Fortified by cheap champagne, I face the crates containing the pottery I neither sold nor gave away, nor continue to use in my everyday life. And there I find, sure enough, a new box—smaller, as if to apologize for its insignificance (or as if to hunker down in hiding)—containing the twelve plates, blue as the ocean in August, their glaze crackled to a dragonfly shimmer, that I gave my parents for their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary. I was proud of these plates when I made them; they look both ancient and new, each a little different from the rest. They are much nicer than the dark raku plates Hugh and I use every day in New York.
I’ve switched on the barn lights, spooking a dozen cats from their lairs in the ramparts of hay. Two bats zigzag through the rafters and out the door to the sky, now the pure blue of twilight (a blue I once yearned to mimic in glaze).
Several mundane thoughts convene around my indignation.
The plates should never have gone in the dishwasher to begin with. I did not expect them to be saved for special occasions—those are reserved for my grandmother’s china—but I did expect them to be washed, lovingly, by hand.
My mother apparently knew about this stash of boxes, which leads me to wonder what else she knows about my things. I picture her snooping through the boxes, including all my teenage letters, resealing them carefully so I’ll never know. This is absurd, of course. She has neither the time nor the inclination for such deceit. For better or worse, she lives life out in the open.
What makes my parents so compatible when it seems they are anything but? Is it just a matter of sticking it out, the never-ending aggravations, till all the habits you have, good and bad, are simply all you know, easy because they’re familiar? Yet my parents make a happy marriage look real.
Here, in the next crate, are my teapots, elongated vessels with serpentine spouts, green with flares of orange and violet across the surface. I remember the sensation of blowing the glaze through a narrow straw, taking care not to draw it up into my mouth, yet tasting chalk and metal for hours. Some of the pigments smelled like spices: cinnamon, turmeric, mace. I called this my Arabian Nights phase. Though I didn’t know it at the time, this was my last phase, during which I started working at the magazine, during which I met Hugh. “I must be looking for a sultan,” I said, self-consciously, the first time I took him to my studio and showed him these pots. “No, not a ceramicist,” I corrected him. “A potter. I’m a potter.” Words, in the end, came to matter more. Now I shape words, not clay.
A loud crackling noise stuns me with fear for an instant. It comes from outside the barn, yet it’s close. Beyond the door I see only dark sky, the tops of trees around the house. Then comes a long sharp whistling, a war-movie sound, followed by a soft, thunderous echo. A small string of explosions. I’d forgotten all about the fireworks.
At the next fusillade, I walk over to the door, edging carefully toward it, holding on to the top rail with both hands, leaning forward so that my feet remain a good ten inches from the threshold leading to open air. Though it doesn’t include the fireworks—which I realize now would be visible only in the opposite direction—the view of my childhood house, in the dark, holds me there for a moment despite my fear of heights. (If I were to fall, I’d land in the bed of Dad’s truck, on the bags of memorabilia with which I’ve reluctantly parted.)
Nearly all the windows are alight. In the kitchen, my mother is at the sink, rinsing her nonexotic dishes, talking on the phone, probably with Tighty, checking in at the kennel to make sure the hounds aren’t panicking at the inexplicable clamor from above. On the porch, Dad’s pacing and talking on his phone. I hear him laughing. I hear him say rich for about fifteen minutes. Upstairs, the light is on in my room, too. Is Hugh reading? Has he defiantly taken Eliza’s letters from under my pillow (do I really care?) or is he in the middle of that book on Vietnam, the one that puts such a dark scowl on his smooth, kind face?
I look back at my parents, each involved in a separate conversation. Or what if they are talking to each other? What if they phone each other all day long, because that’s where they talk best, even when they’re steps away from each other? Is that their secret? Do they even have one?
When Clem talks about how crazy she thinks it is to get married, she claims that it’s like making a decision based on geologic time—antithetical to human nature, she says. To mortality. The first time I heard this little sermon of hers, I told her she’d lost me. “Like, come on,” she said. “All that talk about forever?”
I asked her, “What about our parents? They seem to go on and on.”
“Well,” she said, “they have an arrangement. I don’t want an arrangement. Do you?”
