This Angel on My Chest

by Pietrzyk, Leslie

  You know what’s funny is that you didn’t even drink all that much. And when you did drink, it was beer. You didn’t like wine, and you really, really didn’t like hard liquor, the real stuff. Your parents drank an impressive amount, but not you. Back then I had a margarita if someone else was buying, not much more.

  But beer. You did drink beer. You died just as microbrews were getting popular. For sure you would have loved the multitude of regional beers out there now, all so easy to find online or in grocery stores, and you would have been pleased at the respect beer has earned in the foodie world, with flights and beer pairings at certain big city restaurants. Craft beers, people call them. I bet even your dad drinks a craft beer now and then, though he was a firm Heineken snob on the few occasions he strayed from Chivas.

  You know how many times beer is mentioned in my book?

  Zero.

  Crap. (Q: Too late to add section with beer?? I’ll email new pages by COB tomorrow.)

  Anyway, so where did all this hard liquor and wine come from, I wonder?

  I’m sorry.

  Cornflakes, pages 199–200, 206.

  And then here are Kellogg’s Corn Flakes, which happen to be something I would very much like to forget. I haven’t bought them since. Or eaten them.

  When I came back from the ER—alone, alone, alone—there was your cereal bowl on the kitchen table, centered on the plastic placemat with the lemons on the border. The skim milk in the bowl was warm and filmy, the cereal a mess of sludge, the spoon handle poking up like a broken ship’s mast.

  One droplet of milk on the plastic placemat that had dribbled off your spoon. Or your mouth.

  I pushed everything into the garbage—spoon, bowl, milk, soggy cereal, placemat, the half-full box of cornflakes on the counter that no one had put away.

  Also, I threw away the pieces of the light blue terrycloth robe the paramedics had slashed off your body as they repeatedly tried to shock your heart into beating while I sat on the too soft bed in the guestroom, shuffled there by a middle-aged cop distracting me from the grim beeps and grunts with his chatter about the weather, which I don’t remember at all except that it was stupidly sunny. And the sky was stupidly blue.

  I wanted to be in the kitchen with you. I know that keeping me out of the kitchen was standard procedure; I know that I wouldn’t like seeing what was happening in the kitchen if I had been in there, that distant, helpless professionalism at work. I would have screamed for them to try harder, to try again, more, more, no, no. No! I would have grabbed someone by the throat. I would have punched someone. I would have fallen onto my knees and howled. I know the cop was doing his job. I know one shouldn’t disobey a cop.

  I know, I know, I know.

  I know.

  I’m sorry.

  Coffee, pages 64, 69, 105, 112–13, 115, 121, 128, 149, 183, 193, 211.

  I’m drafting this index of food in a neighborhood coffee shop. Like The Majestic, this coffee shop is ten minutes from my new house and twenty minutes from our old house. It’s a beloved spot in this neighborhood, and though it had opened before you died, you never came here.

  We didn’t drink coffee. We didn’t even own a coffee maker. When your parents visited, your dad drove two blocks to the 7–11 every morning because he and your mom were desperate for fast and immediate coffee. We didn’t understand how important coffee could be to some people, the caffeine of it, yes, but mostly the routine, the “I always start my day with a cup and read the sports section” of it. The “I’m just not myself until that first cup” of it.

  Now, I’m a social coffee drinker—no caffeine required, no morning coffee habits ingrained. But it’s only here in this neighborhood coffee shop—with the mismatched thrift store chairs and the bulletin board overlapped with pictures of lost and found cats and houses to rent and buy with and without off-street parking—it’s only here, away from my routine, away from my cluttered writing desk and my new house and my new life—it’s only while sitting here at this table scattered with scone crumbs, writing by hand on the unlined pages of a gift journal printed with inspirational quotes by famous women, drinking an iced skim decaf latte with a plastic straw—it’s only here, amid strangers who don’t know me or care who I am, sitting amid strangers consumed by their own fascinating lives and their own litany of sorrows and joys and secrets—it’s only here, sitting alone, muffled in the white noise of people and the background keyboards of The Doors, then Bread, then someone snapping off “Baby I’m A Want You” mid-lyric and laughing, it’s only here, only here—

  —apparently it’s only here where I find myself able to write about you. Only in this place.

