Obviously, time has not improved my costuming skills, but I still love trying on a different persona every now and then. It’s a thrill to look in the mirror, blink your eyes, and see the glittery eyelids of a different person winking back. It makes you think, for just a second, Who are you?—which is a useful question to ask yourself from time to time. If you don’t check in every now and then, you might not realize that the answer changes. So if you’re feeling unsettled, I highly recommend getting a different haircut or outfit or eyebrow pencil (or guitar). It’s fun. And who doesn’t occasionally long to walk through the world as someone else for a while?
* * *
Playing guitar didn’t transform me into a rock goddess, but man, it was fun. On and off for about a year, I took lessons with Robert. We moved from heavy metal into classic rock. (Turns out we didn’t share much in the way of musical taste.) Eventually, our mismatched schedules made it harder and harder to book time together, and without actually meaning to quit, I stopped going, thinking I’d find another teacher with more availability. But when I stopped going to regular lessons, I stopped practicing. And when I stopped practicing, I stopped getting my guitar out of its case and smelling its weird vanilla smell. The calluses on my hands softened, then disappeared, my fingertips becoming tender again.
I still have the guitar. It mostly sits in its case now, although I do move it from room to room sometimes. When I look at it, I remember all the hope I placed in this instrument, how I whiled away so many hours with it, distracting myself with any music I could make. I remember thinking it might turn me into someone else. And I remember how good it felt to be in the presence of a believer—someone who said if you’re going to play, you might as well take yourself seriously.
No Safe Place
“I love lifeguards,” I said to my friend as we watched our children splashing in the pool.
We’d recently joined a swim club not too far from our neighborhood, and I was happy for the kids to have a place to cool off during the blazing Atlanta summers. The pool also fielded its own swim team. I dreaded sweltering evenings waiting for my kids’ races to come around, but I felt great peace knowing they’d have a daily swim lesson for a month each summer as part of team practice. They’d grow up to be safe around water.
My friend and I, mothers of kids the same ages, stood on the first step of the pool cooling our feet in the ankle-deep water. Though I wouldn’t think of taking my eyes off my kids (ages four and seven) while they swam, the presence of a lifeguard added an additional layer of security. So much security, in fact, that on this day I wasn’t even wearing a bathing suit. In white shorts, a loose yellow shirt, and a giant floppy straw hat, I felt I could keep watch from the edge just fine. The hulking lifeguards—young men home from college looking to make some money during the day before their restaurant shifts at night—sat on ten-foot-tall chairs patrolling each end of the pool: red swim trunks, red foam rescue tubes resting across their laps in case they needed to offer emergency flotation, their heads turning slowly this way and that, scanning the water constantly.
If I miss something, I thought—if I turn away from one child for a second to look at the other—the lifeguards are watching.
“Will you send them to day camp next month when swim team is over?” my friend was asking. I’d been watching my daughter bounce up and down a few feet in front of me, holding her breath to crouch under the surface, then pop! out of the water like a jack-in-the-box.
“I forgot to sign them up,” I said.
Bob, bob, bob she went, a little farther out, to a deeper part of the shallow end. Pop!
I looked at the lifeguard. His reflective sunglasses were pointed right at her where she bounced.
“So what are you going to do?” my friend asked.
“Hey,” I called to my daughter. “Come back this way.”
I called again, to her brother doing water somersaults nearby, “Tell her to come in.” Neither of them could hear me over their own splashing.
Bob, bob, bob. A foot or two farther. Pop!
“HEY.”
Bob, bob.
She went down. She didn’t pop up.
She stayed down. This is what all the articles and safety courses tell you about drowning, that you’ll expect it to happen with thrashing and screams, but it doesn’t. It’s a quiet slip under the surface.
I looked at the lifeguard, saw his glasses aimed at the surface where my child had gone down. He didn’t move. Wherever his real eyes were looking, he didn’t see her.
I leapt off the step into the pool. “GET HER,” I yelled. To the lifeguard? To myself? My hat flew off and spun away, upside down on the water’s surface.
I yanked my daughter up by the armpits. She choked and gagged, water streaming from her nose. In a second, the lifeguard was in the water next to me. “I thought she was playing,” he said, his voice quavering. I still couldn’t see his eyes, but I could see from his quaking hands, his rapid swallowing, that this boy, this other mother’s baby, felt shaken by guilt and fear. He’d made a mistake. Anyone might have made the same one. It could have turned out so differently.
* * *
A few weeks later, I sat on a folding chair at a table near the pool, surrounded by other women waiting for our children to finish swim team practice. My daughter had returned to the water happily, her incident long forgotten (by her, not by me). We watched the kids do their laps, helped along every few feet by their coaches. In this instance, there really was no need to keep our eyes on them—the coach-to-kid ratio was absurdly high—although I didn’t want to turn too far away.
So I sat and watched the little swimmers as people came and went in the seats next to me, starting conversations I tuned out. I couldn’t concentrate.
* * *
“I can’t believe it,” someone said.
