by Jeanne Ray
I looked at him, still afraid to move. Was he gray? Was that grayness I was seeing? It was hard to tell. He straightened up a little, tentatively stretched down his arms to a position of straightness, and smiled.
“Are you okay?” I asked softly.
He nodded.
“That was very sweet. No one has ever done that before.”
Not for me, not for anyone, not anywhere, except in the movies, which are made to fill our heads with silly romantic notions that would be impossible to live up to. They never tell you they use stand-ins: muscle men to carry; anorexic waifs to be carried; wheeling dollies wedged beneath their backsides to hoist them forward.
He leaned over and kissed me, and this time it was even sweeter. His kiss said: I would have a heart attack on a staircase for you. My kiss replied: I would gladly die with you in a tumbling crush of broken bones.
Love is passion and commitment, tenderness and endurance, but love is also memory. It is important to make a beautiful gesture from time to time, not only for the moment, but as something to hold on to in the future—so that when we were old, really old, I’d be able to hold his hand between our twin beds in the nursing home and think, When you were merely sixty-three you carried me up a staircase.
Romeo helped me with the hook on my bra because I have some arthritis in my thumbs that makes such things tricky for me. But then we were finally there, naked and together. Romeo crawled in beside me and I crawled on top of him and he screamed.
Chapter Two
TIME IS ELASTIC. EINSTEIN CAN GIVE YOU THE DETAILS. I had always understood that in the moment of my death, there would be time to reflect on the minutiae of human existence and my own contribution to it in a way that would be both leisurely and profound. The two seconds before the car crash stretches into hours. The rare surviving jumper from the Golden Gate Bridge always tells the story of all the time he had to work out his problems on the way down to the water. Apparently they always come to the conclusion that life really was a good thing after all.
What I hadn’t known about this phenomenon is that it isn’t limited to your own death. The impending death of someone you love as much as your own life can also do the trick. So while it may seem insensitive that I would digress with Romeo’s last breath hanging in the balance, I would be remiss not to include the life that flashed before my eyes.
It was Sarah’s. Maybe that’s lucky: The kid was only eight so it didn’t take a lot of time. In my split second of soul-crushing despair for having killed the only man I ever really loved, I saw my granddaughter: the freckles on her nose, which were her biological father’s only contribution to her upbringing, her curly hair which, with a strong arm and a stiff brush, could be coaxed into honest-to-God ringlets that fell down her back like a Madame Alexander doll’s. She was a sweet, affectionate kid with a good sense of humor, who had been a real pleasure until she fell into the vortex of the chocolate factory. I never thought it would have happened to her, though I guess that’s what everyone says.
There was even a child in the film named Mike Teavee, who is one of the cautionary tales about the outcome of bad behavior. He is shrunken down to the height of a matchstick because he won’t stop watching television. But Sarah pointed out that she watched no other television because she used her whole allotment of daily viewing to see Willie Wonka. Even then, she could only watch half of it a day because she was only allowed an hour on school nights (a schedule that was imposed out of Wonka desperation).
When I begged and reasoned and told her that she was a big girl now and it was time to give it up, the way she had given up sucking her thumb and carrying around that ratty little tailless bunny rabbit, she was resolute in her refusal. She said she couldn’t give it up, she never would.
“It’s luck,” she said. “It’s all about Charlie’s luck and how important it is to keep believing in luck.”
“So that’s his luck,” I said to her, “not yours.”
“It is mine. When I watch it, it makes me lucky.”
In this moment that popped up like a movie against my bedroom wall, Sarah was wearing a pink T-shirt with a pink heart smaller than a dime embroidered at the neckline. There was a smudge of something that looked sticky on her cheek. She is small for her age, and I always forget how powerful her reasoning can be.
“How does it make you lucky?”
“I watch it before I take a test, and I pass the test. I watch it before a game of kickball, and I get picked for the best team.”
“But you also watch it before tests when you do lousy, and I’ve seen you come home from school when you didn’t get picked for the best team—so it doesn’t always work.”
Sarah nodded patiently, sorry that I couldn’t figure all of this out for myself. “That’s when I watched without concentrating.”
It occurred to me that maybe she had a little obsessive-compulsive disorder going on, and that instead of counting the number of steps it took to walk to the bus stop or having to tap the light switch ten times whenever she came into a room, she was watching Willie Wonka as a way of controlling her world. I should remember to talk to Sandy about this. “That’s being superstitious, sweetheart. You’re the one who gets the good grades. You get them when you try hard.”
“It’s more than that,” she said darkly.
“Tell me, then.”
“The movie keeps us safe. All of us.”
“Safe from what? Fire? From getting sick?”
“From everything. Sometimes luck isn’t a good thing that happens to you. Sometimes luck is everything staying just the way it is.”
It surprised me that an eight-year-old could realize the implicit happiness in everyday life, but then, kids were a lot more sophisticated these days. “I agree with that, but again, it isn’t the movie that does it.”
She looked at me with her dark, searching eyes. “But what if you’re wrong? Wouldn’t it be better to keep watching, just to be sure?”
