Comfort

by Ann Hood

  The thing about this marriage of mine was I wanted it to work. I really love my husband. He is handsome and kind and thoughtful and romantic and passionate and smart. Every year he makes my anniversary present out of our wedding picture, translated into paper or glass, whatever material tradition deems that year’s gift is. It gives me real pleasure to watch the shelf where they sit gather more of these gifts—me clutching a bouquet of white tulips, both of us looking younger as time passes, our faces free of the pain and loss waiting for us just up ahead, those grins captured in tin and wood and cotton. I am happy to watch these accumulate, marking off another year together.

  Still, for some time, I missed the life I had left behind. I missed walking down Bleecker Street before the city woke up, the quiet of Manhattan in the early morning, the smell of espresso and sugary pastries drifting from old Italian cafés; I missed the ballet class I took two mornings a week with its crazy array of NYU students, injured ballerinas, and plain old New Yorkers like me; I missed the noise from the street that played like a lullaby when I went to sleep at night; I missed the graduate students who crowded my apartment every Tuesday night for pasta and wine and discussions about writing fiction; I missed the friends I met for coffee, the friends I met for beer, the ones who fed my cats when I went out of town, and the ones who walked for hours with me on Sunday afternoons.

  I missed all of it. I struggled to navigate the car through the strange and sudden one-way streets that littered my new city. I struggled to make friends. I wondered where a person bought good cheese here, where to find a movie theater that played foreign films, where the good independent bookstores were. I loved my husband, but every day when he put on his suit and walked out the door, I missed my real life, the one with lunches with magazine editors and book parties and other writers flopping on my sofa wondering if our new manuscripts would ever get finished.

  I had promised my husband and all those people at my wedding that I wouldn’t leave, but whenever we had a disagreement or a full-out fight, I imagined packing my bags and getting on Amtrak to Penn Station. Sometimes, I said it out loud: “I’m leaving! I’m going back to New York!” I imagined bundling up the kids and moving us all into an apartment not unlike the one I’d left in the West Village. But after a while my husband, who is calmer and more sensitive than I, pointed out that I had to stop threatening to do that. When you’re married, he reminded me, leaving means divorce and emotional damage. He had no intention of leaving me, he said.

  Both of us had parents who had stayed married to each other forever, and happily. Somehow they had worked out their differences. Was I really going to uproot my family and our lives because my husband liked to spend Saturdays cleaning instead of loafing? Or a dozen other reasons both small (how can he refuse the fruity olive oil I brought home so happily and drench his salad with bottled dressing?) and large (how could so many of his friends be so conservative?). The truth was, despite all of this, I had no intention of leaving him either. I just couldn’t find my way in this new place, in my new life. Even after we had our son Sam, I struggled with the other mothers I met in their workout clothes and with their talk of home renovations. I didn’t fit in here. That’s what I felt. That’s what I knew to be true. At night, when it was just my new little family, things seemed right. Eventually, we had our second baby, Grace, and Sam went off to a nursery school where I met women who were not unlike me. Some of them were also displaced New Yorkers. Some of them were writers.

  Slowly, slowly, I began to make my way. I thought about leaving less. And when I did leave, to teach or give readings, I missed my family and home more. Arriving back at our little red colonial house after a week away, seeing Sam and Grace and Lorne waiting for me on the stoop with flowers in their hands, shouting, “Welcome home!” sweeping them into my arms, made me understand why people stick things out.

  This is where I was three years ago: busy taking Sam and Grace to school, to ballet, to rehearsal for Oliver!, to playdates. They layered potatoes for potatoes au gratin and apples for apple crisp. They set the table together, deciding which color Fiestaware plate each of us should get: Sam always took purple and Grace always took pink and Lorne and I got whatever they decided for us. After dinner, we put on a bad dance tape and together we did the chicken dance and the Macarena and the Twist. At night, I read them Greek myths or Roald Dahl books. They fell asleep holding hands, and Lorne and I would stare down at our happy sleeping children. Then, on that hot April day, Grace spiked a fever and died thirty-six hours later from a virulent form of strep. She was five years old. Even now, I write these facts for the hundredth? thousandth? time and I cannot fully believe them. But they are true.

