Permanence (3 page)

All this is not ignorance. I am a college-educated, self-sufficient woman. A woman who, before the death of baby, had a terrific career as a travel agent. My job was to help others seek adventure and to see the world. My job was to make sure other people got far away from it all. But the escape to “Sunny Florida” or to “Beautiful Paris” or to “Rugged Africa” was for other people. Not me.

Once baby was born, I never went anywhere.

Despite my education and my career, I have some problems. I have these fears. For instance, I am frightened of riding in elevators. I am scared to death of being lifted into midair inside a small box. I’m scared to death of hanging by a relative thread. So tonight, like any other night, I climb the concrete and plaster stairwell that leads to my apartment, step by step. This is after my twenty-fourth Friday afternoon session with doctor. I climb the staircase slowly, patiently. I cling to the metal railing. I place each step carefully against the treads.

I am in control.

I listen to my footsteps echoing inside the stairwell. There is a sour fish smell that comes from the rainwater that has soaked into my wool coat. I climb by sight, by touch, and by sound. I live and breathe.

This is a harshly lit staircase. The staircase has been freshly painted since baby died—white-washed of the dark, gray stains that seeped through the floor of the bathroom to the plaster ceiling of the stairwell beside it. This is the water that ran and stained in streaks against the plaster walls the night we pulled baby from the tub. This is no longer a familiar staircase. But this is the same staircase Jamie and I climbed once upon a time, before baby left us.

Once upon a time, Jamie would have asked me this question: “Do we have to take the stairs, Mary? We have a perfectly good elevator.”

I would continue climbing as if Jamie hadn’t said a word. I knew he considered my fear of elevators a silly fear. My fears, he insisted, made little sense for the wife of an engineer and for a person with a career as a travel agent.

“But I’m not expected to go anywhere,” I would tell Jamie, laughing. “The beauty of my career is that I can send people away while I stay at home, safe and sound, on the solid ground.”

“Sometimes you have to trust in fate,” Jamie would tell me, lifting his eyes to an imaginary sky. “I mean, if you can’t trust the control of man-made mechanics, at least trust in destiny. You have to open up, allow destiny to take control. I mean, the probabilities of an airplane losing an engine or an elevator cable failing are millions to one. The people who die because of these accidents are not dying at the hands of bad mechanics. They’re dying at the hands of fate. I mean, the person who enters that one-in-a-million jet plane or that one-in-a-million elevator never to see the light of day again is a person whose fate has been sealed in bad luck.”

How’s this for luck?

Now I determine my fate. Not Providence, not technology. Only me, because I am alone. But alone is not the way I planned my life.

Boxes

My apartment is as dark as deep night.

I feel for the light switch against the wall with my fingertips. I find the plastic switch and flip it up. The apartment becomes bright with light. I see the movement of the curtain that covers the open window.

I go to the window. I see the rain falling steadily against the trees, the orange light from the parking lot lamps reflecting off the leaves. I close the window and stand in the quiet of the night.

I step away from the window.

I stumble over the box, but manage to regain my balance by extending my hand to the dining room table. I do not fall. I look down at my feet and at the box. This box is not a small box. Maybe two feet high by two feet wide. The box has been closed with duct tape. The box is marked JAMIE in bold, black Magic Marker letters.

There are four boxes scattered about this apartment. Each one just like the other. The boxes have been here since Jamie left me over six months ago. The boxes contain the last of Jamie’s things—engineering books, blueprints, sketches, and drafting tools. The boxes also hold the rest of Jamie’s socks and underwear. One box holds his shoes and another houses his cassette tapes and CDs—Steely Dan, Beatles, XTC, Copeland’s “Appalachian Spring” and others.

I make the best of having the boxes around. I have been using them as impromptu tables until a time when Jamie comes home again to get them. I set newspapers, ashtrays, dirty dishes, soiled laundry, and even used wine glasses on them. The boxes are an eyesore. They don’t belong among the furniture. But they have become a part of my life now. My routine. The boxes are a part of what is left of my ex-husband, Jamie.

