Days of Awe (2 page)

Was that birthday party the last time we were all together, Mark and Josie, Chris and I? Surely not. There must have been other gatherings, dinners, brunches, movies. But in the highlights reel of our memories, we don't recall pleasant, uneventful Wednesday afternoons or moderately enjoyable evenings out; we remember occasions—graduations and recitals, holidays and birthdays, and this one was mine. I think sometimes, if the parameters of existence were somehow different, if life were memory, then happiness could prevail, and nothing fine would be lost.

It was my birthday, and we had just finished dinner at Mark and Josie's house. My best friend was a little drunk, which barely warranted notice. It was just how she amplified a celebration, the way any of us might, how she became giddy and charming and magnetic. She had just sliced the cake and dropped an enormous slab on my plate.

“Congratulations, Iz,” she said, licking frosting from her finger. “Forty-one is officially the end of the line!”

Chris glanced at me with raised eyebrows. My mild-mannered husband was frequently shocked by the things Josie said; he never quite knew how to respond, so he followed my lead.

“Thank you,” I said, smiling. “Happy birthday to me.” I took a bite of the cake, banana with chocolate frosting, my favorite and no one else's.

Josie sawed off another piece and passed it to Chris. “Forty-one,” she said, “is when you come face-to-face with the void!” She laughed at herself, a low, raspy cackle. “The great yawning chasm of oblivion!” She took a big swig of her wine and grinned at me with purplish lips.

Mark put his arm around his wife. With his free hand he reached for her wineglass and drank the rest of it. “Easy there, cowboy.” He looked at me, his face an apology I didn't need.

“Oh, Jose,” I said. “I'm not quite ready for my midlife crisis.” I thought of Hannah at home with my mother, snuggled up together under a blanket watching
Planet of the Apes,
which for some unfathomable reason they both loved. I thought of the pink-and-orange woven bracelet Hannah had given me that morning and the homemade card:
You're the best Mommy ever!
I'd read that and had to turn away; if she saw me tearing up like an idiot, she'd leave the room. That was the real void, the true earthly terror: being the mother of an almost-ten-year-old girl.

“We're in it together,” Josie went on. She was only a few months behind me. “The next box of tampons you buy could be your last!”

“Stop, Jose,” Mark said quietly.

Her face reddened, and she glanced at Mark, chastened. “Don't scold me,” she murmured. She turned back to Chris and me. “Anyway!” she said, with a merry little kick in her voice to compensate for that blip. “It's not as if it's some kind of a big secret! Doesn't everybody feel that cold lick of mortality on their birthday?” She smiled broadly and held up a paper plate. “More cake?”

“I don't feel that old,” I said quickly. I didn't know what I was going to say next. “I don't feel old, but I do think I'm probably no longer eligible to marry a movie star.”

“Did you have one in mind?” Chris asked. We were taking the reins. A marriage, the entity of it, was capable of a lot of things, and I was grateful for the ways ours could sometimes move and shift with surprising grace; how together, as a force, we could pick up the slack of social discomfort. Our long connection rescued us. Not always, but sometimes.

“Charlton Heston,” I said. I shrugged.

“Of course, he's dead,” Josie piped up, “which gives you an advantage.”

I took another bite of cake. Josie knew how to establish the perfect ratio of banana to chocolate.

“Mark hasn't gotten any cake,” Chris said. It was true. Josie had sliced pieces for me and Chris and herself, but she'd forgotten Mark, or ignored him.

He held out his paper plate, which, like all of ours, had
MARK'S BAR MITZVAH
!
printed on it. Josie and Mark lived in Mark's parents' old house, much of which was pleasantly frozen in 1982. They'd been living there for just over a year, after his parents became snowbirds and headed south, and Mark and Josie hadn't made it their own yet. You never knew what you would stumble on in the attic or at the bottom of a dresser drawer. A rolled-up poster of a cat hanging upside down by its claws. A Jane Fonda aerobics videotape. A few months earlier, Josie told me she'd found a T-shirt in the back of Mark's dad's closet with
WORLD'S GREATEST LOVER
printed on it in fuzzy block lettering. She tossed it in the garbage before Mark saw it, she told me, saved him from that particular image. How much of our relationships are made up of those little mercies the other person never even knows about?

“Sorry, babe,” Josie said, as she passed Mark an extra-large hunk of cake. His hand brushed hers. “Sorry about that.”

And then everything was all right again; all was forgiven. We all felt it, the wave of ease that washed over us.

“Oh!” Josie hopped up. “Izzy! I have one more present for you!” She had already given me an orange sweater, a bottle of pink sparkly nail polish, and an enormous slab of dark chocolate.

Chris glanced at me, with an almost-imperceptible twitch of his lips. We both knew what this would be. In addition to teaching, in her spare time Josie was an artist, and every special occasion brought forth a brightly wrapped Josie Abrams original. In college, she'd received an honorable mention in an art department competition. That was enough to keep her going. Twenty years later, she was still at it. You had to admire the commitment, even if the product was sometimes inscrutable. We had seven Josie Abrams sculptures and five paintings on prominent display around our house, because in addition to making gifts for me, Josie was also in the habit of stopping in unannounced.

She dashed upstairs and thumped around above our heads. “Close your eyes, Iz,” she called, coming back down the stairs. “This one's not wrapped!” I looked at Chris, then at Mark. Mark shrugged, indulgent, fond.
Don't blame me,
that shrug said.
She's your friend.

