“I mean, pure gold is definitely what comes to mind when I think of your urine,” said Adam, his voice muffled through his mask, “and don’t even start me on your sputum.”
I got to watch people trying to save a life. I felt mine pulled away and back in spurts of protest and compliance. From a completely different vantage point I got to measure a length of mortality against that infinite question mark. Best of all, there is a small but distinct category of negative thought that I abandoned somewhere when I realized I only had the strength to hold so much and something had to go. I can’t decide where existence lies or barely dangles, and Doctor, maybe you don’t know either, but I can tell you I am humbled by the second chance. I don’t know what death is, but I am one hundred percent clear on what it isn’t. It isn’t my daughter refusing to try on a pair of shoes while the salesman admonishes me for buying her the wrong insoles and then leaving the store furious as my daughter says, “I want you to know I support you one hundred percent. Can today be the day I start on coffee?” It also isn’t the dog digging a pack of gum out of my purse and chewing it, then peeing on the gum wrappers and crawling in my lap, making me forget to hate her. It isn’t having the door handle to my office break off in my hand when I realize my only keys are in there and then remembering that, oh yeah, these are luxurious problems. It isn’t having too much to do and wanting to scream and it isn’t screaming. It might be poetry, but it isn’t sitting and hearing it read by my son, it isn’t him giving a standing ovation for the actor with the smallest part or my daughter confessing that she lied and then doing a cartwheel. It isn’t getting a whole email in ESL from my niece and not caring that it’s politically incorrect because I laugh so hard while reading it that I actually cry tears. It isn’t Antiques Roadshow after sex for the sixth time while the sheets threaten to disintegrate. It isn’t me listening to my children breathe at night and that being enough to want my heart to keep pumping blood. That one, mine, was not the only heart you saved. Sure they may have used the loss of their mother to fuel them in life toward a greater purpose. Or maybe it would have been so damaging that they’d never fully come back. Thanks to you I don’t have to watch either of those scenarios play out while perched on a cloud fighting with God to let me intercede, or spend eternity aching to at least become the quivering sunbeam that lands on them one morning when they roll out of bed aged twenty-five.
As my friend Father Bob says, medicine can be more art than science. I believe the best doctors are a particular category of artist, with the creator’s instinct to throw something on a canvas and start expanding, which must come down to divinity and the ability to judge what would bleed well into what.
It was too scary for me to face, my body giving me warnings of being so screamingly temporary. I wonder how often we are being nudged but we turn away. We find a place to jettison all of it, or hand it to someone and say, here, please organize this for me, I can’t stand it. It would be eerie if those warnings lingered somewhere, the sound of them: Run home, Don’t answer the door, Walk away from him now—What if that lasted?
If only I knew what “last” meant. “There is no now,” my father would say, banging his cane on the floor on the word now. “As soon as you say the word, it’s already in the past. When is it? There isn’t one.”
This is the only moment and it has already passed. The only things suspending time are children and cross-country travel. Not even all our stars are moving, that was light-years ago; it’s only us here, dying as slowly as we can.
Dear Gorgeous,
I have won a prize. The prize comes with a cruise through our galaxy with a couple of stops on habitable planets. I am required to bring one man.
Our spaceship is stocked with oversized couches and fifty- foot-wide windows to view Earth from every angle. Spaceship has fine cheeses and rare wines that you recognize because you have an appetite for rare.
The man I am bringing is you, Gorgeous.
You are impossibly tall. Your tall intoxicates me. Your tall is nearly ridiculous. When I come back down from going on half-toe to kiss you, I yawn from the altitude adjustment. When you walk down a hall your head grazes the ceiling and you do a sweeping thing that isn’t fey. It’s as though you left your cape and crown at home to be kind. You left your scepter in a cab because you are absentminded yes, but really deep down you don’t like to make others feel lesser.
Others are lesser.
You wave your hand through the air to dismiss something that displeases you and it’s tantamount to another man firing a machine gun.
You do not need a machine gun.
You are so tall that if I’d ever lain underneath you (which is incomprehensible why I didn’t) (though now I can since you’re coming to the moon with me) (in my fantasy where we’ll cruise our outer and inner spaces) I could have hidden there.
The spaceship will have your Pulitzer Prize that I will hold sometimes and pretend is mine. This will make you laugh. All your books are there also, and you’ll read me your poems but it won’t tire you. When you do sleep I’ll hold your books to my face, mouth open; my inhalations dragging some of your genius into my lungs, ink dripping from the corners of my mouth. I’ll exhale poetry onto paper afterward and when I read them aloud you’ll say
I think that one is really promising
I’ll kiss you and bring you a glass of wine. I’ll tell you how handsome you are and how tall and kiss you deeply again and take off all your clothes. Your body will be forty years old, and then seventy years old, and then fifty. My body will be thirty-five years old, and seventy, and then we will end on our actual ages and decide reality is the way.
That will be the best moment but I am not at all spoiling it by telling you in advance. You’ll see.
Dear Emergency Contact,
“Shut up. Get out!”
“I haven’t seen it,” I said.
“No way! Get out. I’m shutting off your morphine drip right now,” you said.
