In the Middle of All This (7 page)

I am keeping a journal, she wrote, so that no one will have to hear how afraid I am, how being afraid of death is not good enough, how you can't give in to it and let it rule you, how exhausting it is, how careful you have to be in everything you ever do. I am keeping a journal only when I want to keep it and I am keeping it away from anybody else—even Richard, even Martin, even Martha—and when it's done and I am somewhere else, it will be like a rock that never existed and no one will have to even know how awful it is and no one will have to know what it means to die and why it should matter how they die, how they take it, because I will not be the sick sister, I will not be the sick wife, I will not be the sick daughter. I will not, I will not, I will not. I will not be mad and I will not be miserable and I will not be afraid and I will not be pitiful. I will follow my God because that is part of whatever the healing can be, and I will not think only of the numbers and I will not hold back what shouldn't be held back and I will be. The difference being the difference between being and doing. I will be. I will do whatever can be done, but I will also be.

Yesterday he finally called. We talked about what the children were doing and we talked about the usual shit about Mom and we talked about what it means to complain, how complaining is okay, how everyone complains, how everyone has something to complain about. I could hear him getting tired and I said, “I don't want to drag you down with me,” and he said, “You're not.” But I heard it in his voice and I lied and said, “Look, I've really got to run. There's someone at the door.” And I could hear the relief in his voice as he tried to offer up a resigning “okay.” We hung up. He is the one I am closest to and I've told him that and not to tell anybody else that, and he said of course not but why does it matter who I'm closest to? Why am I being like this? Why am I pitiful? Why am I doomed? Why
can't
matter.

Maybe I won't write in this journal again.

Was that really her? She'd always distrusted journals, she'd always felt they kept you from living, that while you wrote in them life went by, and you rose afterward still heavy from seeing inside yourself, and you were slow to catch up. She didn't have time for slow.

In the kitchen she put away spoons and bottles, hearing the hollow echo of her tending to herself. When they'd first gotten beyond the shock, Richard had suggested a dog.
A dog
. As if she were blind. As if she were an old woman living alone looking for any constant company to extend her time. He was only thinking aloud. A dog wasn't it. Every now and then Martin or Martha would dare, Are you sure you don't want to move back? She didn't want to interrupt Richard's and her life like that. She'd only move back if she was afraid. She refused to be that afraid. He'd murmured about it again on the phone last night. No, she'd said, I don't think so.

I have to run, she'd said. There's someone at the door.

She shut the journal and winced with pain as she pulled on an overcoat. For a while she stood under the dangling crystals and took deep breaths. All she felt was a new pain blooming in her shoulder.

At the spa she walked the treadmill for twenty minutes, stretched for twenty minutes, swam for twenty minutes, and then sat in the juice bar watching the sun on the wooden tabletop, dozing and then waking to the low grind of the blender, drinking two glasses of apple-ginger juice. At noon the bar began to fill with corporate exercisers in their ironed white togs. She drove to a row of clothing shops and found a pale blue sweater to go with Richard's eyes. She had to keep holding it up to the light to make sure, as if her eyes were thinking of failing. By two-thirty she had popped another fifty vits and made it in time to art therapy. Four men and five women, all sick in ways she didn't want to hear about, sat in a straggly circle, huge easels in front, oversized sheets of paper shielding them from one another.

“I want you to paint,” Marge said, looking at them and then looking out one of the many-paned windows that brought in the last of the day's northern light, “something from your own history, something that was so deep inside you and so much where you'd been and who you were and even who you'd become, that sometimes—maybe even often—you'd forgotten it was there. Until just before now, when news of your own struggle hit you, and you began to work at unpacking yourself and putting you back together, to get it right, and there was this thing that you'd somehow forgotten about, and you understood it was a most essential piece. What is that thing?”