Josie clomped into the dining room and pressed a large, rectangular canvas into my arms. I could still smell the paint on it. “You can open your eyes now,” she said. She was like a little kid, vibrating with excitement.

I looked. It was a painting of thirteen women sitting together on one side of a long dinner table, in the style of
The Last Supper
but with middle-aged women instead of apostles. The women were wearing sweaters or high-collared blouses; they wore lipstick and had formal, old-fashioned hairstyles, updos and teased 1950s bouffants. They had vacant, pleasant expressions on their faces, and they were examining clear plastic containers of different sizes.
“The Last Tupperware Party!”
Josie said.

“Oh!” I said, genuinely stunned. I had a fleeting thought about faith and impermanence, about ambition and disappointment. Those dopey-faced women tugged at my heartstrings. “I love it!” I said, and I meant it. I loved the brain that had imagined this painting, the hands that fashioned the women in their pastel tops. I loved Josie, who had baked me my favorite cake for my birthday, and Chris, whose heart was sometimes still a mystery to me, and Mark, who was like a brother. There were invisible tethers that tied us together, and they extended out from us to Hannah, to my mother, to my mother's family, all lost. And beyond: they flowed out beyond us. You didn't get to feel the tug of these ties very often, the fragile net that held us all.

“Happy birthday, Isabel,” Josie said. She flung her arms around me, her skinny little body all ribs and hips and solid force. She stood on her tiptoes so her mouth could reach my ear. “I love you,” she whispered. “What would I do without you? You're my family.”

Josie and I met at my first staff meeting fifteen years ago. She sauntered in twenty minutes late, took a quick survey of the room, and plopped herself down in the third row, next to me. Bob Coffey, the principal of Rhodes Avenue Middle School, was in the middle of a story. He was in his mid-fifties and fossilizing rapidly. But he was worshipped, an institution in our district. You wouldn't catch anyone saying a word against him.
Mr. Coffey,
parents would whisper reverently,
Mr. Coffey,
like sleepy addicts.

All of his stories, I would soon discover, were about his dog. After taking care of faculty business, he would ramble on about Starbucks the spaniel for a few long minutes, turn the episode into an outdated parable about children and their charming inadequacies, and then adjourn the meeting with a hearty “You are released!” These weekly staff meetings were mandatory. Our school was small, and absences were noted.

“Starbucks woke us up in the middle of the night on Saturday,” Mr. Coffey was saying when Josie walked into the room. He turned to her and nodded. “Thank you for joining us, Miss Bryant. As I was saying, Starbucks woke us up in the middle of the night on Saturday, demanding that we take him for a walk. ‘Don't give in,' I warned Anita.” To everyone's delight, his wife's name really was Anita Coffey. “But Anita gave in, and sure enough, Starbucks needed to empty his bladder. Oh, the chiding I took from her!” He had been walking up and down through the rows of chairs, but now he paused for effect at the front of the room. “Until Sunday night, that is, when Starbucks waltzed into our bedroom at four a.m. and whined to be taken out again. Only this time, he didn't need to, he simply
wanted
to. The same thing happened on Monday night, Tuesday night, and Wednesday night, until finally Mrs. Coffey and I put Starbucks in his crate and broke him of this unpleasant habit.”

I leaned forward in my seat. I had been concentrating so hard, trying to grasp the meaning in our principal's strange homily. Only later would I understand that Bob Coffey viewed children as recalcitrant, barely domesticated animals who needed equal amounts of discipline, affection, exercise, and a protein-rich diet. He crossed his arms over his chest and smiled benevolently. “Children require patience, you see, but not overindulgence.”

There were nods and murmurs, and Janice Van Dyke, the seventh-grade math teacher, let loose with an emphatic “So true!”

“If we choose to give them an inch,” Mr. Coffey continued, “it is our duty to see that an inch is all they take.”

I leaned over to Josie and whispered, “Or they get put in their crates.”

Josie looked at me. For a second she seemed puzzled, and then her face opened with delight, her smile huge and toothy and as irresistible as the sun. She nodded to herself. “We need to have dinner,” she said quietly. “You and I. Tonight. I need to know you.” She reached over and squeezed my arm with startling intimacy, and I felt myself heating up, blushing with pleasure.

That's the way it is with certain people. They set their sights on you. They look at you straight on and they choose you, and they are dazzled by their own brilliant choice. It was the first time anyone had fallen in love with me like that. And I was powerless against it.

Lurch forward exactly one year from Josie's death: one tear-lubricated, misery-drenched, grief-addled dung heap of a year. Chris and Hannah and I are meeting Mark at the cemetery for the unveiling of her gravestone.

“I will never get used to this,” Chris whispers, hunching over so I'll hear him, his hand on my back, a familiar pressure.

“I know,” I say, digging my fingernails into the soft flesh of my palm.

Hannah drags her feet next to mine. She won't look at me. The wind whips up around us. A few drops of rain land, dotting the hard ground of the parking lot, threatening more.

I spot Mark from a few feet away—alone; I wasn't sure if he would be—his hands jammed into his pockets, shoulders hunched. He looks up and starts walking toward us, and relief calms his features. “Hey, guys. Thanks for coming. I know this isn't easy for any of us.” He hugs Hannah, then Chris, then, finally, briefly, me. And I feel relief, mixed in with everything else, because I wasn't sure he would; we haven't even spoken in more than three months.