“I get it,” I say. “But what you’re feeling now—it’s going to change.”
“How do you know that?”
“Do you remember how I was when you met me?”
Waiting for Hannah’s answer, I notice that her breathing is a bit less labored than it was yesterday.
“You were in pieces,” she says. “You’re better now.”
“No one knows that as well as you do.”
“You were sleeping on people’s couches,” Hannah continues. “You’ve been working hard on yourself, and you’re different. More positive. More compassionate. More giving. You have a great life. And you made it all happen. You created a whole new reality for yourself.”
“I did,” I agree. “With a whole lot of help from my friends. You’ll do that, too. It’ll just take time.”
—
HANNAH CALLS ME EVERY MORNING when her sleeping pill wears off. I talk to her—listen to her, mostly—for an hour or two, until she says, “I’m going to try to get out of bed now.” Then I go back to writing until I meet the swim team for the drive to the pond.
—
OF COURSE I NEED TO TELL Helena that Michael died. Helena has always liked Hannah, not least because Hannah was such a fan of Helena’s and of our relationship.
It’s comforting to hear Helena’s voice. Compared to the shiny new pennies of my colony friendships, my connection to Helena feels solid, known. Since Hannah has forbidden me to fly across the country for Michael’s memorial, Helena promises to go in my place. Hannah reports back that Helena signed my name in the guest book.
“She hardly even knew Michael. She came because she loves you that much,” Hannah tells me the next morning.
“Apparently even your husband’s death can’t stop your campaign to marry me off to Helena,” I say, and for the first time since Michael died, Hannah and I laugh together.
“I was so happy before Michael died,” she says. “I’m glad I appreciated what I had while I had it. But I don’t think I’ll ever be happy again.”
“It’ll be a different kind of happiness. But you’ll be happy again,” I say. I’ve spent the past three years saying this to myself without much luck, as Hannah well knows. But we both also know that Hannah is made of stronger stuff, self-esteem-wise, than I am.
“Grief is the biggest part of you right now,” I tell her. “But that won’t always be true. The rest of your life will get bigger again. You’ll grow scar tissue over this wound.”
“I’m not sure about that,” Hannah says. “I know I’m strong enough to get through this. But is that what the rest of my life is going to be? Getting through the days, instead of being happy, the way I used to be?”
“I wonder the same thing,” I confess. “It’s exhausting, trying to be happy.”
“But you’re happy now, with your new book and your new friends,” Hannah says. I hear the plea in her voice. I understand it. But I’m not going to lie to her.
“Not the way I used to be.”
My words ring in our silence. I can’t stand doing this to Hannah. But she trusts me to tell her the truth.
“I hate hearing that,” Hannah says.
“I know, honey,” I say. “I hate that it’s true.”
—
LATER THAT DAY I’M WRITING in the colony’s air-conditioned library when Otis, a sculptor I’ve chatted with a few times, comes into the room with a sketchpad in his hand.
“Will it bug you if I sit here and work?” he asks.
“I’d love it if you’d sit there and work,” I say. “I’m sick of myself right now.”
Otis nods. “All this solitude is awesome when I’m feeling good. It’s hell when I’m not.”
Our eyes meet and hold. “Right now,” Otis says, “not.”
“Do you feel like talking about it?” I ask.
“Oh,” he says, “I thought everyone knew.”
“Maybe everyone else does,” I say. “But I don’t.”
Nine months ago, Otis tells me, he was driving his family minivan through the mountains, taking his wife and daughters to his parents’ house for Thanksgiving. As they rounded a blind curve and came up out of a dip, their minivan crashed into a snowplow that had broken down, without lights, in the center of the pitch-black country road. Otis and his wife sustained minor injuries. His thirteen-year-old daughter was permanently paralyzed from the waist down. Their five-year-old daughter died.
“I’m so sorry, Otis,” I say, keeping my eyes locked on his, trying not to flinch in the face of his pain.
“Thank you,” he says.
The clock on the library wall ticks and tocks.
“Have you been able to work?” I ask him.
“Before the accident, I mostly made big public sculptures. Since the accident, I’ve been making work about my despair. Since I got here, I’ve been making small pieces that deal with my daughter’s death more directly.”
“That must be so hard.”
“It’s excruciating,” Otis says. “But I think it’s helping, too.”
“It must be,” I say. “Or you wouldn’t be doing it.”
Otis gazes at me intently. “Voice of experience? Are you writing about hard stuff?”
“Nothing as hard as what you’re going through.”
“One thing I’ve learned,” Otis says, “is that everyone’s hard stuff is hard. Do you feel like talking about it?”
I close my laptop, and Otis closes his sketchbook, and for the next couple of hours we talk and laugh and cry a bit together. He asks if I want to see the sculptures he’s made since he got here a month ago. We walk across the meadow and down a dirt road to his studio, a huge, white windowed room splattered with gray clay. Otis shows me a dozen or so life-sized ceramic replicas of a little girl’s lace-up shoes—some studded with nails, some crushed flat, some topped by a pregnant belly, some flanked by a woman’s high heels or by a man’s boots.
