Yeah, that was his pattern. I got it. He always came back to me. I always let him come back. We trusted each other that way. It would have been crazy except that we considered it romantic.
We’d been together the whole school year when he told me his dad had moved out when he was ten. We were eating ice cream cones, sitting on the flat quarry rocks piled along the shore of the lake. Students painted their names on these rocks; until this moment, we’d been plotting to do the same before summer break, when he let it out about his dad. He bit into the cone part. He ate too fast.
“You didn’t tell me your parents are divorced.” It seemed like something you say early.
“She’s too embarrassed to get divorced,” he said. “So they’re still married, but these days my dad’s shacking up with a stewardess in Boston.”
“What about your mom?”
“In love with my old pediatrician.” He shook his head. “It’s not important.”
“It is,” I whispered. “At least kind of. Why didn’t you tell me?”
He finished his cone and spoke loudly through a too-full mouth: “Don’t define me by who they are. I’m not them. I won’t be.”
Remember how back in those silly college days, people could believe that we could go up against the gods and create our own destiny? I was convinced I’d die at the same age my mother did, and when I didn’t, there was relief but mostly confusion. Something promised felt messed up.
D. H. and I shared a dorm room, unofficially. He lived in the nerd and loser dorm, where every room was a single (always a whiff of Dungeons & Dragons in the hallways), and I lived there with him, treating my own dorm room as a largish closet overseen by a roommate who borrowed my clothes.
Every night I fell asleep in D. H.’s arms, the two of us tucked into his squishy single bed. We fit only one way: him on his back and me half-draped over him, my face nestled into his chest, his arms wrapped around me. We’d wake in that same position the next morning.
Typically, we’d study until one or so—it was the kind of school where everyone studied, even the people who claimed they didn’t—and then we’d strip down, do it, and lie in that single bed in the dark. We’d talk. Rather, he’d talk, and I’d listen. I absolutely loved his voice. Sort of Southern. Bet you didn’t picture him from the South, did you? He hated where he was from, but there was no hate in his buttermilk voice. He spoke like the way cream swirls through coffee. No wonder [Evil Name] lapped him up. You always think a man with that kind of accent is going to be kinder, don’t you?
It’s killing me to talk about him like this.
He told stories about raising baby rabbits in shoeboxes. Dogs loping alongside when he rode his bike to the creek. Sprinkling salt on leeches to shrivel them off his shins. His dad teaching him how to tie knots. How his mother fried chicken for his birthday dinner each year and baked red velvet cake. (All exotic to me—the chicken, the cake, the mother.) The kids he beat up, the kids who beat him up. Moments of glory in baseball games, moments of humiliation. Eating a caramel apple and wrecking his new braces. I’m sick to think of the stories I’ve forgotten.
There was one favorite that I especially liked. It was D. H.’s fourteenth birthday, and his mother was sitting at the dinner table, wing in her hand, and suddenly she shrieked, “Daddy!,” and all chatter cut off because she was sobbing, claiming her father—on a fishing trip an hour away—was dead. Dead.
D. H.—newly fourteen and eager to plunge into the stack of gifts; one box had to be the new turntable he wanted—expected everyone to tell his crazy mother to stop talking cuckoo, but the aunts’ eyes darted as they nodded, and one aunt ran for the phone, and another wailed the way you would if you saw a dead body right then and there, and the third rushed into the kitchen to get water boiling for the macaroni and cheese the family took to funerals. All these women leaping to action before the phone call an hour later confirming the death—an aneurysm in the boat—as if his mama’s one word was a done deal.
“See,” he told me there in the dark, my head on his chest, ear tuned into his heartbeat. “Ghosts run in my family.”
“Ghosts run in your family,” I murmured.
“If I ever die, my ghost will come back to find you,” he said. “I won’t leave you alone on Earth without me. I would never do that.”
The thought scared me—that he would come back, that he wouldn’t. We were in college, but he told me this same story late at night, word for word, for years after. Each time, I made him promise, made him cross his heart. “I’ll come back,” he whispered in the dark, “promise.” I believed him.
