by Dawn Davies
Sometimes people think people will do that for them.
I had moved from my home state of Florida to Massachusetts after dropping out of college at nineteen. I am not sure what made me think that college was holding me back from my dreams, but I knew I wanted to experience new things, like most young people do, and I wanted to get out of Florida. New England looked beautiful in photographs, so I packed up and went.
Boston didn’t disappoint. It was the exact opposite of the South that I knew: extremely expensive, painfully cold, even in April, and bulging with fast-moving and fast-talking people who pushed through sheets of sleet and mounds of dirty slush on their way to what looked like very important work. I felt an immediate entrepreneurial urge and wanted to be part of this productive, collective energy. I wanted to start a cheesecake-on-a-stick business, or a T-shirt business with all the great philosophical ideas on them, such as “Beauty” and “Truth” and “Justice” and “Fate.” I also planned to become a well-known painter. They say the human brain doesn’t mature until twenty-five or twenty-six and there’s your proof.
I spent weeks greeting strangers on the street with a smile and a “Hey” or a “Good morning” like we did down South, and they would look at me and clutch their bags a little closer. I wouldn’t fit in with that pace or the place, but I didn’t know it then.
I found three “artists” looking for a fourth person to share a four-thousand-square-foot commercial loft space next to a fortune cookie factory. I forked over my savings for the deposit and first and last months’ rent, and claimed a thousand of those feet as my own. Then I landed a job as a waitress at an upscale Italian restaurant. I got myself a library card for my days off, whereby I immediately checked out one book on how to start a small business and eight novels, which shows you where my sensibilities really lay. I worked nights and read books and painted during the days. Occasionally, I would bake a cheesecake and slice it up and impale the wedges with popsicle sticks.
A week into the new job, a young Brazilian cook called Wagner caught my attention. He was fun, goofy, lived in the moment, and had a twinkle in his eye that made me think there was something special under the surface. When a waiter did something good, like picking up an order on time, or fetching him something from the fridge, Wagner would point his knife at the waiter and start an exchange that went like this:
Wagner: Hey? You know what?
Waiter: What?
Wagner: You okay!
Waiter (suspiciously): Yeah, thanks.
Wagner: No, you not listening. You … okay.
Waiter (brightening): Thanks.
Wagner: No. Really. You okay.
Waiter (big smile): Yeah? Thanks!
Wagner: What you doing hanging around here, bastard! Get out on the floor, you!
Wagner and I had little in common, including language, but we started dating anyway. Wagner was not particularly deep or intellectual, so in a way I was kind of marking time. This was mostly because Wagner was extremely handsome and I was still a child. Wagner liked ribs and sauce and beer and slapstick comedy. He liked picking a boiled lobster clean while sitting by the heat of a bonfire. He liked action movies, especially those starring Clint Eastwood. He abruptly switched to Portuguese when he was doing a bad job explaining things in English, then he got mad when the American he was talking to didn’t understand his Portuguese either. He cooked me breaded chicken livers and a cake that looked like it was made of cream cheese, but when I cut into it, I found it was made of meat and peas, and the icing formed from mashed potatoes. Wagner liked to drive fast in the dark, and he peed on me once at the outdoor shower at Salisbury Beach when I bent over to clean the sand off my feet, which made him laugh for a long time. He had an extravagant laugh.
I almost went to Brazil with him the following Christmas to meet his family, but before we bought our tickets, he got nervous. He decided I was too tall for his family to handle, and our height difference would embarrass him in front of his competitively masculine brothers. Don’t ask. It’s both appalling and true. I was a lot taller than Wagner. I was that tall girl who would, every once in a while, suspend my lack of faith and order something from a tall girl catalog and wait nervously until the package arrived in the mail. Then when I ripped it open with a measure of hope, it would always be short—mournfully short, hillbilly short, even though it came from a tall girl store. But it is what it is. Some guys mind. Some don’t. Some like it.
