“It’s not a problem,” he said. “Everything’s fine.”
We continued to have some version of this conversation for a long time and it never came out differently. As far as Karl was concerned, the news was good and he didn’t care why.
But I had sold my house. We were married. Karl’s complexion pinked up. He had no problem going up and down the stairs. He started carrying his own luggage again. It was as if he didn’t remember anything that had happened. “Why do you think you finally changed your mind and decided we should get married?” he asked me one day, months after the prescription bottles had gone in the trash.
I looked at him. “I thought you were going to die,” I said.
“You married me because you thought I was going to die?”
“Remember? We were in the airport in Rochester? There was talk about a heart transplant?”
“It wasn’t because you loved me?”
“Of course I loved you. I’ve always loved you. But you asked me why I married you.”
In fact, even as Karl’s health continued to mysteriously improve, I still found myself lying awake at night, worrying that he was going to die. He may have made me a better person, but he had not made me a better Buddhist. I wanted to grasp, to possess. “Stay like this,” I would think to myself as I watched him sleep. “Stay here, in this exact moment.” I tortured myself over what awful thing might happen in the future instead of being wholly present and thankful for this moment. I realized that by not marrying Karl, by never allowing myself to be in the position to divorce him or to be divorced by him, I thought I had tricked fate. But in the wake of this commitment I was flooded with thoughts of what I wouldn’t be able to control. I could understand why Gautama had to leave his wife and child in order to find the path to nirvana. The love between humans is the thing that nails us to this earth.
I wish I could say that we came to a point where the matter of Karl’s heart condition was properly resolved, but really, it never has been. I once told the story to a doctor who explained that if the parvovirus was still active when the tests had been done, the heart could have been stunned, rendering the muscle tissue temporarily paralyzed rather than dead. Another doctor, a cardiologist I sat next to at a post–bar mitzvah luncheon, told me that it sounded to him like Karl wanted to get married and had run out of ways to ask me.
“He didn’t fake it,” I said. “I went to Minnesota. I saw the films.”
“I didn’t say he faked it,” the doctor told me. “But the heart wants what it wants.”
If my marriage were a fairy tale, this would be the moment that I closed the castle door. Stories are based in conflict, and when the conflict is resolved the story ends. That’s because for the most part happiness is amorphous, wordless, and largely uninteresting. Still, I promised Niki, and so I will try to press ahead for another minute.
My marriage, which was long in the making and built on the bones of divorce, is one for beginners. We are both, astonishingly, in good health. We both had money when we married and two years later we merged it, every last cent, into joint accounts. (Which, I must tell you, was a moment of trust and commitment the likes of which most wedding vows couldn’t touch. Likewise, we had both rejected any talk of a prenuptial agreement because how can you say, after eleven years of thinking it through, We have fully committed to staying together until one of us is dead but I want to make arrangements for what might happen if it doesn’t work? “If you ever decide to leave me, just look in your rearview mirror,” I like to say to Karl. “Because I will be coming after you.”) We both have work we find meaningful and for which we have received so much recognition and positive reinforcement that it borders on the comical. We have no small children. We have a large master bathroom with two sinks. We have loving, supportive families who think we each picked the best person possible to spend our lives with. And—no small point, this—Karl has the kindest and most highly evolved first wife in the history of first wives. I touch my forehead to the floor in gratitude for how easily we all sit down at a dinner table together with her second husband and the wonderful grown-up children she and Karl had together, and now their grandchildren. When someone comments on my happy marriage I want to say, My God, look at the circumstances. With a script like this you’d have to be a fool not to make it work.
And yet, we have a wealth of differences that come mostly from the fact that we didn’t grow up together. Karl was born in Meridian, Mississippi, in 1947. His parents stayed married, as did the parents of his friends. His mother still lives in the house they moved to the year Karl turned one. He walked down the street to school. I was born in Los Angeles in 1963. By the time I started college I had moved fifteen times. We saw different movies, read different books. I never had a single date in high school, but when I went with Karl to his high school reunion women lined up all night to tell me how they had been in love with my husband. All I felt was the wondrous luck that he had found me. “Just think,” I say to Karl, “every night we come home to the same house and we sleep in the same bed with the same dog, and of all the houses and beds and dogs in the world we hit on this combination.” The fact that we came so close to missing out, missing out because of my own fear of failing, makes me think I avoided a mortal accident by the thickness of a coat of paint. We are, on this earth, so incredibly small, in the history of time, in the crowd of the world, we are practically invisible, not even a dot, and yet we have each other to hold on to.
When we do things differently, and very often we do, I remind myself that it is rarely a matter of right and wrong. We are simply two adults who grew up in different houses far away from one another.
I can’t imagine that there is a right way to be married. The most essential terms for happiness I can think of—commitment, acceptance, love—could be challenged by one successful marriage or another. Even the very worst ideas for marriage, my own personal worst ideas, would be tolerable circumstances for someone else. I can tell you how I came to have a happy marriage, but I’m not so sure my results can be reproduced: wait until everyone you know gets divorced, then get divorced yourself, find a divorced man, date him for eleven years, wait until you think his situation is terminal, and then marry him. It will not be terminal.
