The Backdrop
All of this—life, death, fear, dread, worry—is not going on in a vacuum, no matter how it sometimes feels. We live in a village with a village green and two bookstores; good coffee, nice people, crowded weekends. This is the Catskills, and I am surrounded by green mountains with names I will never learn. The house is pretty, big enough for everyone to visit, the dogs reassure me with their reliable doggy ways. Days begin and end, weeks come and go, only my focus is small and intense: Catherine. I keep forgetting all the rest—changing seasons, stories told, stories withheld, the pleasure of seeing Chuck almost every day and Catherine and her family sometimes spending their weekends here, as if I were a vacation. My daughter Jennifer visits often with Violet and Ralphie, and the four children play together, making memories. My default position remains fear.
I fear for Chuck too. He has scans of his liver every six months. He won’t last forever. (I hear him saying either “Why not?” or “Thank God,” depending on his mood.)
Today, though, I finally began worrying about someone else, an old friend gone to the dark place, someone I can’t help.
“Make yourself useful,” my father used to say. I forget what he wanted me to do—dust? vacuum? dishes? Nothing that appealed to me. But now I seem to be living by those words.
“You don’t just want to be useful,” Chuck points out. “You need to be useful.”
That sounds neurotic, but I’m too old to be worrying about it. Neurosis is for the young, who think they are made of time.
So we have children finding salamanders under stones, and wanting to know the names of things, and Fred finding a locust, almost invisible on a tree, tediously making its way out of its shell. Freddy, so excited, jumping and shouting, “Isn’t it amazing! Isn’t it amazing!” Once the creature had worked the last of itself out, Fred carefully reached up and removed the husk. We both stared at it lying in his palm, fascinated by the hole the locust had made for its departure. We watched the newly hatched thing as it crawled up the trunk with its green legs. Then Freddy ran into the kitchen to tell his mother. “Amazing” I heard him cry through the open window.
Mindfulness
The dishwasher is broken. The door won’t close properly. Now its lights won’t turn off, it is stuck in some dysfunctional machine dream. All of my male family members who are around this weekend have a go at it, but nothing works. I don’t want to fix it. Nobody (me) ever unloads the dishwasher, it is too boring and thus too onerous a job, so there are always dishes in the sink anyway, and now I am going to wash them as they appear. It is a contemplative activity. Here is the Fire King golden cup from the set my daughter Jennifer gave me. Here is the big mug my daughter Catherine uses for her tea when she drops by. Here is last night’s cast-iron pan with the remnants of a roast chicken I made for Chuck. Here are the pale blue cups Kitty gave me. Here is a plate with chocolate smears from the twins’ birthdays. Here are two candles with the icing sucked off.
Deer
In the back, under the fallen apple tree and hidden in the tall stalks of whatever remains of summer, lies a deer carcass. Every morning there is less and less of it. How did it get here? Maybe, as a friend suggested, the deer was hit by a car on 212 and made it as far as my yard, then lay down and died. I doubt coyotes brought it down, coyotes are mostly in the hills, the less inhabited parts of these parts, or so I hope. I never hear them. Anyway, there is this deer. My dogs can’t reach it, the underground electric fence stops them, nor do they smell its remains as everything is frozen. It must take some effort to rip what is left of the flesh from what is left of its bones. Catherine loves bones, and I have rescued and hung in the fork of a tree the jawbone, teeth attached, the small ones in front very worn down. This morning there is a long piece of backbone lying by itself, and I will put that somewhere safe too until nature takes its course and all trace of pink is gone.
I keep an eye on the dogs anyway. Carolina has already wandered past the electric fence, whether she is too old and deaf to hear the warning whistle before the shock, or the weight she has lost makes the collar ineffective, it being too loose around her throat. She is an old party now, her muzzle almost completely white, her eyes getting milky. She needs help getting into bed at night.
