Financial limitations aside, a property search for a single woman can be a nerve-racking expedition, complete with blueprints of the status quo. I found that residential real estate, particularly in New England, was an illustration of demographics: Single-family houses were just that, colonials and Victorians built with nuclear families in mind. Every time I visited one, my stomach sank and I felt an overwhelming fatigue. Formal dining rooms, upstairs bedrooms? I wanted to weep from estrangement. The architecture-for-singles had its own problems, diminutive spaces and features that seemed a subtle punishment for going it alone. There were oppressively small houses with low ceilings and cramped rooms. Or apartments in old three-deckers or large apartment buildings, which meant you gave up a yard and privacy and parking for an affordable mortgage.
Caroline and I dissected every angle of this morass. I would drive home from Sunday open houses, spent and empty-headed, and call her for a reality check, or she would meet me at the appointed place and march through the rooms, cheerful and skeptical at once. Did I really want to live in this gorgeous third-floor aviary, she would ask, with my bum leg and a sixty-pound dog? It was the season of bidding wars and land rushes, and places were selling in a day or an hour—one manic agent had called me at nine-thirty at night, wanting me to bid on a place I hadn’t even seen. I’d been in this queue of desperation (and lost) a couple of times, only to be outbid by those with more money or less sangfroid than I. The high stakes of real estate hunting fed my anxiety; the market in those days was like a game of musical chairs, with everyone frantically trying to get situated before the music died.
In early spring of 2001, I made an offer on a little house in the suburbs with a large, overgrown yard; Caroline had climbed up the back fence the day before the open house to get a look at it. Then I panicked at the last minute. I saw my future unfolding before me with years of manicured streets and quiet New England reserve, and the picture horrified me. As nebulous as they may have seemed from the outside, my criteria had been honed by years of considering what I didn’t want—and by the outlines of what my spirit craved. What I wanted was a dorm for grown-ups, someplace with flowers and dogs and people who looked like I felt. A colleague had articulated this netherland of intuition for me. She was a young, hip African American lesbian with a couple of body piercings, and we had talked endlessly about the perils of real estate for single women and about where we each belonged. “Let me put it this way,” she said. “On the day I move in, I don’t want to be the most interesting thing happening in the neighborhood.” Her wry acumen came back to me the day I signed an offer on the house in the suburbs. The well-appointed agent shook my hand and said, “You seem so interesting!” Two days later, I took my interesting self out of the deal.
And then, on a blossom-drenched day in May when I had nearly given up, I saw a listing for half of a rambling 1920s clapboard house on a magnolia-lined street in Cambridge. The apartment was smaller than what I wanted; the owner had painted the walls mustard yellow and hung red velvet drapes in the dining room. I cared about none of this. What had seized my heart before I ever went inside were the towering maples overlooking the long driveway, leading to an enclosed garden of dogwood and lilacs and a sixty-foot sycamore maple in the middle of the city. I had lived in New England for two decades, but I was still a Texan, and I knew the land mattered more than what was on it. I went after the trees.
Caroline loved this house. She saw past its imperfections—the lack of a guest room, the upstairs neighbor—to her certainty that it was my home. The place was halfway between the river where I rowed and the woods where we walked; the neighborhood had a park and an Italian take-out joint and a dozen people I knew. The open house lasted one hour, and at the end of the evening there were four offers on the place. A couple outbid me, outlandishly, by tens of thousands of dollars over the asking price; presumably, they had loved the trees as well. Within forty-eight hours, they withdrew their offer, and the agent called to say the place was mine if I wanted it. I told him I needed an hour to think, hung up, and called Caroline. “Yes,” she said, unequivocally. “Yes.”
Several weeks later, after the usual steep education in property buying, I was standing on the front porch of what was now my house, fiddling with the keys, dumb with fatigue and vague apprehension. Inside lay a near gut job of months of renovation. I heard someone drive up behind me and turned to see Caroline and Morelli at the curb in Caroline’s Toyota RAV, both of them grinning and waving at me to wait up. I got the door unlocked just as Caroline vaulted up the front steps. And while Morelli held on to the dogs and laughed, she picked me up—I outweighed her by ten pounds—and hoisted me, like a sack of grain, over the threshold.
BY THE END of that summer, Caroline and I had become accustomed to the new routes of our conjoined paths. The apartment was a couple of blocks from Fresh Pond, and carpenters and painters were working throughout the summer. Each day I would say to Clementine, “Would you like to go to Cambridge?” and she would bark in happy reply, more at my inflection than anything else. Then we would drive to the job site, talk to the guys working inside, and head over to the reservoir to meet Caroline and Lucille at the bottom of the hill. I usually had a collection of paint chips stuffed in my back pocket. Because Samoyeds are a mix of cream and off-white, we would line up the paint chips across Clementine’s back for our consideration. I had taught her the command to be still, and so she would allow this folly, standing patiently while we envisioned her coat color as, say, a trim for the dining room. One evening a woman walked past us at the duck pond, where Caroline and I stood peering at eight shades of peach, and the woman raised an eyebrow and called out, “What are you doing to that dog?” It was an easy summer, full of aimless walks and evening rows, and the unfolding clarity that I had taken a huge leap forward and was moving, heart and soul and cartons of books, to where I belonged.
