Safekeeping: Some True Stories From a Life

by Abigail Thomas

  “What can happen,” she asked.

  “Well, probably nothing for a good long while,” he said, “the disease isn’t active right now.” He didn’t say “in remission.” “Nothing is going on right now, and they can’t treat it until it becomes aggressive.”

  “What’s the worst that can happen?” she asked. His eyes were hazel. She loved this man she had been so unhappy with.

  “Well, we’ve all got to go sometime.” He shrugged and laughed.

  “No, I mean it.”

  “You can’t clot,” he said, “among other things, your blood can’t clot. The slightest bruise, even just your organs moving against each other in the normal course of a day, can make you bleed to death.”

  “That won’t happen to you,” she said, and held his hand really tightly.

  His Cosmic Joke

  Sometimes when they were out walking together, he would nod meaningfully at some very old man and whisper to her, “Un vieux,” as if it were the punch line of a long cosmic joke.

  What It Was Called

  For the longest time she couldn’t remember the name of his disease, and things went on as usual. She and her husband often had him for supper, and when he seemed tired they walked him home, one on either side. He got exhausted going up the hill on 116th. She and her husband told him they were tired too, that it was a steep hill. “And it’s winter,” she’d hear herself say, “and we’re wearing all these heavy clothes!” Then one morning he asked if she would mind going with him to the doctor. He was very short of breath these days, nobody knew why, and today they were doing a bone marrow biopsy and he was afraid he might be tired, too tired to hail his own taxi. It might be a long wait, but would she mind terribly going with him? Of course not. They went together, like husband and wife, which of course they had once been. “Why didn’t you ask me before?” she demanded.

  “I didn’t want to trouble you,” he answered. She was angry and sad. She wished he had asked her sooner. Then they got out of the elevator and she saw what the sign on the wall said: ONCOLOGY. Even then she couldn’t believe it. She thought there must be a mistake, that his disease was probably some distant relation, some third cousin once removed, and it was just coincidence that they were on this particular floor. But as the hours went by and she saw the other patients, and the faces of the people who sat with them, she understood.

  Myelodysplasia, she made him tell her again, and this time she remembered it.

  Coming Home Tomorrow

  Almost spring, and he was in the hospital. He had been there months but was coming home at long last. This or that was still very wrong, he didn’t know, but the doctor had promised tomorrow for certain. She looked at him in the bed, his flesh, the way his arms had gotten all soupy, she saw that he couldn’t really get up at all anymore or hardly even raise his arm right, but she had rented the wheelchair and there was oxygen at home. She found herself feeling very business-like all of a sudden. She ticked things off a list. He didn’t look so wonderful, but he had been through a lot. She didn’t want to get sucked into a bad sad place, all sentimental; she needed her wits about her; she wasn’t even married to him anymore for god’s sake. She did however love him. She looked at him again. So many transfusions, who wouldn’t look exhausted? He was coming home tomorrow, glad to be home finally after months that had started out as overnight. Spring was coming sooner or later. “We will take you in the wheelchair,” she said, “until you get your strength back, we will go to Ollie’s,” she said, “or the Thai place. I am good at wheelchairs,” she said, “and we will sit in the park.”

  He turned his mouth down and frowned. This particular face always made her laugh. “It’s just until you get your strength back,” she said, although she had her doubts. The next year or two would be in a wheelchair, she was pretty damn sure. He was losing ground. But he would accommodate himself, he had been so patient through all this terrible stuff. He never complained, never. He had a year left, certainly, maybe two? She didn’t know. The doctors were vague when you could find them. She was brisk; she was more than ready to go. She was collecting the heavy books to take now, so the load would be lighter tomorrow. “What’s that funny look you’re giving me?” she asked. He tried to smile. He had had a bad dream. It was still real and he had to ask her something. He wasn’t sure it was a dream at all. And now, looking at her, he trailed off.

  “What dream?” she asked.

  “I dreamed,” he said, his voice a little husky, “that you were leaving. I dreamed you were going away.” His eyes were suddenly sharp. That old look of his. “Are you?”

  “Am I what?”

  “Leaving.”

  “What are you talking about?” She was standing at the foot of his bed now. “Don’t be silly.”

  “It was a terrible dream,” he said, “the worst dream I’ve ever had.”

  “But I’m not going anywhere. How could you think such a crazy thing?” She put the books on the chair.

  “In my dream,” he went on, “I was the most articulate I’ve ever been in my life. I had ten reasons why you couldn’t go, and I told them to you. I have never been so fluent, so eloquent, so persuasive.”

  She was smiling, moved in spite of her desire not to be moved. And curious. “What were they?” she asked, resting her hand on his left foot.

  “I can only remember the first one.”

  “What was it?”

  He looked at her fiercely. “We need you.”

