Days of Awe: A Novel

by Lauren Fox

  There are other teachers at Rhodes Avenue with whom I feel a camaraderie—Bea Marcus, who tacks photocopies of her students’ most hilarious mistakes onto the bulletin board in the teachers’ lounge (“Slavery was an enema to the abolitionists”); Will Carrick, who pokes holes in his eighth graders’ terminal self-consciousness by giving them random, nonsensical nicknames: iTunes, Gluten-Free, Our Lady of Paper Clips. But since Josie died, that kinship is vaporous to me, exposed for the superficial coping mechanism it always has been. These people are not my friends. It runs through my head as I sit at my desk grading papers or perch on the edge of a chair quickly eating my lunch: Not my friends. They are not my friends.

  But sometimes, for a minute or two, I find myself giggling with Bea over the latest of her students’ entertaining flubs, or brainstorming new nicknames with Will, or gossiping about the not-very-well-kept secret that Arthur Greene, the eighth-grade English teacher, and Violet Nowicki, the part-time librarian, both in their sixties and both divorced, are finally, after twenty years of flirting, hooking up. And maybe the world cracks open in those moments and a little bit of light comes in, and just for a few seconds I can not only imagine being happy in a world without Josie, but I’m actually living in that world.

  And then the crack seals up and I’m back on familiar ground, and I remember to miss my friend, and I am relieved.

  For months, the phantom smell of latkes clung to the sweater I wore the night of Mark’s party, even though I had washed it three times. When I held it close to my face, the whole evening came rushing back to me in a sensory, canola-oil-drenched flood of images, all culminating in Mark turning and walking away, fed up with me, done. Our meeting at the dedication of Josie’s headstone on that dreary day, our brief embrace, resolved nothing. I thought that my punishment for losing Josie was losing Mark, too—although “losing Mark” didn’t really describe it. My greasy fingertips all over Andi’s silk shawl were a map of my intentions.

  One night in April, I couldn’t sleep. The air in my bedroom was stuffy and stale, like the inside of a broken refrigerator. I got up and opened the window, kicked off the covers, then pulled them back over me, then kicked them off again. Maybe this is hell, I thought: alone in my house in the middle of the night, stuck in an endless loop of thermal discomfort.

  In the year since Josie had died, I had never once said the word “suicide,” not out loud. But it played on the edges of my psyche, always there, raspy and ugly, and that night, in bed, I couldn’t get rid of it. In fact, no one ever spoke of Josie’s death as a suicide. We all pretended that her death was the result of a tragic accident—preventable, yes; it wouldn’t have happened if she hadn’t been driving too fast—but not deliberate. By our unspoken agreement, Josie had not killed herself.

  At 4:40 a.m., in the silent darkness of my room, I sat up in my bed and I said it out loud. “Josie killed herself.”

  It didn’t sound right, but it didn’t sound wrong, either.

  I got out of bed and made my way to the end of the hallway, my footsteps graceless and loud in the empty house. The noise didn’t matter. Hannah was at Chris’s. I poked my head into her messy room; I imagined her face, her pursed lips, the way she sometimes flung her arms over her head in her sleep exactly as she’d done when she was a baby. Be asleep, I thought. I would have taken her insomnia. I would have sacrificed all of my sleep for Hannah, forever. My chest was tight with love for my blameless baby. I loved her so much when she was at Chris’s!

  I felt my way down the stairs. The house was dark, but not sinister. I liked it this way. It reminded me of the darkrooms I’d spent time in in college, the comforting blanket of velvety blackness holding the promise of what was to come, that slow reveal. I felt my way into the kitchen. The digital clock on the oven glowed green: 4:43. I turned on the light and the coffeemaker, took the milk out of the refrigerator. I was thick with tiredness. A smudged coat of exhaustion lay over every bit of me.

  This life: scattered papers and leftover lasagna, a silver barrette on the countertop and books and coffee and a scribbled note taped to the refrigerator, Mommy, can it be true? We are out of ice cream! What on earth could turn a person away from it, what seething despair or failure of attachment? I had spent thirteen months not asking this question, terrified of the toxic sludge that would surely spew out of me if I did. But I was asking it now. And I found, to my surprise, in my messy kitchen in the dark early morning, that I wasn’t angry with Josie.