THE MORNING OF September 11, I awoke to two voices simultaneously: the BBC announcer on the radio, reporting that the first plane had hit the World Trade Center, and my friend Pete on my answering machine, saying, “By now you probably know what’s happened.” The next ten minutes were the chaos of comprehension. With the TV and NPR in the background, I went online and saw that I had a three-word e-mail, still unknowing, from Caroline, sent a few minutes earlier: “did you row?” I shot one back: “New York towers hit by terrorists go downstairs and turn on TV.” Caroline’s office was the third-floor attic of her house, and she was usually at her desk by eight-thirty or so, cloistered from the radio and phone. Within a few minutes we were on the phone together, watching the recurring horror on the TV screen, in the same limbo as everyone else. Because the planes had originated out of Logan Airport, in Boston, there was another layer of trepidation about the city itself; most of the-land-phone and cell lines were jammed for part of the morning. Caroline and I kept getting disconnected, and finally we made a backup plan in case the infrastructure failed. If things got worse—if something happened in Boston—we would both find a way to get to Fresh Pond, which was equidistant from each of our houses; we knew we could find each other there.
It was a nonsensical plan, like millions of others made that day. We laughed about it later—the cold, anguished laugh, like combat humor, that accompanied the next few days—and considered our own bad planning: Fresh Pond wasn’t exactly a Red Cross evacuation center. But now the plan’s absurdity is what touches me. We were acting out of instinct, like horses headed to the barn or birds being flushed out of a tree. We were simply aiming for shelter, for our own high ground.
I wound up going for a row late that day. I didn’t know what else to do. The city by midafternoon was quieter than I hope it ever is again: no planes overhead, most foot and automobile traffic suspended. Already there was the dissonance that would unfold over the next few weeks: I saw a fool on the river who called out to me, “Beautiful day, isn’t it?” The whole picture-perfect scene was like the opening pastoral shot in a horror movie, except that the horror had alrea
dy happened. I kept thinking about the last scenes from On the Beach, when the postnuclear blankness of an Australian beach is attended by the strains of “Waltzing Matilda.” I was rowing under that now infamously blue sky, its emptiness chilling and inert, and I heard the eerie melancholy of “Waltzing Matilda” the entire way.
I MOVED INTO my house in early November, on Caroline’s birthday. I sent her flowers that morning; she was taking care of Clementine while I watched movers run up and down the stairs. The New England fall, breathtaking and rueful under normal circumstances, had been eclipsed and upended by history’s fallout. There was the suicide down the street, a woman whose fiancé had been killed in the towers. The friend of a friend whose whereabouts had never been determined. Everyone had a dozen stories like these, all the concentric circles of calamity, sad details packed in between trauma and loss. In the first few days after the attack, responding to a city-wide plan, Caroline and I had stood on our porches one evening with candles held high, on the phone together; neither of us could see anyone else’s glow, and this made us feel alternately weary and aghast at our futility. In the next several weeks we each stumbled into a version of survivor guilt, the flinch of awareness that could hit you in the midst of some mindless form of denial. Caroline would be playing computer solitaire and be overcome with sorrow or anxiety; I would be worrying over a renovation one minute and ready to fire all the painters the next, thinking I would send my leftover house budget to the New York firefighters fund. Everyone was getting a crash course in irony, the lesson that the grievous and the mundane exist in parallel spheres. One day I told her I felt ashamed for thinking about my house with the world in tatters, and she put her hand on my shoulder and gave a small shrug. “Paint chips … Osama bin Laden,” she said, using her hands to plot the entire range of human experience. “This is what life turns out to be.” We were all living those days inside Auden’s vision of Icarus. Even with a boy falling from the sky, the ships sailed calmly on.
IT’S TAKEN YEARS FOR ME TO UNDERSTAND THAT dying doesn’t end the story; it transforms it. Edits, rewrites, the blur and epiphany of one-way dialogue. Most of us wander in and out of one another’s lives until not death, but distance, does us part—time and space and the heart’s weariness are the blander executioners of human connection.
I have several recurring dreams about Caroline. In one she is living calmly in the woods in a little house of blues and greens; in another, I am typing a letter to her, and the ink keeps disappearing on the page as I write. She is always dead or dying in these dreams, but they are not awful, or anguished—the reach between us always trumps the loss. And yet my one unbearable dream is the one in which she is sick and in treatment and I cannot find her. We have lost touch, or a phone has been disconnected, or my key breaks off in a locked door with her on the other side. There are many variations on this dream, the one from which I wake up clawing at space, but the message is unchanged: Life, not death, has intervened.