You don’t really start making deals with God until the cards have turned against you, and in that split second of my eternity, I found myself wondering if I had disrupted the order of the universe by turning Sarah’s movie off. What if she was right, and I had unwittingly thrown a rock in the smooth waters of our good fortune? I’m not saying I believe this, but the idea, with a hundred of its neighbors, came rushing past me.
But even if I had the chance to turn back the clock, I would still punch the TV’s OFF button. I would always turn it off because it drove me insane. It drove Sandy insane, and it drove her husband Tony so insane, he would sit out on the back steps to study rather than stay inside with Willie Wonka, even when it meant having to shovel out a place for himself in the snow. It drove Little Tony insane, because sometimes he would be walking past the living room when it was on and he’d get stuck watching it. It caught him like a piece of flypaper, no matter how much he hated it, and once he could pull himself away he hated himself for watching, like a drunk hates himself after a bender.
In fact, the only person other than Sarah who could stand the movie at this point was my older daughter, Nora. If it was on when Nora came by, she would sit on the couch next to Sarah and stroke her hair and move her lips soundlessly to the words of the song. Nora, who had divided her days into perfectly scheduled ten-minute strips in her Palm Pilot, was never one for chitchat and hanging around—but somehow Gene Wilder worked on her like a neural-inhibitor. I didn’t understand it.
“It’s like I told you,” Sarah would explain to me. “She wants the luck.”
Sarah’s sense of luck was certainly becoming more specific. She had gone from believing that the movie was her general talisman for a safe and successful eight-year-old life, to thinking that the movie showed a clear way to profit. She had so completely entered into the world of Wonka that now she wanted her own golden ticket. Charlie Bucket got his from a candy bar. Sarah, understanding that such things did not exist in Somerville, had her sights set slightly higher. She decided to win the Massachusetts
state lottery instead.
Oh, I suppose it started out innocently enough. One day, out of the blue, she asked if I would buy her a ticket when we were at the checkout line in the grocery store.
“A scratch ticket?”
She tilted up her chin and pursed her lips together, an interpretation of a child thinking that she had picked up from Shirley Temple movies. “No,” she said slowly. “I think I want the Mega Millions.”
The girl at the checkout, who had until this point been so thoroughly disengaged I would have thought she had been swallowed up by the pod people, sputtered out a little laugh. She leveled her kohl-rimmed eyes at Sarah. “The other kids are angling for a Snickers,” she said. “Or a Colt .45.”
I gave her a chilly glance, but she had a point. When up against a can of malt liquor, a single lottery ticket didn’t seem like much of a vice. “Do you want to pick your own numbers?” I asked.
“May I?” Sarah said brightly, still in Temple-mode, which accounted for the correct grammar. I pulled out a dollar bill and handed it over. There was no dithering over the numbers. Sarah knew exactly what she wanted.
The kid was canny, I had to give her that. She’d hit up one adult and then another, always remembering to space us out so as to never look suspicious. She asked casually, as if it were the last thing in the world she really wanted but it had just crossed her mind. She never asked for more than a dollar at a time. Over and over again, we fell for it. Her secret plan was to win big. She wanted the entire chocolate factory.
So, that was my elastic time moment, naked, looking down at Romeo. I thought about having luck, and the insatiable human greed of wanting more of it. And all of that happened in a split second though it seemed like half an hour. He was still screaming.
I scrambled over him to the other side of the bed and grabbed the phone. I don’t know what people did before telephones. Even if you couldn’t save a life, at least you had a sense of purpose in the crisis now. “Hang on,” I said. “I’m calling an ambulance.”
“Don’t.” Romeo’s eyes were pressed closed tightly, and his neck was slightly arched, as if he was trying to push the crown of his head into his pillow. I remembered the position from a yoga class I took years ago. It was called the Fish. He was sweating like crazy.
“What do you mean, don’t?” I was in full panic mode now. “You’re having a heart attack!” I should have taken that CPR class they’d offered at the Y. Was it five breaths and ten pumps, or the other way around?
“No—heart—attack.” The words seemed to be harder for him than carrying me up the stairs. His teeth were locked together.
“Listen to me,” I said in a loud voice, as if the problem were his hearing. “Even if this isn’t a heart attack, it’s clearly an ambulance worthy situation.”
Romeo still hadn’t opened his eyes, and the edges of his lips looked slightly blue. “Call—Al.”
I stood there for a second, blinking, then I sank down next to Romeo and touched his hand. My heart fell five flights of stairs. “Father Al? You want me to call your priest?”
I saw the slightest movement of his head and then he yelped and cringed. It was a nod.
I started to cry. I put my head in my hands.
“Now,” Romeo reminded me. His breathing was very shallow.
I went to the bedside table for a phone book. Wouldn’t it be something to want to turn to God with your last breath? I guess I’d want to see my daughters, assuming that Romeo was already with me. Maybe I’d want to see my grandchildren or my best friend, Gloria. I couldn’t imagine that religion would even occur to me in that moment, as it hadn’t occurred to me since Sandy had her Bat Mitzah the year she turned thirteen.
