by Sarah McColl
FLIRTING FILLED ME up again. It pulled me from the edge of a deep pit on a cemetery hill and brought me back among the living.
“I think it’s a blessing,” my friend Jane said. “What are you going to do, sit home alone and feel the full weight of your sadness?”
Instead I felt the full weight of a man’s body. David left oily sardine cans on the counter and fell asleep to a 12-hour YouTube recording called “Rain on a Tent.” He sang “If I Were a Carpenter,” and looked like he wanted me to harmonize, or answer. When he watered the neglected orchid on my windowsill, its green buds cracked into five-petaled blooms, their insides washed watercolor-violet, edges pale as a celery heart.
When I spilled bourbon in the grass and couldn’t remember the words to the songs I love, he led me from one body of water to another. Down a wooded path to a creek bed swimming hole, to the ocean. We sat on a sun-bleached slab of driftwood, slipped out of our clothes, and tiptoed across the uneven stones pressing into the soft arches of our feet, down to the lapping edge, then into the cold water, rocks ragged underfoot. The day was bright, and we bobbed underwater like corks. I tilted myself back, held on the water’s surface like a hammock. The bay was filled with moored sailboats, and then suddenly I couldn’t stop laughing—at the sun on my face, the cold water stinging my eyes, salty in my mouth; at the man who stood naked nearby, as tall and stately as a heron. We waded back to the shore and I said, “Thank you thank you thank you, that was such a good idea,” and he shooed it away. “Of course.” The seat belts clicked, our hair wet in the windows-down wind. He said, “Let’s go for ice cream,” and we did.
Night after night at Long Pond, we watched the sun sink below the pines. The water reflective lavender, the sky soft pink, like a fingertip. I felt a duty to experience each pleasure twice—once for my own sake and again for someone who could not. My mother would have liked the cool of a Berkshire evening, the Irish fisherman’s sweater I had pulled over my sundress. She would have found this cocktail too strong and too sweet. David stoked the wood fire in the evenings, carrying in logs from the wood pile out front, and she would have liked that, too—going in once the fireflies came out, the clanging pots in the kitchen as they hit the burners. After dinner, he sat in the stern of a canoe and paddled us from end to end, the oar dipping into the dark water. I sat in the bow, relieved to let someone else steer.
But if he left me alone for the post office, or to buy orange juice, he returned to find me on the couch.
“Why are you crying?” he’d ask, and I’d answer, “I don’t know,” because the truth seemed too long to explain.
I think again of that anthropologist on the radio, the one who talked about our brains under the influence of attraction. Who wouldn’t want to crowd out grief with something that feels like hope?
WHEN THE SUN shone, I tilted my face up to it and closed my eyes. God was not everywhere, but she was.
PLEASURE BECAME THE escape hatch to my grief. One friend was impressed by the range of men to whom I was attracted. A captain of the Staten Island Ferry, a motorcyclist, a cocky magazine editor, a bad artist, another cocky magazine editor, a barista, a sci-fi novelist with a trust fund, a Canadian, a surfer, a waiter, a bartender, a silver-haired architect, the writer I began to love. I had never done this before. This, being what I understood my friends had been up to in our twenties when I was playing wife and roasting chickens. Meet-cute in the dark, sniff out fun with a bourbon nose, feel your way. I loosened the valve in me that had been turned right-tight, and skin became my sail, directing me toward an island of relief. Witness: my forearm, my foot sole, my fingertips; the bowl of my hip bones, an earlobe, lower lip. Grief introduced an unknown abyss, just as it revealed the inverse, like the black-and-white trick silhouette of an old woman. Seen just so, she is young, too. And so a scrim parted, and behind that was a vast expanse. It could be saturated with the sense of something other than pain; it could be flooded with joy.