  I poured myself a cup of coffee, made it milky and sweet, and sat down at the kitchen table. There was a lacy fringe of frost on the window, and the crescent moon was still high in the black sky, crisp and sharp, like a little cookie. I blew on my coffee.

  I wasn’t angry with Josie, and I didn’t blame her, but I couldn’t explain her death, either. Even after all these months, it was an unanswered question, a vast expanse of pain.

  At seven fifteen, I called in sick. In truth, my eyes were burning from lack of sleep, and my head ached, so it was easy to commit to the part. I made my voice extra husky on the phone, and Carol Wall, the school secretary, tsked with sympathy and told me to drink tea with honey.

  I splashed some water from the kitchen tap on my face and downed the last few gulps of lukewarm coffee. I had not spoken to Mark, really spoken to him, in months. Mark! My loyal confidant, friend of my youth. I felt the urge to see him, to say to him: It’s okay now, it’s not our fault, mixed up with something else, a feeling somewhat less benign, but still inchoate. I got dressed quickly. Ten minutes later, I was on my way to his apartment.

  ···

  Did I think he’d be there, at seven forty-five on a Friday morning? Did I think that my desire to see him could conjure him? I knocked, softly at first, then with more urgency. No one answered. He must have had an early class at one of the community colleges he worked at. Andi—I hadn’t even thought about Andi, about what I’d do if she were home; I’ll admit I wasn’t operating at maximum capacity. But Andi was at school, of course. I stood in the hallway outside his apartment and turned in a circle, as if the freshly painted tan walls could tell me what to do, as if the thick green carpeting under my feet would offer up a solution. I wanted to talk to Mark. At the very least, I would leave him a note. I banged on the door one more time and wondered if my exhaustion combined with this vague sense of psychic lawlessness, this emotional unhinging, was a little echo of how Josie had felt—the desperate need for solace coupled with the jangly, hopped-up, insistent impulse to do something. Anything. The worst thing.

  Well. I’ll take most of the responsibility for what happened next, except for this: Mark had continued their questionable habit of leaving the key under the mat. I used to tell Josie, over and over: If a burglar wants to break into your house, where’s the first place he would look? And Josie would laugh dismissively and say, “He? Why do you presume the burglar is male?” which was of course not the point and was also more prescient, I guess, than either of us thought, because here I was. Once when I went over to their house, Josie had run to the store and had actually left me a note taped to the screen door: “Iz, the key is under the mat.” It wasn’t a good idea back then, and it wasn’t now.

  I let myself in. I was just going to find some paper and a pen and leave a note on the kitchen table, something like Mark, I’m sorry we haven’t been in touch lately or Mark, I’m sorry I ruined your holiday party, I’m sorry I hated you for moving on with your life, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry. Something like that. And then I was going to leave.

  Their apartment bore an untidy resemblance to how it had looked the last time I’d been here, on the night of their party. There were books and papers on the coffee table now, a pair of pink running shoes next to the couch. It was a “before” picture, cluttered and homey and lived in. The surreal impossibility of our small existence struck me with shuddering force—the idea, probable but unproven, that life continues without us, in classrooms and living rooms and queen-sized beds. It surprised me, as it
always did: the asteroid shock of it. Life goes on, for the living. Whose stupid idea was that?

  In the kitchen, an open box of cornflakes and a bowl with the soupy remains of milk and soggy cereal sat on the table. The coffeemaker was on. I walked over and flicked it off, glanced around for a pen and paper. In the doorway, in a green robe, sleepily rubbing his eyes, was Mark.

  “What are you doing back, honey?” he said, and then, blinking at me, utterly baffled, “Iz?”

  “Hi.”

  “What the hell?” He reached out and touched his palm to the door frame. “What the hell?”

  “I came over to talk to you.” I smiled weakly, raised my palms, a gesture of supplication. My heart was pounding, and I suddenly saw this whole thing for what it was: a very, very bad idea.

