piquant smell on his tennis shoes. We closed our eyes at night, leaning against each other, listening to the world moving up and down the hall on wheels. The laundry baskets were on wheels, the scales, the I.V. poles, the respirators, the meal trays, the beds, the chairs, the dressers, the bedside tables. Nothing was rooted to the floor. The nurses seemed weightless, like birds, flying down the hall,their cushioned shoes barely touching the ground. They were as swift as they could be, considering the ringing bells and gravity and the time of night.
Other families came to wait out their calamities. We stood by as they formed their own communities within the space of the lounge. I sat at the end of the sofa watching Lizzy’s door. Periodically the obese woman rose up and asked for our attention. “Let us bow our heads,” she began.
Chapter Three
——
W HEN I USED TO grieve for my mother, and later for my Aunt Kate, I told myself that although they were certainly as dead as they were ever going to be they were still mine, that they inhabited my interior world, which was at least as noisy and various as life itself. From early on I valued the gift of memory above all others. I understood that as we grow older we carry a whole nation around inside of us, places and ways that have disappeared, believing that they are ours, that we alone hold the torch for our past, that we are as impenetrable as stone. Memory still seems a gift to me and I hold tight to those few things that are forever gone and always a part of me, while the new life, the changing view, streams by. Theresa, I feel sure, has been able to achieve the healthy balance between cherishing what was and forging ahead. Howard has made the last several years a blank. Sometimes I think he tries to trick himself into believing that Prairie Center was an impossible and foolish fancy, that we fell asleep in a field of poppies shortly after we met, and were out cold for six years. When we woke we found ourselves in a surprising and yet inevitable location. If I mention Lizzy, he has to stop and stare at his shoes and then he shakes himself, as if he has had to dig back into a dream to remember our friends’ daughter.
At the hospital, Theresa’s oldest sister organized the family so that there were always six or seven people in the prayer circle. Those off duty brought food and pillows, shuttled Grandma to and fro, gave back rubs, and made phone calls to relatives out of state. Theresa’s youngest sister cried outside of room 309, not for Lizzy at that moment, but because at nineteen she was still the baby and couldn’t do anything right. She had brought the wrong order from the Chinese restaurant: one grease-stained shopping bag with twelve cartons of sweet and sour pork, six cartons of rice, and twenty-four fortune cookies. The girl had so much misery in her face, her mascaraed tears running into her mouth, that Howard had taken off to the end of the hall to look out the window at the heating plant.
Hour after hour I sat, confessing my fundamental unworthiness to God. I was going to try to do much better, was going to put all my strength into forcing love into my heart. If only I had more Shakespeare on my tongue, more than a few lines knocking around; if only I could rise up, climb on the end table and with nothing but verbal wizardry rout the angels from their warrens. I had so little, no complete poems or Bible verses lounging in my brain like firemen on cots, waiting for the disaster. I could only get as far as, “Do not go gentle into that good night,” and “No worst, there is none. Pitched past pitch of grief.”
The only thing I had that was close to religion was the weekly pilgrimage Aunt Kate and I used to make to the international folk-dance group in Hyde Park, at first glance, nowhere near the Judeo-Christian path to the divine. Much as I tried to concentrate on Lizzy, what was not only her bone and flesh, but also what was the pure stuff of her
Other families came to wait out their calamities. We stood by as they formed their own communities within the space of the lounge. I sat at the end of the sofa watching Lizzy’s door. Periodically the obese woman rose up and asked for our attention. “Let us bow our heads,” she began.
Chapter Three
——
W HEN I USED TO grieve for my mother, and later for my Aunt Kate, I told myself that although they were certainly as dead as they were ever going to be they were still mine, that they inhabited my interior world, which was at least as noisy and various as life itself. From early on I valued the gift of memory above all others. I understood that as we grow older we carry a whole nation around inside of us, places and ways that have disappeared, believing that they are ours, that we alone hold the torch for our past, that we are as impenetrable as stone. Memory still seems a gift to me and I hold tight to those few things that are forever gone and always a part of me, while the new life, the changing view, streams by. Theresa, I feel sure, has been able to achieve the healthy balance between cherishing what was and forging ahead. Howard has made the last several years a blank. Sometimes I think he tries to trick himself into believing that Prairie Center was an impossible and foolish fancy, that we fell asleep in a field of poppies shortly after we met, and were out cold for six years. When we woke we found ourselves in a surprising and yet inevitable location. If I mention Lizzy, he has to stop and stare at his shoes and then he shakes himself, as if he has had to dig back into a dream to remember our friends’ daughter.
At the hospital, Theresa’s oldest sister organized the family so that there were always six or seven people in the prayer circle. Those off duty brought food and pillows, shuttled Grandma to and fro, gave back rubs, and made phone calls to relatives out of state. Theresa’s youngest sister cried outside of room 309, not for Lizzy at that moment, but because at nineteen she was still the baby and couldn’t do anything right. She had brought the wrong order from the Chinese restaurant: one grease-stained shopping bag with twelve cartons of sweet and sour pork, six cartons of rice, and twenty-four fortune cookies. The girl had so much misery in her face, her mascaraed tears running into her mouth, that Howard had taken off to the end of the hall to look out the window at the heating plant.
Hour after hour I sat, confessing my fundamental unworthiness to God. I was going to try to do much better, was going to put all my strength into forcing love into my heart. If only I had more Shakespeare on my tongue, more than a few lines knocking around; if only I could rise up, climb on the end table and with nothing but verbal wizardry rout the angels from their warrens. I had so little, no complete poems or Bible verses lounging in my brain like firemen on cots, waiting for the disaster. I could only get as far as, “Do not go gentle into that good night,” and “No worst, there is none. Pitched past pitch of grief.”
The only thing I had that was close to religion was the weekly pilgrimage Aunt Kate and I used to make to the international folk-dance group in Hyde Park, at first glance, nowhere near the Judeo-Christian path to the divine. Much as I tried to concentrate on Lizzy, what was not only her bone and flesh, but also what was the pure stuff of her
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