THE LIGHT OF early evening, driving a fast highway at rush hour. I remember: “It is hard to express how much I love my life.” I had heard this as a kind of grateful prayer. “I have not accomplished much in this life,” she decided on her fiftieth birthday. “But I have loved and been loved, raised four great kids, and I still wear the same size I did ten years ago. It just doesn’t look the same.” Suddenly I’m in the fast lane, and I see her reclining in bed. She can’t sleep, and so she is up weeping, pushing the sticky buttons of an old cell phone to send this last note to the women she has read novels with for years, a last note about how much she loves her life, and this time, the words ring in my ears with panic. The sound goes sour, like an atonal turn to minor key. What if it were not gratitude but a lament? I hear it then as a cry, the sound of a life pulled from its vessel. It is hard to express how much I love my life. Please do not make me leave it yet.
I WAS COMFORTED by my own grief. I liked to sob until my breath couldn’t keep up, like staying underwater too long and then returning to the surface, panicked, disoriented, and then awash with relief. I liked working myself to exhaustion this way, heaving until I was scraped clean. I liked feeling that total and complete emptiness. It felt factual to me, like irrefutable evidence. This was how much we loved, now turned inside out.
WHEN I RETURNED to work two weeks later, I thanked my boss for understanding I needed the full time allotted by our company bereavement policy.
“We all understand,” she said. “Sometimes life gets in the way.”
She had it all backward.
Shortly after that, I gave notice.
I WAS TEN years late to being alone and began to note its difficulties one by one. I could not reach the overhead kitchen light, for example, and had never before bothered to purchase a stepladder; my husband could reach it standing on a chair.
My car was a culprit. Whenever I awoke to the gray slate roof of the church out my bedroom window buried under snow, I felt the aloneness. I felt it stepping into my boots and pulling on my gloves, holding the shovel, and then outside in the storm, stooped beside my tires as I tried to clear myself a path.
Imagine my relief to learn a friend hired a neighbor boy to dig out her car. And when I discovered I could climb onto the kitchen counter and hold the top of the refrigerator with one hand and reach for the overhead lightbulb with the other, I felt an outsized sense of triumph. How many divorcées does it take to change a lightbulb?
Our marriage, in the end, had echoed with loneliness. How many times had we been restaurant silent, the couple that dines wordlessly, then beams up into the server’s face at the offer of more water and dessert? To feel the absence of affection between us where once there had been so much, florid and overflowing—that was lonely. This was just being alone. Empty rooms, carrying the laundry, the bed so wide I began to sleep diagonally across it. I could begin to wrap my arms around each instance, one by one; I could get my sea legs on the ocean of aloneness. As a divorced person it was not terrible.
As a daughter, it was.
I HAD GIVEN UP on dinner. Not the activity of eating in the evening, but the meal as a recognized daily event. It was not a ritual I was interested in partaking in at home or providing for myself, and so I ceased to turn on the stove, didn’t even make my own coffee anymore. What I wanted was to be out in anonymous public places or safe, familiar ones—on other people’s couches, at a bar with a strong drink and a sweet friend. My friends treated me to expensive wood-fired pizzas and assembled complicated snack plates piled with cured fatty salami, briny black olives, crumbling slices of aged cheddar. They ladled homemade chicken soup. My own kitchen had become a room to pass through after it was long dark outside, and only then on the way to the bathroom, where the smooth curves of the bathtub held me like a crib.
The cross-streets in my neighborhood slope down to a view of New York Harbor. On the walk home from the subway, between the rooflines of Sixteenth Street, the water is busy with the white wakes of speeding ferries, the creaking, high masts of historic
al replicas; the Statue of Liberty stands at the center framed by cranes and low-slung barges. One evening in the spring, I arrived home before the sun had disappeared behind the milky folds of her massive robed figure. I tried to find a new way to name the sky’s shade of old-fashioned sailor’s delight. One thing I loved about my mother was her odd celestial observations. A certain moon was like a fingernail clipping, a sort of sunset like God winking. This sky was the saturated hot pink of a ripe fruit not found in nature.