But as I put my hands on the phone book, I knew with utter clarity who I would want to see in my final moments on earth: I’d want to see the admitting doctor at Mass General Hospital. If I were going to die, then the last person leaning over me better be someone who was doing everything in his power to keep it from happening. I shut the phone book with a decisive thump. “This is insane. You’re going to the hospital.”
“It’s 8-2-4-7-7-8-9,” Romeo said, though every digit extracted a toll on him.
I dialed.
“Julie!” Father Al said when he picked up after the second ring. “You’ve made my day.”
“You knew it was me?” I said. The Catholics were always surprising me.
“Caller ID,” he said.
I wasn’t sure it was right for a priest to have caller ID. Who was he avoiding? “Romeo’s here, and he’s very sick. He said I couldn’t call an ambulance. He said I had to call you.” I started crying again and had a hard time saying the last sentence. “Al, I think he might be dying.”
“Not,” Romeo managed to get out.
“He says he’s not dying,” I told Al. I picked up the corner of the bedspread and wiped my eyes. “But I don’t believe him.”
“Ask him if it’s his back,” Al said.
“Is it your back?”
“Yes,” Romeo said. The word was somewhat calmer than the others. I didn’t think the pain was lessening, but he seemed to be making peace with it.
“Poor Romeo,” Al sighed. “The last time it was horrible. It was biblical, really. But he’s right about not wanting the ambulance. When it happened before, they ruptured a disc on top of everything else when they were getting him on the stretcher. Is he upstairs or downstairs?”
“Upstairs,” I said, feeling guilty.
This sealed the deal for Al. “He’s better off if you just let him lie still. I’ll come over with Dominic; he’s right here with me now. I’m sure that’s why he’s having you call. Ask him if he wants to see Dominic.”
“Dominic?” I said to Romeo.
Something crossed his face that was almost like peace. “Dominic,” he said.
After Al had assured me that Romeo wasn’t going to die, and promised that they would make record time getting to my house, I hung up the phone. “You’re going to be okay,” I said to Romeo. “They’re on their way.”
“Yes,” he said softly. He looked like he had been shot. He looked like he needed a bottle of whiskey and a knife to bite on.
“Is there anything I can get for you? A heating pad? Some coffee?”
“No.” I saw him take a running jump at the words thank you, but he gave up after passing the “th” sound.
“I won’t ask you anything else. I’m just going to sit here and you don’t have to say another word.” I kept two fingers lightly on the top of his hand and thought about how much I loved him, how lucky we had been to find each other just at the moment when other people were giving up on love altogether.
The light from the windows was almost gone, though it wasn’t even five o’clock. I switched on the lamp beside the bed so I could watch his breathing, which seemed impossibly shallow and irregular. I was crying a little again, part from love and part from his pain and mostly from my stupidity at letting him carry me up the stairs.
“Talk.” Romeo opened one eye a little and tried to smile at me.
I took a deep breath and did my best to find a steady voice. Romeo liked to hear me talk, he was always telling me the sound of my voice made him feel better.
“I’m worried about you. I know that’s not what you want to hear. I love you.” Talking was a funny thing. I could think of a million things to say until someone asked me what they were; and then they flew out of my head like hummingbirds.
“Do you ever think about luck, about the way things turn out? What if your parents had stayed in Italy? Or what if my grandparents had gone to New York? They did for awhile, you know. They had cousins in Brooklyn, and they stayed there for months after the boat ride over here, but my mother kept saying it was too dirty, and she wanted to move again. Your parents could have sold fish and mine could have made hats and they never would have met and hated each other and we never would have met and fallen in love.”
In my mind I saw myself passing Romeo on the st
reet, strangers to one another. I’m sure it happened all the time, true love missed by circumstance. “It’s like every second is a chance, a choice between turning right or left, and when you stack those millions of choices on top of each other, what are the chances that we’d get here?”
Romeo took a deeper breath, and I thought I saw something in his neck relax a little. It made me feel hopeful, and the hope kept me talking.
“What if our parents had both made chocolates? It sounds like a good idea. When I was a kid I would have been in heaven. There was a girl in my fifth-grade class, Nancy Tilsman, her father owned Tilsman’s Drugs. She got to have any candy bar she wanted after school every day. She could go to the rack and take anything that struck her fancy and not even ask. She told me once that she basically owned all the candy anyway, because it was all her father’s and what was his was practically hers. I remember thinking at the time that there could be no luck on earth greater than that.
“But now I think I never would have lasted in the chocolate business. I would have gotten fat, my skin would have broken out, and I would have cashed out the first year I was in charge. But I’m always glad to see the flowers. No matter what’s going on in my life, the flowers always make me happy. Even when things were at their very worst, when Mort left me and I just about bankrupted the store, and I had to work around the clock just to hold on to things, I never once resented the flowers.
“The way I see it, we have a lot to be grateful for. We have each other and we have our families and we have the flowers, and up until about twenty minutes ago we had our health. I have to say we’re doing pretty well.”
