ELIZA, LIKE
A LIGHT
“If the sun ever fails, hold fireflies
in your hand for warmth.”
Eliza cupped the greeting card in her
hand as she might hold an antique, demi-tasse cup, a pink and cream piece of
coral, a fledging chickadee, rescued from a cat.
“If the sun ever fails,” she said,
unaware of the woman beside her looking at baptismal cards, “hold fireflies in
your hand for warmth.”
“That’s lovely,” the woman said—her
singular face half-holding a smile.
Eliza flinched and turned.
“I’m sorry,” the woman said, “I didn’t
mean to…I…the words are lovely.”
Composing herself, glancing back at
the card, Eliza said, “It is isn’t it? Lovely, I mean.”
Smiling crookedly, the woman nodded.
Her thick red hair was pulled back. Eliza no longer envied hair, but she
noticed the earrings—tiny gold crosses. Perhaps she should know the woman,
Eliza thought, experiencing what Dr. Spitzer called “the illusion of
familiarity.”
“Your disease is so present to you,”
Eliza heard his nasal, New York accent, “that you feel everyone else is
thinking about it too. So total strangers will look familiar, like an old
friend.”
Before going to the counter, the woman
said, “Well, God bless you,” as if Eliza had sneezed.
Eliza thought how odd it was to be in
a Logos bookstore. She was a church goer, a devout Episcopalian—but she never
frequented religious bookstores. She remembered walking down Chapel Street
through the unexpected warmth of the October afternoon. She remembered, with
amusement, inserting plastic in the Yankee 24 machine in exchange for $60. And
she remembered visiting the florist to send Edward Adams flowers for tomorrow
night’s dinner party. But, for the life of her, she couldn’t remember entering
the bookstore.
It must have been the card. Eliza had
grown to expect reasonableness from serendipity. “For anyone walking around
with a time bomb inside,” Dr. Spitzer’s voice echoed in her mind, “things that
‘just happen’ no longer seem random.”
Obviously, the card had called her
into this shop. That much was clear. Everything else would make sense
eventually.
HOLD FIREFLIES IN YOU HAND FOR WARMTH,
Eliza repeated to herself. The card was enclosed in a plastic bag to protect
the fine paper from finger spots. Eliza imagined slipping off the covering to
hold the card against her face. The bag reminded her of flash-frozen
vegetables, boiling in the bag; herbs from Derosas’, done up and sealed;
packages of Special Bull Dog Blend she bought for Walter at the Yale Pipe Shop;
the tuna sandwiches she once fixed for Bobbi’s lunch, always despairing of
getting the zip lock closed; bags of cat-eye marbles her brothers carried
around as children. But most of all Eliza was reminded of Bobby Delgato’s body
bag.
Three months before, in late July,
Charles and Eliza came back from Cape Cod for a Treatment. Barbara—young,
attractive, well-known to Eliza—had been her nurse that day. Barbara was
especially cheerful. Eliza debated whether that meant that Barbara’s on-again,
off-again affair with the resident from Kentucky was going well or whether she
read the lab reports and the cheerfulness was obligatory. It was not a
mean-spirited wondering—Eliza was well past all that. She was flying on
automatic pilot, remembering Dr. Spitzer’s wisdom that those around the
terminally ill are ‘always dealing with their own psychic tension.’
Back in her clothes, exhausted from
dressing, Eliza reflected Barbara’s mood. “Another day, another dollar,” she
said. Barbara’s laugh was giddy, almost too silly for a nurse. (It must be
love,) Eliza told herself.
“Oh, Mrs. Cummings,” the young woman
said, “you’re always my brightest patient.”
“Radiology’s super-star,” Eliza
answered. “The darling of the cat-scan crowd.”
Barbara disappeared behind the
curtain, laughing softly. Not the first time that’s worked, Eliza told
herself, and added, without anger, but perhaps the last.
