Annie Oakley's Girl (14 page)

“Let it go, baby, let it go.”

I can't say anything. My jaws are tight.

“Let it go, babe.”

Ange pulls away from me enough to kiss my forehead. I break. She squeezes herself around me tight. Then they're both around me, holding me.

And then, dear Jim, held close between the bodies of our friends, I see you.

I roll you and your wheelchair out to the sidewalk. I'm worried because in the few minutes it's taken us to get from your room to here, the sky has turned gray. I tell you we ought to get back inside, but you wave that idea away. I stand above you at the pedestrian crossing and look down at the top of your cap, the back of your neck, your shoulders.

There's a traffic jam. The cars are pressed so close not even pedestrians can squeeze through. A wind is picking up. People are opening umbrellas. Cars are honking, drivers are laying on their horns. I start to say again, that we really ought to go back in, but you find my hand on the wheelchair grip and cover it with your own. You sigh like a tolerant, tired parent. You shake your head. You pat my hand then squeeze it.

“The traffic'll break in a minute, Jim.”

But you aren't listening to me. You slip your hand from mine, and before I can stop you, you've unhooked the tooth of the drip-feed from your arm.

“Jim, the IV.”

“Ssssh.” You put your finger to your lips like you are finally going to tell the truth about a story you've been telling for so long.

You slip the blanket off your knees. You stand up alone, not needing to lean on anyone. You're tall as you used to be. You stretch your arms out to your sides and take a deep breath. I see your chest expand. You stretch your neck up and look at the sky. You throw your arm around my shoulder and pull me to you. I feel the firmness of your body and smell the good clean smell of your healthy skin the way it was the summer we climbed Mt. Si. You pull my face in front of you. You hold my face between your hands and look at me. You look inside where I can't see, where I can't look away from you. Beneath the fear the covered love, you see me, Jim. Then, like a blessing that forgives me, and a healing benediction that will seal a promise true, you kiss my forehead.

You tell me, “Tonto, girl, I'm going for a ride.”

You fling your Right-On Sister Stonewall fist up in the air then open your hand in a Hi-Yo Silver wave. I watch your hand as it stretches above you high, impossibly high. Your feet lift off the sidewalk and you rise. Above the crowded street, the hospital, above us all, you fly.

The rain begins. Cold drops hit my face when I look up at you. But you fly high above it, Jim. Your firm taut body catches glints of light from a sun that no one here below can see.

I raise a Right-On fist to answer you, but then my fist is opened, just like yours, and I am waving, Jim.

Good friend, true brother Jim, goodbye.

GRIEF

We're all at the airport to see our friend off to a foreign country none of us has been to before. Tonight there are hundreds of us. We all pitched in to buy the ticket. We bought her travel guides and sent her to Berlitz school. We traded evenings reading to her from phrase books and flash cards. We bought her luggage and clothes. We got letters of reference from well-connected people at home. We booked reservations for her in reliable hotels. We showed her our support. Though we're all reluctant to admit it, we live vicariously through her.

How did we choose her? Well, we didn't really. Like greatness, it was thrust upon her. The dubious honor of bringing us all together through our fear of departure.

Because beneath our party spirit, there's an edge. One thing's not arranged: her ticket home.

She stands at the gate to board the plane and we strain, from our distance at the end of the wide open hall behind the electronic surveillance gate, to see her face. She turns to wave goodbye to all of us and I have a flash of vision: I recognize this as a photograph we will show each other in the future when we remember her. I expect to hear a camera click, but I don't. Everything is quiet. None of us even breathes. She turns to walk into the collapsible corridor that leads to the plane when I notice she's the only person boarding the flight. It's then, and only then, I realize she's actually leaving. She throws her shoulders back with confidence. Her golden hair swings with her gait. When I hear something, it is the sound of her skirt rustling in air.

After we return home, only the bravest of us will allow her self to think we might not get postcards from her. We were so conscientious to give her all our addresses. Someone even gave her a telephone calling card. However, not even the bravest of us will admit what we think is true.

In the first few weeks she is gone, we tell ourselves she's too excited and busy to get in touch. She's having fun, we tell ourselves. We elaborate beautiful fantasies of the sunny streets she walks through, the sculpted gardens she spends her afternoons in, the exquisite dishes she dines on every warm exotic evening. We people her life with people we want to love us. Every dream we have we give to her. Some of us even envy her, so convinced we are that she has what we want.

But in fact, we hear nothing from her at all.

Gradually, we all think the same thing about her. We deal with this nobly, or rather, we deal with it with manners. It is one of the great, sad, tragic things that make us who we are. Our references to her grow vague, then disappear. We manage this transition without a word. But at home, alone, we each work hard at our forgetting. Here's what we forget:

We forget her hair. We forget the way it shone in the sun on the beach where we played in the summer. We forget the way she wore anklets and made us all laugh at her imitation of cartoon characters from our youth. We forget her milk-white complexion and the soft strong veins in her hands. We forget the dusty line of fuzz that covered the small of her back. We forget her small breasts inside her swimsuit. We forget the way her calves tightened when she crouched at the start of the city parks race. We forget the stories she told of her zany brother in the farm country. We forget the colored strips of cellophane she decorated her bedroom windows with so we could see the light make rainbows in the morning. We forget the warmth of her palms, the moisture of her hairline when she came home from a run. We forget the secret places she knew of when we were bored and couldn't think of anything to do. We forget the way she ordered sweet and sour pork and always,
always
, picked out the pork and only ate the sauce and vegetables. We forget the way she pushed back her hair from her forehead when she was trying to make a point. We forget her favorite song from her childhood. We forget the favorite shells she had collected from the northern shore when she went there with her family when she was eleven. We forget her annoying habit of never putting the toothpaste cap back on all the way and being obsessive about dust in her study. We forget her inability to compromise when her favorite program was on at the same time as a great movie. We forget the way she covered her mouth whenever she told a story she liked too much.

