Every Body has a Story

by Beverly Gologorsky

  “I do.”

  “And the smells.”

  “I do.”

  “Would you rather not chat?”

  Dory shrugs. “Too many thoughts to express. They seem to need my concentration. It’s as if there’s a little bubble following me, writing out questions, insisting on answers. Sometimes even when I close my eyes at night, it hovers over my head, waiting. When I respond, the words inside the bubble disappear as smoothly as erasing a blackboard. Eerie, no?”

  “Not really, considering all that’s on your mind.”

  “My memories come in scenes now, almost like paintings or drawings, except the people in them don’t speak. Try as I might I can’t get a word out of them. I should go to bed, I’m starting to sound weird,” Dory murmurs, her face pale in the dim light.

  “I was wondering. Would it help to join one of those support groups?”

  “Where people cheer themselves along on the way to death? What in heaven’s name for?” Dory replies with great disdain. And the absurdity of the suggestion hits them both. It feels good to laugh some.

  “I don’t know … I thought maybe it would be easier to talk to strangers than to the people who love you.”

  “Forget it and anything like it.”

  “I will. I have. The nausea … is it better?”

  “It takes a while.”

  “Can I do anything?”

  Dory shakes her head. “This journey is mine alone.. No one else can experience it. Not you, not Stu, no one. I plan to follow it as I wish.”

  She slides her hand over Dory’s cool fingers grateful to the core for her friendship. “I can’t imagine not having you beside me.”

  “Don’t imagine it yet, okay?”

  “Don’t be annoyed with me, please. You mean more to me than I can find words for.”

  “Sounds like love.”

  “It is. I talk to you about things I can’t say to anyone else.”

  “Women do that for each other.”

  “What, if anything, have I done for you?”

  “Deep, constant relationship from way back. I count on it. A woman who always appreciates me just as I am.”

  “You’re right about that.”

  “Good,” Dory murmurs, almost to herself.

  “I’ve made terrible mistakes,” she’s shocked to hear herself say.

  “You’ll outlive them.” Dory’s face gives nothing away.

  What awful bag of demons is she unzipping? Penitent, she looks into the shine of the deep-brown mahogany tabletop and wonders what to say next, but Dory isn’t waiting for a reply. She’s gazing past Lena, with a serene expression and a distant look in her eyes. Must be the pills.

  52.

  Praying not to wake anyone in the still sleeping house, she moves stealthily, a fugitive escaping before Lena can ask where she’s going so early. She tiptoes past her orderly kitchen, her well-furnished dining area, her comfortable den. It’s how she takes in each room now. Fully. She slips into the garage, gets in the car, and heads for the bridge.

  Though she had another fitful night, she isn’t tired at all. Then again, sleep has become a joke. Her head buzzes with jumbled thoughts, plus a stew of memories creep out of the folds to fill the sleepless hours with images of life lived and owned. Often there’s the beach, the four of them cavorting, drinking, and slathering sun lotion on each other’s backs. Lena didn’t actually enjoy the beach, complained about too much sun, sand in her hair. She and Zack, the water lovers, swimming, jumping waves. How boring it must’ve been for Lena and Stu to sit there, watching them, for god knows how long. Weird to see now what she couldn’t see then.

  The sleeplessness is more than reflection or review. It’s a reckoning of sorts, a time to consider what there wasn’t time to know before. And lately in the half-light of morning a feeling of utter disconnect visits her, as if she’s unlatching herself from life, as if everything solid has evaporated, leaving her untethered, unable to find ground. Though it’s often accompanied by the nausea, she can’t help wondering if it’s a taste of death, or preparation for it?

  Some of her charges speak of death as around the corner, a given. She’s not that accepting, and not that old, either. Still, her equanimity in the face of it puzzles her. Maybe in another life she was a Buddhist. More likely she’s simply not as brave as Lena thinks, not even as brave as some of her charges. Miss Z, who has accommodated to that ultimate insult to her mobility, a wheelchair. Mr. Todd, who’s having difficulty swallowing but eats his mushy food without too much complaint. She won’t do as well. She’ll resent losing pieces of herself. She already does. If eventually she has to be wheeled around, the dependency will be awful for her, more than awful, impossible.