While Eliza was at the hospital,
Charles had run by his office to ‘check up on things’. When he returned, he
would be wearing his best picking-up smile. Invariably as afternoon, he’d say,
“we beat them again, didn’t we Cookie?” His eyes would be beagle said.
Late at night, roused by nausea, Eliza
often sipped Perrier in bed, watching Charles. She eventually decided the
sadness was as much in her looking as in his eyes. Dear Charles, sleeping so
soundly, with what dreams? What dreams?
That day the routine had moved quickly
and Eliza had a half-an-hour before Charles returned. Keyed up, she wandered
the familiar basement of Yale-New Haven Hospital, walking off nervous energy,
wondering when the nausea would come. Eliza no more resented the side effects
of her illness than the sadness in Charles’ eyes. Nausea anticipated was simply
less inconvenient.
Opening a door she thought would lead,
underground, to the Memorial Unit, Eliza found herself with a naked young man,
encased in a plastic bag, lying on a table. She resisted the instinct to flee
and stared instead. His face—pale, all the way to yellow—had a two days growth
of beard. Hair and nails, Eliza remembered, had life of their own. And he was
still. There was no movement at all. None.
Robert Delgatto, 22, was dead and
bagged, like so many egg shells, milk cartons, bean cans, wet paper towels,
coffee grounds, orange peels, wine bottles….Eliza read his name and age from a
small tag double-bound to his ankle with a gum band and an almost transparent
length of suture.
Fully aware of the extravagance of her
invasion, Eliza circled Robert, looking for wounds. She did not see the neatly
closed incision under his hairline where the pathologist had found an
inexplicably ruptured artery in the young man’s brain. Robert’s brain was now
room temperature—62 degrees Fahrenheit. Eliza shivered from the cold, blaming
the chill on her audacity.
She touched Robert’s left arm through
his body bag. He was reptilian, enclosed in a plastic skin not unlike that of a
lizard—but not porous. Not porous.
All that flooded back to Eliza as the
woman with red hair left Logos, clutching her baptismal card, thinking of new
life, a baby. Eliza held the IF THE SUN EVER FAILS card as she would hold
Sunday morning’s only egg. She wondered about composing a letter requesting
that she never be in a body bag. Dying did not horrify her any more. “Dying is
like a dinner party, just a part of life,” she had said in her group a
year-and-a-half before and recently read the quote in Dr. Spitzer’s latest
book. Death held no terror: what happened to her body did.
Charles never wanted to hear Eliza’s
concerns about embalming, body bags, someone worrying about which wig looked
most natural. In the first few months after her diagnosis, Eliza often dreamed
about her blood being drained after her death. In those dreams she watched her
blood—flame red, monotonous—being pumped away.
“What will they do with my blood?” she
once asked Charles, after a graceful private dinner and a lot of Chablis.
“Oh, Cookie,” he said, his voice laced
with pain and sadness, “oh, Cookie….”
Eliza never asked again. But often,
long before dawn—vision swimming, stomach churning, head pounding—she wondered.
At inappropriate times, Charles would
ask, “we’re winning aren’t we Cookie?” In those moments Eliza would see him as
something inexplicable—a monolith on Easter Island, a ‘tertium quid’, some
unnecessary genetic experiment—but invariably, she would smile and nod.
“Today, tomorrow, always,” she would
say.
Eliza took five of the cards. That was
just enough, though she didn’t know it then. She carried them to the counter
and paid in cash--$1.33 each and 7% for the governor. That’s what Bobbi always
said when they shopped together. “Seven percent for the governor.” Eliza
wondered how many times she had heard her daughter say that? Where had Bobbi
heard it? Whether she would always say it.
“Lovely cards,” the clerk said as
Eliza looked through her purse. “Lovely.”
On the cards a couple ice skated,
properly old fashioned. The man, dark and tall, was not unlike Robert Delgatto.
The woman, lithe and fair, could have been her daughter, Bobbi. He wore a
mourning coat and she had a long, petticoated skirt, with a hat like ever one’s
grandmother wore in her youth. Both skated on their right foot, left legs
lifted, having just pushed off. The man’s left arm held the young woman, and
both stared, transfixed, at something glowing in her cupped, gloved hands.