Did somebody get a tragic haircut? Did a toddler pee in the kiddie pool? Did someone forget to salt their chicken salad? What’s so unbelievable now? I pulled out my phone to scroll through messages. I opened a new email.
I’m sorry, the subject line read.
It was from one of my best old friends, a guy I always called “the brother I never had.” (“You have a brother, dummy,” he’d say. “But he’s the brother I do have, and you’re the brother I didn’t have,” I’d reply.) We’d fought over something recently, the kind of fight where each party thinks they’re in the right and that they’ll make the other understand if they just type enough words to make themselves clear, but everyone only gets more hurt and offended.
I assumed I’m sorry was the beginning of his apology. But he wasn’t writing to apologize. I think we should get a platonic divorce, he wrote.
* * *
Whatever unimportant thing we’d fought about in the beginning—some opinion we thought we’d shared but didn’t ultimately see eye-to-eye on—had long since stopped being the point of our argument. Now we were arguing over our arguing: who was being unfair, who was being presumptuous and bossy. He wanted to take a month and not talk, maybe longer, because our last conversation had been so unpleasant.
“If you feel bad about yourself, that’s not my fault,” I had yelled. “Why do you project your problems onto me?”
“I’m sick of this. You’re a vortex. You keep dragging me back into the same conversation.”
“I AM NOT A VORTEX. I AM A PERSON. AND YOU’RE THE ONE WHO CALLED ME.”
Had it really come to this? Could toddler-style squabbles actually lead to adult friend breakups?
* * *
Meanwhile, the conversation going on around me was picking up volume.
“I heard it was a while before anyone found them.”
“It must have happened instantly.”
* * *
I looked up, confused. “What?”
“Sarah’s dad,” another mom said, pointing at the herd of children in swimsuits huddled by the diving blocks for a motivational speech from their coaches. Sarah, the same age as my daughter, was not
among them.
Someone explained that Sarah’s dad—not a guy I knew personally, a friend of a friend—had been killed the night before in a plane crash. The adults were trying to piece together what had happened from fragments of testimony offered by people who had heard some part of the horror: A woman had come running through the pool gate by the snack stand yelling about a news story; Sarah’s dad’s best friend had screamed; another friend had gone over to Sarah’s house to sit with Sarah’s mom, who was, as you would imagine, in shock. From what everyone could gather, it seemed that after finishing up a business trip, Sarah’s dad had accepted a colleague’s offer of a lift home in a private plane. The plane flew into a mountain in the dark. No one knew why.
I listened to one conversation and held another in my hands.
* * *
“There was nothing anyone could do.”
I don’t know what else to say.
“Crushed.”
Crushed.
* * *
I felt dizzy, sick.
Anything could happen. A child could slide under the water. Treasured friendships could end. A dad could pack up his briefcase to go home to his kids and have his bones and heart smashed instead. All this could happen right here in our world. The big sheltering umbrellas. The little spandex swimsuits. The towels smelling of bleach. The metal gate around the outside to keep strangers out and swimmers in. The cloudless sky.
I must have looked pale. One of the women at the table asked, “Are you okay?”
“No,” I said.
* * *
My children were fine. My friendship was uncertain. (We’d resolve our issues over the next few months, retiring this argument to the Friend Fights Hall of Fame, although I didn’t know it then.) Sarah’s dad was not fine. Sarah’s dad was dead.
Should I have snapped right out of my funk over my fight with my friend when I heard about the death of this man? It did put things into perspective. “Look, neither of us is going anywhere. We’ll get over it,” I said to my friend the next time we talked, several weeks later, as the ice began to thaw between us. But I felt like the tragedy should have made the squabble disappear, and it didn’t. If anything, these two losses—so vastly different in scale—served to stake out two ends on the spectrum. That’s one of the strange things about life: Even when we know how much worse it could be, everyday pains are still pains. Losing our patience, our dignity, or our good graces with our loved ones hurts, even if that hurt is nowhere near the grand-scale pain of losing a person.
Sometimes people say things like, “You think it’s so sad that your kid is going off to college and your nest is empty? Well my cousin’s kid died.” Of course that’s more sad. But one person’s more-sad doesn’t cancel out another person’s less-sad. The fact that an earthquake took out a whole city block doesn’t make it hurt less when you trip and snap your ankle. Your neighbor’s cancer doesn’t make it painless for you to lose your job. Sure, it might help you cope if while boxing up your desk you said to yourself, “This professional setback is nowhere near as bad as a tumor.” That’s what I do when I imagine that whatever I’m going through is the lesser curse I got in exchange for some worse outcome I traded away. Bad things are still bad things, though, even if there are worse things. When you hear reports about the suffering people on our planet are going through—epidemics, drought, melting ice, corrupt elections, oppression—you might feel a little guilty for stewing over a disagreement with a family member or a roadblock at the office. But our personal concerns don’t go away just because the world is going up in flames on a global scale. That’s not how it works.
