By
Suzanne Cheavens
I am dying, and this is what I am thinking. It is entirely different than what those gathered around my bed believe. Far from it.
The flicker of a smile they are sure is for the fat, squirming infant dangled within my dimming sight, is born from the memory of a sun-drenched afternoon in another bed, long ago, with a lover whose deft and fanciful caresses left me sodden with bliss. What made me think of that as I lie dying is the warmth of the sun on my sunken, ancient cheek. My daughter dearest, who came to know me better even than my dead husband, rest his soul, wheeled my death bed into the southwest corner of my room, the corner where the cacti my children had given to me through the years had grown from prickly little nubbins into the dangerous colossi they are now. They serve as massive, spiny sentinels that keep the number of audience members down as I live my final act, my act of exiting.
The sun feels good. Not good enough to try to muster the strength to see another luminous afternoon, but good enough, certainly, to call to mind sweet Richard, who was kind enough to declare, in those years when I plodded through the desert of my marriage between first child and empty nest, that I possessed what he said was “a potent aroma of desirability.” Whatever that meant. Richard spoke better without words and for that I was grateful.
While my dead husband, rest his soul, was a veritable effluvia of fact, opinion and words, words, words, Richard listened like a student to the breathless musings I saved for those stolen afternoons after I wrestled the clamor of my household duties into submission and walked unhurriedly along the path through the thick woods that separated our two houses. We sat on wicker chairs near the unruly rose bushes he adored and whose aroma wafted into the open windows if the breeze was just right. A glass of red wine and a shared drag or two from one of his thin, hand-rolled cigarettes loosened my joints and erased whoever it was who lived in my shoes. In his dusty world of corduroy trousers and woolen sweaters, socks with holes at the heels and piles of books, serious, non-fiction stuff, he wondered who I was. And I drew him near and told him stories I didn’t know I could tell. Like how my father was Einstein and my mother was a French whore. Or the time a pop star, upon gazing at me at a giddy backstage party, doffed his trademark tweed cap and pressed it into my hands before being swept along by his entourage and adoring admirers. Or how I spent my childhood years in Brooklyn. It didn’t matter that he did not believe me, and he was right not to. He loved the inventions of my head, he said. I loved them, too, because in that book of fantasies, I could be free of the one story I was reluctantly destined to write – my own.
-They’re better than real life, I declared.
-Maybe so, he shrugged. But maybe not. Life has an infinite number of possibilities. A single choice shifts everything else that follows. Like being here.
The certainty in his voice was reassuring and so I tried to imagine that I could feel my life ripple before me each time I followed the path to his house. The drift of waves carried me along easily and resistance never crossed my mind. Some decisions are more right than others. Only Richard and my children seemed right to me. Like they belonged in my life.
And now, as I lie dying so many decades later, it is the sun’s kiss that pulls my dry lips into a smile. The body that once crackled like a downed power line in a thunderstorm under the confident touch of my lover on the other side of the woods has become deflated and powdery to the touch. Cold seeps easily into the bones of the very old, but through the window the afternoon sun poured heat around the giant, looming cacti and found my papery cheek in the mound of pillows my daughter placed under my head.
The sun and I have always been fond of one another. The only time I ever had my head examined, (my dead husband’s suggestion, but not such a bad one, really) the therapist, who was kind and soft-spoken and quite adept at prying me open, asked me what it was I focused on when the gloom of impending winter left me disconsolate. I did not hesitate.
-The sun. I talk to the sun.
She arched one long eyebrow and smiled, but she was hard to rattle, try as I might.
-Quite the famous buddy you got there, she said.
-Yeah. I figure the sun will never go away, will always be there. Like a good friend. I appreciate that in a person.
-Or a star, my therapist said. I liked that she could make me laugh.
I never told my stories to that woman – her name was Brenda, or Linda. Time muddles best with people’s names. – and once we deduced the reason for my occasional surges of bleak, uncontrollable despair, I never again needed to den up in her little office to offer myself to her sleuthing.
–Get plenty of sun, she said. Every day. I did. Even as I lie dying, I still am.
Now the sun is granting me a wish I’d made long ago, before marriage, before children. I wished to be caressed by the sun as I died. I was once afraid of dying but in one of my longer talks with the sun, I asked if it could accompany me as I passed into the wild unknown. And what do you know. I smiled enough to cause a susurrus of murmurs from those encircling my bed. Thank you, old friend, I thought.
-Baby Chloe, your Nana loves you.
Fine. Let them think what it is they need to think. The child’s mother responded softly to what she thought was my appreciation and cooed in her baby’s damp neck – my great, great granddaughter I think – and let a fat tear drop on the sleeve of my flannel shirt.