  (I’m almost finished.)

  I’m sorry.

  Mexican food (guacamole made tableside; stacked cheese enchiladas drenched in red chile sauce; an entire basket of chips; virgin margarita; chilequiles; tamales; menudo; that restaurant in Nogales), pages TK.

  We lived in Arizona for two and a half years when you were in graduate school, so we ate a lot of Mexican food. I entered the state disliking avocados and I left with definite, irreversible opinions on the right way to make guacamole. I also pried from a tiny restaurant in Kearney, Arizona, their supersecret salsa recipe, which was the best salsa I have (still) ever eaten. They gave it to me only after I promised never to divulge how to make it.

  We all, all of us, promise a lot of things.

  Like not to include recipes in a book.

  So here’s the recipe, which remains in its original form, handwritten on the back of a credit card receipt from a bookstore in Tempe dragged out of the bottom of my purse, and which I keep tucked in the pages of The Joy of Cooking: One large can tomatoes (drained), 8–10 chile tepins, 4–6 green onions, 1 medium white onion, 2–3 cloves of garlic, a handful of cilantro, a tablespoon or so of white vinegar, a pinch of dried oregano, salt, pepper. Run it all through the blender to the desired consistency.

  Chile tepins—dried, red, the size of blueberries, potent—are the secret ingredient because they’re not usually found in a regular grocery store. Don’t accept chile pequins, which seem similar and are easier to find—not after I’ve told you specifically and clearly what the secret is to this salsa. Don’t screw up this perfect recipe over one tiny thing just because it’s a little bit hard.

  Okay, so I broke my promise to my editor, and I broke my promise to La Cantina in Kearney, Arizona, and I broke my promise to you. I should not have kissed that man that one night when I was out of town. I should not have done more than kiss him.

  I’m sorry.

  Burke’s (Schultz’s in the book, the way I think of it in my real life, because you called it cute that I perpetually forgot “Burke’s,” a name that felt wrong, and remembered instead “Schultz’s,” a name that was exactly right), pages 54–55, 58–59, 66, 68, 77–78.

  Maryland seafood: oyster stew, crabcakes, steamed shrimp. German food: schnitzel and sauerbraten. Old-fashioned, lost in time options: chopped steak, chef salad, cottage cheese diet plate.

  You found this place up in Baltimore. You loved food, you loved to eat, you loved finding secret spots and the homiest, diviest place for lunch wherever you were. The building that might have been shut down a couple of times by the health department but which had the absolute best something: pulled pork, doughnuts, fried clams, tamales, oyster po’boys, pecan pie, corned beef, pierogi. You taught me what to look for—pickups AND Cadillacs lining the barbecue parking lot; “family owned since 1946” printed in the yellow pages ad in the motel room phone book; odd hours and early closing; fried chicken with a parenthesized note to allow thirty to forty minutes to prepare—so I’ve found great food using your tricks in the years since you died. (Though the Internet makes the search much easier now: chowhound.com, roadfood.com.)

  I still go to the places you discovered, including Schultz’s.

  Sometimes I take people with me, and sometimes they start calling it Schultz’s just the way I do, and sometimes these people and I hav
e very intense and private conversations in the booths lining the wall in the bar, and sometimes these intense and private conversations go on at the same booth where I sat with you, eating all those bowls of spicy steamed shrimp.

  Sometimes these people are men.

  Sometimes—one time, really—I marry these people. Sometimes I love them—him, really.

  Always, I love him.

  And you.

  They say that being able to hold two contradictory ideas in our head at the same time is what separates us from the apes.

  Maybe.

  If so, then this:

  You died.

  I . . . didn’t.

  * * *

  *See Leslie Pietrzyk, A Year and a Day (New York: William Morrow, 2004), 226–27: “and he got a collie for his tenth birthday that he named Snickers, after the candy bar; Snickers still lived with his mom and dad in Muscatine. ‘Great dog,’ he told me. ‘She’d love you.’”