  Some statistics say that fifty percent of couples who lose a child get divorced. Some statistics are even higher. It is easy to understand why. When your life is ripped apart, all the rules no longer apply. There is no order anymore: in your family, in your life, in the world. A week earlier, my mornings were all the same. I made my kids their lunches—ham on white bread, a yogurt, three cookies, and an apple for Sam; sliced cucumbers, cheese and crackers, blueberries for Grace—searched for clean underwear and matching socks, struggled to untangle Grace’s hair and find Sam’s homework, then drove them to school. Now, I didn’t know what to do when I woke up. The life I had struggled so hard to create didn’t exist anymore.

  Eventually, Lorne went back to work. He put on his suit and went to his office. But my office was a tiny room off our dining room. It didn’t provide an escape for me. My work was a blank page that needed filling. But I couldn’t think or form sentences. Suddenly, the woman who ran away when things got tough had nowhere to escape. Our house filled with my friends. They held my hand and did our laundry and picked Sam up from school. They climbed into bed with me if they had to. In the evening, when Lorne returned from work, he came home to a house full of people.

  These are the kinds of things that tear grief-stricken couples apart. I craved noise and conversation; he needed solitude. Lorne took comfort in sitting at Grace’s grave and talking to her; I hated going there, hated the idea that my little girl was there, and avoided it. Church became a refuge for Lorne; but I hated God. The different ways two people grieve are enough to make them seem like strangers to each other. But losing Grace did the opposite for me. I saw the man I married as more precious.

  On a New Year’s Eve six years earlier, we conceived Grace together. Except for the midwife, we were the only two people there when she was born. He’s the one who put on the Simon and Garfunkel CDs, and sat with me in the whirlpool until we climbed onto the king-size bed and, with me pushing and Lorne coaching, brought Grace into the world. My husband is the person who, when Grace’s head emerged, said, “Here she is! She’s the most beautiful baby in the world.” He cut her umbilical cord and walked with the midwife across the room and weighed our baby daughter. Together, we held her and said her beautiful name over and over, whispering it to her, announcing her to the world.

  Lorne and I were by her side five short years later, in a cold room in an intensive care unit at the children’s hospital, whispering her name again, this time desperately trying to keep her from leaving us. I watched my husband climb onto the hospital bed, amid tubes and machines and monitors, press his lips to our dying daughter, and sing her the Beatles’ “Love Me Do.” We stood together, banished from her room, pounding on a Plexiglas window as they tried, one more futile time, to save her life. We pounded on that window and together yelled her name: “Grace! Grace!” We did those things.

  We have been crying in each other’s arms ever since. At first, after friends went home to their own families, we fell into bed together, exhausted and so filled with grief that we could only cry; words were too difficult, too meager. But slowly, our crying framed our stories. “Rerember?” we would ask each other, using Grace’s mispronunciation of “remember.” Rerember the night she was born? The way she used to crawl, dragging one leg behind her? Rerember when she stuck the goldfish cracker u
p her nose? When she wouldn’t leave the stage after she danced in a ballet of The Polar Express but instead stayed there, bowing and bowing, alone in her white tulle?

  These memories are ours, Lorne’s and mine. We are the only people in the world who hold Grace’s history. I used to think that leaving was the thing to do when times were hard. But having now lived through the hardest time, having made it because Lorne was by my side, holding me, and I was there holding him, I understand the virtue, the necessity, of staying.

  I am writing this on the eve of my eleventh wedding anniversary. Tomorrow night, Lorne will give me a gift. It will be our wedding picture cast in some new material. I am holding a bouquet of white tulips; we are both grinning out at the world, our faces hopeful and happy; we are facing the future arm in arm.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Hello, God! It’s Me, Ann

  WHEN I MET my husband-to-be, Lorne, I used to walk every Saturday morning from my apartment in the West Village in New York City, up Hudson Street, to St. Luke’s church where I helped cook meals for people with AIDS. This was in 1992, and my neighborhood, where Christopher Street with its condom shops and gay bars with blackened windows, was especially ravaged by the disease. It was common to see young men whose faces had splotches of red and purple, leaning heavily on canes or walkers as they made their slow way down the block.