I continue to think back to Edra, standing in that swimming pool on a bright day in summer. “Does he make you a better person?” was what she asked me, and I want to tell her, Yes, with the full force of his life, with the example of his kindness and vigilance, his good sense and equanimity, he makes me a better person. And that is what I aspire to be, better, and no, it really isn’t any more complicated than that.
(Audible Originals, Winter 2011)
Our Deluge, Drop by Drop
THE FIRST BIG flood in my memory was in 1974, when my family was living in Ashland City, a half-hour down the Cumberland River from Nashville. My mother was stuck out at the farm by herself; my sister and I were in school, my stepfather was at work. We lived in a hollow down a very long road, and by the early afternoon it had begun to fill with water. By the time my mother, who doesn’t know how to swim, realized how high the water was, it was much too high to make it out in her car—a 1971 Jaguar XK-E the color of a lima bean that sat about six inches from the ground. She loaded a plastic Sunfish sailboat up with luggage, dragged the boat down the road by a rope in the rain, and then walked into water up to her chest until she reached the considerably higher (and aptly named) River Road, where she and her bags were picked up by a man who worked for us.
When the rain that has caused Nashville’s worst flooding in seventy-five years stopped last Sunday night, I got to wondering: Why do people wait and watch the water rise? Why do they keep their luggage in the boat and themselves in water the color of milky coffee that is no doubt full of snakes? There are things about human nature we’ll never understand, but part of it can be explained by the fact that a flood is, at least in the beginning, only rain, which is not as s
udden as an earthquake or as imperative as fire. Rain happens all the time.
I live in Nashville now, I have for a long time. I started watching the rain on Saturday morning. It was coming down so hard it looked white. My husband and I stood at the front door with our very old dog and decided she’d have to wait until things eased up. But they didn’t ease up. We canceled our plans for the day. Finally I put on my flip-flops, shorts, and a raincoat and took the dog out. I went down the street to walk my mother’s dog, and then the dog of a friend who lives on a hill around the corner. The water was up to my ankles, but it was mesmerizing, as was all that thunder and lightning. I went to see how high the creek was a block away; it was raging like an angry little river.
All night long the tornado sirens wailed, which in the South is a sound you get used to, like cicadas. (If I went down to the basement every time the tornado siren went off, I would have spent a great deal of my life in the basement.) The next morning when I went to walk my mother’s dog again, the water was up to my knees at points and I could barely see through the rain. My husband went off to walk our friend’s dog, but he couldn’t make it there on foot. He picked me up in the car and we drove for fifteen minutes, looping over higher streets to make it to her house, which was only a block away. There we saw that yesterday’s creek was now a torrent, leaping over the road and through the houses beside it. It would take just the slightest error in judgment to be swept away in the suburbs—though maybe fording floodwaters in order to carry small dogs to higher ground for purposes of relieving themselves could be called an error in judgment.
Three years ago my husband and I bought a small piece of land on the Cumberland, just off River Road on the way to Ashland City, not far from where I had lived as a child. We keep meaning to build a little house there, a single room with a wide porch where we would spend quiet weekends, but we haven’t gotten around to it yet. We go out there some evenings to have a picnic or paddle around in a canoe. We like to visit with our neighbors.
On Monday morning my husband called Monty, who lives to the left of our lot. He was on the second floor of his house. He said everything was lost—his cars had washed away and all the houses on the road were ruined. Then the phone cut off. I called him back and told him to come and stay with us in town. “I’m going to my sister’s,” he said. Then he told me he had to go. “The helicopter’s here.”
That afternoon, on the street where I live, we stood in the sunshine and took stock of our damages. While sump pumps turned driveways into rivers, one woman told us the water in her basement was up to her hip. Another had water to her shoulder. I offered up the leak in my chimney, which will require ripping out the ceiling in my living room, but that’s small potatoes; my basement was dry. A block away, a family’s furniture was piled on the front lawn.
The rain is over; what we’re left with is the life that follows weather. While my more intrepid friends head out to pull up the carpets of strangers and muck out their living rooms, I stay home and do the laundry they bring back to me. It is thick with mud and leaves and bits of sticks. Every night when I’m finished, I mop the hall to the laundry room and pull a dozen ticks off myself. I wash boxes of mud-caked dishes and dry them all and put them down in my clean basement in neat, labeled boxes until the people they belong to are settled enough to want them back again. We’re waiting to hear if the water treatment plant is going to close.
But in my limited personal experience this is nothing compared to the aftermath of the flood of ’74, when the corpses of drowned cows floated down the road from two farms away and sank in our front yard. We didn’t know about this until days later, when the water finally receded and we were able to return home. It turns out that cow removal is not the responsibility of the people who own the cows, but of the people who wind up with them in the end. The dead cows, like the ticks and the mud, like the rain itself, serve to remind us that life is a civilized business until it’s not. And in those rare times when we manage to emerge triumphant from an encounter with weather, we realize we’ve been placated: if we’re still standing, it’s only because the weather didn’t feel like taking us out on that particular day. Once again I’m counting myself as lucky.
