– Diary entry –
I am writing from somewhere in Pennsylvania. Southwest corner. A motel off the highway. Our room overlooks the parking lot, and if I peek out from behind the stiff beige curtains, I can see people milling about under the fluorescent lights. It’s the kind of place where people mill about. I have the emotional bends again. Too much has happened, and so fast, and now I am in southwest Pennsylvania, and my husband is enjoying a defiant sleep amid the little packets of chips and candies he bought from the vending machine down the hall. Dinner. He is angry at me for not being a good sport. I thought I was putting up a convincing front – hurray, a new adventure! – but I guess not.
Now that I look back, it was like we were waiting for something to happen. Like Nick and I were sitting under a giant soundproof, windproof jar, and then the jar fell over and – there was something to do.
Two weeks ago, we are in our usual unemployed state: partly dressed, thick with boredom, getting ready to eat a silent breakfast that we’ll stretch over the reading of the newspaper in its entirety. We even read the auto supplement now.
Nick’s cell phone rings at ten a.m., and I can tell by his voice that it is Go. He sounds springy, boyish, the way he always does when he talks to her. The way he used to sound with me.
He heads into the bedroom and shuts the door, leaving me holding two freshly made eggs Benedicts quivering on the plates. I place his on the table and sit opposite, wondering if I should wait to eat. If it were me, I think, I would come back out and tell him to eat, or else I’d raise a finger: Just one minute. I’d be aware of the other person, my spouse, left in the kitchen with plates of eggs. I feel bad that I was thinking that. Because soon I can hear worried murmurs and upset exclamations and gentle reassurances from behind the door, and I begin wondering if Go is having some back-home boy troubles. Go has a lot of breakups. Even the ones that she instigates require much handholding and goo-gawing from Nick.
So I have my usual Poor Go face on when Nick emerges, the eggs hardened on the plate. I see him and know this isn’t just a Go problem.
‘My mom,’ he starts, and sits down. ‘Shit. My mom has cancer. Stage four, and it’s spread to the liver and bones. Which is bad, which is …’
He puts his face in his hands, and I go over and put my arms around him. When he looks up, he is dry-eyed. Calm. I’ve never seen my husband cry.
‘It’s too much for Go, on top of my dad’s Alzheimer’s.’
‘Alzheimer’s? Alzheimer’s? Since when?’
‘Well, a while. At first they thought it was some sort of early dementia. But it’s more, it’s worse.’
I think, immediately, that there is something wrong with us, perhaps unfixable, if my husband wouldn’t think to tell me this. Sometimes I feel it’s his personal game, that he’s in some sort of undeclared contest for impenetrability. ‘Why didn’t you say anything to me?’
‘My dad isn’t someone I like to talk about that much.’
‘But still—’
‘Amy. Please.’ He has that look, like I am being unreasonable, like he is so sure I am being unreasonable that I wonder if I am.
‘But now. Go says with my mom, she’ll need chemo but … she’ll be really, really sick. She’ll need help.’
‘Should we start looking for in-home care for her? A nurse?’
‘She doesn’t have that kind of insurance.’
He stares at me, arms crossed, and I know what he is daring: daring me to offer to pay, and we can’t pay, because I’ve given my money to my parents.
‘Okay, then, babe,’ I say. ‘What do you want to do?’
We stand across from each other, a showdown, as if we are in a fight and I haven’t been informed. I reach out to touch him, and he just looks at my hand.
‘We have to move back.’ He glares at me, opening his eyes wide. He flicks his fingers out as if he is trying to rid himself of something sticky. ‘We’ll take a year and we’ll go do the right thing. We have no jobs, we have no money, there’s nothing holding us here. Even you have to admit that.’
‘Even I have to?’ As if I am already being resistant. I feel a burst of anger that I swallow.
‘This is what we’re going to do. We are going to do the right thing. We are going to help my parents for once.’
Of course that’s what we have to do, and of course if he had presented the problem to me like I wasn’t his enemy, that’s what I would have said. But he came out of the door already treating me like a problem that needed to be dealt with. I was the bitter voice that needed to be squelched.
My husband is the most loyal man on the planet until he’s not. I’ve seen his eyes literally turn a shade darker when he’s felt betrayed by a friend, even a dear longtime friend, and then the friend is never mentioned again. He looked at me then like I was an object to be jettisoned if necessary. It actually chilled me, that look.
