Hourglass

by Dani Shapiro

  M. asked me if I remembered that day in Provence. Of course I did. What was his point? I lied. It was a bee that stung you, M. said. He found it in the back of our rental car and quickly disposed of it before I could see. He took matters into his own hands. He knew I would panic if he told me. Didn’t you wonder why we spent an hour circling the hospital?

  —

  I’ll take care of it, M. says. I’ll take care of it.

  —

  But now—alone, without M., in Florida, miserable—it doesn’t matter what I think, what I know to be true. I cannot bring myself to leave my cottage and walk through the swarm. Each morning, I sit at the kitchen table, pecking away at my laptop. The hot Florida sun beats against the roof of my cottage and I imagine them, the fist-sized bees, burrowing into the wood. I take a break from the essay I’m writing and read up on their two very different mating systems: large-eyed males search for females by patrolling, hovering, and pursuing. Other males release pheromones into the air while they fly, announcing their presence. Hey, baby! Going my way?

  —

  “In English, the term memoir comes directly from the French for memory, mémoire,” David Shields offers in Reality Hunger. “And yet more deeply rooted in the word memoir…is the ancient Greek, mermeros, an offshoot of the Avestic Persian memara, itself a derivative of the Indo-European for that which we think about but cannot grasp: mermer, ‘to vividly wonder,’ ‘to be anxious,’ ‘to exhaustingly ponder.’ In this darker light of human language, the term suggests a literary form that is much less confident than today’s novelistic memoir, with its effortlessly relayed experiences.”

  —

  I tell the carpenter bee story to a friend one evening when I’m finally back home. I’ve been telling the story to whomever will listen, the way one recounts a trauma. She offers to set up a phone conversation between me and a man she knows who specializes in Jungian dream analysis and imagery. In other words, what do the bees mean? Though I no longer keep journals, I do compile many bits and pieces of paper on which I take notes. The notes from the conversation with the Jungian: Mugged by the unconscious. Gripped by the hand of god. Phobias are fascinations. Shaman-totem-bee. Has the quality of an initiation. Initiations are in some sense about death. Initiations are disorienting. Not just to fuck with you, but to reorient you.

  —

  Once in a while, if he’s very tired or very drunk, M.’s Boston roots will reveal themselves. The letter r will vanish. Smaaaht, he’ll say, for smart. Or blizzaahd. He grew up north of Boston—both his parents speak with thick, unmistakable New England accents—and that long-ago boy emerges from the depths of the man, as if elbowing his way out. God, I’m hammahed.

  Still there are pockets, absences. Sinkholes inside my husband where whole other lives are contained—ones impossible for me to know. His years in Africa are inaccessible to me. At dinner in Venice, Italy, I return from the ladies’ room to find M. speaking to the table of tourists behind us in a language I can’t identify. I slide next to him on the banquette and listen for a moment. The room tilts. Who is this man? What is he saying? Kuongea Kiswahili? Mimi aliishi katika Afrika ya Mashariki kwa miaka kumi na saba.

  That night, we make hard, fast love in our hotel room. The Swahili has turned me on. My husband is a stranger. But then morning comes, light seeping through the windows overlooking the Grand Canal. M.’s cheek is pressed against the pillow, his eyes flickering beneath closed lids. I wonder if he’s dreaming of another world. His whole face soft the way it almost never is when he’s awake. I watch him breathe. And my own foreign language—the Hebrew of my childhood—returns to me from the distant place inside me where it lives: Ani l’dodi v’dodi li. I am my beloved and my beloved is mine. And then this: Hineni, I silently tell him. I am here.

  —

  These days, my sleep is disrupted multiple times during the night. It’s not insomnia, not exactly. M. has started snoring and so has the old, demented dog—that’s some of it. But the feeling is one of being nudged awake at two, three, four in the morning. I lean over to look at the clock. Is it time to get up yet? I lie back down and listen to the snoring. My mind begins to thrum with worry. I compile lists, the kind sure to keep me up until dawn.