  THE CIRCLE

  The church door was locked, so the group stood in the May evening, a cluster of seven women and one man, none of them saying much of anything beyond murmurs about what time it might be, and that surely someone would come soon to let them in. It was a Lutheran church, or maybe Methodist—one of those churches that blurred a bit for not being imposingly Catholic like the churches she had known growing up in Chicago. This was a church that was more like a school: functional, not worshipful, nothing to inspire. That was okay. Impossible to imagine she would feel inspired ever again.

  The church was located in Virginia, off a Beltway exit she had never taken—Little River Turnpike, which was a charming, old-fashioned name for a road, though the buildings and houses along it were like everywhere else—and not too far from the Beltway. Standing silently, she heard the distant drone of traffic.

  She worried that she would be the youngest one. She worried that she would be the oldest one, though the man was surely older than she was; he had to be in his late forties. Still. People sometimes looked old when they weren’t.

  She was thirty-five, turning thirty-six in September, and couldn’t wait to not be thirty-five. Like being a child, caring intensely about a birthday.

  Across the cluster stood a woman with shoulder-length, wispy, white-blond hair—not colored but naturally that way—and the blue eyes a country singer might have. The woman’s arms were pressed rigid against her sides, perfectly straight and stiff, as if someone had told her not to let them move, not even a little bit. Her cheeks were pink, as if from the sun or wind, a natural pink. There was a trick she had learned from her mother, “Find one person in a group who you could be friends with. That settles the butterflies.”

  Her. The white-blonde woman.

  But picking the white-blonde woman didn’t mean she would smile, or go talk to her, or do anything but stand in this shapeless, formless clump, waiting for the person who was supposed to come and unlock the door for them, the person who was going to show them what to do, the leader they would follow.

  Ruth Feinstein is a social worker who specializes in grief and grieving. When the newscasters report that grief counselors are available to students in a school tragedy or to office workers following a shooting, Ruth might be one of them. “How can you do that?” people ask at parties when she tells them what her job is. “It’s so depressing,” they announce, as if they somehow know Ruth’s life, and on and on they go, about how sad it would be to be around sad people talking sadly about sad things. Finally, there’s the point where Ruth always says, “What’s sad to me is people who cut themselves off from feeling. That’s what’s sad to me,” and she stares in a lingering way, making clear the unspoken conclusion to the sentence: That’s what’s sad to me—assholes like you.

  She’s the one with the key to the church, and she’s running late now, at seven thirty, because five fifteen was the only time her doctor could squeeze her in, and when they work that hard to squeeze you in, it isn’t because they’re anxious to give you good news. So she leaves her office early to drive all the way out to the doctor in Reston—rush hour traffic is hell times two—and once she gets there, she parks the car and sits in it, hands staying dutifully on the wheel in the proper position. It’s one of those office complexes that’s trying too hard, with a fountain, tidy red brick walkways lined with shrubbery, and flowering trees arranged in the parking lot medians. Even through rolled-up windows, Ruth hears a mockingbird singing madly, a wild riot of notes, including some that sound like a car-remote door lock, and on and on the bird goes, working the scales, spinning repeatedly through its repertoire, and finally Ruth backs out of the parking space and drives to a New Mexican restaurant she and her ex-husband liked when they lived out here. She orders guacamole made tableside—“that’s enough for two,” the waitress warns; “I know,” Ruth says—and stacked cheese enchiladas drenched in fiery, musky, bloodred chile sauce. She eats all of it—including an entire basket of chips—and compromises only with a virgin margarita instead of the real thing. Then she heads to the church to lead the inaugural meeting of this iteration of the young widow support group she has organized.

  That’s why she’s running late.

  The group silently passed through the glass door and into the church basement. The room was what she would have described if anyone ever asked, What kind of room would a support group meet in? Drab, large, as shapeless as something with four walls could be, so that while the room was rectangular, the boundaries felt ill-defined. Alternating between stuffy and chilly. Windows high up on the walls, offering squeaks of light but no view. Fluorescent lighting with a slight buzz. An unplugged coffee maker on a long table covered with a plastic, red-checked tablecloth with dark brown burn circles where someone had set down something hot. It was a room where sad people collected, people with vast problems. She stared at a wall calendar with a picture of a European castle, wondering why something seemed off, and finally realized she was looking at last month’s dates.