I once saw a flyer for a live storytelling series seeking performers. “No regular stories,” it read. “We’re looking for the extremes. The running of the bulls! The capsizing of the ship! The trauma you never thought you’d survive!” I like those stories—they’re interesting—but I don’t always want to hear about how someone faked their own death or escaped a fire. A sinking boat makes for a thrilling tale, but I’m also interested in how people deal with the sinking feeling of regret over an irretrievable harsh word.
That’s what I thought about by the pool that day: Both types of sinking happen all the time. The thought had been bubbling under the surface of my mind in some form or other for a while, I realized. As my children grew bigger and pulled away from me, the less I could protect them. The more you have, the more you have to lose, which means the further you get along in life, as people and places and things accumulate, the greater risk you’re taking just walking around every day. As a kid, I’d come to expect the unexpected—sometimes I faint, sometimes we move, nothing I could do about it—but now the range of “unexpected” seemed wider, scarier. One wrong step, and you could screw up something that could never be put right.
Was this the reason I’d started waking up with heart palpitations at 3 a.m.? Because I couldn’t stop wondering who would be okay tomorrow and who would not? None of us will be okay, in the end. The not-okay is coming for everyone. It’s a wonder we don’t all go around with our hands clamped, white-knuckled, around the wrists of our loved ones. A death grip, indeed.
We act like there are safe places. We behave as though if we work hard and acquire the right things, gain the right access, put ourselves in the right zones, we can arrive somewhere where danger can’t touch us—where anything can’t happen. We pretend that if we can identify someone else’s loss as greater than ours, we won’t lose. But nothing really guards our lives. Lifeguards don’t exist.
A Letter to the Type A Person in Distress
Hi.
Put down your phone and Post-it notes for just a minute. I know you’re busy rewriting your to-do list in your head, first chronologically and then in order of task magnitude and then visually like a pie chart with different colors for each slice of pie according to how long each thing will take. It takes concentration to keep the precision-tuned gears of your world-machine clicking along, but you can spare a minute.
I just want to tell you that your outfit today is spot-on. Are you wearing seasonal socks? Damn right you are. The rumpled, under-the-elbow half-roll of your sleeves didn’t happen by accident, either, and I appreciate that. You looked up a video tutorial online so you could do it right, I bet. And before you closed out the video, I bet you left it a review. You look like everyone’s favorite fun professor who’s also in a band on the side and knows how to arrange a handful of flowers in a jar. That’s a good look for you.
Not only does everyone find your appearance neat and visually pleasing, we all admire your words, too. Your emails dance on the line between eloquence and candor. You have a real sense for when to go with bullet points instead of paragraphs, and you’re always handy with an emoji or a culturally relevant movie clip. Some say there’s no place for exclamation points anymore, but you intuit precisely when to employ that unexpected little punch, and it always delights your readers. The note you sent to the whole neighborhood about the raccoon problem? Clear, to the point, but not bossy. The part where you called the raccoons “masked banditos with a taste for burritos” was a riot. Bravo.
The dinner you made for your book club last night had to have taken you hours to plan and execute. I know you left the packaging from the grocery store sponge cake out on the counter because you wanted to make your friends a strawberry shortcake they would love but you also didn’t want anyone to roll their eyes and call you a perfectionist for making everything from scratch. Did you use a vegetable peeler or a paring knife to get the sides of the cucumber to look like green-and-white peppermint stripes? That was a whimsical touch and really added depth to the colors in the salad. People don’t think about that sort of thing enough. You do.
* * *
I want you to know that I see your face when someone parks over the line in a crowded parking lot and inadvertently wastes a whole second spot, and I know your scowl isn’t really about the parking space. When you stop to pick up trash on a sidewalk or put the to-go menus back in
their rack at the sandwich shop, you wish you didn’t have to. You’d rather everyone else pull their weight, but if they won’t, you will. You like having work to do, but it’s hard for you to work alongside people who cut corners and blow off responsibilities. It feels like they’re doing these things to spite you, like they slack off because they know you’ll catch whatever balls they drop. You can’t fathom how they can feel okay letting so many things remain half done. This leaves you in a constant state of simmering, low-grade resentment, and you feel guilty about occasionally having the urge to throw your laptop at someone’s face. You wish these things didn’t get to you. You want to live and let live.
And I won’t tell anybody, but I know you didn’t really want to make costumes for the community center’s spring musical. You don’t even like Mary Poppins. But you filled out the feedback form after last year’s play, because that’s what you’re supposed to do if you attend, fill out the feedback form. And because you were so detailed—that’s what you should do, you should give details if someone asks for your input—they asked you to do the costumes this year; and you said yes, because that’s what you’re supposed to do, you’re supposed to give help when someone asks for it—and now you’re stuck trying to figure out how to make Mary’s dress fit around the cast on the young actor’s broken arm and you want the play to be great but you wish you hadn’t said yes and you’re mad that no one else said yes and that the same people always end up doing everything.
You wish you could take a break from carrying everything. It’s all so heavy. You are so fucking tired.
I know.
I Miss You When I Blink Page 13