So it is decided that quickly, with that little of a debate: We are leaving New York. We are going to Missouri. To a house in Missouri by the river where we will live. It is surreal, and I’m not one to misuse the word surreal.
I know it will be okay. It’s just so far from what I pictured. When I pictured my life. That’s not to say bad, just … If you gave me a million guesses where life would take me, I wouldn’t have guessed. I find that alarming.
The packing of the U-Haul is a mini-tragedy: Nick, determined and guilty, his mouth a tight line, getting it done, unwilling to look at me. The U-Haul sits for hours, blocking traffic on our little street, blinking its hazard lights – danger, danger, danger – as Nick goes up and down the stairs, a one-man assembly line, carrying boxes of books, boxes of kitchen supplies, chairs, side tables. We are bringing our vintage sofa – our broad old chesterfield that Dad calls our pet, we dote on it so much. It is to be the last thing we pack, a sweaty, awkward two-person job. Getting the massive thing down our stairs (Hold on, I need to rest. Lift to the right. Hold on, you’re going too fast. Watch out, my fingers my fingers!) will be its own much-needed team-building exercise. After the sofa, we’ll pick up lunch from the corner deli, bagel sandwiches to eat on the road. Cold soda.
Nick lets me keep the sofa, but our other big items are staying in New York. One of Nick’s friends will inherit the bed; the guy will come by later to our empty home – nothing but dust and cable cords left – and take the bed, and then he’ll live his New York life in our New York bed, eating two a.m. Chinese food and having lazy-condomed sex with tipsy, brass-mouthed girls who work in PR. (Our home itself will be taken over by a noisy couple, hubby-wife lawyers who are shamelessly, brazenly gleeful at this buyers’-market deal. I hate them.)
I carry one load for every four that Nick grunts down. I move slowly, shuffling, like my bones hurt, a feverish delicacy descending on me. Everything does hurt. Nick buzzes past me, going up or down, and throws his frown at me, snaps, ‘You okay?’ and keeps moving before I answer, leaving me gaping, a cartoon with a black mouth-hole. I am not okay. I will be okay, but right now I am not okay. I want my husband to put his arms around me, to console me, to baby me a little bit. Just for a second.
Inside the back of the truck, he fusses with the boxes. Nick prides himself on his packing skills: He is (was) the loader of the dishwasher, the packer of the holiday bags. But by hour three, it is clear that we’ve sold or gifted too many of our belongings. The U-Haul’s massive cavern is only half full. It gives me my single satisfaction of the day, that hot, mean satisfaction right in the belly, like a nib of mercury. Good, I think. Good.
‘We can take the bed if you really want to,’ Nick says, looking past me down the street. ‘We have enough room.’
‘No, you promised it to Wally, Wally should have it,’ I say primly.
I was wrong. Just say: I was wrong, I’m sorry, let’s take the bed. You should have your old, comforting bed in this new place. Smile at me and be nice to me. Today, be nice to me.
Nick blows out a sigh. ‘Okay, if that’s what you want. Amy? Is it?’ He stands, slightly breathless, leaning on a stack of boxes, the top one with Magic Marker scrawl: Amy Clothes Winter. ‘This is the last I’ll hear about the bed, Amy? Because I’m offering right now. I’m happy to pack the bed for you.’
‘How gracious of you,’ I say, just a whiff of breath, the way I say most retorts: a puff of perfume from a rank atomizer. I am a coward. I don’t like confrontation. I pick up a box and start toward the truck.
‘What did you say?’
I shake my head at him. I don’t want him to see me cry, because it will make him more angry.
Ten minutes later, the stairs are pounding – bang! bang! bang! Nick is dragging our sofa down by himself.
I can’t even look behind me as we leave New York, because the truck has no back window. In the side mirror, I track the skyline (the receding skyline – isn’t that what they write in Victorian novels where the doomed heroine is forced to leave her ancestral home?), but none of the good buildings – not the Chrysler or the Empire State or the Flatiron, they never appear in that little shining rectangle.
My parents dropped by the night before, presented us with the family cuckoo clock that I’d loved as a child, and the three of us cried and hugged as Nick shuffled his hands in his pockets and promised to take care of me.
He promised to take care of me, and yet I feel afraid. I feel like something is going wrong, very wrong, and that it will get even worse. I don’t feel like Nick’s wife. I don’t feel like a person at all: I am something to be loaded and unloaded, like a sofa or a cuckoo clock. I am something to be tossed into a junkyard, thrown into the river, if necessary. I don’t feel real anymore. I feel like I could disappear.