I remove my coat. It is soaking. I wrap it around my arm and carry it into the bathroom. I toss the coat over the curtain rod above the bathtub and allow gravity to take over.

Eventually, the rain falls away from the coat and into the bathtub basin. I stand there in the bathroom, watching the little droplets of water fall out of the coat and into the bathtub, drop by single drop.

There is the drip, drip, drip.

The water falls droplet by droplet, collecting in the basin. The water forms a tiny stream that runs downhill to the drain. The water disappears inside the drain. But the water that falls away from my coat also misses the basin altogether. The water falls to the ceramic tile floor and collects inside the spaces between the tiles.

I do nothing about the rainwater.

I see the rips in this shower curtain that I have not replaced since the night baby died. I see where the plastic fabric tore away from the thin metal rings that are supported by a long metal rod that extends from one end of the bathtub to the other. The curtain was pulled away when baby was pulled away from the tub.

I have no plans for replacing the curtain.

I walk away from the bathtub, out of the bathroom. I walk into the dining room only a few steps away from the bathroom. I sit on one of the four boxes marked JAMIE in big, black Magic Marker letters. From there I can listen to the steady drip of the rain that seeps out of my coat and into bathtub basin and onto the floor. The steady drip, drip, drip combines with the rhythm of my pulse. The noises are strangely alive.

Seeing me would not be difficult

Now, I rarely leave this place.

I leave for my weekly, one-hour visit with doctor. I leave for food. I no longer leave this place on Sundays to see God. I do not leave for work at the travel agency anymore. I do not have the heart to book “Open Adventure Cruises” or “Relaxing Beachside Getaways.” After I lost baby I could only handle the inland vacations, far away from water. I preferred hotels without pools or bathrooms spas. I preferred booking trips that no one preferred: Arizona desert hikes or long drives through Nebraska, where it’s safe. The travel agency has given me some indefinite leave time to “sort things out.”

In other words, I’ve been fired.

Life insurance

Now I do not work.

Now I live on life insurance.

But the life I live on is no longer with me.

The dream that occupies my sleep

The time is seven thirty-five on this Friday evening. I have been home now for twenty-five minutes after having left doctor’s office at six-fifty, far later then I should have. I am dead tired.

My limbs seem to struggle with the weight of my body. I feel as though I am walking in a slab of mud a foot thick. I lie down on the couch in the living area of my apartment with the now empty bookshelves and the fireplace with the black, cold embers and soot. There are several store-bought, fake logs stored in a wooden crate intended to hold real wood for the fireplace. The fake logs will be left unused. I still store the matches in a mason jar on the window sill above the kitchen sink where Jamie and I kept them so that baby could not get to them once he became a toddler. I keep the matches there out of habit. I turn off every light.

I lie down on the couch in the darkness of my apartment. I am fully clothed. There is the drip, drip, drip of the rain falling away from my coat and into the tub basin. I can hear the sound from the living room. Like a metronome, the water has a steady rhythm to it. The rhythm puts me to sleep.

Now mother comes to me only in my dreams. This is the familiar dream, the dream that has occupied my sleep since baby and Jamie left me. In my dream I can smell the smoke. I can see my mother. She is standing over me. Her face appears through the smoke and the haze, like a ghost. She says nothing. She only slides her arms beneath me, inside the covers of my bed. I see myself as the child I once was through the eyes of the adult I have become. I begin to cough. I choke on the smoke. I feel the smoke in my throat. My head rushes from the burning paint, wallpaper, and carpet. Mother cradles me like a baby. She pulls me away from my bed with both arms. I am not a baby. I am ten years old. I try to speak. “Where are you taking us?” Mother does not answer me. She will not speak. There is the rustling sound of her nightgown, the familiar aroma of the fabric that smells more like mother than her own skin. I feel her hair with my fingertips behind her neck. Her hair is loose and tangled. Mother has been sleeping. In the second-floor hallway of my childhood home, the smoke rises from the first floor, through the stairwell. Mother holds me in the hallway, cradles me like a baby. We have nowhere to go in this, the home my father burned.