  As she reaches the Triborough Bridge, it rises to greet her with its view of Manhattan skyscrapers. The World Trade Center towers are gone, of course, but in their place another gigantic structure. How stupid is that? Cramming even more workers into a building to prove what? The thinking of these people eludes her, thank god. She rolls down her window. The humidity has lifted, the bright-blue sky is cloudless.

  Montauk is still a few hours away, but she doesn’t want to stop until she arrives at the point, the tip end of Long Island. She hasn’t been there since her honeymoon, twenty-one years ago. They stayed at a hotel perched on craggy cliffs high above the ocean. Below was a long strip of beach, people stretched out on blankets, a scatter of seagulls along the water’s edge. It all looked tiny, a diorama in a shoebox. At night, the sea whooshed and cried through the wide-open hotel windows. The noise bothered Stu but not her. She adored the sound, the cool closeness of the rocks and water, so companionable, so reassuring in their constancy. Though she knows the houses and narrow sandy streets will have changed over the years, the cliffs and ocean will still be there.

  If the hotel is gone then the car path to the cliff edge may be gone, too. She and Stu walked that path every morning. Less than a half mile. At the steep, rocky edge, where the cool wind always blew, they’d sit and talk, newlyweds that they were. Funny, when she thinks of it now, they never hankered to travel anywhere exotic. Of course, travel takes lots of money, but it wasn’t just that. They wanted to save and buy a house one day. They were nesters, both of them, just as happy at a nearby beach, or later on their own patio, where, after work, they would sit drinking, laughing, telling tales. Why does it seem so long ago? She’s being sentimental, which is totally against her belief system.

  The hotel is there and open for business. It appears smaller somehow and a bit frayed, scuffed by wind and salt water, but not a smudge of grime on the pristine windows. She drives around to the rear, finds the path, and the car rolls over the rutted dirt to its end. She gets out and sits on the flattest patch she can find. It’s pleasantly windy. The waves crash against the jagged rocks, then recede again and again, the repetition hypnotic.

  She allows the wild beauty of the place to fill her. Returning here feels like the impulse it is, but coming isn’t an idle adventure. It’s where she can get ahead of what’s to happen.

  Beyond the distant lighthouse she searches out the white wall of the horizon and listens for foghorns. Except for the surf, all is quiet. As the position of the sun changes so does the color of the water, from black to deep green. One area resembles a great hazel eye. Except water has no color; it simply reflects. She remembers this from the high school science class where she and Stu first hooked up. Not that he would ever commit to going steady. He would simply show up at her apartment or wait around in the hallway downstairs. She’d find him leaning against the mailboxes or sitting on a step. Some late nights he’d phone her to meet him and Matt at Tina’s pizza place, or just him at the neighborhood bar, never saying what he’d been up to earlier. She didn’t care. She just felt joyous to be with him. No secret that he was always drawn to Lena, but it was her he married, her he came home to, her he built a life with these past twenty years. In their first apartment together, near the projects, they had lots of parties, so
many more than they’ve had since moving to the North Bronx. And he wasn’t as restless then as he seemed later. Poor Stu, he can’t do enough for her now. He sleeps curled around her, no doubt anticipating the time when she won’t be there. He hasn’t said as much, but he doesn’t have to. He’ll miss her. He’ll pine. He’ll cry. He’ll drink, of course he will, and he should, but then he’ll move on, because humans do, most of them, and he will, too, of that she’s certain.

  Lena will miss her, then find her way, because she’ll have to. She’s a mother. A mother doesn’t leave her children willingly. Was it selfish not to try harder for a baby, not to go to the fertility clinic or take the adoption route? Did she forfeit not only the connection but also the chance to live on in an offspring’s memory? She’ll never know, only that her devotion to her work, her charges, was satisfying and illuminating. Though in no way children, they needed her physically, spiritually, in every way possible. So many stories digested over so many years about so many troubles and joys, about lives she could never hope to know otherwise. When one of her elderly charges dies, it’s a loss, not a tragedy. And when she dies? What will that be?