  For most of my life, I had the persistent sense that I was in a race. Someone—something—was behind me, gaining on me, and I needed to keep moving in order to outpace it. Outpacing it seemed a viable option. But the longer I have run—and as life has had its way with me—the more I have come to understand the foolishness of running. I married. I had a child. I wove all the threads of myself into a tapestry. I am part of a design. Now I hear a word, forgive, echo in my head. The voice isn’t mine. More like a wise old crone, insisting: Forgive.

  But who is it I’m meant to forgive? I hear the first birds call across the meadow. The big fluffy dog stirs, then settles back down, bones hitting the floor in a satisfied thump. The bed creaks as M. turns toward me. Jacob is asleep in his room on the other side of the staircase, door closed, the multicolored plastic sign we purchased for a four-year-old in a souvenir shop announcing JACOB’S ROOM still glued to the paint.

  What must we summon and continue to summon in order to form ourselves toward, against, alongside another person for the duration? To join ourselves to the unknown? What steadiness of spirit? What relentless faith?

  As dawn streaks pink across the sky, the crone’s words land. It’s us. I understand. M. and me. It’s us I need to forgive.

  —

  “A mosaic,” writes Terry Tempest Williams, “is a conversation between what is broken.”

  —

  In crafting a work of fiction, at least in first draft, a writer’s got to have a kind of willful blindness to her own motivations. Why the knock at the door, the chance meeting, the near miss? The writer may not know, even as she proceeds. But when the self—not a fictional character—is the landscape of the story, we can’t afford to be blind to our own themes and the strands weaving through them. And so we must make a map, even as the ground shifts beneath us.

  This is, of course, not only a literary problem.

  —

  After our housecleaning, we still had a few rooms that remained untouched. We kept waiting for a rainy weekend to tackle the basement, which, M. would argue, ought to be next on our list. But I found it overwhelming. The basement requires a Dumpster, or at the very least a pickup truck to haul stuff away.

  It was easy to part with the contents of closets and drawers—the old sweaters, jeans, dresses, boots. The gold satin dress by the Italian designer, worn to a friend’s black-tie wedding (they now have twins in first grade), the scraped-to-shit pans, broken thermometers, stained dishtowels. But to get rid of my mother’s sister’s china, for instance, is to cut loose the hopeful young woman who chose the pattern decorated with cheerful bursts of gold and silver confetti. To tape up that box and cart it off to Goodwill kills her all over again. Or perhaps this is sentimental and foolish. She’s dead, dead, dead.

  Rainy weekends come and go. The basement remains an obstacle course of boxes. I can’t part with the framed diplomas of my parents and their siblings. They were the first generation in my family to go to college. How does that get tossed in a Dumpster? My uncle’s pipe, my aunt’s forty-year-old golf clubs, ceramic figurines from my grandmother’s apartment in her assisted-living facility mingle as if at a family reunion with Jacob’s discarded booster seats and board games. I am an only child. I have inherited it all.

  M. goes down there, once in a while, and hauls up a few boxes filled with long plastic containers of slides. There are thousands and thousands of them, mostly from my parents’ vacations, and they’ll be ruined soon if not already. He sifts through them and digitizes the ones with people in them. These are few and far between.

  “What we have,” he tells me, “are endless Alps.”

  —

  The pharmaceutical company calls after reading some of my work in The New Yorker. They’re in the late stages of
clinical trials for a drug that shows great promise in slowing the progression of Alzheimer’s. Might M. and I be interested in writing something for them? Something—they have no idea what—that will create empathy and dramatize the effects of Alzheimer’s on a family? We know something about the effects of Alzheimer’s on a family.

  Big Pharma! It’s all very hush-hush. Very cloak-and-dagger. We sign a nondisclosure agreement—perhaps I am breaking it now—before we meet with them. Writing for a pharmaceutical company isn’t something either of us has imagined doing. But ever since the Writers Guild strike, the invisible rule book for screenwriters has changed. M. is having trouble getting projects off the ground. He recently pitched an idea to one of the Hollywood studios. They loved it and promised to get behind it, once he brought them a script, a star, and a director. This puzzled M., who asked: But if I have a script, a star, and a director, why do I need you?

