Eat Your Heart Out (12 page)

“I can't wait until you're my wife.”

I reach around my body, hold his hands, and also hold myself, further shortening my own breath.

The new moon
rode high over the modest golden fields and bruised skyline. Too hot, tangled in sheets and sweating, I left the bed frustrated, wanting for sleep but unable to find it. I needed to walk. The space I create cutting through the thick air is cooling, and when I am far enough from James I can breathe again.

How could I think this was working?

Since he proposed marriage, my hair has been falling out. All around the house I see it, like small golden chains, littering the floor. No matter how much I sweep, I cannot clear them away. The strands multiply each day. They are little lightning bolts made of my dead cells that mock me and remind me there's a reason that actresses wear wigs. I wonder if a bald bride is still a beautiful one.

My mother died last year, bald. I know now that she was faced with this same decision. She chose to marry my father. She gave him forever within the numbered days.

I wonder if it cost her life; the cancer sprouting everywhere it could, seeping into her bones, punishing her for lying. Sometimes, I want to ask her what to do, even though I know it's ridiculous to believe a dead person can hear you.

My mother watched me as I got older. She knew that we were two of a kind, that she had given birth to herself. She was jealous of me, my youth and beauty, but I was her accomplice. She'd tell me the truth and I would cover for her. She would leave for hours to visit with friends who did not exist. I told my father she was seeing Mary, her friend from church, who never attended when we did. There was her doctor, Mr. Green, whose office did not exist in the phonebook. And there was Mrs. Merriweather, the sick old widow to whom mother would bring dinner every Saturday night, to an address I made up, that did not exist anywhere in Texas.

“You and me, we're liars. That's not so bad. Anyone who tells you they aren't is a worse type than we are.” That was one of the kinder things my mother ever said to me. I was not loved by my mother, but she did claim me as her own.

I lie to James almost constantly. Most of the lies are meaningless, it's just that telling the truth feels so flaccid.

Lately, I have started telling him I am seeing a psychiatrist when really I cannot think of anything more pointless. For three hours every week I drive as far away as I can before I have to turn back, giving my face a break from its metalled mask.

He does not know that I have seen dozens of therapists but after two or three sessions, I never return.

I walk home through such blackness that I cannot see two paces in front of me. I dread each step closer to the cabin knowing I will not sleep tonight. There is no extra blanket for my wooden mattress.

“Should I get
a six-pack? Or enough for us both?”

It is now noon, and we are among the yahoos at the local grocery store. James will drink the beer as soon as we get home. He thinks it's celebratory. I do not. So, I shake my head: no, I don't want any.

Alcohol rarely passes my lips and I never get drunk. Alcohol provides James an escape, I guess. But it is my belief that escaping through alcohol allows people to remain stuck in lives they hate. I believe that if you are unhappy, you might as well know it, and know it always.

Three children are in line in front of us, buying candy. They are arguing over who will pay the fifty-seven cents for their sweets made of pink, thick chalk.

“You said you'd get it, Laura! I got it last week!” says the first one.

“NO, I did! Stop lying, you liar!” says the second.

“You're all stupid!” says the third.

I will lose my mind if this continues.

“I'll get it,” I tell the older lady at the register. I lay the quarters, a nickel, and two pennies on the counter. The sound of metal hitting metal hurts my ears.

On the way out James grabs my hand and rubs my index finger slowly with his rough thumb.

“You will be the most wonderful mother.”

“I can't wait,” I say, smiling.

I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that I will not have his children. I will take birth control pills until the day that I die.

Not having children raises fewer questions than never marrying.

On the way
back home, I did make my decision.

I was in the same position that I was on the drive there, only reversed. Everything was exactly the same. We listened to the same music, his hand was resting on mine, and I was staring at the hard, blue sky above me out the dirty window, and in the nowhere and everywhere moment, I felt so cruel I swore I bled.

I wanted to pick a fight with him. A desperate scrap. I am a useless old boxer with a bum shoulder, fighting to prove that I can still hurt.

I looked over at him. He caught me staring. He smiled at me so broadly, and like skies after thunder, the light grew.

I knew in that moment that he loved me more than he could ever love anyone. He was committed to me. Tangled, matted so deeply. He looked so natural, so serene, as if he was made, created solely, to meet his maker. He would never get out alive.

“I can't do it.”

“Do what, baby?” he said.

He looked at me, still serene, unmoved. I searched his face for any sign that he knew what I was saying. There was none.

“What's wrong, baby?”

I look away, and I feel all alone in the car next to him. The loneliness invites breath back in me. He will never know that we are strangers. I can lie to him until we both turn to dust, and he will never know.

Why did I think that I needed to change?

It is winter
now, and the wind shakes the bare branches above me.

I walk on cobblestone. I am not used to the heaviness that I am carrying with me.

I reach the end of the path. I look backward.

He lifts my veil. The brisk winter air slaps my face like angry hands.

A few moments later, we are pronounced man and wife.

A week before Joe died,
Meryl had an appointment with his doctor, Aaron Stein. St. Mary's Hospital was not where Meryl had worked, in palliative care, as a grief counsellor for twenty-three years. She had worked for Johns Hopkins.

St. Mary's was the hospital closest to her house, and it had the best specialists for what Joe needed. Through the years she had made some friends there, but now no one told her anything. All she could find out was that Dr. Stein was new there.

Meryl didn't like him.