  I never actually set foot in that church. Instead, I walked through a gate, past a garden that bloomed bright in warm weather, and into the kitchen. There, I chopped and sautéed, diced and sweated, rolled and pounded, preparing the high-fat, high-caloric food prescribed by doctors. I am Italian-American, raised with the philosophy that feeding people nourishes their souls as well as their stomachs. Someone else plated those potatoes au gratin and crème brûlées; someone else sliced the leg of lamb marinated in yogurt and spices; someone else set the tables and served the food and cleaned up afterward. Me, I cooked. And by cooking those few hours, I nourished my own soul as well.

  By this time in my life, I had dabbled in and explored just about everything. When I ruptured my Achilles tendon hiking when I was twenty-two, I wrote “Buddhist” on the emergency room form under religion. I puzzled over the silence and simplicity of Quaker meetings in a meetinghouse in the Berkshires one long lonely winter there. I lit seder candles and ate challah on Friday nights during a relationship with a Jewish man, and visited the Ethical Culture Society down the street from my apartment in Brooklyn. I read everyone from Saint Augustine to Lao Tzu to the Bagwhan Rashneesh, and finally, at the age of thirty-five, newly divorced, moderately successful, my spirituality felt rich and large and comfortable.

  In many ways, by the time I met Lorne, I had come full circle. My family’s spirituality came from people—helping them, sharing with them, talking to them, and, yes, feeding them. I grew up sitting around a kitchen table with a platter of spaghetti and meatballs in the center, a pot of coffee bubbling on the stove, and various generations of aunts, uncles, cousins, and friends filling every chair and corner of the room. At that table, I learned about love and loss, faraway places and broken hearts, strange diseases and miracle cures. As one of the youngest, I didn’t say very much. I ate wine biscuits twisted into pretzel shapes and hard bread dipped into tomato sauce, tight batons of prosciutto and crunchy stalks of fennel dripping with olive oil. I ate and I listened and my soul and heart grew and expanded in that kitchen.

  Ostensibly we were Catholic. But on snowy Sundays, or busy Sundays, or sometimes on any old Sunday, my grandmother climbed onto our kitchen table, threw holy water at us, and gave us special dispensation to stay home from church. Instead, I helped her mix the meat and spices for meatballs, and got to eat them hot from the frying pan. In summer, we abandoned church altogether and spent Sundays from sunrise until dusk at a lake an hour from home. There, in the cold early morning, my father fried bacon and eggs in a wrought-iron skillet over an open fire. My cousins and I chased each other across the pine-needled floor of the woods, ran in and out of the water, played Frisbee and frozen tag, while our parents fed us sandwiches of deviled ham or salami and provolone. When it got dark, we huddled together at campfires after dinners of barbecue chicken and marinated London broil, and toasted marshmallows on the long branches we had collected during the late afternoon.

  When I was twelve, I abandoned Catholicism and churchgoing after the priest told me during confession that my entire family was going to hell because we spent summer Sundays together at the beach instead of attending mass. Even then I understood that my spirituality came more from those long days swimming, hiking, and eating together than it did from sitting bored in an overheated church.

  Although our mutual lapsed Catholicism was one of the things we shared stories about when we first met, Lorne had in fact been a more serious Catholic than I ever was. Various family members sang in the choir, and the kids all joined the youth group, playing guitars and taking ski trips and camping trips. While my parents looked relieved when I announced I was finished with church, Lorne continued attending mass all the way through college and into adulthood.

  I realized right away that Lorne was more religious than I. When his earlier marriage was falling apart, he had gone to talk to his minister; when mine was on the rocks, I sought solace with friends and family. I didn’t have a minister, of course. But Lorne did. He attended a big ornate Congregational church in Providence, where he joined various committees and ate at potluck suppers. When he drove, he got inspiration from tapes of famous sermons by renowned preachers. One summer, years earlier, when he was in graduate school, he worked for Church World Service, and still counted the various ministers and Riverside Church administrators among his best friends. It seemed to me that church and spirituality were linked in Lorne’s world, and separated in mine.