  They unfolded white plastic chairs and arranged them into a rough circle. It would have been better to sit around a table, she thought, with somewhere to put the hands, a protective barrier. Sitting in a folding chair across from the woman with the white-blonde hair, the two of them might as well be buck naked.

  The man was already crying. Not loudly, but soft, seeping whimpers, as if he were a dog having the worst possible dreams, a dog dreaming of a world without other dogs. She had Kleenex in her purse—surely they all did—but she was afraid to offer it to him. It seemed he was imagining that no one noticed his tears, and she didn’t want to point out how visible they were.

  There were moments of awkward silence, of scraping the chairs on the linoleum tiles to get situated, a couple of people rustling in their bags to turn off their phones, the slowing whimpers of the man. She inhaled deeply. This was a good time to stand up and leave; she could announce she was going to the ladies’ room and moments later, she could be safely in her car.

  “I’m Ruth Feinstein,” Ruth said, and she explained that she was employed by Fairfax County and was responsible for leading workshops and facilitating support groups for people grieving varieties of losses. “Like this one tonight, the young widow group,” she said, speaking casually, as if it were nothing, and the more traditional groups: older widows, children who have lost parents, parents who have lost children, even people who have lost pets—pets who have lost people? she couldn’t help but wonder, and maybe a half-smile flickered along her lips because the white-blonde woman raised one eyebrow at her and also half-smiled, possibly thinking the same thing.

  “People helping each other through shared experience,” Ruth continued. “What I have found to be the greatest benefit of support groups is that here you’ll meet and interact with others who share similar experiences. Look around you. These people understand better than anyone else out there in the world what you’re going through right now.” Ruth paused as the words settled, then looked around the room, significantly, looking at each of them one by one.
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  She didn’t like that abrupt gaze, its sudden intimacy adding a new layer of responsibility to rest upon her, like ash after a volcano. She didn’t want to help anyone. She wanted—no, needed—desperately needed—help. What if she told them that yesterday she didn’t get out of bed except to pee, and then only reluctantly, going so far as to wonder whether she might order a bedpan online and how soon it would arrive? That she hadn’t opened the blinds in the den since the day he died nine weeks ago? That she threw away—entirely away—ran through the shredder—the season tickets to the Washington Nationals baseball games—and what if she mentioned that the tickets were seven rows behind the home dugout? What if she mentioned those things? Would that excuse her from helping others? Would Ruth’s gaze skim past her? Or, God forbid, would someone say something worse? Was anything worse than what she had been through? What was worse? She wanted to be the worst. She wanted to win at being worst. It was all she had to cling to: I suffered, she thought, I suffered the most.

  Ruth said, “I think it would be a good idea to say our names and then the name of our spouse or partner. Then tell us a little bit about how that person died and when.” Ruth was stocky and solid, in her late forties maybe, but she had a wild mass of black hair that cascaded halfway down her back in a stream of ringlets; straight hair might be the current fashion, but Ruth’s hair was gloriously curly and glossy, and from the way she tilted her head from time to time, it seemed evident that she loved her fabulous head of hair, too. Even in this bad light, it shifted into a blue-black sheen that was mesmerizing. It was confident hair.

  The man went first, because he was sitting to Ruth’s right. He was Tom, and his wife died two months ago from ovarian cancer. A sympathetic ripple moved through the circle. “I’m a mess,” he said. “I’ve lost all my credit cards twice already, and I know that has nothing to do with anything, but I can’t focus.” More murmurs, more sympathy. “My daughter left last week for study abroad in Italy, and I’m the shittiest dad in the world for knowing she should go have fun in Europe because that’s what her mom would want, but then I gotta say, what about me? I want her back home with me, but I can’t say that. But why doesn’t she know? Shouldn’t she know I need her here?”