our lives, as if they were folktales. I’m not convinced. She and I had always been more interested in meaning than plot, but a lesson is the merest articulation of significance.

  “What happened,” a man too young for me asked. And when I said, Same vision for the future, different ideas of how to get there, he looked disappointed. “I thought one of you might have stepped out,” he said. He was asking for a story.

  Condoms in jeans pockets are tangible but not the whole story. They signify all of the sex and none of the despair. The longer version, had I told it to him, would have gone like this: When I stepped in from stepping out, and shook the cold out of my coat and scarf and slumped into the bathtub, I still had bourbon on my breath and the memory of another man inside me. I sat beneath the shower and cried for the mess I had made, at the cowardice of the only rebellion I could muster. Sometimes I’d fall asleep on the enamel and wake when the hot water had turned cold.

  Now my life was the cliché-ridden trash.

  AFTER HE LEFT the hangers in his closet swinging, I pushed all the living room furniture to the center of the room and covered it with a rough taupe drop cloth. I wanted to paint.

  In years of photographs from our dinner parties, the orange color on the walls had seemed warm, and with the low candlelight, our faces glowed as if we sat not around a dinner table but a campfire. But in summer, the color had always struck me as too hot—close and oppressive like a stranger’s breath.

  I chose a stark, matte hospital white. Night after night, I returned from work to the room that looked like a home long vacated, the furniture draped in white sheets. I painted by the light of a bare bulb, then sat on the ladder, exhausted, overwhelmed, scanning my eyes across the patchy walls. It was all taking so long.

  Three girlfriends arrived unannounced on Sunday afternoon. “You hold her,” Laureen said, handing me her one-year-old daughter. Katie looked at my last near-empty gallon. “You need more paint,” she said. “Eggshell?” She left for the hardware store around the corner.

  Jessica climbed the ladder and with her long arms carefully painted the seam where the ceiling met the wall. Laureen suggested painting the ugly closet door. I nodded, bobbing up and down with the baby. Katie returned, cracked open the can, and poured it into a pan on the floor. Before the hour was up, they pulled the drop cloth off the couch and pushed it nearer to the wall, then scanned the room, pleased.

  “It looks good,” Jessica said. “This is a cool single-girl apartment.” The blank white walls reminded me of the Parisian apartments in Godard films, the emptiness a kind of shabby bohemian glamour. I could start to see it: I would lean my bicycle against the wall. I would keep oranges in a blue and white bowl on the table.

  Jessica’s husband arrived to pick her up, and jiggled my front door handle. “Do you have any tools?” he asked. Those had been my husband’s, I said. He turned around and left, then returned with a screwdriver, crouched before the knob, and tightened screws.

  I looked at my friends. Katie was checking her phone, Jessica had her hand on her husband’s shoulder, and Laureen was suggesting how I might arrange art on the expanse of white wall now behind my couch. Her baby gurgled at my ear.

  “Thank you guys,” I said, and my voice buckled. “Thank you so much.”

  “Well, don’t cry about it,” Katie said, typing with her thumbs.

  I said that I would not.

  THE LETTERS ARRIVED. They said, Congratulations.

  But maybe I should stay at my job, I thought, save more money, buy a cottage upstate. I was beginning to und
erstand how people could hide from their lives inside the ceaseless demands of work. Yet it was becoming increasingly difficult to summon daily devotion for what had once been at its worst benign, and more often truly fun, and now seemed almost offensively inane. I consulted another food editor over fourteen-dollar cocktails. Maybe there’s more to life than traffic goals, I said. Do we really care what the new quinoa is?

  “Oh,” she said, as if I’d revealed an adorable hobby. “You want to make the world a better place.”

  “Well, I’m from poor people,” I said, since I thought that explained it.

  “Not me,” she replied, “I’m from money.” I wondered how I should reply to this.

  “I can’t talk to other women like I can talk to you,” she said. “We really should be friends.”