When I stepped across my threshold that evening, I dropped my purse on the floor and found eggs in the fridge. Low heat, a knob of pale butter, and I stood for several minutes at the stove dragging the spatula in figure eights, tending to it, until I tipped the yellow eggs onto a white plate. That night, I sat on the floor of the hallway, my back against the wall, and I ate dinner. That night, I did not cry in the bathtub.
NOTE TO SELF, care of mom’s Stop and Shop bag: “Sometimes I wonder that our six-year-old may be brittle,” she worried about me. “But when I advise her to look into herself and feel her strength, she responds with jolly self-control and a temporary surge of self-reliance.”
I sometimes wonder that I am brittle, too, that the ordinariness of the world that others seem to bear with such grace and forbearance is enough to break me. I feel joy today. I feel sad today. Ticktock, careening from frivolity to despair in the span of a week. Feeling may be living, but living like this is exhausting.
The evidence to the contrary is today. Or May 9, 2014. Or May 22, June 13, July 28, August 17. All of the days I awoke from the cool relief of sleep to the blunt force of my grief, or even a less acute awakening to the simple devastation of what had been lost. Predawn birdsong can break your heart. Still, I swung my bare legs out of bed, put the coffee on, moved through sorrow and joy as they came in waves. After a year had passed, my doctor praised me with a pronouncement that proved my mother wrong. We sat in a small office downtown, and he tapped at his computer keys under black-and-white photos of skyscrapers. “You are very resilient,” he said. True: To bend to force and not shatter proves a kind of strength I did not know I possessed, and still, that surge, too, is temporary—all of this is.
THERE WERE DAYS when I thought my mother had given me a great gift by dying. Later, I was grateful for certain logistical conveniences, like one less household to negotiate at holidays or the freedom to move far away, but I do not mean that.
Here is a woman who fills her one small life. Not with milestones—birthdays, graduations, weddings she wasn’t particularly good at. In fact, it wasn’t until college, when people fussed over one another’s birthdays with hand-drawn cards, a proffered doughnut, little treasures left like bird’s nests outside dorm room doors, that I came to know the importance of celebrating those special days, too. For her, the anniversary was in the hour hand. Branches of bittersweet in the snow. The copper kettle on to boil. Beauty is the ticktock, and feeling it the pulse. There is no reward in the end, my mother said of parenting. The only reward, ever, is ongoing; it must be the day itself. Would I like it? she would ask of a movie, a restaurant. She is out for her own enjoyment and yours. Go ahead, wink with a stranger at the cash register. This is how to make the drone of a day come alive. You want something done, ask a busy person, they say. You want to know joy, ask a woman who swims against her own sadness. Opposites are most striking when held at once: bloom and rot, reverie and boredom, grief and joy. You are just like your mother, people say, and finally I know.
summers
JANE DROVE ME to the farm the morning my mother died, and Jane drove me to the ocean in August when I was still crying. She let me be her mute and deadened passenger while she kept busy.
It reminded me of the picture book my sister had loved as a girl, We Help Mommy. We help Mommy prune the rose bushes. We help Mommy fold the laundry. On the North Fork, I helped Jane buy raw milk from a kind old Welsh farmer who handed us a glass jug and six brown eggs. I helped Jane buy a paper sack of square ice. I helped Jane shell beans and shuck corn, and eating outside next to the blooming hibiscus as big as a dinner plate, the salt air waving our hair, of course it was Jane who helped me. We walked into the lapping water of Long Island Sound, our hairless legs prickling at the salt, and when it was dark, laid our backs flat on the benches of the picnic table, still and silent, watching for something to happen, and knowing it was already right there, happening.
Jane gestured at the wide galaxy with her hand. That’s Mars and the Big Dipper.
“This is how you feel now,” she said. “Soon, you will feel something else.”
I had only known one other person who could relax into life like that, could so take it moment by moment.
