Or Not to Be (22 page)

“Actually, you can give them some of
yours. There’s an organization that takes hair donations, mostly from little
girls like you. They make wigs for sick kids. Would you like to do that?”

“Yes, Daddy!” she squealed. “Let’s go to
there right now!”

So that’s where we went next. I was so
caught up in her enthusiasm that I brought her to my barber and had ten inches
of her silky hair chopped off. My girl was delighted as she carried the long
hank of her hair to my truck—to bring home to show her mother.

I should have known how Anna would react.
She was always a bit sensitive about hair.

Bethany ran in
from the garage screaming, “Mommy! Mom! I need you
now
!”

Anna appeared right away, saw our little
girl and screamed, “Who scalped you?”

When I walked in behind Bethany, Anna’s
huge eyes landed on my smiling, guilty face.

“Eddie! I will
kill
you! Why did you do this?” She sank to her
knees in front of the still beaming Bethany and gingerly touched the ends of
her butchered hair. “Oh. My. God!”

There was nothing I could say, so I didn’t
even try. It would be like arguing about whether to add an s to cow or popcorn.
Besides, any comments from me about hair had been forbidden a decade ago on our
first date. It was my number one No-Go zone. Fortunately, I didn’t have to say
anything because I was saved by the six-year-old wizard.

“I’m donut—danish—giving it away, Mommy!” She bounced up
and down and squealed with delight, her face all smiles. Anna wept silently,
but there was no denying this little girl. “It’s
okay
, Mommy. It’s for the
sick kids at Daddy’s hospital.” She wrapped an arm around her mother’s
shoulders and patted her back. Anna wiped her eyes, smiled, and pulled Bethany
to her in a bear hug. Perhaps I was home free.

Over Bethany’s head, I ventured a single
line in my defense, “It’s only hair, Anna.” It was a risk, but worth it when
she let out a snort. I still had it. I could still make her laugh.

Thus began Bethany’s hair cycle. She’d grow her hair all
the way down her back and then hack it off and give it away—like a hair farm.
She managed a donation almost every eighteen months for the rest of her life.

35

Joey was my pal
.
I’d tiptoed around in Estrogen World with Anna and Bethany for more than a
decade when, suddenly, I had a little boy in my life. My Joey was quiet, like
his namesake, my grandfather. He liked to fish and look at books, to draw an
d think. He’d learned his numbers and letters before
his second birthday and was reading when he was three. The kid was a genius. He
spent hours under his bed. He was always thinking and had endless questions,
none of them about adding s.

“Dad, tell me about the moon.”

This was at bedtime, six months before his
mother died. I figured he was stalling and wanted to draw me into a long
discussion that I couldn’t escape, to prolong the tucking in process and put
off sleep. I told him, “Our moon is a big rock that orbits our planet.” Simple
statement. Answered the question. Case closed. Right?

Wrong. “What’s ‘orbits’? Like the gum?”

“No. Not gum.” I scratched my head and sat
down on his bed. “The moon orbits the Earth, um ...” I had to define the word
without using the word. “It means the moon travels in a path around the Earth.”

“Oh, okay. A big rock, huh? Can we go
there and touch it?”

“Well, I guess, in theory, we could go
there. We’d need a big rocket though.” I tucked his blankets in tight on the
sides the way he liked, but left them loose on his feet.

He snuggled down with his black bear,
wiggling his toes, ready to chat the night away, and said, “Cool. Let’s get a
rocket and go. Does the rocket fly us there?”

“Mostly the rocket part is to help us
escape the gravity of this planet and to steer the spaceship in space.”

Anna came in to say good-night. She kissed
Joey and sat down beside me on the edge of his bed. “What’re you guys talking
about?”

“Mom! Me and Daddy are going to the moon!
We’d have a spaceship, too, right, Dad? How does the gravity thing work? Could
we go other places besides the moon?”

“I guess. It depends on how much fuel we
bring along. Fuel can be heavy. We’d have to balance the weight of our fuel
with our rocket-thrusting capacity and the distance we wanted to cover. We’d
have to bring along food, too, because there’s no food in space.” Yeah, he
sucked me into his imagination again. Joey made life fun.

“Hmm. We’d have to balance our fuel with
our weight in Oreos. I’d need Oreos. We could leave Mom’s granola cereal here,
though.”

Anna laughed. “Leave it here with me. I’m
not going to the moon.”

“And what’s gravity?” he asked like a dog
with a bone. Joey had an incredible mind. He had excellent short- and long-term
memory and never forgot a thing. Well, except for where he’d left his blue
plastic cowboys. But I always suspected he was just too lazy to look for them.
Or else he enjoyed watching his Mom find where he hid them.

Anna took a turn. “Gravity is what holds
us all on the Earth. It’s an attraction between the world and each of us.
There’s a gravitational force between every two objects, even you and me. Here,
give me a hug—that’s the force at work, pulling us together.”

While he endured a hug from his mom, Joey
dug his index finger two knuckles deep into his left nostril and tried the word
“gravitational.”

My boy wiped the boogies off his finger on
the sheet, out of his mother’s view. “Daddy, where can we get a rocket?” I
realized he wasn’t just stalling. Maybe he was at first, but now he was really
interested in this. I shouldn’t have misled him into thinking it was a
possibility.

“Listen, Joey. I was just talking in
theory here. I don’t have a rocket, and I don’t have enough money to buy one or
the brains to build one.” His face fell.

“It’s okay, Dad. I’ll figure it out.”

Anna kissed his cheek and said, “I love
you to the moon, Joey.”