  On the walk home across the Gowanus Canal, telling my mother the story, I couldn’t stop laughing. The dark water swirled with rainbows of shiny oil, the moon mirrored on its surface. I was as clear-eyed as a cat.

  I HAVE ALWAYS wanted a sense of self as immutable as a diamond, a fixed thing that refracts light regardless of outside attention or indifference. I’m not even sure this is how ego works, but I do know parents play a part in it, that a generous one can help give form to the inchoate shapes they see in their kids. Maybe this is why, in the months following my divorce, my mother kept repeating the story of my flying past her on the sidewalk the day I learned to ride a bike. She remembered I called over my shoulder, my long red hair streaming behind me. Isn’t it interesting? I taught myself!

  “You’re turning into one of those New York women who knows how to do everything herself,” my mother said that last winter. All I had done was driven us through snow to an Indian restaurant and suggest saag paneer. We listened to Joni Mitchell’s Blue on the ride home. My mother nodded off, her head toward the foggy window, and woke to me singing. I want to make you feel better, I want to make you feel free. Her laugh was a mix of relief and pride, as much for herself as it was for me.

  “See, you don’t need me,” she said. “You’re going to be okay.”

  SOME OF HER FLAWS: She was helpless and avoidant. Oh, I didn’t get your message, she’d say, when what she meant was she hadn’t listened to it. She thought her tax bill a personal attack. She was both a know-it-all and an unreliable source, a dramatic arc more important than fact. Oh, I don’t know anything! she’d demure if challenged. She whined. She was so practical she could be tone deaf. But I love him, I might say over a heartbreak, and she became a deli counter employee. Next! she said. And though she called my stepfather “pathologically optimistic,” she must have also seen brighter things ahead. Days before she died, boxes of peony bulbs and rhubarb plants arrived in the mail. I do not know if I have the energy to plant them, she said. On Mother’s Day, I dug holes for the peonies at the edge of the lawn, but they never bloomed.

  SOMEONE THOUGHT there was an information blockage. That we weren’t learning new details about my mother’s condition there were to be learned. Someone called the oncologist, and all of us awoke to a group email the next morning.

  “Anyone who calls the doctor will be permanently on my shit list,” she wrote. “Do you think he will give you a secret prognosis that you can handle, and I cannot?”

  Prognosis is an average. Prognosis, according to one opinion, said she should have been dead six months after diagnosis. I have never had the guts to call my mother’s oncologist. I still don’t want to be permanently on her shit list. There are questions I have about the end that will go unanswered. They have been supplanted by a belief as fixed as my DNA, inscribed perhaps with its own genetic doom. I think I know what he would say on the phone, his voice tender. It would not be about how she died but about how she lived.

  IT WAS A crowded Friday night at a strip mall steakhouse after chemotherapy. A black hockey puck flashed to tell us our table was ready. My brother and I softened our edges with alcohol.

  My mother ordered filet mignon and a baked potato. Growing up, she encouraged us to eat the skins. That’s where the vitamins are, she had said. Now I noted she left hers on the plate.

  “I’d like to be buried in a plain pine box like Johnny Olesen,” she announced. “With a honeysuckle planted on top.”

  I sat opposite her in the booth, the beaded lampshade between us like the ones on horseshoe tables in an old movie big band supper club. Next to the salt shaker there was a laminated dessert menu with photographs of multilayered, whipped-cream-topped cakes and blue cocktails. This life is filled with so many distracting and crude details. I put down my silverware and looked at her across the table.

  “I think honeysuckles are invasive,” I said.

  “Good,” she answered, cutting a bite of steak.

  spring again

  WE WERE ALL pulling away from one another by early spring, the veil between the living and the dead already falling. Why summon Bliss from China, my mother asked, when each of her children off living their lives was what made her happiest? We visited my sister for Easter. My mother slept in a hotel with my stepfather, where she stayed in bed, dozing, while Katy and I went to junk shops, took a yoga class. Saturday, we hid plastic eggs for my niece: in hotel room drawers, on windowsills, balanced on a roll of toilet paper. Violet searched, and my mother laughed.