  She’s rarely even been sick, yet something about the diagnosis was unsurprising. It’s as if she’s been waiting all these years. It’s not a sense of doom. No. More a sense that everything she experienced and is still experiencing can’t be repeated. It’s a once-only chance, a once-only choice, a once-only day, month, year. It made her grab and hold onto whatever she could, including Stu.

  Gazing at the rocks and ocean below, she remembers asking her father where a minute goes when it’s gone. He said it doesn’t go anywhere, it gets used up. And she will use up whatever good time is left. After that … well … the way she sees it now, her loyalty will only be to herself.

  Thelma and Louise was a movie she watched years ago. The final scene pissed her off. Two beautiful women driving their car straight off a cliff seemed such a waste. Now, the ending makes sense to her.

  53.

  After two days of repacking suitcases and boxes, she stands in Dory’s backyard, idly watching the activity. Zack’s busy moving out the items they brought here initially. Rosie’s helping Stu pile stuff into the two cars, instructing him on where he should place things. Casey clambers up a short stepladder to adjust a small lamp tied to the top of the car. The children’s joyful noises about moving back keeps her silent about the possibilities—none of them good—that continue to take up residence in her head.

  The last rage of evening sun bathes the adjacent houses in a golden light, the sky a deepening blue. It’ll be dark by the time they get there.

  If only she could make a neat package of the past months—leave-taking does that—something to get her arms around and contemplate, but so much remains unknown.

  Her eyes flit to Dory, plucking weeds from her flowerbed. “I’m so damn sad,” she says, uprooting her friend from a kneeling position.

  In black leggings and long green over-blouse, Dory looks tiny, and increasingly fragile.

  “You’ve done an amazing job with the garden. The flowers are gorgeous.”

  “They are. Strange. I sit here now simply to enjoy them.”

  “Not so strange,” she says half to herself. “All we ever do is rush around and rarely ask why. But you … you’ve been stopped from all that, and way too suddenly.”

  “It’s true.” Dory continues to gaze at the flowers. “Actually, I’ve let go of a lot of stuff, including the chore of loving too much, which leaves me weirdly, happily carefree and able to see, actually see, what’s around me in a way I never have before. Sometimes what I see is frightening, sometimes beautiful. Either way, it doesn’t matter. That’s the carefree part. It’s ironic because … well, because this can only happen when time is short. Otherwise all of life’s traffic would stop to take in the view, and what a pile-up that would be.”

  She wants to put her arms around Dory, hug her tightly, but it would be more to comfort herself than her friend. “You’ve both been so good to …”

  “Stu will miss you.”

  “What?”

  “He’s enjoyed having an extended family. Haven’t you noticed? He hasn’t stopped at a bar after work since you guys moved here. Keep him close when things go south for me.”

  “Of course we will. We’re all family.”

  “Are you about ready to go?” Dory asks.

  “The U-Haul is almost packed. The stuff in storage, I’ll let it stay there for a bit, don’t you think?”

  “The board will let me know their decision tomorrow. If it’s a go, you’ll be working with me every day for a while. I’ll introduce you to my charges, routines, all of it. It’s important to develop an honest connection with the people you’ll care for.”

  “I would be over the moon if it wasn’t your job.”

  “Yeah, Lena, well … too bad you can’t have it all.”

  “Do I complain a lot?”

  “A lot.”

  “Jesus,” she says.

  “He can’t help.”

  “We both agree on that.”

  “How unusual,” Dory says.

  “Actually, it’s not. Growing up we agreed on almost everything.”

  “Except you didn’t believe Stu would ever marry me.”

  “I thought he wasn’t the settling-down …” Afraid, though, to meet Dory’s searching eyes.

  “You were wrong. Say so.”

  “I was so wrong,” she admits quickly, gladly.

  “Good, then that’s resolved.”

  54.

  The four of them tiptoe into the dark house as if they might wake whoever lives there. Stu and Zack are out back, setting up the generator.