I wake up from the dream the way I always do: with the sight and smell of my mother as if she were by my side. My mother is nearly twenty years dead, as is my father. I do my best to forget. I convince myself that the dream is not real. I say it out loud: “The dream is not real.”

I know this: the dream will be repeated in my sleep. But I must sleep in order to live. When I sleep I dream.

Time

I check the time on my watch, out of habit. Eight-thirty in the evening. As a travel agent, I was once a slave of schedules, time, and itineraries. Now, I have nothing but time.

Silence

I see the black embers in the fireplace with the yellow-orange lamp light that bleeds in from the parking lot outside my windows. I thrust my legs around front, sit up from the couch. I breathe deeply. I pull my neck-length hair back, choke it between my fingers into a ponytail. Then I release my fingers and allow the hair to fall back onto my neck.

I feel my stomach, but I have not eaten anything since the lunch hour. I feel a slight, flu-like nausea.

In the bathroom I place the rubber stopper into the bathtub drain. I turn on the water so that the water flows. Running water is the loudest sound I hear inside this apartment. I let the water run over my fingers until it warms.

The water gets warmer. Hotter. Steaming.

I hold my hand beneath the hot water until I can’t hold it there any longer.

I snap my hand back. The hot water is moist beneath my leather watchband. The skin of my hand turns to pale pink; the skin tingles in the cool air that surrounds me. Steam from the pouring water runs up now, into my face, into my eyes. I adjust the water to a cooler setting. I leave the water to fill into the basin at just the right depth. The depth I used for baby was six to twelve inches deep.

I take my coat away from the shower rod and out of the bathroom. I drape it over one of Jamie’s boxes.

I step into the bedroom. I begin to take off my clothing, piece by piece, folding the clothing onto the bed. In the dark I can see the blinking red light of the old answering machine.

I undress, down to my underwear.

I press the play button on the machine. I allow the messages to run silently—with the volume completely down—with the water from the tub filling the silence in the apartment. I sit on the edge of the bed and listen to the squeak as the tiny wheels of the tape deck complete their cycle.

After three minutes, the wheels stop turning. The messages on the tape are erased.

Here’s what I do: I go back into the bathroom. I place one leg into the bath and allow myself to adjust to the hot water. I place a second leg inside. Allow it to adjust. I sink gradually. My entire body quivers. But the water becomes an embryo. I slide into the tub as far as my body will go. I allow the water to cover my torso and head, completely. With open eyes I see the distorted, white world. I wait while the bubbles of my breath rise to the surface. Until all breath leaves my body. I wait and live. I listen for the steady rhythm of my heartbeat.

Still lives

I use the box closest to the fireplace to stand on.

The box is a sturdy box, filled with Jamie’s engineering manuals. This is just one of four boxes Jamie must come home for. Listen: By now, Jamie wants his things back. He leaves messages on the answering machine that I leave unanswered. If I listen to it, the voice will suggest a specific time of day for coming home again so that Jamie may pick up the remainder of his things. The voice will ask me not to be here. The voice leaves information about where to drop off sets of keys in the mailbox, just inside the vestibule door of this apartment building. But I know once Jamie returns his keys and takes the boxes away, that will be the end of it all.

I would never see Jamie again.

But I won’t let him get away with it. Here’s how: I let the messages left for me go unanswered. I erase the messages without listening. I will not allow Jamie to come into this apartment without seeing me first.

For now I shift my feet, steady myself on top of Jamie’s box. My hair is damp from the bath, pulled into a ponytail and held there with a rubber band—one of the rubber bands Jamie would use for his rolled-up blueprints. I am dressed in flannel pajamas with yellow and blue stripes. These are Jamie’s pajamas.

Jamie’s photograph is up here where it always is. This is the photograph I go to first. Always. This is the black and white photograph my eyes have a natural attraction for. The photograph is my favorite.

Taken before baby was born, the photo depicts Jamie standing barefoot on a deserted stretch of beach in Cape Cod. It is the late fall. This was the trip we arranged off-season from my travel agency, for free. No time schedules to adhere to. Just Jamie and me. This is nearly five years ago, two years before the birth of baby.