  “Well, I need you too,” she said, anxious to feel as little as possible, “and I wouldn’t go anywhere. How could you think I would leave?” She felt like doing a little nervous jig just to show how silly he was.

  “Well, you look so beautiful. I thought you must have a lover. I thought you were running away with a lover.” He looked so tired.

  “Oh god,” she said, shaking her head. “When do you think I’d have time for a lover? I don’t want a lover. I love my husband. I love my family. I love you. I’m not going anywhere. I would never go anywhere. Don’t worry. You don’t have to worry about that ever.”

  “Do you promise?” He had never asked her, Do you promise.

  “I promise,” she said, putting her hand on his ankle. It felt so swollen.

  She didn’t then crawl into bed next to him under the tangle of wires and lines hooked up to bags of blood and water, she didn’t crawl into bed next to him and feel the length of her body along the length of his, although she thought about it, how she could, if she were careful, put her arm around him and her face against his cheek, how she might say, Don’t you know if I were to run away it would only be with you, which she knew would please him, whether he believed it or not; she saw herself doing these things but she didn’t do them. Instead she straightened up and said out loud, “Well, that’s enough of that,” and she walked around the bed and kissed his forehead. “I will see you tomorrow.”

  “You’re leaving?”

  “I’ll see you tomorrow,” she said. “Bright and early.” She could tell he was still in his awful dream, but what could she say to him that she hadn’t already said at one time or another? After all, she had her life to live, her errands to run, the hospital was such a difficult trip for her, and it was really the whole day, not just the hours she spent there, but the hours preparing and the rest of the day trying to forget. He had trouble lifting his arms and could no longer really sit up, but it didn’t occur to her what this meant, what this signaled, that the body was dying, he had been bleeding everywhere, so many transfusions. It was over. Perhaps it is a blessing that she didn’t know. The mind pulls a blindfold out of its pocket on these occasions maybe.

  “So you aren’t leaving us?” he asked once more, an unfamiliar look on his face. This was not a man to do any pleading. “It really was just a dream?” This was so unlike him.

  The next day the nurse said, “He has children, hasn’t he? Isn’t there a daughter?”

  And even then she didn’t understand. “Do you mean I should call her?”
she asked, shocked.

  “He isn’t stable,” said the nurse.

  “Should I call?” she repeated. “You mean it’s time to call everyone?”

  “He isn’t stable,” said the nurse again, kindly but firmly, and it sank in.

  • • •

  She thinks of his dying as a hole he fell through, a hole in the day that opened and then closed back over him. But he is still here; she feels him near. She feels him all the time. She assumes he knows now, everything she meant to say. She hopes so anyway.

  Once they walked down Broadway and passed the church on 114th whose message board often quoted Woody Allen (90 PERCENT OF LIFE IS JUST SHOWING UP), but on that particular day it was blank. “Look,” he’d said, surprise in his voice, “the Presbyterians have run out of things to say.” He put his arm around her shoulders (he was still able to walk then). “You appreciate me,” he’d said then. But maybe you had to be there. She had been there; he had been there; they had been there together.

  The Animal They Made

  Once they were no longer married he was free to love her again and she was free to love him too so after a while they did. Because they had always loved each other, and because of the animal they made. Not a real animal, nothing born in a litter, nothing fashioned out of clay or wood or brass, and not the beast with two backs, but what they were, the two of them together. The animal they made, that’s the only way she can describe it. An animal with its own life, its own life history, its own life span. Its own intelligence. Its own memories and regrets. Its own sins. An animal with its eyes and ears open, so alive, so alive. Greeting them! Making jokes out of thin air.

  Extinct now.

  Drifting Away

  You died, and the past separated itself from me like a continent drifting away.

  PART THREE

  Here and Now

  The New Year

  Like a trick floor. Somebody has tilted it and I have slid into the new year but you remained behind. Last night I dreamed you’d moved to California and I’d forgotten to get your number. Forgotten to call you. I was just starting to make a few inquiries when suddenly you returned, thinner and happy. I was glad to see you looking so well, although I worried about the weight you’d lost. “I’ve been trying to call you,” I began to say. “I’ve been home all along,” you said, “although last night might have presented problems.” By which I knew you had fallen in love with somebody. You were so calm. And then this morning your ashes are still here, in a box on my bookcase.

  Rocking Chair

  I saw a chair you’d love, says her third husband, want to come see? It’s in the street. She goes. She does love it. She starts to drag it home. What are you doing? he asks, aghast. But he has known her these ten years. I’m taking it home, of course, she says. What did you think? She doesn’t understand the question. I love this, she goes on, look at the old red velvet, look at the curve of the arm, look at the broken rocker on the left, look at the original sawdust and horsehair. This is a beautiful beautiful chair, my grandma had one just like it. But where will you put it, he asks, and look, he says pointing, what is that? Horsehair! she cries delighted. That’s the horsehair! That’s how you know it’s old. She thinks of grandmas, she thinks of rocking. Horsehair! He shudders.