We forget in order to be happy.

That is why her lover, who forgets most of all of us, is happiest. She forgets things we never knew that, even if she wanted to, she couldn't tell us.

When most of the forgetting is done, something happens.

I get a call from her lover.

“I heard from her,” she tells me. “She called me.”

I can't say, “But that's impossible” without implying what we all think but don't say. Instead I say, “Oh, we'll have to hear about it.”

I call several of us and say, “Her lover told me she heard from her. She thinks she got a phone call.”

We agree it's a wrong number, a similar voice, even a cruel joke. We agree we don't need to do anything. Soon, we reason, her lover will forget the phone call.

But she calls me again. “I got another phone call from her. She says she's doing fine, but she misses us.”

I call a meeting.

“She hasn't forgotten the phone call,” I say. “She says she's had another one.”

“How do we know she didn't get a call?” someone asks.

We all turn. “That's impossible. It's imagination, just something she wants.”

We decide to do something.

But we don't act fast enough. Her lover shows us a postcard she says she sent which says that she'll be home. The handwriting is faint and shaky. We must help our poor foolish sister through her grief by exposing her fantasy for what it is. So we pretend to agree with her in her expectation when she goes to the airport to meet the return flight. We all know she will not come back. We are not surprised when she does not arrive at the airport. But our poor, foolish sister is insistent. “She missed the flight,” she tells us. “She'll be here.” We go again. Again she isn't there. Again she says she missed the flight but will come back. We go again. Soon we go there all the time, forgetting we're only there to keep our poor sister company. Instead, we start thinking like her; we think she will return.

We show ourselves in huge numbers at the airport. We tell ourselves there's power in numbers. Even though we know we simply haven't got any power when it comes to this. We start re-enacting the past, hoping our re-creating can undo it. Over and over we re-live her final days with us, her departing flight. We stand where we were, we shout as we did. We try to do what we hadn't done then. The truth is, we never wanted her to go. We were afraid.

The past comes back to us, vivid as blood, how we tried to soothe ourselves with final comforts. But all we did was give her guide books and feed her her favorite home-cooked meal the night before she left, throw her a farewell party. We vowed undying love and meant it, but learned that what we needed was forgetfulness, the only release from sorrow there is. And even now there is nothing we can do about our grief.

We stayed with her in vigils before she left. We told her we'd change places with her if we could; we couldn't. All our good intentions profited neither us nor her anything. All we could do was pretend — while she was with us — that she was coming back.

That's why we go to the airport in our party clothes. Why we sing Welcome Home as we remember pushing her toward her flight, why the cake we decorated says, “Welcome Back,” why we refuse to sublet her room, why we refuse to offer help to her lover because we don't want to imply that she needs help, why we've left the bon voyage decorations up, the pink and yellow streamers, the cheery opaque balloons on the ceiling, the color-coordinated plastic forks and spoons, why we laugh and tell ourselves we're so clever to recycle them into Welcome Home.

We wander from gate to gate all the time. We stand and watch as flights deplane and people kiss their loved ones home. We mill around wearing our party hats and blowing our party favors. We offer punch and cookies to reunited couples, families, friends. “Welcome Home! Welcome Home!” we cry, knowing the next flight will bring her back to us.

With our practiced songs and our party clothes, we make people happy. Especially her lover, because she is the most beautiful. She drapes her tan healthy body with light spring clothes, her arms and legs firm like a gorgeous young animal. In her bright green and blue and yellow silks, she smiles gracefully, but with the expectation of a confident child. Her longing for her lover's return, her nostalgia for every warm inch of her lover's flesh, is so strong we are almost afraid to be near her. She is flushed with the beauty of things about to happen. Her full, just parted lips, are ready.

We are sure she cannot have left us, sure she'll be back, sure she'll return even stronger and more beautiful than when she left. She will have braved something marvelous and strange. We are sure she'll enter with a flourish and tell us we were wrong to have remembered and forgotten what we did, to have ever stopped believing she'd come back.

But tonight, that's almost all I know, that I have stopped believing. It's not something anyone notices; my party hat is still on straight and my full lace skirt is crisp as starch. But I am singing our happy Welcome Home with only part of me. I imagine the sagging points of party hats, damp limp paper horns, ice cream turning to foamy puddles on paper plates, crumbs of lemon layer cake ground into the cracks between the linoleum tiles. Maybe the flush is weariness, not excitement.

In fact, I think I never believed that she'd come back. But I knew I needed something. I wanted to find it in all of us. I was warmed by our costumes and camraderie, our routines of ritual comfort. And, truly, I love the songs we sing together and the sweet look on people's faces at the airport when we give them cake and tell them about our friend.

But I didn't do these things because I thought she would return. I did them for us. And I did them in case, somehow, she could know. I did them to tell her that I would remember her. I did them to tell her goodbye.

The last memory I have of you, you're falling. Alone in the airplane corridor, you stumble. Your thin shoulders are hunched as though you're being pushed down. You can't bear to turn and look at us on your way out because you know what we'll see in your hopeless face.

The sound is your final gasp of air before you could tell us goodbye.

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