  My memory of the next day is vivid with color. My aunt had decorated the table with egg-shaped chocolates wrapped in pink and purple foil. My mother ate ham and green beans. Violet wore a yellow cardigan and a striped blue dress, both too long. Duncan practiced his Texas two-step with me across the pale maple kitchen floor. I drank espresso with whipped cream on top. It really was a beautiful day.

  My mother and stepfather drove me to the train station after lunch. Everyone in the family was piggybacking on my Amazon Prime account, and it was up for renewal in August. Would she split the cost with me this year? Sure, she said noncommittally. I was flipping through a survivalist’s homesteading guide someone had left in the backseat.

  “Talk to me,” she said, when what she meant was, I have some things to say.

  This conversation I remember. It was when she told me marriage was Sunday morning and Tuesday night. That she was so proud I was going to graduate school. That I have only one life, and it is mine alone.

  At the train station, I opened her passenger-side door, leaned in, and burrowed my face in her chest. I often felt afraid to touch her in the normal ways. I didn’t know where it hurt and thought it might be everywhere. But that last time, I held her so tight. She wrapped her arms around me, I was subsumed. Her sweater was very soft.

  As I waited on the platform for the train to arrive, I saw my stepfather watching from the station house. He stayed until the train came, and my mother sent me a text message.

  “We want you to feel loved but not smothered. It is a delicate balance!”

  AND THEN THE veil fell completely. The phone at the farm rang with no answer, and she replied infrequently to text messages and to email.

  “I am going to see Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore with Jane,” I texted on the way to the movies.

  “That is exactly what you should be doing,” she replied, meaning she was glad I hadn’t come home for the weekend. When the movie let out, I wrote again. “Update: Kris Kristofferson is my dream man.” She reminded me of the time we saw a handsome farmer in a hunter green MG, his dog’s tongue flapping in the top-down Vermont wind.

  “I’m worried about Mom,” I told Duncan.

  He sounded annoyed. He continued to bring her dinner, but he noticed with increasing frequency that our stepfather was the only one who ate. Has anything changed, he asked. But nothing really had.

  What I didn’t yet know but sensed, was the latest news her doctor had reported the previous week: she had months, maybe weeks, and certainly not years. This should not have even qualified as news to us, but it did. She told her book club in an email as they planned the next meeting, but she did not tell me.

  “It is hard to expres
s how much I love my life,” she wrote them on Monday. “Please just make your plans, and I will endeavor to be there.”

  Don’t be angry with her, one of her friends told me later. It is a mother’s nature to protect her children.

  On Tuesday she said I might consider taking medical leave from work to be with her. I was at home with a sprained ankle, learning how to use crutches. You just say when, I told her. Yet wasn’t she saying it?

  I did not recognize the event as it arrived; I did not take the action of the woman I wanted to be. I waited for a more urgent request. Come to me now, baby, I thought she would say.

  But on Thursday morning, I woke to the voicemails Duncan had left throughout the night while I tossed and turned, unable to sleep.

  “Sarah, Sarah,” he said in one message after another, “please call me when you get this.”

  IN THE NIGHT, my stepfather offered her a sip of water through a green straw, the kind wide enough for bubble tea. She began to cough, and what came up, based on the darkened pillow that lingered in their bedroom for days, did not appear to be blood but necrotic tissue. Her body was already dead inside. She coughed and coughed and she must have been very scared, and my stepfather, holding the cup with the green straw as her eyes widened must have been very scared, too. By the time the ambulance arrived, the event was long over. My stepfather says his two black Labradors, usually ill behaved and in the way, lay quiet and obedient as the men from the funeral home carried her down the stairs, holding her body in delicate balance down the winding staircase. My stepfather stood in the bedroom holding her gold rings in his palm.