There’s something in the wind. History crawls on your skin.
Someday, I’ll take my son there. I’ll ask him to describe my face.
* * *
A box arrives in the mail. It’s from Alaska, an address I don’t recognize. Inside are four frozen hearts and a note:
3 deer
1 buffalo
One of the oddest packages I’ve packed, enjoyable but odd.
I take a picture of the note and post it to Instagram. Then I get back to work.
Right marginal artery, diagonal artery, auricle.
Pericardium, pulmonary trunk, superior vena cava.
In case you didn’t know—a deer heart has four chambers. So does a human heart. A frog heart only has three. I was surprised to find that fact in my head, twenty years after high school. Also in my head: cutting the frog open with scissors. How its tongue is connected to base of the mandible instead of back near the esophagus. Peeling away thin layers of membrane and finding its tiny, jelly-like heart between the shoulder blades.
Not in my head: What the classroom looked like. How the desks were positioned. My notebooks. My lab partner. My teacher.
Later, I wiped heart off my hands and got on Facebook.
I know we haven’t talked in years (hi, hello, how are you?) and I know this is totally random and probably insane, but I was wondering if you remember dissecting frogs in high school.
I sent this message to a handful of old friends, people I remembered fondly from show choir and debate. The responses went something like this:
Great, how are you?
Yes, this is insane
YES I REMEMBER IT WAS SO GROSS
I hate science
Those poor frogs!
I don’t know . . . who was the teacher?
I have blocked out high school entirely.
ugh, who cares
Wait.
Did Mr. Leith teach that class?
He taught chemistry, right? Did he do anatomy, too?
It was Mr. Leith, wasn’t it?
Shit. It was Leith.
* * *
It was the end of my first semester of college in Boston. I was in the dorm, studying for final exams. Soon I’d be flying home to Michigan, the first holiday since my parents had split the summer before. Which one would I stay with? Where would I spend Christmas? I felt guilty for choices I hadn’t made yet, selfish for wanting time with my friends, so desperately eighteen.
A girl from down the hall stuck her head into my room. “Aren’t you from Chelsea?” she asked. “Chelsea, Michigan?”
My high school was on the news. There were the buildings, our ridiculous outdoor campus snow covered in mid-December, the baseball field where my dad and I played catch. There were cop cars in the parking lot. School shooting, said the newscaster. Unknown fatalities. And later: Condition unknown. Then: Critical condition. And: No word at this time. And: Fatalities unknown at this time. And: One fatality at this time. They didn’t name names, of course.
Only this: The shooter was a local schoolteacher.
And this: The victim was a local school administrator.
A local school administrator.
This was before cell phones. Before voice mail and call waiting. Before all of us on the Internet and Twitter with its to-the-second news. Back then, we had to wait. No one was picking up at either of my parents’ houses and I couldn’t get through on their work lines. I paced my dorm room, listening to the busy signal. In the absence of information, I filled in the blanks: a school board meeting maybe, one of countless I’d attended as the principal’s kid. My dad at a conference table in his suit and tie. Mr. Piasecki, the superintendent, would be there, and Mr. Mead, the high school principal. I knew both these men. Were they okay? They had kids my age. Were they okay? Our families got together sometimes. Were they okay? Other people would be there, too: the elementary school principals, maybe some teachers and parents. Was the shooter already in the room? Did he burst in later? What happened? Where was my father, under the conference table, a desk, a supply closet—can’t move, can’t cry, breath locked.
We learn to fear our own imagination.
Five hours went by before I heard his voice. Five hours before I knew he was okay. Maybe that doesn’t sound like long, but stare at a clock for a single minute and see how calm you feel. Shut your eyes and count to ten: one one thousand, two one thousand, three. Imagine what can happen to a body in that amount of time.
Imagine what can happen to a heart.
* * *
I don’t want to remember Stephen Leith. I don’t want him in my head and he doesn’t deserve my heartbreak, but memory gives a rat’s ass about permission. A smell can take us back. A look, a taste, a song. I hear Paul Simon and I’m eight years old in the car with my dad. Leaves turn colors and I’m twelve in a field with a rifle. Slice into a heart and there I am in high school, cutting up frogs. I remember the formaldehyde. I remember they were double injected to better see their veins. I remember the stuff: scalpel, scissors, forceps, pins. I remember the ugh! and the gross! and the ewwww, but the teacher is gone, wiped clean by time or anger. He was my teacher—that much I know—but everything else is constructed from media reports and legal documents, a story nobody wanted to be part of.
Some students liked him, apparently. He won a few teaching awards. He played in a band. He had a ponytail. He was thirty-nine years old, the same age I am now, and on December 16, 1993, he walked into the administrative offices at Chelsea High School with a 9mm Browning semiautomatic handgun. It wasn’t a board meeting, like I’d imagined after hearing the news reports. It was a grievance meeting: superintendent, principal, and union rep. Leith shot all three of them, killing Joe Piasecki and wounding Ron Mead and Phil Jones before his wife, Alice Leith, came in and told him to give her the gun.