But what is a marriage, I think, if not an arrangement? Is that so bad?
I walk back to the safety of the loft interior. I will finish my difficult task tomorrow. I turn off the fan. I leave the door to the sky wide open; I don’t have the courage to close it myself. I’ll ask Dad to do it tomorrow. I find the box, tape it up again, and carefully hoist it onto a hip. I take the stairs slowly, one at a time.
In the driveway, I set the box down and move to where I imagine I will be able to see the fireworks, over the trees at the back of the pasture. But all I can see is the varicolored glow; the spectacle itself is out of sight. I watch anyway, until the orgasmic crescendo comes at the end of the show. A couple of long, cometlike flares rise high enough that I can see them. I hear one of the horses snort. The bride and groom will be climbing into a long white limo, blazing off toward a honeymoon somewhere classy and expensive. Tuscany. The fjords of Norway.
I open the trunk of our car and lift into it the box containing the beautiful plates I made for my parents that they are never going to use. As quietly as I can, I close the trunk, pushing down until I hear it click.
I enter the house with a purpose, so that no one will stop me—but both of my parents are still on the phone. As I pass through the porch and then the kitchen, I wave at my father and then my mother. They wave back but do not interrupt their conversations. I was right: Mom’s talking to Tighty, though it sounds as if the hounds are fine.
I head upstairs resolved to have it out, to unbox Hugh the way I’ve been unboxing everything else. I am going to say, I love you, but we are in trouble.
He’s asleep, of course, the Vietnam book askew at his hip. It’s nine-thirty and he’s asleep.
I sit on the edge of my bed and stare at him. I could wake him up. What if this is the moment that will be the turning point, the one that determines whether or not we stay together? Which is the right choice, to wake him or let him sleep? In the scheme of things, in geologic time, how can it be urgent?
Two years ago I was pregnant—briefly. It pleased us, even amused us, because it had been so completely unplanned. Before we’d decided whether or not to tell anyone, but not before we’d begun to talk about names, I miscarried. I had just turned thirty-one. My doctor said, “Don’t worry! This is normal. Take a break for a couple of months and then you’ll get right back up on that horse.”
I did not appreciate the equestrian analogy. I was relieved when, because of a glitch in my health insurance, I had to change doctors soon after. I did not ask the new doctor about getting pregnant again, and she has never pried.
Hugh didn’t say much about the subject, either. Several months went by. The time to get right back up on that horse came and went. We let it slip farther and farther behind us. As if losing the baby, or even being pregnant at all, had been an embarrassment. We never told our friends; by then, too many of them were desperate to be pregnant or desperate simply to be coupled off. We were at least half lucky that way.
Hugh sleeps quietly, looking every bit the reasonable, patient, likable guy I married. The air from the fan in the window ruffles his hair, still sandy from the beach. “Where are we?” I say quietly, experimentally, to see if he will wake. He stirs, but only to turn around in his sleep and face the other way. The Vietnam book begins to slide, slowly at first, then tumbles onto t
he rug. I think about leaving it there, its paper innards bent and curled. But that would be childish. I pick it up, straighten the pages, close it, and set it on the table between the two beds.
Now I am looking at the back of his head. This means nothing, I tell myself. I am tempted to touch the roiled, humid curls, Hugh’s boyishly ungraying hair. Just that I’m tempted seems hopeful.
I take off my clothes and put on my nightgown. When I pull back the quilt on my bed, I see that familiar, livid green poking from under the edge of my pillow. I make myself comfortable and, in my lap, arrange the envelopes in order by postmark. There are twelve. As I read them, I realize why it thrilled me so much that summer to get them. They are love letters: letters all about love, at least how it begins.
I See You Everywhere
1990
Safety-pinned to my blanket is a pink WHILE YOU WERE OUT slip. An OUT, I’m to learn, of titanic proportion. Your sister called. Loves you very much. Coming by train tmw. I puzzle thickly over those three letters. Tramway? Tomahawk? Tunisian Motor Works? My mind feels like a fly-mobbed garbage barge plowing through a sea of tar. At the foot of a strange bed, a strange window: leafy branches, bright sky, parking lot of blinding glitter. Pin-striped curtains wall me in.