Each time, I thought about ghosts running through a family, their cold shapelessness passing through the gaps of hugs at Thanksgiving; weightless on the sofa during the Super Bowl, ghostly fingers reaching for kernels of popcorn; their Christmas stockings dangling next to mine, limp, empty, forgotten. I thought about a ghost settling between the two of us, and I pressed myself tighter against his chest.
Drunk driving. Only he was the drunk and the driver. I hate that, so sometimes I say heart attack or cancer. Other times I say murder victim. I never say the truth, which is that every drunk driver is loved by someone.
I didn’t marry him because I inherited a fortune after my mother died. Okay, “fortune” is a fairy tale word. And it wasn’t an inheritance, but more of a settlement. I never told him how much. I hated that money. It’s sick to get money because someone dies. You think it might fix things, but it doesn’t. It pays for college. I know, that sounds great, but there’s more to the story. Another day.
The point here is that it was me who didn’t want to get married. Me, not him. I let people think it was him. Maybe it was him a little. He didn’t push. We were fine.
After he died, I had to rip up my will. Now what? Cats, kids, the opera, a disease? I left half to Schultz’s. Hope they don’t wreck the place by upscaling it; I was thinking raises for the bartenders and bigger bathrooms. The other half to—well, I’ll let that be a surprise. Not my college, though.
Can you see that bit by bit I’m answering the questions you’re embarrassed to ask? You’re welcome. And yeah, this martini is damn good—didn’t I tell you, didn’t I tell you? You’re welcome again. Have another. I am.
The last appointment with the counselor, the one that fixed us. The clock was ticking down our fifty minutes, and she suddenly said, “I don’t understand why you two stay together.” She sighed, clicked her ballpoint pen rapidly. There was a logo on the pen, as if she’d snitched it from a realtor or bank, which seemed cheap of her, using that kind of pen to record our angst. “I’m pretty sure you’d both be better off alone.”
“You’re not supposed to make those kinds of judgments,” D. H. said.
“Neither of you can possibly be happy,” she said. “Or happy as any normal person defines the word.”
D. H. grabbed my hand. His fingers were warm.
“It’s incredibly frustrating.” The therapist’s voice cracked. We had broken her, making her say things she shouldn’t. Maybe she would yell, or threaten us, or throw one of her tasteful Chinese-style vases against the wall. (They were meant to look expensive, but I recognized them as being from one of those cheap import stores.)
“I don’t know what to do with the two of you,” she said. “You’re beyond logic.”
I blandly watched her surrender. Now that it was over with her, I felt sort of sorry. Maybe if I mentioned my retaliation affair?
“You deserve each other,” she said. Finally she cried, reaching for the tissue box.
We skipped our next appointment. She didn’t call to follow up. We could have reported her to whomever you report things to, but we just laughed. This was our normal. This was us. Who he said he loved didn’t matter, because he couldn’t leave me. It would be like gravity leaving the Earth. That counselor didn’t understand and [Evil Name] didn’t either and no one did. We liked it that way. The sex that night was incredible, I distinctly remember.
I promise I’m getting
to the part about the ghost. You knew there’d be a ghost, right? The only worthwhile story is a ghost story: lost past, lost youth, lost love, ancestors leaving traces of their genetic code and maybe a silver tea set.
There was a phone call. There wasn’t a mother sitting upright as she passed a platter of fried chicken. There was a day where he drove to Schultz’s and I didn’t. I had a sore throat and a bad cold. I secretly wanted him to stay home and take care of me but didn’t say so. I should have said so. I chugged NyQuil and fell asleep on the couch with the TV blasting.
There was a phone call. Accident—identify—come now. Clipped words just like the police show playing on the TV. Except on TV they knock on the door. Goddamn it. I always cry at this part. I crawled into a taxi, my mind zoned with NyQuil.
“At least no one else was hurt,” someone said to me. Actually, that was not so much my concern at that exact moment.
People weren’t as nice as they would have been if it had been cancer or a heart attack. I don’t even remember most of what they said. I signed a bunch of papers because I told them I was his wife. You could say that’s when we got married.