Mrs. Leith was my AP English teacher. She taught me Shakespeare. She taught me that “a lot” is two separate words. She prepared me for the ACTs and SATs, those vital steps to getting the hell out. Once, a boy in my class asked her about the purpose of literature—why did he have to study it, what impact did it have on his life—and Mrs. Leith gave an incredible monologue about language and poetry and what it means to be a human being.
This woman married to that man.
It’s enough to break your heart.
When she asked for the gun, he set it down on a desk. Then he went back to his classroom and graded papers until the sheriff arrived.
Later, it came out that he’d been reprimanded for “behaving inappropriately” to female students. Later, he’d say that medication affected his judgment, even though he was clear enough to reload. And later, years later, I’d read about his guns: eleven total, including an AK-47 assault rifle.
* * *
My dad wasn’t at the high school when the shooting happened. He arrived just afterward, one of the helpers I’d learn about later from Fred Rogers. When I finally got through to him that day, when I heard his voice instead of the busy signal, my first reaction was relief. It didn’t happen. And then, almost immediately, shame. It did. A man lost his life. A girl lost her dad.
“Here,” I want to tell her. “Here is my heart.” And I want those words to mean something. I want them to mean everything. Our hearts are with the families, we say and nothing changes. Our thoughts and prayers, say politicians who’ve taken thousands from the NRA. Relief that it happened to someone else, somewhere else, on a different block or neighborhood or community or country. Shame or guilt when we feel bad, and who has time for that? People are dying. That man should not have had eleven guns. That man should not have had a gun. His right to a gun is not greater than our right to walk through this world, alive and living.
“I want to be a helper!” says my kid.
Me too, baby. Me, too.
* * *
This past February was my dad’s seventieth birthday, and he and Marilyn went to New York to see Hamilton. My aunt Sally and uncle Bob joined them and I showed up
as a surprise, sliding up next to him in the impressionist wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. “What do you think?” I asked, referring to the painting in front of us. “Well—” he started, launching into his ideas, the colors, the form, not even looking at me at first. Long story short—hugging, laughing, drinking, and just after midnight, in the first few hours of seventy, my dad decided he wanted to join the crowd outside the Today show and try to get on TV.
“Don’t people line up early?” Mare asked.
“Five in the morning,” said Bob, who’d looked it up on his phone.
“We won’t sleep!” Dad said.
“Who won’t sleep?” Mare said.
“I need a poster,” Dad said. “It has to say I’m visiting from Kodiak. People love Kodiak.” He looked at me. “Do you have any poster board?”
That’s how I found myself, two o’clock in the morning, running around New York City in the freezing rain looking for twenty-four-hour poster board. And markers. “Good markers,” Dad insisted. “Not those thin pointy ones.” We wound up in that pharmacy—what’s it called—Rite Aid, which for future reference has a surprisingly well-stocked office supply section.
“Anything else?” I asked, my arms full of paper and scissors and nonpointy markers.
“Yeah, grab me some nitroglycerin.”
Everything froze.
“In case I have a heart attack.”
We stared at each other.
I could almost see him counting down: three, two—and he laughed.
He laughed.
So I laughed. We laughed our faces off in Rite Aid.
“You know I’m going to write about this, right?” I said.
“Why do you think I said it?”
Three hours later, he was on the Today show.
Three days later, he was back on the mountain.
* * *
Last night, we had a dinner party. Randy drove down from Oak Park. Jeff brought wine from the bistro where he works. Lott and Ryan played cards with my now eight-year-old son. Christopher prepped steaks for the grill; his hands were covered in sauce and he asked Randy to grab him something from the freezer.
“What’s this?” Randy asked, holding up a Ziploc bag.
Everyone looked at me.
“It’s my heart,” I said. “My last heart.”
It felt meaningful, somehow. The room was heavy.
And then, in one of those loud little-kid voices, my son said, “Let’s cut it up!”
A plan was made: thaw the heart, eat dinner, and dissect. The table was set, wine poured. Randy talked about the farm in Minnesota. Ryan talked about the farm in Indiana. Lott talked about sheep in Florida. Christopher talked about agriculture class in Texas: “Mostly we watched movies about animal deformities.” Jeff talked about his heart surgery: “I watched them put in my stents!” Randy talked about his: “I watched my angiogram!” And my son asked what the heck we were talking about. These are the men in my life. They love me even when—especially when—I act bonkers.
Naturally, we got drunk and forgot about the heart. But later, when everyone was gone or asleep, I got out the cutting board.
I remembered Alice Leith lecturing that kid in English class about the meaning of literature; Billy’s mama running dog entrails under the faucet in Where the Red Fern Grows; Fleur Pillager working at Kozka’s Meats; Raskolnikov holding the ax over his head; “I Am a Knife,” by Roxane Gay; Sethe and her children and the handsaw; Materia cutting her daughter open with sewing scissors in Fall on Your Knees; Lidia holding her stomach in Chronology of Water; Janis Joplin screaming: “Take it!/ Take another little piece of my heart!”; humans as blood bags in Fury Road; Indiana Jones hanging from a rope bridge with Mola Ram; every episode ever of True Blood; the rhythm sequence from Jeunet’s Delicatessen; Louise Erdrich: “How come we’ve got these bodies? They are frail supports for what we feel”; Charles Yu: “You want to tell a story? Grow a heart”; and Eileen Myles: “I can hold your heart for a second. And that’s all anybody ever wants.”