My right arm is in a cast. From my left hand, an IV snakes its way up to a large crystalline prune. HYDRATION, my brain remarks, the word flashing out, a lighthouse on my sea of tar. I turn my head—to another flash, this one exuberant pain—and there’s an electrocardiograph showing the placid skip-to-my-Lou of a healthy heartbeat. E K G, my brain instructs, each letter another beacon, a tiny gem in the murk.
Wow, so this is amnesia. But now I recognize the woman asleep in the strange chair by the strange window. My name, my profession, the goings-on in my life: I seem to know all these things and am vaguely disappointed that I do—except for Jerry, hot-as-a-short-order-skillet Jerry.
The pink note still clings to my thigh. “Oh, tomorrow. Shit.” A whisper but, against the white noise of life support, stunning.
In a flash, my mother’s awake and pressing a hand to my forehead. “Honey, honey, it’s you.”
“Like I’d be, who, Mick Jagger?” I sound like wheels on gravel.
“Don’t talk! Save your energy, sweetheart.” She pulls back the curtain and calls out, “Gwen! She’s with us at last, she’s here!” Someone shushes her gently. Before she lets the curtain fall, I see half a dozen beds in a long arc, some tented, all flanked by machines.
Mom scrapes her chair up beside me. She clearly wants to take my hand, but both are already taken—one by the IV, the other by a sling.
“You’re in the hospital,” says Mom. As if I might think we’re in a pool hall or carwash. “You’ve had an accident, but you’re going to be fine.” I am about to say, Jesus, Mom, what hospital, what accident? when she puts a finger to my lips. “Please, sweetheart. In a minute, I’ll call Dad. He had to go home to dry-dock a Friendship and feed the horses.” Again I take stock: My father runs three boatyards. My mother is an accomplished rider, a master of foxhounds. They live on Pemiquisset Point in Rhode Island, where I grew up. These swatches of knowledge are safely intact, that part of my cerebral quilt unfrayed. But the NOW of my life as I know it takes place largely in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, where I am staying with Jerry while I figure out where my next job’s going to be. Jerry says that maybe I should figure out, first, why I change jobs so often, especially since I never get fired.
A nurse enters my tiny lair. “Well, well. Forty winks and then some.” She wrangles a pressure cuff onto my cast-free arm. As she leans across me, I see her badge. Her name is Gwendolyn Treeble, she is a blizzard of freckles (in person; the flash of her ID photo bleached them all out), and we are at the hospital in Boston that my father, who went to Harvard and had a broken femur set in this place, calls Poobah General. My brain flings out the weirdest details.
“ ’Scuse me,” I say, figuring she will be more helpful than my mother, but then a man in a white coat pops in behind her. “Well, well,” I hear again, as if it’s the password. “And how do you feel?”
“Caved in,” I say, straining to enunciate. “Kicked by a Clydesdale.”
He laughs, a small mannerly laugh. “Vocabulary an excellent sign.” He leans in from the foot of my bed and holds out a pen, moves it back and forth before my eyes. Then he untucks the bedding, pulls it up to my ankles, and uses his all-purpose pen to stroke the soles of my feet. When I flinch, he winks. “Guess we’ll forgo amputation.” Finally, he puts his hands around my neck, hands as cool and dry as a lizard. He seems to be making sure my skull is still attached to my spine. His badge tells me he is Eric Slocum, Chief Res., Emerg. Med. His clipboard, now on the table beside my bed, tells me today is July 28. But wait. That date is more than a month in the future. Isn’t it?
“Doctor, excuse me, but have I been out cold for a month?”
He watches the ceiling while taking my pulse. “We don’t know why you aren’t a lot worse off. You are a very lucky young lady with a noggin of grade-A granite and a pair of very resilient lungs.”
Real conversations with these people are going to be difficult. But then, I’ve been at the mercy of doctors before. I know their game of bait and switch.
Mom’s eyes are swollen. Weeping isn’t her style, so something serious happened here. She is a woman made of gristle, pumice, and more than the customary dash of testosterone. If my noggin’s made of granite, her genes are to thank. She believes in the supremacy of genes; that gene I got from her, too.