Elizabeth started with pink, which became pale red, black for hair and eyebrows and even lips, blue for the dress, pale red for the legs, black for the shoes. What kind of shoes were they? She could only remember her mother in fat, white high heels, but it was too late for white. She didn't want to make up anything. She wanted it to be true. She added blue to the black. Navy blue heels. Now another face, white outlined in black, tufts of hair at the ears, a line of mouth in pale red, black-outlined neck. She could not remember what her father wore. Yellow, she wanted it to be yellow, but it wouldn't be. Sometimes he had worn suits. Dark suits. When was it worst? When he didn't have to wear a suit? That didn't seem right. Blue for the legs: jeans. Red and yellow and black for a plaid shirt, what he wore when he helped them up to the roof to claw leaves from the gutters. White for sneakers.

“Your father and mother,” Marge said easily.

Elizabeth nodded.

She pointed at the woman. “Your mother's that much larger?”

Elizabeth shook her head, but she had drawn her mother at nearly twice the height of her father.

“Well,” Marge said. “It's a lot of red and black and blue.”

“Pretty obvious, huh?” She pathetically wiped a tear out of the corner of her right eye.

“I don't know. You have a brother and a sister, too, but they're not in here.”

“No.”

“You're not going to put them in.”

“No.”

“Are you finished?”

Elizabeth shook her head.

“I hope I haven't said too much.” Marge eased on to the next student.

Elizabeth dipped into the black paint and began in the background, almost blotted out by the oversized figures, the structure of a house, five windows wide, the furthest right over brick, the middle two above a porch, the two left above downstairs windows. The porch had a black roof. The roof above the second floor was all black, the chimney white. In the windows she wanted to paint their small faces, but they were hiding, terrified, the house soon to rock with their mother's voice as she spied the broken kitchen window and pounded up the stairs. I'm going to let you have it! she shouted. I'm
really
going to let you have it. How old were they then—nine, seven, and three? Don't, they would beg, as she swung the belt. Don't.

I'll never know, Elizabeth couldn't help thinking as she watched the painting of her mother, I'll never know what kind
I
would have been.

Late at night he sat with the cats at the bar in the basement, sipping another glass of wine and taking one-shot hits of marijuana. Upstairs, in the bedroom, she waited. If he held out long enough, she'd be asleep. Tomorrow was
her
teaching day. He'd only have Max, laundry, bills to pay, dishes, Sarah to amuse after school, dinner. He could walk around in a fog if he had to. Do you really need to do that? Lauren had said when he slid toward the basement.

The bar—which they hadn't touched since moving in—had a mirrored back bolted onto black glitter board.
THE
CAPTAIN'S
RULE IS
LAW
, declared a sign nailed to one of the cabinet doors,
COCKTAIL
HOUR
ABOARD
: 7:00
A.M
.
TO
6:59
A.M
.
DAILY AND
SUNDAYS
. He swiveled on the pink stool. He loved this bar. He pushed himself off and reached behind the counter and brought out a pack of light cigarettes. He and Elizabeth used to shoplift LifeSavers together from the Acme on Woodbine, when he was six and she was ten. In a hideout by the creek, they'd re-count their loot and divide it. Ten years later they planned an elaborate tour of Europe together. They took a train all the way from Germany to Greece, boarded a ferry to an island, climbed steps to a white villa, purchased rooftop accommodations for fifty cents each. When he was in college in New Jersey, he visited her once every few weeks in New York, where they ate and drank in tapas bars and he pretended that he liked her friends from work. One New Year's Eve they dressed up and went to all the parties, told everyone they were each other's dates. That kind of crap.

Before he was born, an uncle whom he would be named after lay dying of cancer, his brain growing mish-mashed. Close
the
Venetian blinds, he'd ask, when he meant: Turn off the television. His wife, sweet faced, utterly gentle, attended him. They were childless. “A man as sick as I am,” he managed to say once, quite clearly, “does not tell his wife his thoughts.” What did that mean? Martin now wondered. Regret? Bitterness? Hatred? What would be left between him and Elizabeth if he stood beside her a last time? Would all the accrued memory feel something like mercy, or was mercy the release from exhaustion and pain? Couldn't denial—the instinct that even as you slipped under you still might emerge again—be merciful? Was grace acceptance or wishful thinking? He wanted to
know
. He couldn't know.