This morning a friend called to say her husband had driven past my neighbor’s yard, which borders on the very busy 212, and saw one of my dogs there. I rushed into the car, peeled out of the driveway, and stopped with a screech at the end of the road. There was Carolina, sniffing in circles, and I caught her easily, lifted her into the car, and drove the thirty yards home. Both of us were trembling.
Soup
Chuck has bought a chicken. He sounds proud. The chicken sat in his icebox for three days, wrapped in its original plastic, and now he wants to make soup. I make a worried sound.
“Better take a good sniff,” I say.
“It’s fine,” he says. I decide not to argue.
“So throw it in a pot, chop up celery and a whole lot of carrots, cover it with cold water, and simmer it until the meat wants to fall off the bones.”
“I don’t have many carrots,” he says.
“Go get some. The ones you cook with you can eat, but then put more in at the end to make the broth sweet.” Then I tell him a terrible secret. I put a little sugar in the soup if the carrots aren’t plentiful or sweet.
“You can fry up the liver for Pojd,” I say. “But throw the gizzard in the soup. It is delicious with salt.”
He cooks it. Then the soup sits on the back of his stove for days, but he declares it a success.
Birdsong
Catherine has a PET scan scheduled for this week. She has been in pain recently, a pain that seems to move around her body. She is scared, I am scared, we are all of us scared. I sat outside in the early morning, and heard an unfamiliar bird. It seemed to me it was saying over and over, “screaMING screaMING screaMING,” but that might have been my state of mind.
After a year of bad news, there is good news. Catherine’s scan is clear. There is no sign of cancer in her system. Wonderful news, a lovely day, but I don’t trust good news and I don’t like good weather. Dread has been my faithful companion, and without it I am alone. There has been no tearful relief, or renewed vigor. Maybe I have burned out those circuits. The sun is golden, the trees will turn green eventually, the sky is blue with a few puffy white clouds, but I don’t know what to do with it, so I head inside to watch all five seasons of Burn Notice again. There nothing exists but these silly people running around shouting at each other, all of them carrying guns and drinking things I’d love to be drinking too. Then I watch 24. “Secure the perimeter!” “We’re running out of time!”
But my behavior is troubling. Who sits in a dark room watching Burn Notice on a beautiful day? I’ve thought about it, trying to get under it, but there isn’t any deep here. Just the simple desire to be not living one’s life. I need to learn how to accept a clearing as a clearing. Yes, the woods are still all around us, yes, there are five years of PET scans every four months ahead of us, yes, triple negative is a monstrous disease, but this is a clearing.
There might even be a pond.
Jennifer
Jennifer calls every day after dropping the kids at school. “Good morning,” she says in her generous, cheerful voice. This is my favorite way to start off the day. We talk on the phone as often as if we were just in the next room, little bits of our lives transferred back and forth.
Garden
Catherine is making a garden now. A friend asks her what the difference is between skunk cabbage and hostas. “Hostas look like skunk cabbage that went to private school,” she says. “I’m going to write that down,” I say, laughing. Catherine is recovering from radiation, planting flowers and planning a vegetable garden. For the first time, under Catherine’s influence and borrowing her enthusiasm, I am planting a garden too. First I pulled out millions of nettles,
whose roots snake along lengthwise underground, and threw them on a tarp. My grandson Joe hacked down and dug out a field of forsythia that was encroaching on the lawn like the topiary garden in The Shining. I am noticing everything: how bright a pale green are the locust leaves—almost chartreuse—before they sober up. I will go to Houst to find the color, try to make a springlike painting.
Tiny
A tiny (one-knuckle-high) tree somehow took root in the dirt between two boards of a wooden table on the patio. Catherine discovered it. In the morning it had a cap on its head, not an acorn, some other covering. Then it grew half an inch and by afternoon the cap had fallen off. Chuck came by and took its picture. We all wondered how long it would last, how high it would grow. But there wasn’t enough dirt for its roots, it dwindled and died.
I tried not to think of this as an omen, but unwelcome thoughts enter my head all the time.