He was young, around thirty. He was handsome, broad, and muscled. She had never found it so difficult to like such a good-looking man.

She hated his voice. He spoke so quickly that he was winded by the end of each appointment. The pace made it hard to take in everything. Between his gasps and run-on sentences, she got lost.

Still, in the two years he had been Joe's doctor, Meryl never asked him to speak slower.

The irony. Now she was the little old lady whose husband was dying, who couldn't understand what the doctor was saying.

“You help people die, how can you be confused?” she'd ask herself as she left his office, dizzy every time.

But on that day a week before Joe died, she felt dizzy as she walked into his office. She knew how this appointment would go. Joe had stopped eating.

She sat like she used to sit when she was a nervous girl, with her hands pressed firmly on the chair, underneath her thighs.

Dr. Stein was ten minutes late.

She looked around his office. There was a white rug, a white desk, white lamps. What type of a person would want an office this white? Wouldn't it get dirty?

Meryl noticed a picture on his white desk that she had never seen before: two small children and a young woman, smiling. She got out of her chair and inched closer to the picture, staring at these happy people. She wondered how long he had been married. How old were these children? Her nose was almost to the glass when Dr. Stein came into the room.

“Hello, Mrs. Johnson.”

Meryl turned around quickly, trying to appear as if she hadn't been snooping.

“Lovely family. Your wife is just beautiful.”

“Oh no, that's my sister and her kids. I'm not married.”

Figures.

Meryl sat back down in her chair, promising herself that today she would force herself to take in everything Dr. Stein said.

“Beautiful day, isn't it?” Dr. Stein said, busying himself with papers, turning his back to her.

“Yes, it's lovely out.”

“Did you have a chance to get out and enjoy it at all?”

“No, not yet. Maybe this afternoon.”

“That will be nice.”

“Yes, I think so.”

Dr. Stein turned, looked at Meryl, and slowly put his papers down. He never moved as quickly as he spoke.

“So we have the test results here.”

Meryl nodded.

“Joe has enough cancer in him to kill five men. It's time to say goodbye.”

For a still minute, the doctor stood, and Meryl sat, in tableau.

“Why is your office so white?” she asked.

Even when you
know that bad news is coming, it's still disappointing. Even when you know there is no hope, a small part of you believes that you will get that miracle, that things could still turn around.

It's why battered women stand by their husbands, why failed actors don't leave Los Angeles, and why Meryl sat in Dr. Stein's office on that Friday, disappointed and surprised.

“You're very handsome,
Joe, did you know that?”

Meryl stood in the kitchen, washing dishes. It was one of those days early in the spring when you open the front door, ignoring that it's too early to celebrate the season.

She looked over her shoulder at Joe, who was lying on the daybed that Meryl had fixed for him in the kitchen.

“Even like this?” he asked.

“Yes, even like that.”

Joe watched Meryl and the soft circles her shoulders made as she did the dishes.

“You are still as beautiful as the day I married you.”

He won't remember this in twenty minutes, Meryl told herself. She had a lot of experience with pain medication, and she knew it made people say things they didn't mean. She had watched so many families upset by how the drugs changed their loved ones. Mean, brutally honest, fearless. She would tell them it was the drugs talking. When the medication wore off, or when the doctors got the dosage right, they would come back.

She wanted Joe to come back.

Meryl felt the warm water fall over her hands, watched the soap foam over the dishes.

“That's not true, Joe. I'm not beautiful anymore.”

“Yes it is, Meryl. You are beautiful.”

As the morning light flooded the kitchen and hit her shoulder, making her warm, Meryl paused. Maybe he was complimenting her for the same reason she was complimenting him. She wanted to say nice things to him while she still could.

Joe had never been handsome.

He was tall and lanky, and had never found himself in his body. He started going bald young. He looked much older than he was. But when he smiled, his skin crinkled and his eyes closed and his whole face changed shape. If he smiled at you once, you remembered him for the rest of your life.

While she was drying her favourite mug, Meryl remembered how she was beautiful once. She turned back to her husband.

“I'm not like I was, Joe. Not anymore.”

She knew her face once looked as if someone had spent a long time thinking it over, making her perfect. Now when she passed by the mirror, she didn't recognize the woman staring back.

Meryl finished drying the dishes and put them away in the cupboard above her. She stood on her toes, struggling to reach the higher shelves. It was something Joe would have helped her with.

“Are you comfortable?” she asked him.

“Very.”

Then, after a moment, Joe said, “Meryl, come kiss me.”

That was strange.

“Not now, Joe. I'm busy.”

“Meryl, come kiss me like you used to.”

He was slurring.

“I'm putting the dishes away.”

“I don't care. Come close. Come kiss me. Like last week. Before I had to get you home to your father. Remember that? Come kiss me. Like last week.”

Even though she knew better, the hazy moments between lucidity scared her.

“Joe, you're confused again. That wasn't last week.”

Meryl was going to call that good-for-nothing doctor. He had given Joe too much oxycodone.

“Come here. Come kiss me.”

They can be so stubborn.

Meryl put the plate down on the counter and crossed the tile floor to sit with Joe.

After a few seconds, she placed her hand on his chest and slowly moved her fingertips back and forth below his collarbone. Finally, she rested her palm on his left breast, remembering the many times she had fallen asleep just there. She leaned down, placed her lips on his lips, to remember how she kissed him when they were young.