He drew on the cigarette, in the mirror watched himself fill with smoke, then clouded the basement. The cats snarled and chased each other over stalagmites of toys.
“Mel,”
he warned.
“Chance.”
They ignored him. “Are cats smart?” his mother once asked him, after a weekend of baby-sitting while he and Lauren had visited London. “I mean, they don't come when you call them.” “I don't know,” he'd said. “Well, I don't think they are,” she'd said. He'd scooped up Max and sat at the kitchen table. They'd arrived only a few minutes ago. “Daddy,” Max said, “I miss you.” “I missed you, too,” he said. “I missed you terribly.” “Daddy,” Max said, “I miss you tewibly, too.” The boy put his damp face into the hollow of Martin's neck and rested there.

Now he crushed out the almost-whole cigarette and looked at himself in the bar back. Past midnight and he was alone. Past midnight, and upstairs she slept. In London another day had gone by, there was another day to get through. He couldn't imagine what it was like.

You keep trying, is what you do. You listen to the numbers when they're good, and ignore them when they're bad. You do flushes and decide that the pieces and chunks and stones in the toilet bowl afterward are the
it
of it coming out. You let the shamans and healers take you wherever and however you can. You lie to yourself. You tell yourself the truth. You touch his hand whenever you can, you follow the crease of his collar to the soft belly of his throat, you crumple his earlobes between your fingertips whenever he comes in late from a course or a meditation and you tell him how glad you are that he is growing in all this. You get up every morning and go after it. You try not to call everybody all the time. You stay within yourself. You get out of yourself as much as possible. You deny the self. You are all self. You swim in a flood of meditation, constructive reading, and organic vegetables. When he's left you for another night of Epiphany or yoga and you can hide it from yourself, you sneak a bite of chocolate, a slice of steak, a dab of pâté, a sip of wine, hours of television. On the Internet you surf the humor sites and send a selection every Monday to the e-mail list of your mother, brother, sister, cousins, old colleagues, friends. You crawl into bed every night and hunt for pockets of energy that you forgot to burn. You lay awake long after he has fallen asleep. You use the toilet six or seven times. You wonder what God will look like. You listen, breath held, for the phone to ring and then you will answer it and the voice on the line will say whatever you most need it to say. There's been a mistake, and you don't have what they told you you have. Or, You're going to be a mother. Or, I love you, we love you, everyone loves you. Or, You can rest now. Go ahead now, rest. And then you will. Although for a few minutes after the phone still hasn't rung, your heart will beat too rapidly, and sweat will trace its way along the lifelines of your palms and in the creases under your knees. And then you will. You will rest. It won't be a rest like the rest you used to have, if you can remember what that felt like. It will be a rest from which you will wake unrested and hoping to discover that it's all been a dream, just a mistake, just a nightmare. The dream is the tremor of the
it
in you, and the sleep around the dream is as shallow as the bed you are in, and you wake—what?—almost disappointed to find that you are still alive and that you haven't arrived at some new, daring, dazzling, endless world.

Later still, he found himself swaying in the kitchen, feeling for the phone, opening the refrigerator and dialing in its light. Her voice. How are you's. Questions about the kids, how she missed them and loved hearing stories about them and would he please please please send some pictures or a video. Stuff they always said.

“I want you to know we're thinking about having a baby for you,” he heard himself say. He'd had more than he could count and he looked at his near-empty glass, puzzled by what he'd just offered.

“You've got to be kidding,” Elizabeth said incredulously.

“Isn't it—” He gulped the rest of the drink. He'd forgotten he'd switched to vodka. Not much resistance there. Maybe if he'd chosen scotch he could have shut himself up. “—What you want.” He fucking wished he could put the phone down and yet he noticed how exhilarated he was beginning to feel.