  “But…I…How did you?”

  “The key,” I said. “Under the mat.”

  Mark shook his head, to clear it or possibly to convince himself that I wasn’t a dream. “I need some coffee,” he said. “Do you want some? Why is the coffeemaker not on? Andi always leaves it on for me.” He walked over and carefully touched the pot with the back of his hand.

  “I turned it off,” I said.

  “Of course you did.”

  “I’m sorry I let myself in,” I said. “I was just going to leave you a note.”

  Mark nodded, groggy. He looked vulnerable in his green robe, his skinny legs poking out, tender as a frog. Maybe this would be the best time to talk to him, after all, before he could rebuild his defenses for the day.

  He took a sip of his black coffee. He walked into the living room as if I weren’t there; I followed. “You’ve been avoiding me for a really long time,” he said, “and now all of a sudden you need to talk to me so badly you break into my apartment?”

  “Let myself in,” I muttered. I couldn’t tell if he was angry or bemused, but I had a hunch he was angry, because instead of sitting down, instead of asking me to sit, he just stood there, with his coffee, in the middle of the room. He took another sip and grimaced. “I’m sorry I turned off your coffeemaker,” I said. “I thought nobody was home.”

  “Yes,” he said. “That’s what you should be apologizing for.” But then he smiled a little.

  I took a deep breath and tried to shove my hands into my pockets, but the pants I was wearing didn’t have any pockets, so I just ran my hands down and up my thighs weirdly. “I came to tell you that I realized that it’s not our fault,” I said. “Josie’s death was not our fault.”

  Mark stopped, midsip. “Iz,” he said, taking a half step back. “What?”

  I looked around the living room again and blinked hard against the pressure building behind my eyes. “Josie killed herself, right? She killed herself, but we can’t…it wasn’t…and so we can’t blame ourselves.”

  Mark finally set his coffee mug on the table and sat down on the couch. “Jesus,” he said. “Jesus Christ.”

  “She did reach out,” I said, “and I wasn’t always paying attention. But that doesn’t mean it was my fault.”

  Mark nodded, a slow bobbing of his head. His face was dark with a day’s growth of beard. He was like a Chia Pet.

  “And it wasn’t yours, either, no matter what was going on between you.” There. I had said what I had come to say. We could get on with things now, I thought. I had freed us. I waited generously for Mark’s gratitude. I hoped he wouldn’t cry, but it was all right if he did.

  Mark swiped his hand over his stubbly face, and then looked up to meet my gaze. “What the hell are you talking about, Isabel?” His voice came out in a low rumble, like he was trying to contain it. “What the hell are you saying?”

  One of Josie’s paintings was propped up against the wall in the far corner of the room, facing out. I had never seen it before. It was a send-up of a Degas, three ballerinas balanced at the barre and gazing dreamily into the distance, except the dancers were burly construction workers. Instead of tutus they were wearing tool belts, and instead of being lithe and poised, they were bulky, with huge guts. They struck graceless, lumbering poses. One had a droopy mustache, and the one on the end was reaching behind himself; you just knew by looking at it that he was about to scratch his ass. It was brilliant, in the way most of Josie’s paintings and sculptures were brilliant: that is, it was also awful.

  “You truly don’t know what you’re talking about,” Mark said. “She didn’t kill herself. She skidded into a guardrail. It was an accident. She didn’t kill herself.” He practically spat those last two words. “Goddammit, Iz! She did not kill herself!”

  He was wrong. He was so, so wrong. How could he tell himself this story, so clearly false? How could he live with the wrongness of it? I heard myself breathe in, a gaspy wheeze of oxygen, and then, there in the middle of Mark and Andi’s living room, I disappeared—all of the molecules that collided to form me, Isabel Moore, the DNA of my thin fingers and my unruly hair and my wide hips and my high arches, dissipated in Mark’s living room, became formless and chaotic, diffuse.

  We could never know how Josie had died; we would just go on, living close to the emptiness. That was the best I had. It was, to my surprise, not nothing. Faster than a blink, those jagged fragments of me flew back together, so that only I knew it happened; only I would ever know.