Jerry is in the business of genes. I had never wanted a guy the way I wanted Jerry, almost the minute I met him. I was feverish, crazy, jealous of everything he touched, from his cat to his phone to the steering wheel in his jeep. By nature (genes again!), I am far too skeptical, too bound by gravity to ever get swept off my feet, but if anyone’s come near, it’s Jerry. Jerry is a high-tech veterinarian. He flies around the country and orchestrates in-vitro breeding of pedigreed cattle and horses, from genetic counseling to the carefully engineered reproductive moment of truth. (His dream is to do the same for lions on the Serengeti.)
I met Jerry last winter in Augusta, Maine. I was alone in a bar, consoling myself after a disastrous interview for a job I might have had tagging moose. Till now, my work has taken place on the ocean, but lately I’ve been restless for the reassuring enclosure of mountains and lakes. And the ocean is becoming too politically charged. Overfishing, nuclear testing, PCBs, and a mulish nostalgia for whaling have all conspired to make the practice of Darwin-style biology next to impossible.
We got talking about something predictably high-minded like the dawning obsolescence of wilderness. He was wearing a bolo tie, a ridley sea turtle treading water at the throat of his denim shirt, under the reef of a coral-red beard. I remember wanting desperately to impress him. That’s not like me, so I was partly hooked, partly annoyed. We’d been talking less than an hour, had moved on to Richard Dawkins and selfish genes, when Jerry admired my earrings, tear-shaped slabs of turquoise hanging from silver studs.
“How’d I look in one of those?” he said. He reached out and gently unfastened my right earring. I was acutely aware of his callused fingertips; of his beard, like fiery sagebrush, grazing my face. Not a soft square inch on the man except this pair of blue eyes, a blue like bridesmaid satin. I expected him to turn toward the mirror behind the bottles and hold the earring up for show, but instead he set it down. When he took an ice cube out of his scotch and held it to his right earlobe, I laughed and said, “You are bluffing.”
Merely smiling, he put the ice cube on the bar, where it slid aimlessly away. He took the earring and, just like that, pushed it through. The noise was faint but excruciating, a cell of bubble wrap popping. He did not blink.
“Now we’re a package,” he said, pressing our naked ears together and facing us toward the mirror. “Siamese, inseparable.”
“Get away!” I shoved him, but I was laughing hysterically. The part of m
e that was hooked had just won me over against all survivalist caution, of which I’ve been told I possess next to none.
Just like that, I’ve lost a month of my life. Sloughed off my frontal lobe like snow shearing off an ice floe in May. Other people fill in the details, but what do you believe? One incidental thing I’d like to remember: the helicopter ride to the hospital. A chopper careening up the muscleman arm of the Cape: Ride ’em, cowboy! Woo hah! My mother says, “No you would not want to remember, honey, believe you me. You were in a lot of pain. Sometimes God is merciful. God or whoever. Whatever.” She is a Minnesota-born Presbyterian and goes to church only on Easter and Christmas Eve. She went a lot more often when Louisa and I were small, to make sure we had our full dose of Sunday school—like a course of antibiotics—but she could never drag our father along, not even for the “Hallelujah Chorus” by candlelight. (He is not swayed by bravura or sentiment, least of all by a merger. In this way, at least, I am his daughter.)
The afternoon is ruthlessly long. There is no conversation around me, and the fading light outside has no impact on the homogenized glare within. Dinner, equally dull, might as well be intravenous, and afterward, every time I drift toward sleep, Gwen or some resident pokes me. Or I hear another patient in distress. Even if I had the energy to complain, I’d feel like a brat. It’s no secret that some of my companions here, just beyond my curtain, are going to die—die right here and soon. That’s why they’re here. They’re like planes in a holding pattern over an airport, waiting their turn to land. This doesn’t spook me—I think about death sometimes as a state of respite—but I know that I’m moving away from them, that I’ll make it out of here. At which point I’ll face another struggle. Best not to think about that now.
In my jackknifed bed, subdued by a pill whose name I’ve forgotten, I assign myself a mental calisthenic: to configure my life as a timeline of medical crises—of which there have been quite a few.