“The holiness of the Heart’s affections,” Keats wrote, trusting in nothing but that and the imagination, and I think now that Caroline and I stilled something in each other, letting us go out and engage in the larger world. And as certain as I am about fact and memory and the influence of each upon the other, finding the threads of all these stories has sent me into an eerie, detached insistence that she not yet be gone. I have all the detritus of life and death that argues the contrary: the potato au gratin recipe in her small, careful handwriting that falls out of a cookbook; a first edition of J. R. Ackerley’s My Dog Tulip that she tracked down for me one Christmas. And a mysterious CD I found in her house after she was dead, entitled “Music for Caroline,” its every song, from Norah Jones and Fiona Apple to Edith Piaf, a testament to the unknowable passions we all carry within.
Once she referred to the core ambiguities of life as “the dark side of joy,” and here, these days, has been the reverse: a happy limbo in which I have brought her along on the journey. The writer’s self-imposed fugue state. She has been thoroughly alive in the meadows and woods with the dogs, through each rowing lesson and argument and carefree phone call. Her death these days is somewhere down the hall, behind a closed but unlocked door. But for now she is river-tan and laughing, and pretty soon the phone will ring and one of us will say What are you doing? and it will all begin again.
9.
CAROLINE STARTED COUGHING IN THE WINTER. A dry cough, not yet worrisome, what seemed like a gravelly smoker’s accompaniment to her singular voice. She was run down from finishing a book; she could have stood to gain ten pounds. For Christmas she gave me a mezuzah to hang near my entry door for blessings on the new house. We went out to dinner to celebrate my birthday on a frigid night in January, and she seemed subdued, but we both attributed this to work and emotional fatigue. If she was worried about her health—and she was, as it turned out—she told no one but her sister, Becca.
Two seemingly disparate incidents would later reassert themselves. Caroline tried to swim her usual forty or fifty lengths in the pool and finished only seven before she could go no farther. And then one cold, sunny afternoon in early March, her legs went out from under her at Fresh Pond with no warning. She recovered almost immediately, and sat down on a park bench to call me, minimizing the event even as she described it. For reasons I can only guess at, I absorbed this information with an urgency and dread that were disproportionate to the thing itself. I grabbed my car keys and flew out of the house, driving the few blocks to the pond to save time. When I saw her on the rise above the parking lot, I went running; by the time I reached her, she was shaking her head that it had been nothing—a momentary collapse, low blood sugar, something transient and benign.
Much of my alarm that day came from the fact that Caroline was one of the most stoic people I had ever known. She rarely got sick; when she did, she barely complained. But the coughing, hollow and persistent, didn’t get better. She cut her smoking by half, then half again. Oddly, I was worried about my own health at the time. Felled by a couple of common winter bugs, I had responded, uncharacteristically, with a dark unease I couldn’t shake.
Caroline had a chest X-ray and was treated for pneumonia, and the antibiotics bought her a few weeks of ease. At the end of March, on an unseasonably warm day when the river was still, we both took the boats out for the first time since the fall. She rowed her standard five miles. She would be in the hospital not long thereafter, but then, on that day, there was no wind and the water was glass. When we walked together at the end of the afternoon, she said it was the only time in fifteen years that the first row of the season had felt effortless.
That word kept coming back to me in the brutal revisionism of the days that followed. Two weeks after that perfect row, Morelli took Caroline to the emergency room late one Sunday night; she was burning up with fever and had pneumonia again. For a couple of days the doctors thought she might have tuberculosis, and we all had to wear masks in the hospital room. Those masks: She told me that she knew the news was bad when the nurses stopped wearing them, and began treating her with excruciating kindness.
I was there by chance when the doctor finished the bronchoscopy, a procedure that revealed an inoperable tumor on the lung, classified as stage-four non-small-cell adenocarcinoma. I had been absurdly positive in the two days before the procedure, consoling Caroline that she was too young to have cancer, that the mysterious spots on her liver they had detected would turn out to be nothing. Becca, who shared Caroline’s poise and stillness under pressure, told me as we waited in the surgical recovery room that we should prepare for the worst, and I was stunned: She was a physician, and I trusted her far more than I did my own desperate optimism. Then the pulmonary specialist walked through the doors, threw his lanky body in a nearby chair, shrugged with a shred of kindness, and said those words that made the surrounding comments disappear: “inoperable,” “necrotic,” “palliative.” And the obscene euphemism that telegraphs the end: “We can make her more comfortable.”
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bsp; I remember two things from the rest of that day with glaring clarity. One was Caroline crying as I wrapped my arms around her, after they had brought her back up to her room, when the first thing she said to me was “Are you mad at me?” It was the voice of early terror, a primal response to bad news, and to this day I don’t know whether she meant because we had fought about the smoking or because she knew she was going to leave.
The other picture is from late that afternoon, after I had left the hospital long enough to walk Clementine and get some things Caroline needed. I was walking down my street toward the neighborhood park, and I saw a friend and her seven-year-old daughter up ahead on the basketball court. I looked their way just as Sophie aimed the ball and made the shot. “Mom!” she cried out. “Did you see?” It was her first triumph on the court, and I had been her serendipitous witness, and the force of that simple reach toward joy took my breath away. The afternoon was flush with light, and Caroline was dying, and Sophie had scored. Mom! There she was, the life everlasting, shooting hoops.
Let's Take the Long Way Home Page 9