I look at this man, this new friend, in all his grief and grace. How clearly he knows that the accident that killed his daughter was just that. “I was traveling at the speed limit. I had no time to react,” he tells me. “I couldn’t afford to blame myself. At that point I was in survival mode, trying to take care of my wife and daughter, staying focused on their needs.”
If I’d been behind that wheel, could I have convinced myself, or been convinced, that the crash wasn’t my fault? Blaming myself would have made an unthinkable tragedy even worse for everyone involved, including me.
I want to be like Otis. Like Hannah. I want a better relationship with myself. Now, before it’s too late.
—
LOVE IS LOVE IS LOVE, and grief is grief is grief. Otis’s pain, Hannah’s pain pull me back toward my own. But no matter how low I go, every afternoon, the car ride with the swim team and the baptism in the cold, clear water of the pond take me somewhere lighter and brighter.
Hannah tells me every morning that our conversations are helping her. They’re good for me, too. We’re so different from each other in so many ways. She hated L.A. and loves Northern California. I was so over NorCal and I love L.A. She’s sitting at one end of the mourning train and I’m sitting at the other, but we’re riding the same rails.
The distance between where I was three years ago, when Hannah held me together, and where I am now, holding Hannah, gives her a shred of faith, however thin. When she says, “I don’t think I’ll ever . . . ,” when she says she’s afraid she’ll feel this way for the rest of her life, we both remember the many times I said that to her. Then she says, “I guess there’s hope.”
—
“MY THERAPIST TAUGHT ME a trick that kind of works,” Hannah tells me one morning. “If I force myself to focus on the present moment, instead of worrying about being alone for the rest of my life, I actually feel a little better.”
“That�
��s great.”
“I think the Zoloft is kicking in. I’m starting to feel okay on my own.”
“Wow, honey. You’re amazing,” I say. Weeks after her husband’s death, Hannah’s already more comfortable by herself than I’ve ever been. It’s a flashback to our old dynamic: Hannah walking calmly ahead of me; me trotting distractedly behind her, then running to catch up.
I don’t want to be that puppy anymore.
“What’s wrong with you today?” Hannah asks.
“I’m fine,” I say.
“Please tell me,” she says. “I’m so sick of being everyone’s patient. It would be such a relief to listen to someone else’s problems for a change.”
“It’s my birthday next week. I love being here. But . . . I’m a little lonely.”
I wince at my own insensitivity. Hannah just lost her husband of twenty-five years, and I’m feeling lonely?
“No biggie,” I say. “I’m fine. Tell me how you are.”
I feel Hannah wrestling with the transition. In our old relationship, she never would have accepted the shift of attention to her. But now she’s working new muscles.
“Twice yesterday I had the experience of quieting, just knowing that this is how it is for me now,” she says slowly. “I realized it’s the desperation of trying to fill the hole that makes me frenetic.
“But the hole can’t be filled,” Hannah says. “It’s going to be there. There’s absolutely nothing to do. This is where I am.”
I tell Hannah that I did some reading on grief yesterday. “Want me to read you a bit?”
“Please,” she says.
“This is from Daring by Gail Sheehy,” I say. “She was really happy with her husband, and she lost him after twenty-four years, too.”
“Her husband was Clay Felker,” Hannah says. “He founded New York magazine.”
“How do you know everything?” This is an old joke between us: the Ivy League intellectual who reads Kafka, the high school dropout who reads Kingsolver.
“I tried to think of one good thing about being a widow: more closet space. I knew the worst thing about being a widow: five to seven PM.”
“That’s my worst time,” Hannah says.
“I know,” I say.
“So much of grief . . . is raw fear. Would there ever be happy times again? A tearless night? A rising from bed that was not a heroic act? Careless laughter?”
“Spoiler alert,” I say. “Gail Sheehy got happy again.”
“How long did it take her?” Hannah asks.
This is our deal, mine and Hannah’s: we do emphasize the positive, but we do not lie.
“Years,” I answer. “But listen to this, from Gail Caldwell’s New Life, No Instructions.
“We survive grief merely and surely by outlasting it—the ongoing fact of the narrative eclipses the heartbreak within.”
“What if I’m too old to outlast my grief?” Hannah says.
I wonder this about myself every single day. It’s the geriatric biological clock ticking. “You’re not too old for anything,” I say, emphasizing the positive while lying just a little bit.
TWENTY
I’m aware that for normal mortals, spending a birthday alone is not a thing to dread or fear. Some, including Hannah, who will only name the month, not the date, of her birthday, prefer to “celebrate” that way.
Normal is not a word that anyone would use to describe my relationship to birthdays—others’ or my own. At the family gathering where my ex-husband and ex-girlfriend first met the woman who is now my ex-wife, they both wished her luck surviving the month of August for as long as our relationship should live.
Even before I open my eyes, waking up on this birthday feels different. The solitary day I’ve planned is a long, quiet tunnel, one way in, one way out, no interventions. No one around me knows, so no one will disappoint or rescue me. The day will be as pleasant or unpleasant as I choose to make it.