Daughter dearest, who really does know me best, clad me in this old rag of a shirt because she has always known that I love the way flannel feels against my skin. Cool and warm, all at once. When she was a girl she gave me a pair of pink and blue plaid flannel pajama bottoms for Christmas. I wore them until they were little more than shreds and would have worn them into invisibility had not my dead husband, rest his soul, not ripped them up and relegated them to the rag bag. When I found the scraps as I went about my chores, I sat on the kitchen floor and sobbed into the soft remains. He could not have known how a daughter’s well-chosen gift can serve as an unspoken pact, an implicit understanding that yes, my mother, we are two along the long line of women, of daughters and mothers and grandmothers, who stretch into the past and the future and hold the destiny of the world in our hands, our wombs, our kitchens. The unspoken words of women will forever echo through the long hallways of time.
My dead husband, who preceded me to this point by nearly twenty years, meant well, I know. As I lie dying, I can’t help but think about him, too. James. He fathered first a daughter and then a son, the results of acts of off-hand and hurried congress that stood out only because they produced the children I’d always wanted. He worked hard and gathered respectable wealth, and provided for us all we could ever want. And yet he was an island in the middle of the sea of his family. We could swim to his shores and acquire some morsel of his self but then we would be cast off to navigate our own way through the tempest of our separate lives. Like a child – like our own children -- I craved his attention. I was a smitten young bride, and mistook his ponderous lectures and never-ending advice as affection. I once took for fact that lovemaking devoid of kisses and endearments was how all couples enjoined until Richard first made me tremble like a leaf.
But time teaches us well, if we are paying attention, and eventually son, daughter and wife found emotional comfort and succor in our own world. To my daughter, I was as transparent as I was to Richard. And like Richard she accepted and loved what was exposed, stories and all. My son grew to be a good man, kind and strong, who remained close to his sister and his mother, but in his grey eyes – eyes like his father’s – dwelled a heart bereft. My resilient daughter withstood her father’s insularity, while my son lived in a torpid state of dull grief.
When James released his stubborn grasp on life, his mind shrunken and vacant with the ravages of dementia (but his tongue never still), we three went to a favorite roadhouse, slid into a dark, wooden booth in the back of the low-lit room and feasted in the man’s honor. Each of us that night was unburdened of the need for his approval, his blessing, his inevitable discourses quieted at last. We drank a river of red wine, lingered over steaks and ordered all the desserts on the menu. We told no stories and shed no tears. Sadness had become a way of life. To be free of it meant a new journey for each of us.
Richard moved away a year after I became a widow. His brother, the only family he had, became too ill to care for himself, so dutiful Richard packed away his belongings and left for California. He tidied up the house as if for the winter between summer vacations, flinging sheets over his furniture, draining the pipes, emptying the refrigerator of perishables. He paid the utility bills for six months, fully expecting he would have buried his ailing brother by that time. I knew grief then, for I knew I would never follow him, and that he would never return.
The walk through the woods quickened my heart to the very end. Even after his house burned to the ground, I never let the path between our homes be reclaimed by the woods. No matter the hour, my feet would keep true to the path. Like some haunted specter, my grey hair loose around my shoulders, I paced along the ribbon of loam to the back gate of Richard’s ragged garden and stood looking into the dark, black eyes of the shuttered house, remembering the last time laughter left my open mouth.
When the house caught fire, I was woken from my sleep by the smell of smoke drifting by my open window. I quickly pulled on my clothes and raced barefoot through the woods. The house was engulfed and beautiful in its fiery death. Flames licked from every window and smoke wreathed the conflagration like a noose. The fire department blamed bad wiring for the blaze. I wept for Richard then and wept for him again when I heard of his own death not long after the fire. He died much as I would have imagined, a glass of fine burgundy at his side, a biography of John Adams fallen askew onto his lap, his slippered feet close to the hearth. It was his sick brother – the one Richard left to care for -- who let me know. The wheezing old man told me Richard was smiling and that a slip of paper with my name and phone number on it had slid from the book’s pages. –Let her know I’m gone, the note read. -Who are you, anyway, his brother asked? The phone line droned in reply as I wasted little time in letting myself be carried by the tsunami of loss along the wooded path to the rusted garden gate where I stood, willing my eyes to reconstruct every timber, every shingle, every creaking wooden floorboard so I could let myself wander from room to room and close each door. After that, I returned only to tend his roses.
We never called it love. Daughter swears Richard was the only man I ever loved, refusing to believe my protestations to the contrary. Even though she does know me best, she’s completely wrong about this.
-Not love, dearest. He was a mirror and I saw my own possibilities when I looked into the reflection. That’s what I loved. The possibilities.
-No, no, no, she laughed.
The sun burrowed into my cheek and penetrated the thin sheath of my closed eyelids. So bright. So very bright and warm. My breath is shallow and slow and my body as empty as a glove. It has come to this, an elaborate show in shadow and dream, memories dancing like wraiths, teasing me from behind moving curtains of shimmering, diaphanous light.
-No, no, no, mama, I heard her say. Or was she saying go? I gave her hand a squeeze with all my might and chuckled.
Exit.
“Like being touched with a wing,” my daughter told everyone waiting in the hallway for my demise. “Mama brushed her fingers across the back of my hand and sighed out loud and that’s it. And she’s smiling.”