Loss
Chuck rarely talks about his children in terms of grief. He adores them all, is happiest, I think, when they are visiting. But every once in a while his divorce, and the damage it did, rises up and he breaks down. I remember we were out for supper one night a couple of years ago and the subject came up. I might have been talking about what my kids went through with all my divorces, and he may have been replying. It might have been one of those conversations old friends have, familiar as prayer, only this time it took a turn. I looked across the table at my weeping friend. Chuck overcome is a sight as rare as a solar eclipse.
I am aware of my cavalier attitude toward men. I wittily describe them as single-celled organisms. In the time of divorce, I take the woman’s side; it’s my default position. But this is too easy, and it leaves out the men I love. Chuck is one; my son, Ralph, is another.
Without any warning, Ralph’s former wife decided to move with their three daughters from Vermont to Nantucket Island. Ralph was living in Montpelier, where he had been used to seeing his girls a lot, and now they may as well have been on their way to the moon. Ralph was devastated. Chuck and Catherine and I were having supper, talking about Ralph’s imminent loss, and how there seemed no practical solution. Chuck began to say something about how Ralph had to find a way to hold on to them. “It’s so important,” Chuck began, and his voice broke. Catherine moved quickly to the sofa and put her arm around him, but there was no comfort for anyone that night.
Staples
Six staples in my ears. Acupuncture. I can’t stop smoking. I want this to work so Catherine can give it a shot, but this is day three, and I’ve scrounged up all the butts from the studio and the rest of the house, and smoked all but three right down to the cuticle. To keep busy, I took the dogs to have baths at the vet. They have returned, silky and clean, but are now busy digging and rolling in the dust. Dust isn’t so bad. It’s the other stuff. Cooper’s collar had a lot of deer shit on it, and I took it off and sprayed it with various things and then rubbed it and laid it in the sun, and now I need to find an old toothbrush. He’s so clean I can’t put it on him until it is sparkling.
They all got up at five this morning, an hour earlier than usual. I held them at bay (now I know what that means) until five-thirty, then let them out, all three howling and barking into the morning. If they weren’t hounds, it might be quieter, but they are hardwired for the hunt. So far they haven’t discovered the two birds’ nests on my front porch, a tiny overhang that leads to the front door, which we never use. Sparrows occupy the light that hangs over the door, and robins are in the eaves.
Now it’s a rainy Saturday morning, birds cheeping. God, what a lot of work it is to be a robin. Jennifer calls, having found two tiny blue jays as yet unable to fly, who are supposed to be learning how to forage and live on their own, but hers is a neighborhood full of cats and the occasional coyote. She has trapped them under flowerpots on her front porch but can’t decide what to do next. She so badly wants to save them. I tell her she has to let them go.
Despite my good intentions I find a cigarette on the floor of the living room. A cigarette is to smoke, so I smoke it immediately. I feel the dark god of nicotine raise himself on one elbow in my bloodstream. What took you so long, girl? he asks lazily. He has those bedroom eyes.
Windows
My friend Karol has given me three superb storm windows. “Look at the tar on the edges of this one,” she exclaimed. (She must be an artist too.) “I know,” I said. “I love it!” My grandson Joe helped put them in the back of my car, and we drove home. They are so big I’m going to use the sawhorses for the first time. Then I’ll lie underneath to see what’s happening. I could get one of those rolling things people use to work under cars. I’m already imagining huge trees, their branches swooping to the ground, like the old horse chestnut in my parents’ yard. The one my father called a church.
Maine
Chuck has rented a house in Maine for Ralph and his children this summer. They will be together for two weeks.