Wagner went home without me for Christmas and rode his motorcycle up and down a mountain at high speed until he drove himself into an unmarked construction hole at two in the morning. He died alone in the dirt. To me, his death was abstract—a midnight phone call from my sobbing restaurant manager, a largely one-sided conversation that beat me to a pulp in about two minutes. I never saw his body. I never went to a funeral. I didn’t know if his family knew about me, so I didn’t contact them.
Things didn’t feel right at the restaurant after that. I missed Wagner’s cheerful goodness in the kitchen, so I quit and got a job at a seafood joint in the Back Bay, serving lobster and clam chowder to tourists. I wasn’t well. My mind was starting to buckle, and I began to twist Wagner’s death, which was a freak accident, into a suspicion that I would soon die too—abruptly, or protractedly, but always tragically. If it happened to Wagner, it could happen to me, I thought. It was a cold winter and I wanted to go home where the sun knew how to shine, but I was broke.
I kept my feelings to myself, showed up to work, and no one, including me, knew that I was drifting down into the compass-free land of depression. I didn’t share my troubles, mostly because I didn’t know how to talk about how my days were spent slogging through puddles of fear, and how I closed each night with a bout of midnight hypochondriacal genius, with thoughts of pancreatic cancer and brain tumors and lymphoma cutting loose in my head like naughty whack-a-moles I could never seem to plug. I didn’t understand that I was grieving; I just thought I was weak. I was poised, locked in amber, struggling to step over a dangerous, stalagmite-filled pothole, straddling that place between childhood, where things existed because I was told they did, and adulthood, where I was facing a crippling lack of meaning and purpose.
Once you know you will never see someone again, nostalgia for what could have been makes you love them more. I had loved Wagner, I think, and we were left unfinished. I walked the streets we used to walk, rode the T alone to the places we used to go. More than a few times, I walked past his old apartment late at night, wondering who was in there turning the lights on and off, living carelessly, lightly, in the space he once took up. Once when I had a bad day, he had grabbed my shoulders, shaken me hard, and said, “Keep the faith, you. God not gonna mess up, never,” with such force that it rattled my teeth and took my breath away. Then he hugged me. I also remembered making fun of him because he couldn’t say “Clint Eastwood” with his heavy Brazilian accent. He could only say “Clingy Stewage.” These memories made me sad, and I wanted to cry when I thought about them, but after that first day, I didn’t.
Living in the loft was beaucoup bohemian. I cooked on a hot plate, witnessed a few stabbings on the sidewalk outside my building, and could almost always smell the sticky, bready sweetness of the fortune cookies baking in the factory. In the mornings, I woke up with frost on the inside of my windows, thanks to the commercial heat that turned off at six P.M. and didn’t come on at all on weekends. One particularly damp morning, there was frost on my quilt. I thought the lifestyle would help me paint, or design T-shirts, or develop my cheesecake empire, but after Wagner died, my desires drained, and I found myself simply living in an overpriced dump. I started to hate the city with its dissonant non-rhythm; honking night horns and apartment building entryways that smelled like waves of foreign food every time the door opened; the coarse, slushy sidewalks; the people trudging back and forth, to work, to home, to schools and bars and stores, no one thinking of what would one day happen to them—that they would all die, one by one, with or without no
tice, and be replaced by generations of strangers. I also hadn’t seen the sun in a month.
So I moved away from the city, out to Belmont, into the first floor of a quaint old two-decker with a big bay window seat and a real yard. The entire apartment cost less than my share of the loft, and I hoped I could save up some money and get myself home before another winter hit. Florida, with all of its familiarity and warmth and family, was suddenly looking pretty good. In the meantime, I wanted to read in the window seat, with the sun shining across my knees, a mug of coffee in my hands, and a couple of Italian lemon drop cookies balanced on my knees. I wanted to recuperate.