(New York Times, May 5, 2010)
Dog without End
TWO DAYS BEFORE my dog Rose died, I put her in the stroller and pushed her down the sidewalk. It was late in November but the day was mild and bright. For a minute she sat up on the fake sheepskin pad and sniffed the air, but then she lay down again. When my friend Norma had bought Rose a dog stroller the summer before I hadn’t wanted it, but feelings of idiocy were quick to give way to Rose’s obvious pleasure. She liked the jostle of the uneven sidewalks, the chance to track a squirrel or bark at another dog. If the late afternoon came without a walk, she would begin to cry and complain beside me on the couch until I finally took her outdoors and rolled her around. If my neighbors found my behavior to be worthy of discussion, so be it. My dog was happy.
Rose hadn’t walked for more than a year, and she had been deaf for longer than that, but in the last two weeks the stronger antibiotic she’d been taking for a persistent bladder infection had turned her eyes to milk. Blind, she would trace a figure eight in the air with her nose, barking piteously whenever I walked away from her. She lost her appetite. I held the smallest bites of meat loaf, always her favorite, to her black lips and she turned her head away. I took her to the vet constantly in those days, trying to hold on to the empty little sack of a dog she had become. There were pills and drops and ointments, bags of fluids to be administered subcutaneously. On the visit to the vet this particular late-November morning, he had told me what I already knew: it was over. It was now just a matter of deciding on the day.
Rose and I took our normal route, three blocks towards West End before turning right on Craighead. We went up a long hill and down again to where the street gave way to an alley. It was the middle of the day and the neighborhood was quiet. There was a golf cart coming up behind us with an older man driving, two little boys in the back. The man stopped the cart a few feet past us when it registered that I didn’t have a baby.
“Boys,” he said, when they were looking straight at us, “look at that. That’s a little dog in there.”
I knew this man by sight though not by name, the way you know the man in your neighborhood who drives a golf cart, the way he knows the woman who pushes the dog stroller. “She doesn’t walk,” I said.
He was wearing a ball cap pulled down over his sunglasses. “Well, isn’t that nice of you to take her out like that. Boys, isn’t that nice?”
The boys, who were for at least a minute genuinely interested in the unexpected visual of a dog now sitting up in a place formerly occupied in their experience only by human infants, nodded in thoughtful agreement.
“She’s old,” the man said to me.
“Sixteen,” I said, though Rose, up until these past few weeks of sharp decline, had never looked her age. Soft as any rabbit, she was all-over white with one ginger ear, a gingered spot between her shoulder blades. White dogs are slow to show their age.
“My dog was sixteen,” the man said to me. “Well, it was my girls’ dog, but they were both away in college when she got so bad.”
I had spent the vast majority of the last sixteen years alone in a room with this dog. I wrote books while she chased a ball or chewed a bone or, later, mostly slept. I had spent more hours of my life in Rose’s physical presence than I had in the presence of my mother or my husband, so when I held up my hand to the man in his golf cart, I meant it as an act of self-preservation. “Don’t tell me.”
The man nodded, understanding, but he had already started to remember his dog. He was unable to stop himself. “She lost her mind at the end,” he told me. “She would walk into a corner behind the door and she couldn’t figure out how to back herself up. She’d get stuck there, and she’d start barking.”
“I’m serious
,” I said. “Don’t tell me this.” I pushed the stroller back and forth while we idled.
“The last day I was home by myself. I had to call my girls and tell them. They’d had her since they were little. They’d always had that dog.”
The boys in the back of the cart were maybe six and eight. I don’t know for sure. I’ve never been a good judge of boys. “I’m asking you to stop,” I said.
“When I went and got her, when I took her into the vet and he put her down, I cried.” He shook his head at the thought, at the sadness of it all. “I stayed with her all the way until the end. I’ll tell you, I never cried like that over anything in my life.”
“Please,” I said, begging him, nearly laughing. I did not want to have to run away from him with my stroller but I was prepared to. “Stop.”
And then, of course, he did. He snapped to his senses. He wished us a good walk, and set the electric motor in motion. The boys waved as they rode away, and I reached down to rub Rose’s ears. I let her smell my wrist. When she was settled again, I pushed the stroller on, down the alley and back up the next block towards home. I was trying not to think about the man or his dog or how he had known when that last day was upon them. I was trying just to think about Rose and how the sun sat on the top of her head and how the warmth would feel good to her. Halfway up the street, I saw the golf cart circling back. The man drove a few feet past me and then stopped, turning his wheels towards the curb. This time the two boys did not so much as glance in our direction.
“What I didn’t tell you was that my dog was in terrible shape,” the man said, as if there had been no lapse in our conversation. “She was nothing like your dog at all. Look at her,” he said, nodding down to Rose. “Look at the way she’s sniffing the air, sitting up. She looks five years younger than my dog. She’s going to last you a long time.”