“I haven’t, I swear. Who’s in that?”
“It’s Bette Davis, and she, like. Oh my God. She basically gets sent to a sanitarium for having a unibrow.” You laugh. I think at the memory of the brow.
“The unibrow made her unstable?”
“No, but at the beginning—I’m sorry I still can’t believe you haven’t seen Now, Voyager!—she has a unibrow and they send her away to a sanitarium. She doesn’t have the brow at the end of the movie, and really nothing else was actually wrong with her? I mean, look, as soon as you get out of this hospital we’re watching it.”
“I want to see the brow,” I say. I stand up slowly. “Should I walk? I think I should try to make it down the hall.”
I take your arm and we walk to the end of the hospital wing. Today you have on light flannel trousers and a perfect white shirt. Even for a fashion designer you look sharp.
“It’s chilly out here. Let’s drape,” you say, placing an extra hospital gown around my shoulders. I stand dutifully while you arrange it, tying the strings at an asymmetrical angle so that the gown falls off my shoulders like a pashmina. “No. It’s too Opening Night at the Met. Wait.” You take the gown and twist it, letting it fall around my neck in front with the ties falling down my back. “A cowl! But . . . it’s a little Yohji Yamamoto for the hospital. Wait.” You take it and hold it to your chest, considering.
“What about upside down?” I ask. The day nurse passes us and asks if she can change my bedding. “Sure, thanks,” I say, putting a foot into the gown, which you are already holding up so I can step into the armholes, now upside down like a pair of shorts. The nurse eyes us. “Very creative,” she says, nodding. “Hey, whatever it takes,” you say. “And anything can be worn upside down. Look!” You size me up, pleased as I do my best at a catwalk strut. “Jumpsuit! Very Marisa Berenson circa 1973. If only it were in navy jersey with a floppy hat and chain belt.”
You first put me in a dress when I was twenty-four or so. It was my first important dress, and I had no idea how to
find an important dress or what it should look like. I mostly wore spandex and leather with combat boots, which is what I had on when I came into the store where you worked. You found me the perfect gown, taking it as seriously then, when I was not yet a friend, as you do twenty-five years and countless dresses later. Plenty of fancy people came into your store but you gave me the same attention. It’s more important to you that a woman feels pretty than you getting credit for how she looks, but your creativity runs deep. More than once you’ve shown up with a stack of dresses and said, “I brought these, which you’ll love, but. I had a vision. I dreamed you wore this,” and you’ll hold up whatever dazzling creation inspired you at three in the morning.
Snappy dresser, snappy with the snappy comeback, amidst all the snappy-ness it’s easy to underestimate your humanity. Just so you know, I caught on. You donate your money and time when no one is looking, and are never remiss in sending a kind, handwritten note. Also, I saw the handbags you snuck to my daughter when you gave her a tour of your office. Busted. I have seen more than you probably realize.
I don’t know how you knew to show up at the hospital when I was sick, but you sat with me more than once for an entire day. When you first got to me I was out of it. I was still quarantined and you stood there in a mask, holding a bunch of barrettes and headbands you’d brought me. The nurse came in again, asking for an emergency contact. She’d come back three times and I couldn’t give her an answer. Family was too far, friends were busy and had their own kids, and I hated bothering someone in the middle of the night.
“Can I give it to you later?” I asked.
“Shut up. Put me,” you said, waving her back in the room. “Seriously, shut it. What else am I doing at two in the morning? I’m the emergency contact,” you karate chopped one hand into your other open hand on every syllable for effect, “end. of. sto. ry.”
“But—” I started.
“But nothing. Listen. Seriously. E-nough.”
I might have cried if I’d had the energy. Actually I probably cried a little, that day is blurry, but I do remember that and I know I can count on you, having called you at the eleventh hour and said, “Hey, I decided to go to the Emmys after all, can you make a dress?” or, “Hey I think I am getting married next Saturday do you still have that pink thing that I never wore?”
You are prepared and honest and you get there. After our little Project Runway jaunt down the hospital corridor I was exhausted and as you headed out I was already dipping in and out of sleep but I heard you in the hall with the nurse.
“She’s done the vitals, the doctor said she doesn’t need them again, and she had the other meds at nine, so let her sleep. Seriously, enough with the waking every two hours for no reason, let’s give the woman a stretch of sleep, please.”
“Are you her husband?” asked the nurse.
“Whatever, sure, friend, husband, just let her sleep.”
I remembered the Christmas list I’d made in my mind a month before. Just dreaming up things I’d love to have, from whatever Santa might be dying to grant my personal wishes. In my head I took a pencil and happily crossed out one at the top:
5. EMERGENCY CONTACT
Dear Future Man Who Loves My Daughter,
First of all, show up a bit late. It may be better if she’s seen a little of the opposite of you, and relaxes in your arms only once she realizes you don’t have a gruesome face hiding under the one you first showed her.
Do not have another face hiding. Yeah. I really would not.
Swoop in late, but not so late that she doesn’t trust it when you say you want to make her drunk on happiness.
Make her drunk on happy.