My phone rings. “I figured out how to be okay,” Hannah says without preamble. “It’s all about the neural pathways. I can’t let the bad thoughts carve grooves in my brain. Only productive thoughts are allowed. If I start thinking about something I have no control over, I let it go and focus on something I can do something about.”
“You’re so rational,” I blurt. “I wish I could control myself that way.”
“You can.”
“How?”
“Don’t you have a birthday coming up soon?” Hannah asks.
“It’s today, actually.”
“Perfect,” she says. “Why don’t you give yourself a birthday present and spend the day being nice to yourself? Every time you think something bad about yourself, think something good instead.”
If this advice were coming from anyone else, I’d dismiss it as feel-good, self-validating Post-its-on-the-bathroom-mirror, Oprah pop psych bullshit. But Hannah doesn’t do bullshit.
“If you won’t do it for yourself,” Hannah says, “do it for the people who love you.”
“Huh?”
“If you were okay on your own, you’d stop needing other people to make you feel good about yourself. That’s the only bad thing about you. You pull at other people for that.”
“That’s horrible. God. I’m sorry.”
“There’s nothing to apologize for. You’re human.
“All we can ask of ourselves is that we try to be better,” Hannah says. “You’re doing that. You’re so much smarter emotionally than when you got to L.A. You lost your job and you didn’t fall apart. You ended it with Helena, even though you want a partner and you don’t know if you’ll find someone else. You’ve helped me so much since Michael died. You’ve been here with me very single day.
“Everyone else knows these things about you. You just have to work on knowing them about yourself.”
I am not going to cry, or drown Hannah in the wave of my emotions. “I’ll take it under advisement,” I say.
—
“MORNING, SWEETIE,” Marta greets me in the dining room. “Coffee?” She waves the pot in my direction.
“Thanks. I’m having tea.”
Marta pours herself a mug, adds almond milk, and carries it into the kitchen to order her eggs. I fall into line behind her, greeting the fellow fellows who fall into line behind me.
No one’s wishing me a happy birthday.
They don’t know it’s my birthday. That’s the plan, remember?
Whose idea was that? It’s a terrible plan.
I scarf down my eggs, wish everyone a productive day, jump on my bike, and pedal toward the dirt path that curves for miles through the woods. The muggy air makes me long for arid L.A. But where will that kind of thinking get me? I’m here now, in a different but equal paradise. I force my focus to the spicy snap of the pine needles shattering beneath my wheels.
My plan is to spend my birthday at the racetrack near the colony, picking daily doubles and communing with my dad. I chain my bike to the fence, pay the entry fee that my dad used to pay for me, and find a spot along the paddock rail, where he and I always hung out before we placed our bets. Despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, my father remained convinced that watching the jockeys mount the horses allowed him to predict the outcome of each race. “Number seven’s nervous,” he’d whisper, as if he were sharing insider-trading information. “Look at number five. He’s favoring his right front leg.”
In honor of my dad and his cockamamie strategies, I bet every race in two-dollar combos that obviate a net win. I toast him with a rubbery racetrack hot dog, raise a plastic cup of warm, foamy racetrack beer. I enlist him to help me pick my losers. He throws in a few words of wisdom, no extra charge.
“Win or lose, just stay in the game,” I hear him saying. “Sometimes you might have to give in. But don’t ever give up.”
I go to the paddock, ha
ng on the rail, watch the jockeys mounting the horses. And then I head to the window to place my next bet.
—
SINCE THE ER DOC CUT my wedding band off my hand three years ago, I’ve been wanting a substitute. Every time I glance at my bare ring finger, my stomach sinks, the way it does when I find my credit card missing from its slot in my wallet or my wallet missing from my purse.
This seems a fitting day to shop for a replacement. So after the eighth race, I pedal to the antique store in town. And there, shining inside the dusty display case, I see it. A simple old-gold oval circled by small, sparkling garnets. My ring.
The shopkeeper hands me the tray. I slip the bit of gold onto the ring finger of my left hand. I hold it up, inspect it more closely. The letter M is etched into the oval.
“I’ll take it,” I say.
—
I’D PLANNED TO TAKE MYSELF out to dinner in town, not as a celebration—I’ve never enjoyed restaurant meals alone—but as a safeguard against blowing my secret. Feeling happy and invincible thanks to my new Wonder Woman ring, I turn my bike toward the colony.
Pedaling up the long, steep driveway, I run into Otis walking back from a hike. I get off my bike and fall into step with him. I ask how he’s doing, and we sit on a bench in the garden, falling into another conversation without walls, without niceties, without lies.
I notice the lengthening of the shadows through the pines. “Hey, what time is it?” I ask Otis.
“Whoa! It’s dinnertime already. We’ve been talking for two hours.”
I’m amazed. While we were talking, I didn’t think once about my birthday or who might have left me a birthday message or anything other than what Otis was saying to me and what I was saying to Otis.
In this I find hope. Maybe what I want—what makes me feel human and engaged and alive and good about myself, or better yet, makes me forget about myself entirely—isn’t just other people’s attention and approval. What I want is what I have with Otis right now: an exchange of deep thoughts and innermost feelings, held safe in a container of trust. In other words, intimacy.
The New Old Me Page 22