My landlady was made of wrinkles and had a grown son with Down syndrome who was old enough to have wrinkles of his own. I could hear him thunder back and forth from one end of the apartment to the other, and his clumsy bulk made the little chandelier in my dining room shake. They had a routine: groceries and gas on Mondays, the library on Tuesdays and Thursdays, bowling on Wednesdays, and Mass on Fridays and Sundays. On Monday nights she would bring me a Tupperware of galumpkis—pork and rice rolled in cabbage and slow-cooked in tomato sauce—which I would eat all week. Sometimes I could hear the son shouting with happiness, a throaty, unchecked, choking laugh that carried, and I could hear her laughing along with him.
The move did nothing to fix my state of mind. It is important to know that nothing external can do that for you, but at twenty-one, I didn’t know a whole hell of a lot. In desperation, like so many do, I tried to pray, because alcohol was too expensive and because my grandfather, like Wagner, had once told me that there was nothing too big for God to handle. I gave it a shot and tentatively asked God to give me signs that Wagner was in heaven, that I was going to be okay. I got nothing. I kept at it. I asked Him to change my life. To make me feel better. To take away my pain and fear. Still nothing. Not a stirring. Not a feeling of hope. Just my heart-pounding fear of death. I soon grew to suspect that perhaps my grandfather was mistaken, as he had died fairly quickly after what they called a “brief battle with cancer,” a fact that still angered me and caused me to doubt both my grandfather and God. I remembered Wagner shaking me and saying, “Keep the faith, you,” with such blind assurance, and it ticked me off too. Some savior He was if He let perfectly fine people die all over the place. Little Somali kids snuffing out by the thousands, soldiers dying alone in deserts, families burning up in minivan accidents on the highway, blastomas, gliomas, cytomas, ICUs, NICUs, drownings, all the ways people go that are not fair, and the worst thing of all was the lie they told you about God’s infinite power and goodness. I began to believe that God was like Santa Claus—a story told to little kids so they would have something to grab on to when they faced their first realizations that death would one day happen to them and to their parents and siblings, and that worst of all, their time could be up at any moment, without warning, without their having done anything meaningful.
My dark thoughts grew in scope. I had been a voracious reader as a child, and had made the mistake of reading all my mother’s nursing textbooks and my stepfather’s medical books and journal subscriptions from cover to cover. I knew too much, and at too young an age, with no context or reference points to keep me medically grounded. Every time I was still, I would begin to hear a wheezing in my lungs that could only mean granulomas gone bad, tuberculosis, cancer. My grieving was replaced by paranoia, and I began to check myself for bruises and petechiae, and to prod my groin and neck for swollen glands when I was in the shower. If I felt a stomach pain or blaze of heartburn through my chest, I suspected my aorta was about to tear, or there was a tumor growing that I would soon find out about once the symptoms grew too impressive to ignore.
I was so jacked up that I could hear my heartbeat almost all the time. It pounded with anxiety. I listened at night for it to skip a beat, and when it did, I panicked and caused it to skip further beats, which kept me awake even later in a swirling boil of fear, waiting for it to stop altogether, wondering if I would have time to call an ambulance for myself if something bad went down. If Wagner, who believed in God like he believed in air, had died so young, I thought, if all those trusting, faithful Somali kids with flies in their eyes were dying of starvation by the thousands, then I, a near heathen who was angry at God, could too.
I passed the rest of the winter literally cheating death by riding my bicycle nine miles into Boston, through the snow and rain, for my night shifts at the restaurant, then riding home at the end of the night, twice as fast, sometimes at two or three in the morning. I would take Massachusetts Avenue through Cambridge, then Concord Street and home as fast as I could go. I flew through the dark, dodging cars, hearing my breath rasp and my heart pound in my head, jumping snow clots and dark, red-looking puddles that reflected the choked light of the night sky. I dared something to go wrong. Every time a car did not hit me, I thought, I cheated death, and by doing so, asserted my life. Take that, God. I’m still alive, I thought every time I lifted my bike up onto the back porch at the end of a shift. The endorphins I produced got me high enough to finally fall asleep. I began to understand Wagner’s love for feeling speed in the darkness. I did this for fourteen hundred miles until, when spring pushed through the hard winter, I didn’t have cancer and my aorta didn’t rupture, but I was about ten pounds lighter and needed some new pants. I ended up at the Army Navy in Cambridge, and that’s where I met Kami.