  But when we fell in love that spring, it was fast and furious. The power and passion of that love made me believe that we could overcome everything: ex-spouses, political differences, the two hundred miles that lay between us. Spirituality—a private thing—and religious alliances and alienations seemed easier to work with than all of the other obstacles in our path. Besides, when kissing someone makes you swoon, makes your mind go blank, makes your stomach tumble, it feels at that moment like nothing else really matters.

  That was why, in what felt like a minute, I had left my beloved New York City behind to be with Lorne in Providence. Pregnant with our first child Sam, I became a recalcitrant, though not entirely unhappy, member of that Congregational church. By the time I’d had our second baby, Grace, I was almost enjoying the social aspects the church offered. At the coffee hours and auctions and sing-alongs, I would spot another mom from Sam’s preschool, or the parents of a baby Grace’s age. Taken out of my familiar single, childless world of Manhattan, I was having to find new friends, new places to meet people, a new way of life. Church became one more way to navigate this new territory of wife and mother, one more connection in a marriage already solidly passionate and intimate.

  Although sometimes I left church spiritually invigorated or intellectually challenged, more often I left simply happy to have watched Sam lead Grace hand in hand to children’s hour, or delighted at the sight of them in makeshift costumes during the Christmas pageant. Even now, I can muster something like that spiritual bliss I felt back then when I imagine this tableau: my family—Lorne, Sam, Grace, and me—dressed in our Sunday best, Sam’s shirt untucked, Grace’s hair snarled, my hand tucked into my husband’s, our bellies full of homemade waffles, the four of us entering that big yellow church with the sun streaming through its elaborate Tiffany windows.

  Then, the unthinkable happened. The life I had so carefully nurtured for a decade came to a grinding, confusing halt. Who does a mother turn to for blame and hate at a time like this? God, of course. For all the uncountable moments over these past ten years when I had paused to thank God, now I turned on Him. Just a few days before Grace died, I had dropped her off at her kindergarten one sunny morning. It was uncharacte
ristically warm for April, and I swear the sunlight pouring from that bright blue sky looked positively golden spilling onto my station wagon as I watched Grace walk inside, her purple-spotted backpack bouncing behind her. The sight of her, and all that sunshine, made me so grateful that I was overcome with emotion. I pulled over, and thanked God for this day and these beautiful children.

  When Grace died a few days later, my betrayal was enormous. I told this story to our minister, a woman with two young children of her own. “It’s so terrible,” she kept saying over and over. But had I drawn attention to our good fortune that day in my car? Had I jinxed my family? I had read somewhere that Hmong babies wear elaborate hats that look like flowers from above so that spirits flying past will mistake them for blossoms and leave them alone. Had my gratitude somehow tempted fate? But the minister could only shake her head and tell me how terribly sad it all was. Please, I told my friends who stood sentry by my door and telephones, please don’t make me talk to her again.

  Foolishly, I believed that clergypeople might hold the answers I screamed to God for every night. I watched as my husband’s seemingly unshakable faith wobbled too. Together, a unified force, we drove to talk to famous rabbis, priests, religious experts on loss. Dutifully, Lorne took notes, asked questions, listened. But I saw how their eyes drifted toward the clocks on their office walls, and when an hour passed, they assured us time would heal and sent us on our miserable way.

  Still, Lorne took solace in these visits in a way that I could not. The only shard of comfort I could find was in friends’ willingness to sit with me for endless hours and let me wail at God and the world. Lorne believed in a randomness in the world that I did not; I sought answers where he believed there were none. Even in our grief, we made room for each other’s spiritual differences. People fed us with aluminum pans of lasagna and fancy stuffed chicken and thick, creamy soups; chocolate chip cookies and brownies; expensive wine and single malt whiskey. But at night, in our three-legged house, we found comfort, as we always had, in each other’s arms. Despite the long hours apart—Lorne at his office, me at home with friends—in our bed alone our old passion helped us get through until morning. More often than not, crying became part of our lovemaking. Our bed, where Sam and Grace so happily tumbled into each morning, where we all had squeezed together to watch movies, now held our grief and our fragile selves together. So that even as our loss brought renewed spiritual disagreements, that passion that had brought us together remained, amazingly, unchanged.