  It won’t fit through the door, he says, but it does. It won’t fit through the hall, he says, but it does. It won’t fit in the study, he says, but she is determined. She makes it fit, nudging aside the other chairs, all in various states of disrepair.

  It is so beautiful, she says finally, look at those lovely arms, look at the grace of the thing.

  Look at the broken frame, he says, look at the stuffing and the sawdust trail through the living room. Look at this room!

  But I love it, she says. I’ll get it fixed.

  It will cost five hundred dollars, he says.

  But we got it for free, she reminds him. What did you think? she asks. You knew I would love it. What did you think? That I could just leave it there on the street?

  In bed he says, Snakes. Spiders.

  What? she says. It is very dark in their room.

  Snakes, he says. We’ll wake up and there will be snakes in there.

  What? She is laughing now. Snakes don’t come in chairs.

  Spiders then, he says.

  Don’t be ridiculous, she says. It’s a beautiful chair, why did you show it to me?

  I wish I hadn’t, he says.

  What did you think? That I could leave it there? On the street? To be rained on?

  It’s been rained on, he says. Snakes, he says again, like a little boy. Half an hour passes. She listens to him breathing. He is not asleep. Okay, she says, poking him. I don’t have to have it. They put on their bathrobes and slippers. They drag it out together. Goodbye chair, she says.

  That’s how much she loves him. He is happy. He vacuums up the little trail of sawdust from their pretty red rug.

  Grateful

  She used to think she needed to know things to be the mother. How to fix things, make everything better. And she couldn’t, she just didn’t know how. She felt sometimes not like a mother but like an older sister with an impatient streak. But one weekend when her oldest daughter was afraid she was losing her baby, she spoke to her son-in-law on the telephone. Shyly she asked him, “Do you think I should come?”

  “My wife needs her mother,” said her son-in-law, and in that second she understood all at once and forever everything she needed to know. And she got on the bus directly and went out to their house and she sat by her daughter’s bed and held her hand. She stayed in the room until her daughter fell asleep and she was there when her daughter woke. She is grateful forever to him for saying the right thing at the right moment because her life changed right there on that dime. And the baby is fourteen years old. Hallelujah.

  The Mothers of New York

  Is it her or are the mothers of New York paying less attention? It seems every day she has to place her body between a child and the busy street, the young mothers distracted by conversation or worse. She herself can’t bear anyone under thirty to get within three feet of the curb. Some head off drunkenly in its direction. On their tiny tricycles! Wearing little red bonnets! Jingling their small shiny bells! She doesn’t touch these children; she plants herself in their path, a formidable object, a movable unclimbable hill, a grandmother statue. Are times simply more lax? Was she this negligent? Are young mothers more trusting than they should be? Or is she getting old?

  Her memory (poor) is that she watched her children carefully on the street. It was much later that her gaze wandered. At least she kept them safe in infancy! Of course things were different then. Dangers weren’t omnipresent. But about traffic she remembers being consistently alert. Don’t you know, she wants to tell the mothers, don’t you see? So much is so unpredictable, she wants to draw them aside and explain. Later there will be nothing you can do, having done it already or not.

  Although she does love determination in the young. She smiles remembering the little girl she saw earlier who forced her mother to carry her by one arm down the block, her feet off the sidewalk, kicking and screaming the whole way, her feet in white socks and little patent-leather shoes. Now that is the perfect attire of a really good tantrum, she thinks, a little black velvet dress with lace collar and little white socks with frilly tops. Mary Janes complete the outfit. She can see the catalog now. Dress your child for a tantrum. The little boy gazing up at her as she guards the curb looks at her curiously. He is a perfect gentleman on his set of big wheels.

  Wattles

  Should we get our wattles done? I ask my sister. We are looking at recent snapshots.

  I’ve heard of this thing where they freeze it, she says. No snippy-snip.

  Freeze what? I say. There are several photos of me from the side. Close-up. I slide them into my palm and then into my pocket.

  Freeze your wattle. First they grab one side of your chin and inject it, then they grab the other side and inj
ect it, and presto your wattle’s gone.

  I have spilled my coffee. Gone? Where does it go?

  It just shrinks right up. Now I know you’re not going to like the sound of this, but they paralyze the muscle so it doesn’t sag. She pauses. The bicycle man she likes has just entered the café. We watch him for a while. The line is long and slow in here. Plenty of time to stare. Only one person is manning the cappuccino maker this morning. The bicycle man is unaware of us, two middle-aged ladies at a table on the side.

  You know, I say, regarding the guy thoughtfully, his problem is he doesn’t have an ego problem.

  Yeah, says my sister, but look at his nice little ass.

  We observe some more. He’s probably French, I say, there are Gitanes in his T-shirt pocket. You’re just getting nostalgic for Paris.