  “She’s still dead, though,” I said softly, “which is…fucking bullshit shit fuck.”

  “It is,” Mark agreed.

  I plopped myself next to him on the couch. “What’s with that painting?” I asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Why is it not hanging up on your wall?”

  “Guess why.” He stretched his legs out and propped them on the coffee table.

  “Andi hates it?” I asked.

  “Andi hates it.”

  We sat for a while, next to each other, in silence. “Can I have it?” I asked.

  “Yeah,” he said. “That would actually solve a lot of problems.”

  I didn’t want it. I didn’t want to look at that painting every day and think, I will never get her back, but I got up anyway and I lifted the rough wooden frame and I lugged that terrible thing across the room and out the door and down the stairs, and I wedged it into the backseat of my car and I headed home, and I had no more knowledge or clarity than I had when I’d come.

  But I had Mark back, maybe. With delicate, impermanent stitches, it seemed possible that something torn had been mended.

  The day before Mother’s Day, another forty-degree Saturday, I decide to take myself to a movie. Hannah is at Chris’s now and will be spending the day with her friends Caitlin and Katelyn. Helene is at a wedding brunch for Nancy Teegarten and Ilene Solomon, the two members of her old group of girlfriends, the gay divorcées, who, it turned out, to everyone’s surprise and most of all their own, really are.

  It’s been a chilly spring so far, wet and drizzly. I’ve taken to drinking my coffee outside early in the mornings, before Hannah is up. Barefoot, I gaze out into our small backyard, and the world looks primeval, green and misty and empty. I get the feeling humans do not quite belong here: there should only be dinosaurs, cold-blooded and hungry, chomping through the ferns. And then the caffeine kicks in, and I’m myself again.

  One benefit of the weather is that our students’ spring fever has been kept at bay. Normally, in May, an electrical current runs through them, every one of them, first slow, then fast, one to the next to the next, deep through their central nervous systems, and its single message is: Bust out! They begin a communal snuffling and snorting, like wild horses or pigs. One day they’re in small groups, scanning an e. e. cummings poem, and the next they’re laughing hysterically at a broken pencil, a sudden rain shower, a creaking chair that sounds like a fart. The younger ones forget rules they’ve known since September, push each other in the cafeteria, hurl themselves, en masse, through doorways. The older ones, the eighth graders, are occasionally caught hugging in the supply closet or a bathroom stall. They stage fake fights on the playground t
hat sometimes become real ones without warning. They veer from joyous to cruel, and sometimes you can’t tell the difference, and you can never keep up. The last weeks of school are bearable, but only just.

  But this year the students are mellow and polite, February students, because although their brains know that the school year is careening to a close, their bodies are clueless, slowed and dulled by the wind and the rain. I miss the warmth, but I appreciate the calm.

  Chris has been in his apartment for three months now—long enough to feel as if we are teetering on the razor-sharp edge of something permanent.

  I called him this morning. I told myself that it was because I couldn’t remember who was supposed to pick Hannah up from Katelyn’s this afternoon, but it was written on my calendar and circled in black: PICK UP H, 6:00.

  The phone rang and rang. I felt twitchy and embarrassed, like I was an eighth grader calling a boy I had a crush on. What’s the math homework?

  “Hey,” I said when he finally answered, “I’m wondering who picks up Hannah today.”

  “It’s you,” he said. His voice was low and sleepy.

  “Of course it’s me! Who else would call you on a Saturday morning and ask whose turn it is to pick up Hannah?”

  Chris yawned. “I mean,” he said, “it’s you. You pick her up at six, and she’s with you until Tuesday. Don’t you remember? She’ll have all her stuff with her. I hope.”

  “Did I wake you?” I asked.

  “A little.”

  We’d woken up together on hundreds of Saturday mornings: thrilled, when we first started dating; late and luxurious, early in our marriage; ungodly early, when Hannah was tiny. And now, by ourselves, in separate houses. “I’m sorry.”

  “Hannah and I were up late watching that show you hate. Skin Diseases of the World.”