I took the train into the city for our first date on a Saturday night. It was a warm spring night in May, and there was a feeling in the middle of my belly that was part anxiety, which I was used to, and part excitement, which was a feeling I hadn’t known in a while. I could feel adrenaline coursing through me, and as the train shot through the tunnels in the dark, I believed that something was poised to change in my life. After so many months of anxiety and anger, it felt refreshing and hopeful and frightening. It had been so long since I had traveled by anything other than bicycle that the speed felt dangerous, and I was entranced by the rhythm of the train slicing along the tracks. It felt like we were barnstorming Cambridge, then Boston, flying recklessly, so tenuously that at any moment we could lift off and soar into space. My heart roared. I looked around at the faces in that tube with me and felt a connection with them that made me shiver. When I came out at Copley Square, blinking like a baby, the dark city lights were auroral.
I was early. I walked around the reflecting pool at the Christian Science Plaza. On Sunday mornings, before I moved out to Belmont, I would stop off at a Syrian bakery for coffee and some flat, oily bread with herbs and cheese pounded into it. Then I would walk to the plaza and eat my bread while it was still warm, drink my coffee, thick with cream and sugar, read the paper, and watch the faithful trickle into the mother church for ten o’clock Sunday school.
I had stopped going to church when I was in middle school, soon after my grandfather died. I remember childhood Sunday school classes and long sermons nursing a roll of Life Savers, looking at my mother’s curvy legs in her nylons, drawing on the program and the offering envelopes with the golf pencil that was stuck in the pencil hole in the back of the pew. For a long time, I believed Jesus loved me because the Bible told me he did. My mother taught me to say my prayers when I was a little girl, and I would get on my knees at night and pray, in earnest, for everyone I knew. When I spent summers with my grandparents, they would take me to their Lutheran church on Sundays and to choir practice on Thursday nights, where I would sit with my grandfather and the other baritones while the choir sang to the hauntingly empty church. On rainy days, I would pull out my grandmother’s Bible and look at the colored illustrations of Jesus sitting amidst a flock of sheep and a throng of robe-clad children, or of Moses aiming the tablet of Commandments toward the sky, or of Abraham with the knife poised over his son Isaac, about to slit his throat.
I had often wondered about the early Christian Scientists and how they thought that sickness and death were illusions caused by mistaken beliefs and that prayer would right their bad thou
ghts and cure the fallacy of disease, yet their children died of ruptured appendices, diabetes, and ear infections, as if they lived in the bush instead of Boston proper. Their numbers dwindled as they died out or left the Church, likely due to bad doctrine and bad leadership. After all, not taking your seriously ill child to a doctor is a dumb idea, and Mary Baker Eddy, the founder of Christian Science, had been a hypochondriac like me. In the 1980s, psychologists posthumously diagnosed her with psychotic personality disorder.
Nowhere in the Christian faith did I see what I was truly looking for as a young doubter—proof that Jesus ascended into heaven and was seated at the right hand of the Father. If God were so real, and He cared, and they believed so hard, why did He let Christian Scientist kids die when their parents prayed for healing? This feeling left me sadder still, left me wondering about where Wagner was, and for that matter, my grandfather and dead great-aunties and -uncles and grandparents and great-grandparents, and the files of dead kin that I never knew, stretching behind me, far past any landscape I had traveled. I pushed my fingers through the curl of water falling over the edge of the reflecting pool and thought about being dead, about the potential of heaven as a reality. About the fate of sinners and of the people who sin by condemning other sinners. About the availability of God. I imagined Him to be so rock star that He was off-limits to regular people, cordoned off and guarded by the holier-than-thous who had actually read the Bible, the ones who looked at you funny of a Sunday morning while they filed in to worship a God that they thought you were going to hell for not believing in.