Someone organized a funeral, and I guess that was mostly me, helped slightly by his mother. I barely knew her. Liz-Beth, not Elizabeth. Half her friends who came up from the South had hyphens in their first names. I tried to ask her about the fried chicken, but she wasn’t interested. She was thinner than she sounds in the stories, and angular and sharp, like a bad geometry problem. Wrap her in black and she would fit just fine on a New York City street. “Why didn’t I know you?” I asked her. “Why didn’t we visit you for holidays or something?” I’d seen her twice in my life, once when D. H.’s brother died and there was a memorial service, and once for her fiftieth birthday party, which she spent mostly in the bar next door to the restaurant where the party was. Both times she kept calling me Debbie, I don’t know why. “Don’t take it personally,” D. H. had whispered.
“This family is embarrassingly complicated,” she said. “I’ll sit down and write a letter about it one of these days.” (Still waiting.) His father was a no-show because they didn’t know where he was. Sailing around the world, someone claimed, but someone else said in white-collar prison for embezzlement. Someone else swore he managed a coffee plantation in Brazil. Google didn’t help. Imagine a life outside of Google!
Tangents. I love them. Martinis, too.
So, there was a funeral. Friends, flowers, casseroles, coworkers, hugs, Kleenex, funny stories told by sad people, men who wouldn’t be caught dead in a suit wearing one anyway. You know.
At one point, I asked his mother, “Was there a ghost when he died?” I was drunk. Or, not drunk. But drinking. “Did you know the minute it happened?”
She was amused. “That old story,” she said. “About my dad. I remember.” She was drunk, too, or drinking. The man who came with her—attended her might be more accurate—was named Shep, as if he were a dog or a Stooge. (Yes, I know the Stooge was Shemp, but I think we need a joke here.)
I was embarrassed but I don’t know why. “That old story,” I repeated. Helpfully, I said it helpfully.
She said, “Yes.” She was not helpful. Shep squeezed her hand.
Yes to that old story? Yes she knew the minute her son died? Yes? Just yes? Yes?
Shep shook his head. He didn’t talk much, but he was quick with the liquor, and he grabbed the closest bottle, which happened to be tequila, and dumped some in my half-empty wine glass. White, so okay.
“My dad and I were—.” She paused in an excruciating way. I had a stab of sympathy for Shep and for the men who had crossed her path, including D. H. I sipped the tequila-wine mix, mouthed “thank you” to Shep. You could drive a truck through the space between the start and finish of that sentence of hers. “My dad and I existed on a wavelength,” she said at long last. “We were a continuum. My son and I were—.” That pause. “Not.”
I held out my glass so Shep could pour me more tequila, which he gratefully did. Clearly he liked being helpful. That was probably the only type of man she tolerated, the helpful type, which was not necessarily the type her sons were.
We were at my house. The funeral after party. Lots of liquor. Someone had brought the tequila, someone trying to be helpful. Shep? Personally, I wouldn’t serve tequila at a funeral, but I drank it. You know, since it was there. So, turned out it actually was helpful.
She leaned and whispered boozily into my ear, “You know what they say about those kinds of car accidents, don’t you?”
I said, “You’ll have to excuse me for a moment,” and I walked away, giving a little wave that could mean I’ll be right back or could mean the opposite.
[Evil Name] was at the funeral. She wrote her name in the condolence book in red pen. Why would someone use their own pen when there was a perfectly fine black pen provided by the funeral home? Why would she stand there, rooting around her big-ass purse for her own pen? Germaphobe? Hers is the only name written in red. She used her middle initial and kept within the lines. Her signature lacks flourish and would be easy to forge. Later, I copied it repeatedly on pieces of paper until I could replicate it. Trying to steal her soul? No, just sometimes I sign her name on petitions when people shove clipboards in my face.
She came to the house for the after party. Someone probably handed her a flyer with directions. Damn it.
She didn’t hug me. She didn’t come talk to me. Instead, she hovered, a shadow twitching the corner of my eye. Even when I edged into another room or walked down the hall; even when someone collapsed me into their arms, there she was, a half-step beyond my full and complete vision. She clung to the same can of Diet Coke the whole time, like she was star of a TV ad for it.