Inside, she flipped the downstairs lights off and the ones in the upstairs bathroom on. She combed her fingers through my hair, painted Jolene bleach onto a stripe near my ear and wrapped it in aluminum foil.
We piled into her bed, her laptop between us, and watched a movie about two women who run away together, turn tough and wild as she wolves. The lush 1930s wallpaper was like hiding in a tower of cabbage roses. She peeked inside my foil.
“It’s ready,” she said.
I leaned my head under the faucet and washed out the white bleach. In the mirror, Jane standing behind me, the white strands were like a feather woven into the underside of my hair or an earned stripe of paint across a warrior’s face. Look, she said. Is this what a woman is? It is the more interesting question to me now. We called it my coven streak.
“We need berries,” she said in the morning, and we drove toward the town at the tip of the island. First, a stop: a shaded street dead-ends at the beach, covered not with sand but with white rocks as smooth and round as eggs. We spread our towels and raked our fingers through them. Smaller stones the color of citrine and cooked shrimp, wet-shiny as marbles at the shoreline. We collected a little pile to bring back home to anchor the pages we each kept on our desks. The water was Aegean green with three jagged boulders that broke the surface near the shore. We dove from them like mermaids, waded, fought the undertow.
I was laughing again. Water and white sun my most reliable sources of joy.
“Our great mother,” Jane said, and she was laughing, too.
Our limbs dried in the sun, and we packed up to buy berries and three kirby cucumbers. The beach stones were heavy in my bag. We drove with the windows down, hair whipping across our faces.
“When I met you, you were a girl,” Jane said. Three years before, I was twenty-nine. It seemed another lifetime. “Isn’t it great being a woman?” she asked. She turned onto the road marked NO TRESPASSING like she owned the place, and tree branches scratched at the car like bony witches’ fingers.
IN THE FALL, I entered graduate school, driving an hour north from my apartment twice a week. I wrote in a library carrel with a view of the turning foliage and checked out stacks of books an armful at a time. I called workshop the dead mother parade, since I was not the only one who wrote obsessively about hers. There were dead husbands, too, fathers, pets, siblings.
“Are you in graduate school?” Duncan asked me, “or a two-year grief program?”
Both. I did frequently dissolve during meetings with professors, but my crying was as often about gratitude as it was about grief. When we sat around a table discussing Virginia Woolf as the first snow began to fall, I was acutely aware of what I was not doing. I was not buttoning my emotions beneath a starched collar or announcing myself on conference calls or analyzing click rates or writing advertorial about the versatility of a butter-like food product. I was no longer living my life in division. My heart, head, and body were in the same place at the same time, all pointed in the same direction.
IT WAS NEARLY Mother’s Day again, and I stood in the cemetery under the afternoon sun. On the drive to New Jersey, I watched the vines of a yellow honeysuckle wave in my rearview mirror. It was the first time I’d been back, and it looked as it had that day—the sprawling purple redbud in bloom, the white dogwoo
d at the base of the hill. It was a pretty spot, as far as death parks go. A man rode a mower up and down the hill. It was difficult to be maudlin in the drone.
When I arrived at the patch of lawn where I remembered we’d stood, there was no marker. I walked up and down the rows of dead, searching. There was no headstone with her name. We had not wanted to select one in haste before the funeral. The honeysuckle would do. Now it appeared this was an errand no one had wanted to resume or return to.
For most of the trip to the cemetery, my vision had been blurred from tears. The greatest comfort was imagining myself lying on the clipped grass above my mother’s body. This spot seemed close—the angle of the sun and pitch of the slope. I split the difference between two spots that seemed like contenders, and tried to cover as much space as possible, sprawled like a snow angel. The mower buzzed in the distance, and a butterfly bobbed in the air. I wished I was the sort of person who believed that a butterfly was a sign, but since I couldn’t, since I couldn’t even be sure the bones beneath me were hers, since that quiet country graveyard was, at this very moment, loud with the sounds of upkeep, and of keeping on, I had to admit: It was all suddenly quite funny.