  Rosie giggles. “Why are we being so quiet?”

  No one responds.

  She’s worried lights will attract the neighbors. But, of course, they’re living here, sort of, not hiding out. When the lights do flicker on, she doesn’t move.

  “Mom, come on, there’s nothing to be afraid of,” says Rosie, marching into the living room. She follows her daughter, not quite believing this is happening.

  Suddenly everyone’s busy. Zack moves past her, carrying air mattresses upstairs, and Dory follows to supervise their placement. Rosie unfolds a card table in the bare living room, then places wine, beer, and soda on it, rewards to come. Stu’s already messing with the water in the basement. Casey’s down there with him. Dory said Stu knows pipes. Whatever.

  Dazed at the flurry of activity under way without her guidance, she takes the bag of paper plates and cold cuts to the kitchen. No one had any dinner to speak of. With a napkin she wipes off Zack’s perfectly tiled counter, then begins to prepare sandwiches.

  The lemon-yellow walls … She wanted them painted white; Rosie begged for red; yellow was the compromise. When they first moved in, they bought a kitchen set and lamps. The children investigated each new item as if it were a toy or Christmas decoration. Gossip, arguments, laughter, tears, plans, and so much else went on in this room. If walls could talk … She remembers Zack striding through the house like the lord of the manor, and the children, unused to sleeping in separate rooms, visiting each other nightly. None of them knew how to react to the quiet outside.

  The first weekend, she recalls the four of them staying indoors, still trying to absorb what was theirs. However unhappy he was with his job, Zack was deeply content in this house. Wasn’t she as well? After the newness wore off, it’s true that some of her old restlessness returned, but she wasn’t unhappy. How easy it’s been—too easy—in the past months of misery to obliterate all memory of what went before. At the time, it never occurred to her to savor the pleasure she now looks back on. And she realizes it isn’t hindsight but loss that illuminates.

  “Hey,” Zack calls from the top of the stairs. “Should I hang towels on the bedroom windows?”

  “Yes,” Rosie replies. “I’m not sleeping with an uncovered window.”

  “Rosie, do you want to come up and he
lp me?”

  “No. I’m waiting in the living room. My friend is on the way over.”

  She leaves the sandwiches and finds her daughter. “Your friend? At this time of night? Who is it?”

  “Mom, you need to chill. Be nice to him, promise.”

  “Him? You can’t invite outsiders. We’re doing something illegal.”

  “Please, get off the illegal crap. It isn’t some major heist.” Her daughter’s studiously scruffy in cargo pants and a T-shirt, her face lovely without makeup.

  She takes a deep breath, recalling her decision not to argue with her daughter, or at least not as often. “Who is the man?”

  “Not exactly a man, he’s eighteen. His name is Siri.”

  Dory chimes in. “Obviously, Rosie, you’ve told him all about us, so now it’s our chance to meet him. Lena?”

  “Did you know about this?”

  “Not for a second.”

  “Oh lord,” she mumbles and returns to finish preparing the sandwiches.

  “Mom?” Casey stands in the middle of the bare kitchen, looking a bit lost.

  “I thought you were in the basement with Stu.”

  “I was, but turns out water is never really stopped. They just shut off the valves or something. I saw it trickle out in the bathroom, dark brown. Stu left it running.”

  “Are you okay?”

  “Oh, yes, I’m glad. I like being here with everyone.”

  She puts her arms around his narrow frame, rubs her chin across the top of his curly hair. “I like being here with everyone, too. Help me bring in the sandwiches. We can spread the old green blanket on the floor.”

  “A nighttime picnic.” He sounds approving.

  They sit on the floor around a blanket, sandwiches on paper plates, cups filled with liquids of choice. Two bottles of wine already emptied. It’s past eleven. They’ve done what they could to make the house livable, though it’s more like camping out—something she won’t say, because Rosie will accuse her of being too negative. Siri, in black jeans and a white shirt, seems more at home than she’d ever be in this situation. It’s admirable that he came all this way at such an hour to protect his girlfriend.