Make her unhappy. Put yourself first. Do that awhile. Do it long enough so that she suffers. When she is done with that suffering, which will only make her more compassionate, watch as she rises up like the sea’s last wave and crushes you with her silence. Notice how that silence moves in on you as she speaks, telling you that she’s had enough and you have to change. You will see her mouth moving and recognize the words falling out and forming sentences that mean “Quit this moment or I will quit you,” but the quiet that continues to threaten with staying forever if you don’t comply? That is so much louder than her words. She will not be crying, or begging. She will realize she is powerful and perfect alone and that she doesn’t need you. Her commitment to those words will terrify you. You will change for her because you realize no one is more worthy of changing for.
Remind her that she is beautiful in every new language you can invent. Careful with metaphor, as by then her mother’s overuse of it may have exhausted her and made her immune to poetry.
Remind her about poetry.
If she has given you children remind yourself every day of the second, third, fourth, fifth, and sixth words in this sentence.
If you hurt her in ways that are irreparable I will send out people to hurt you back, sorry, but it has to be like that. Yes, you may have had a difficult childhood, but please allow me to introduce myself: Hello, I am the woman who doesn’t give a shit.
Make her something warm to drink in the mornings and give her time to begin speaking; only rush at her with an embrace or a gemstone. Wildflowers. A love note. Yeats.
Do not fight with her in public. This almost includes the dog. She has an elegance that should not be polluted by compromising her privacy. This has something to do with loyalty, I am not sure how, but it does. Speak glowingly of her to everyone, even on the days she has infuriated you. Inflate! You have landed the loveliest girl walking the earth. Let too many people know how proud you are, so that it gets back to her and she feels proud to be herself.
Take her hand. Notice how like a piece of art that is.
Be a friend to her brother. Be a brother to him. Help him out if he needs it, and give him the opportunity to help you. Call him for no reason, and drop by with her on days you may not feel like it just to make sure they stay connected and trusting.
If her brother is telling a story about me in which I seem especially annoying, please feel free to poke fun. I want them to take comfort in the fact that they share a mother that is only theirs, and a childhood as wild and special as they are. I need them to have each other. It’s almost all I need. My brothers have protected and championed me in ways that she will need also. Should someone slight her honor or threaten her, her brother will get into the ring and I hope you will join him. I have watched him do this already and it fills me with pride even when their fight is against me. My own brother came to the bus stop with me when he learned I wasn’t getting a seat because of my rampant unpopularity. He stood there, arms folded as though he were barring everyone from entering the rest of their lives if they did not comply with his wish to treat me with respect. He said nothing but stared into the face of every kid on that street corner, promising that their futures were going to remain in question unless they understood. All conversation stopped. One person snuck a look at another and his head whipped around to catch both of them looking incredulously at one another in response to his threat.
Try me
his eyes said. And
Don’t think I won’t
The bus pulled up. I got in line and looked at him still standing there with barely contained galvanic ire. I tried to convey my thanks. His eyes said back
That’s how much
I knew how much, but it was good to see it. Needless to say, I got a seat. I saw a different shade of that in my other brother the day my son was born and he came into the hospital and shuffled out all who did not belong so that I could rest. He took my son in his arms and read to him. He read Winnie the Pooh, the beginning of Ginsberg’s “Howl,” E. E. Cummings. He sang “New York, New York” as his first lullaby. Them together in that chair was one thing I will go back and watch if they let you do that at the end.
Make sure you know her uncles and her brother so well that she’d be jealous of your relationship if it didn’t make her so happy. If she is in danger of
forgetting her brother’s birthday, remind her and when in doubt, invite him. To wherever. He is more important than you for her in most ways and I know you will understand. I agree that I’m asking a lot of you but remember
You already won the grand prize
Congratulations. Really. She is still in middle school now and insists she will never marry, but I am quietly hoping she and her brother both find something like my parents had, that endures and comforts them. Something lit by its own moon.
Be worthy of her. God bless you for noticing the right one.
Dear Oyster Picker,
Oh, but you have no idea.
Let’s just say we were both in a hurry. That isn’t presumptive of me. There’s no way an oyster picker would survive in the Pacific Northwest if he were even a little bit slow. Most of you have been doing that hard job for years, but the men who start young become worn down while they’re still pushing through their first acres of low tide.
Raw oysters are not cheap, but if you trace that pearly slip back to the moment it was plucked, you’ll find an underpaid someone who did the plucking. Please, though, I’m not suggesting that you work a lowly job. I just mean that you should make at least as much as a gynecologist, who spends less time than you do all hunched over and plunging into the salty depths with rubber gloves on. You probably go through two pairs of those gloves a week, not only to shield you from the frigid surf but to guard against the gashes that end up on your wrists and forearms from those tongs that pry your crop from its seabed. Your back must ache from being bent over for hours while slogging through mud that can reach your knees. That tub of mollusks that will make memorable someone’s first date can weigh up to seventy pounds. I suspect that costs your body a lot.
I wonder if you grow tired of always wearing the sea. Dragging the sound of waves to your pillow every night, you must fall there as light as an astronaut once your ankles are unshackled of wet earth and seaweed.
Dear Mr. You Page 14