I was certain there would be people who knew she was bereaved, too. But no one hugged her that whole endless hour, and the people who spoke to her spoke small talk—“How did you know D. H.?”—and she answered back small: “We worked together at Stupid Corp. a couple of years ago.” She nodded like a dummy, agreeing with observations about the weather or D. H. or the HoneyBaked ham. (A ham is God’s gift to funerals.)
Okay, yes, she looked sad. Damn it. She dabbed her eyes with a napkin as she stood facing the funeral display photos lined up on a table. I hoped she might try slipping one in her gigantic purse so I could catch her. She just looked. D. H., eight years old, in his baseball uniform. Me and D. H. sprawled in a hammock. D. H. with one arm slung around his brother. A school picture of poor D. H. with a solid line of braces across his smile. Me and D. H. squinting in the Orioles dugout on a stadium tour. Suddenly I couldn’t stand how she was staring at those photographs, memorizing them, so I swooped in.
“I’m about to leave,” she said. Guilty voice, as if I’d caught her thinking something she shouldn’t have.
“Don’t go,” I said. That was a surprise. I had meant to say, Good, go. Go already! Go! No one invited you.
“Cute picture,” she said, pointing to D. H. in the baseball uniform.
“That was the year he played for the Drumsticks,” I said. “The team name was his idea.”
She laughed lightly. I couldn’t tell if she knew that story. Her laugh was sort of cozy. Yet she didn’t add anything, like, “I remember how the other kids called his team ‘chicken,’ and everyone blamed him for not winning a game all season.” I would hate if she knew the things I did, HATE. Also I would like it because we could talk about him.
I said, “There’s ham.”
She said, “There’s always ham at a funeral.” She laughed again in that same stupid, cozy way.
I nodded. Secretly, I wondered what Jewish people would do, or Muslims, without ham at their funerals, how they coped.
She said, “I actually kind of like that.”
“Like what?”
“That there’s always ham.”
I was incredibly bored of talking about ham. Is this what he was missing with me, conversations about ham? I could have gotten him back with more about
ham, with ham jokes? Why did the ham cross the road? Two hams and a salami walked into a bar.
I knew she knew I knew. He told me he had told her I knew.
I wanted to scream, just open wide and SCREAM.
She opened her mouth, and damn it, I was afraid she was going to be the one screaming, not me, but her jaw hung slack. Maybe she was deciding should she say what she was going to say. When you do that, you shouldn’t. You should close your mouth and shut up.
She said, “I hope it’s okay if I tell you that I miss him.”
Why would this be okay, ever?
I was the one allowed to miss him. Me. That picture of us in the hammock. She missed him like I did.
I said, “I know. Me too.” I lifted my hand as if to pat her on the shoulder, and then I did pat her on the shoulder. A black sweater—good cashmere, not the cheap kind. I imagined his hand on her shoulder, her arm, her breast, her back, him admiring the texture of this same sweater. This sweater might be a Christmas gift from him, though he had never given me a sweater. Enough with the sweater. I folded up my arms tight in case they might spring wide to hug her. I was afraid she might ask to meet for lunch, and that if she did, I would say yes. That’s how much I wanted to talk about him, that I would do it with her. So I said, “We should have lunch or something.”
“Or something.” Her eyes slid back to the photos. Memorizing them.
I grabbed the framed picture of D. H. in his baseball uniform, pressed it against my chest. “This is mine,” I said, flipping it so the ugly frame-back faced out.
She turned and walked straight through the front door, not stopping to grab her coat, also expensive cashmere. You know what? It fit me perfectly, so I kept it and wore it. I don’t know why. I don’t know why anything.
Why would I remember a line like “ghosts run in my family”? When someone is dead, your memory becomes both sharper and foggier, and what you don’t remember, you feel as though you have permission to make up. You realize that when you want the true story, you’re going to make it up because he’s not there to stop you. That’s sad.
This Angel on My Chest Page 7