  The rule book for literary novelists has also been revised. Writing books—even quote-unquote best sellers—is no longer a way to make a living. I’ve caught myself wondering whose job it is to name nail polishes. Gucci Mucci Pucci. I Pink I Can. Berry Naughty. The driveway needs repaving. We have to replace the siding, thanks to Mr. Woodpecker. Of course, we tell the pharmaceutical company. Create empathy. We know how to do that.

  We propose that we write a play about a man who develops Alzheimer’s and the ripple effect of the disease on his family, friends, and community. We offer to cast and produce the play ourselves. The play—more like an elaborate staged reading—will be performed during a daylong event for executives in other companies with whom they hope to eventually partner. They agree to the fee we quote them, which is enough to keep us going for half a year, and maybe even finally get the house painted.

  —

  M. and I work very hard by any standard. No, writing is not the same as repairing power lines in the middle of a blizzard. Writing does not compare with military deployment. We have—I’m sure we can all agree—First World problems. Or whatever you want to call them. But nonetheless, we have always worked pretty much seven days a week, and every waking hour. We work in bathrobes, barefoot, not even taking the time to shower or dress in the morning. Our vacations are entirely work-related. It turns out that two writers being married to each other is perhaps not the most practical way of going through life. We have no savings, no retirement plan. Some months we are barely able to pay our bills and triage them until the next check comes in. We have nothing to fall back on but each other. Our minds are always churning. What next? We wonder. What next?

  —

  For years now I have been keeping small, special notebooks into which I write passages that strike me hard as I read the work of others. Perhaps these are another form of diary. Certainly, they are deeply personal. I hadn’t known, when I started this practice, that these are sometimes called commonplace books. The notebooks I’ve chosen for this task fit into the palm of my hand, and into the back pocket of my jeans. I’ve become quite attached to them and order a few at a time from Japan. It takes me years to fill even one. For my tiny script to later be legible, I must write slowly and carefully. The criterion is that the words must pierce me, stop me, so that I can go no further until I write them down—until I make them mine.

  You could say these are a record of my life.

  Alas, the heart is not a metaphor—or not only a metaphor, Elizabeth Hardwick writes in Sleepless Nights. On the next page, a line from Seamus Heaney: It steadies me to tell these things.

  —

  It turns out that M. and I were both right about the strange animals who loped through our meadow—the otherworldly ones, the sight of which shot a tingle up my spine.

  Wolves?

  No. Coyotes.

  Not coyotes. I know coyotes.

  I’ve seen the creatures a half-dozen times. They seem to show up only when I’m home alone. The gray one is large and boney. The milky brown one is smaller, though more muscular, and looks to be injured. It (she?) moves slowly, dragging her hind leg. One never appears without the other. Are they siblings? A couple?

  One evening, at dinner with friends, the subject comes up and I pull out my phone, scroll through photos until I find a series I took of the pair.

  “Oh,” our friend says, peering at my phone’s screen. “Those are coy-wolves.”

  “Coy-wolves?”

  Now he has M.’s attention.

  “Hybrids. Somewhere along the line, a coyote and a wolf bred, probably generations ago.”

  “So now it’s a thing?”

  “Yeah, it’s definitely a thing. There was just a documentary about it.”

  Back home, M. finds the documentary on Netflix and we settle into our usual spot in the library. The television’s blue light reflects us against the panes of the glass doors: a husband and wife curled up together beneath a worn, nubby blanket.

  Coy-wolves are everywhere. They’ve been found in Pennsylvania and Ohio. They’ve traveled south from New England through the Appalachian Mountains to Virginia. Footage shows coy-wolves in Manhattan and its northern suburbs. Cameras equipped with night vision have caught them scrounging for scraps in Dumpsters, moving in packs across parking lots. I think of the sounds I sometimes hear late at night, far off—or so I like to think—in the woods beyond our meadow. The yip-yip-yip of a pack of coyotes circling its prey.