“I love you too, Mom.”

After she left, Joey started a dig in his
other nostril as I turned out the light. I kissed his forehead, and when I
turned to leave, his voice asked from the darkness, “Is ‘in theory’ the same as
when Mom says we could eat Oreos for every meal?”

“Your mom says that?”

He laughed. “Yeah. Then she says I should
eat my granola, or peas, or mashed potatoes, or whatever thing I don’t like
that day.”

“I guess that’s the same ‘in theory.’ It
means it’s possible but not likely. Got that?”

“Got it. ’Night, Daddy.”

“Sleep good, Joey.”

36

Early in our marriage
, Anna and I did everything together. We even ran
together. That’s how I first learned about the dogs, which eventually led to
finding out her deathday.

We were jogging on a country road behind
the high school football field when two frisky Dobermans chased us. Anna
panicked and took off sprinting and screaming. She was hysterical. I kicked at
one of them and the dogs ran away, but she was still shaky. When we got home
and were cooling down with water on the swing, she told me all about her life
with dogs. Her dad had a pack of dogs that worshipped him and followed him on
his long walks, but Anna was always afraid of strange dogs when she was little.
Although her fear faded with time, a barking dog that she didn’t know always
scared her silly. I tucked this information away for further analysis.

I asked Anna’s dad about her fear of dogs.
That’s when he told me about Molly and the attack that occurred when Anna was
just a baby. He said Anna didn’t remember much about it, and they rarely spoke
of it, but he always felt that it was the root of her fear. I questioned him,
rather extensively, about the timing of the attack. He remembered that Anna’s
mom was pregnant with Michelle. He thought it was sometime in October or
November. From then on, like a paranoid hypochondriac, I watched Anna every
fall for any signs of danger. And I relaxed, floating carefree, the rest of the
year. To my wife, I must’ve seemed like two different husbands.

When Bethany was eight, mid-November was
verified and the actual date revealed. Anna had to go to a meeting in the
middle of one of Bethany’s soccer games and was rear-ended by a speeding
sixteen-year-old driver. Our totaled van leaned in the ditch at the side of the
road. I ran like a madman from the soccer field and thought, damn it, now I
know the date for sure. I was astonished to find my Anna still alive.

It was November eleventh, and Anna had
avoided her space-time gap like a champ.

Afterward, I didn’t know how I’d missed
it. Anna always loved November eleventh and 11:11 on the clock. The parallel
ones, the symmetry—she loved everything about elevens. The number is a
palindrome. When doubled or squared, it makes two more palindromes. She even
took her obsession a step further and declared a special affection for the
number fifteen because it is written as 1111 in binary. November eleventh
became the black hole of each successive year of our marriage.

When Anna began to train for her distance
races, she did it with a single-minded fury. There was no stopping her. Each
time she left the house to run alone on the country roads, she was gone longer
and longer. She never decided how long to run until she was up the church hill.
Then she’d analyze how she felt and decide on her route. It was futile for me
to ask her how long she’d be gone when she wiggled her feet into her pre-tied
sneakers and checked the batteries in her MP3 player. It made her mad to be
questioned. She didn’t like to tell me a certain planned distance and then have
to admit when she returned that she ran less.

I didn’t care how far she ran. I just
wanted to know when to start searching for her body—especially in November.

I tried to pull off this questioning as a
joke.

“Anna,” I tried to sound nonchalant as I
followed her to the door, “I just need to know how long to wait before I come
searching for your body in the ditch.”

She flashed her scariest teacher glare at
me and said, “Don’t be mean to me, Eddie.”

This, of course, caused a vivid flashback
to our first date—that day when she first warned me never to be mean to her. As
she slammed out the door, I tried to salvage myself by yelling, “Your hair
looks great!”

One day I’d learn. But not too soon.

I tried not to ask about her running
schedule but failed. I tried not to worry about her. I failed again.

She came home from one run in the spring
and told me about the three large dogs on her six-mile course. I lost all
control; I broke out in a panic. This was her favorite path to run. There was
no way I could talk her out of it.

I got out her sewing machine.

It was a Saturday, and there was no one
home but me. I had no idea how to use the thing. It looked like the thread was
in it already, so I plugged it in and put the pedal to the floor like Anna
always did. My attempt at high-tech sewing was a disaster. The machine jammed
and wouldn’t turn. After almost an hour of mistakes, I found out why that
little knife thing is called a seam ripper. Finally, I gave up with the
machine. I threaded a needle and sewed by hand. Not much different from giving
a kid stitches, really, minus the tears and wiggling. I sewed little white felt
pockets onto four pairs of Anna’s running shorts. I filled two-ounce spray
bottles with diluted ammonia and slid them into the pockets.

I was working on the last pocket, bent
over like a pretzel, when Anna walked in from the garage. I was busted.

She gave me a crooked smile and tipped her
head to the side. “Eddie? What are you doing to my shorts? And what’s that
smell?”

“Ammonia. Sorry, I spilled some. Well,
quite a bit. I don’t smell it anymore. I wonder if that’s bad.”

“Yes, it’s bad,” she said as she walked
past me to open the window. She came back and leaned over my shoulder. “Tell
me, Ed. Why are you ruining my most favorite shorts on the planet?”

Rather than try to explain, I held up my
best effort—one pair even looked decent, the other three were drastically
crooked—and, proud of myself, proclaimed, “Pockets!”

It came out more like a question. Anna
frowned and took the shorts from me. She stuck two fingers into the felt pouch
and asked, “For what?”

“For safety.” I nodded and tried to sound
authoritative.