Broken
The painting I made on Karol’s glass was of blue sky, white and gray and pink clouds. It wasn’t a good painting, I gave it too much thought, and the glass was too large for me to control, or lose control of, whichever way you want to look at it. It lay across the sawhorses all right, but when I picked it up and held it vertically, a sound like rushing water ensued, and the glass fell to pieces at (and on) my feet. Too many heavy layers of paint, alas. When I picked up a large piece, it broke into smaller and smaller pieces. This reminded me of the conundrum of moving toward an object going only halfway each time, so that in theory you never reach it. This I never understood. Anyway, where the paint managed to hold the glass together, there was a crackled pattern, like honeycomb, and beautiful. What to do? How to use this? I chose a few pieces and glued them to a sheet of blue glass, so that the lighter sky and clouds float on the surface, and despite the strict instructions on the glue none of which told you how to glue painted glass to glass, the pieces are holding.
A Life
Catherine says now she has to figure out what to do with her life. For more than a year she has been focused on chemotherapy, surgeries, radiation. Cancer. A tightrope burning under her feet. Suddenly she is in the clear. “I don’t know what to do,” she said the other day.
“Whatever you want,” I probably said.
But what is harder than that? What do we do when there’s a before and you don’t know what to do with the after? And that awful phrase bangs around in the back of my mind: “likely to recur.”
It occurs to me that I have the same problem.
So What to Do
I’m watching DVDs of a program called Supernatural. I learned about it at Catherine’s one cold gray morning when I stopped for a visit. She was lying on the couch with her two ancient cats watching this terrible thing about demons and werewolves and shape-shifters, a whole world infested with vicious beings after the Hellmouth was opened by accident. “How can you watch this?” I asked, settling down next to her, gluing myself to the screen. “It’s terrible. It’s everything you hate in a movie.” Catherine long ago announced her aversion to movies that were “dark and wet.” This is dark and wet. Very dark, very wet. Everything is dripping with ectoplasm or sodden with blood.
“It’s good,” she says, not taking her eyes off the television.
It is ten in the morning. Granted, outside it is nasty, depressing, cold. But television at this hour? I am shocked. I stay for three episodes. “I’ve got to get out of here,” I say, standing up resolutely. “I can’t get hooked on this stuff, and it’s very upsetting.” She nods and smiles, continuing to watch.
“Oh, stay for one more episode,” she says.
I went home and two days later bought all seven seasons of this show and the eighth is on order. Like drinking, I start watching earlier and earlier each day. I’m learning all sorts of useful things for when the Apocalypse arrives. I learn you have to put salt on your windowsills and doorways to keep the demons out. I learn what
instrument kills what evil being. Some need their heads chopped off with an iron ax, some need to be burned alive, some need silver bullets or wooden stakes. Two very good-looking brothers have teamed up to fight the powers of evil, but they have issues with each other. At first Catherine’s favorite was Dean, the older brother, and I liked Sam. Now it’s the other way around. I have memorized the license plate of their old Chevy Impala, and plan to use it as a password.
It’s easy to find that five or six hours have sped by without my noticing. I am having fun. This is not my world, these are not my fears. Supernatural is great storytelling, and it is not my story.
Out of the Blue
Catherine tells me that long ago, she was lying on the Amagansett beach when suddenly, out of nowhere, a dark cloud swept across, there and gone in less than a minute. “Everything changed,” she tells me. “The color of the sea, the taste of the air, the air itself, the feel of the sand, the temperature, everything, and then it was gone and the day was hot and blue again, the ocean turned back into the right color.”
This is the kind of memory I have always thought needs to be remembered by someone else, after the original owner is gone. I’ll never forget it.
Bad Daphne
Daphne, who weighs maybe sixty pounds, thinks she is a lapdog. She climbs up wherever I am and, like mercury, melts into whatever space there is. Or isn’t. Her warmth is comforting, her head on my shoulder, or deep in the back of the chair behind me, and she falls asleep. But when it comes time for me to get up, she doesn’t understand that when the human being begins to squirm, that’s the cue for the dog to get up too. It requires more strength than I have to heave myself up while she lies sprawled on me, oblivious, but somehow the job gets done and she slides in surprise to the floor.