  M. and I, together in the library, the documentary over, stare out into the darkness. I wonder if our coy-wolves—I now think of them as ours—are out there now. Even their voices are something new to this world; living creatures making sounds that have never before existed. Perhaps the smaller, injured one had been caught in a trap, or attacked. Her companion won’t leave her. They’re a couple, I decide.

  —

  That first winter after we moved from Brooklyn to Connecticut, a local high school senior lost control of his car on a winding road as he drove to school with his brother. I learned of the accident only because there were roadblocks near the village green on the day of the funeral, and ashen-faced cops, probably only a year or two older than the boy, directing traffic.

  Baldwin Hill Road—where the accident occurred—is one of the prettiest I’ve ever seen. At the top of the hill, if you look west, is an old cemetery, and beyond the weathered, simple tombstones, a church steeple soars in the distance. I’ve driven it most days for the past twelve years. When Jacob entered preschool, it was the route we took early each morning, sometimes stopping for juice, a bag of chips, or a coffee for me along the way.

  It was autumn when I first saw the mother. She knelt in the dirt next to the electrical pole the boy had hit. She wore jeans and a sweatshirt, long hair tied back, hands working the earth. I knew instantly that it was her. I slowed my car down, worried—she wasn’t far off the side of the road and could easily be hit by a texting driver. But I didn’t stop. Her bowed head, those grasping hands seemed to exist on another plane, a scorched landscape of grief that forced a shudder through me. I had come so close to knowing that precise grief. Instead, my little boy and I continued on our way.

  Month after month, I kept an eye out for the mother as I drove Baldwin Hill. On a number of occasions, I spotted her crouched by the electrical pole. But it wasn’t until early spring, when we passed a soft blur of yellow one morning, that I realized what she had been doing in that roadside dirt. Daffodils ringed the pole, encircling the spot where her son died.

  All sorts of flowers now mark that spot. Sometime during the first few years, I noticed her sitting one afternoon in a folding chair, her back to the road. Each winter, as the bulbs she plants in autumn sleep in the earth, she strings tinsel around the pole, red and silver glitter hugging its circumference. Once, a nearby tree was festooned with Christmas lights.

  Twelve years. Our town has changed quite a bit in these years. More young families have moved up from the city—telecommuting making possible a different kind of life. I see the new moms sometimes. I know them from their SUVs and station wagons, a
whole new generation strapped into booster seats in back. They, too, drive up Baldwin Hill. They, too, stop for juice, chips, and coffee. I doubt they notice the one electrical pole set apart from the others by the flowers blooming at its base.

  —

  In crafting a work of fiction, a writer has to choose among calamitous events. There is no value in piling on. This kind of piling on—a rookie mistake—might well come across as melodramatic. Do we really need the plane crash and the heart attack? The arson and the cancer? Choose one, or risk straining the reader’s credulity. The reader of fiction is, after all, in the very delicate process of suspending her disbelief. She is likely engaged in an unarticulated and unconscious hope that the writer will keep things relatively simple, at least as relates to the machinations of plot: disaster is meted out at a tolerable tempo.

  —

  Autumn in the year 2000. M. and I are settled in the Federal town house with our six-month-old baby. Together, we are adapting my first memoir for the young movie star in our side-by-side offices. Money is—for the moment—not a problem. We hire the babysitter with perfect references and CPR training. Time Out sends a photographer and features our home in an issue. I found the magazine during our basement cleanup and have just now brought it to the framers: our high-ceilinged living room, sunny bedroom, elegant marble fireplaces. The two of us—me with my new-mom haircut, my belly still soft with baby weight, M. looking young, handsome, and in control—sitting in the garden below. Our life—captured in the pages of the magazine—is charmed.

  Then the babysitter slips and falls. Our baby hits his head. But before this—before this—something has already gone terribly wrong inside him, though we don’t yet know it. Just days earlier, I had seen a flicker in his eyes that made my blood turn to ice. The doctor—too busy to see him—was unconcerned. But the doctor was wrong. The fall is child’s play. The two events that happen one on top of the next—bam, bam!—are not connected. The fall—the bump on his skull, the fear of concussion, of internal bleeding—is nothing. In fact, it is a gift. Now the doctors are paying attention.