I’ve always engaged with the heart as a metaphor: a desire, a thing to survive, to heal from or shoot for.
Now I know there’s nothing more real.
We walk through the world at its leisure. We’re here at its mercy and with its blessing.
At some point, we have to ask ourselves how we want to live.
F
The summer between high school and college I worked nights at an Arby’s in a truck stop near Dexter, Michigan: a cute, idyllic white-picket town, which to me was just a pee break on the way to Detroit. I mopped the floors of that pee break. I wiped the booths with Lysol after truckers ate their dinner. I stood behind the counter in my blue visor and took orders for Beef ’n Cheddar sandwiches, which I wasn’t allowed to make because even though my birthday was in August, I was still a year too young to use the deli-style slicer that shaved roast beef. Question: Why is eighteen the acceptable age to operate potentially hazardous machinery? Is there a certain maturity I gained that summer between high school and college? Did I become more knowledgeable, like snap your fingers and suddenly you’re this totally together person who can be trusted with industrial-size blades the same way that: Snap—ten years old and you can shoot a gun. Snap—sixteen and you can drive. Snap—twenty-one and you know how many vodkas are too many vodkas?
More than anything, I wanted something to happen.
I was invincible—on the edge of my life. Do you know that feeling? Standing on a three-or ten-or twenty-story rooftop, leaning forward, the whole world’s spread out before you, and you think: God, what if?
What if I jump?
What if I fly?
But I couldn’t. I had three more months till I left for college and an eight-hour night shift.
Arby’s sauce.
Jamocha Shakes.
Curly fries poured into wire mesh baskets and lowered into the deep fryer, spattering boiling oil like knife tips on my skin that hurt like holy hell but still felt good ’cause I was feeling something, anything besides my incredible seventeen-year-old need.
The summer between high school and college is supposed to be revelatory in some way, right? I pictured mine like a coming-of-age sort of rom/com dramedy involving the following: (1) cushy day job selling muffins at the farmer’s market, (2) home to my cute, idyllic white-picket family, and (3) nights making out with the boy I loved. Note the wordplay: boy I loved as opposed to boyfriend. I knew he was seeing other girls, but during that summer between high school and college I equated love with danger and Lord knows, I needed some. Four years of A’s, scholarship to a swanky school out East, goody-goody rep that was a total coping mechanism—all of which made my love for the boy I loved a total cliché.
I spread quilts on my bedroom floor to silence any footsteps, removed the window screen, and climbed two stories down a fairly precarious satellite antennae. The boy I loved was waiting at the lake behind my house, and we rowed out across the glass-like water, a million stars reflecting above. It was beautiful: mid-Michigan, mid-May, our bodies tangled in the bottom of the boat.
The sun had risen by the time I climbed back up the antennae, and as I struggled to replace the window screen I heard footsteps outside my door.
“Megan?”
It was my dad, and I dove fully dressed under the covers and held my heartbeat. He’d heard me. He must have heard me. Their room was just below mine. “Get downstairs,” he said through the door, and I was not invincible then. I was the opposite of invincible. I was fucked.
We sat in the living room, a place reserved for the most serious conversations. I counted squares in the Oriental rug and wished my parents would say something, anything, please anything besides: “Did you have sex in the rowboat?” So when they told me they were getting a divorce, it’s fair to say I’d asked for it. I remember they sat on opposite sides of the couch. I remember forty squares in the rug. Did I cry? Did we talk about how love isn’t rowing around under the stars or twenty-six years of ma
rriage? Did we talk about how no one is ever invincible?
I don’t remember.
What I do remember is that neither of them moved out, and the tension in that house was so heavy I thought my bones might crack. I did everything I could to avoid it: making out with the boy I loved, staying over with friends, wandering zombie-like through the aisles of a twenty-four-hour Meijer’s until finally deciding that I might as well earn some extra money. And so:
Arby-Q sandwiches.
Philly Beef ’n Swiss.
Curly fries dumped frozen into wire baskets, dipped into oil, wait till they cool; wait till the end of a shift; wait till I could leave for college and jump off the ledge—1:00 a.m., 2:00 a.m., and after a while, standing over that deep fryer with its boiling wire I started to imagine what would happen if I pressed the inside of my forearm against the basket, connecting my skin with the sizzling crosshatch.
That would be something, certainly.
Three months is not a long time, but that summer—a fucking glacier, a watched fucking pot. I’d look at the clock above the food line, shocked that only a few minutes had passed since the last time I’d looked. To pass time, I counted onion rings and wished for something, anything, please anything to happen, so when the boy I loved came in to tell me about the other girl and how maybe she might be pregnant, it’s fair to say I’d asked for it. I remember we sat across from each other in the shiny vinyl booths. I remember the smell: Arby’s in my hair, Arby’s under my fingernails, Arby’s up my nose and pores. Did I cry? Did I say awful things, trying to pick a fight ’cause if he was standing there yelling at least he’d still be standing there?
The Wrong Way to Save Your Life Page 5