The skaters reminded Eliza of the
skaters on her mother’s sturdy kitchen salt and pepper shakers. The man had
been pepper and the girl salt. Eliza, as a child wondered if men were ‘peppery’
and women like salt—like the earth, like Lot’s wife, like the Truth? Or could
it had been reversed by changing the shakers’ tops?
On the front of the card, above the
skaters, it said, in simple calligraphy: IF THE SUN EVER FAILS.
Inside, the same script said: HOLD
FIREFLIES IN YOUR HAND FOR WARMTH.
Eliza pushed her money—a five-dollar
bill, two ones, two dimes and four pennies, warm from the bottom of her
purse—across the counter.
The young clerk after ringing up the
sale. He was close-shaven, short-haired, and as earnest as the Book of
Proverbs. “Well, God bless you,” he said, looking at Eliza’s money, “correct
change and 7% for the governor.”
After arriving home an hour beyond her
energy, Eliza rested, dropping in and out of sleep.
Dreams, for over a year, had come
fitfully, in images of doors of rude wood; frogs and flying squirrels; blood
red flowers; strange, athletic, girlish men and wizened old crones. She walked
wooded paths with a crippled dwarf carrying a basket of fresh pears. She found
herself submerged to the lips in pale, yellow fluid full of shrimp like
creatures who nibbled painlessly at her body. She stood on dizzying heights,
looking down at incredible vistas full of pomegranate and pine, bristling with
life, a golden monkey on every branch, waiting for her to jump out and be
welcomed by those dream trees. She sat alone in a dark room, knowing that
several feet in front of her, humming with life, was a mythical tree
trunk—circles of age after age spinning in the darkness like a child’s top.
Those memories lasted only until she was fully awake. Her dream life was
encased in plastic, sealed and set aside.
But she would dream and remember, once more before becoming a dream
herself.
At 6:12 p.m., between fits and starts
of sleeping, the ferrets gnawing away at her innards propelled Eliza to bolt
upright in bed. Sudden tears rolled down her cheeks. Through the haze she saw
her room and tried to gather it all in, holding mementos like much loved things
to be left behind for a voyage.
She focused on a photograph above her
chest of drawers. Charles and Bobbi, sitting in a dingy, smiling up at the
camera, about to embark. She could not remember the context—where they were
rowing to or why—but she could remember feeling the dock beneath her bare feet
as she moved, the sun on her back, to take the picture. A long-forgotten
splinter returned to her right big toe. A gull rose with the wind, falling to
skim the surface of the sea. It was sunset. Bobbi was eight and had been asking
her questions about periods and having babies when Charles arrived to announce
the improbable boat ride to God remembers where.
Just as on the dock, Charles came
again.
“You’re crying, Cookie,” he said.
“Yes, crying…” she answered, beyond lying.
“Does it hurt, Cookie?” he asked,
sitting on the edge of the bed, rocking her like the sea beneath a rowboat.
“Where does it hurt?”
“Nowhere,” she said, meaning it, then
adding: “everywhere…and especially here.” She touched her chest.
“Are you up for the party tomorrow
night?” Charles asked.
Eliza tried to remember which party he
meant. In her mind a moth was working it’s way out of a cocoon, breaking
through, seeking air and space and life itself.
“I’ll call Edward and tell him we
can’t come,” Charles was saying, just as the moth’s wings, still wet and
fragile, were spreading in her mind. The memory of Edward’s face intruded into
her fantasy. Edward Adam’s rough, handsome New England face was creased with
sun and pain lines from a chronic back problem. But his face was always open
and inviting to Eliza, framed in a doorway, welcoming her into his home. Eliza
had for years called him “Edward, the Host.”
“No,” she said, “don’t call. I’ll be
fine. Just some sleep, some Spitzer wisdom about never missing a party, some
rest. I’ll be fine. We need to celebrate.”
How easily Charles would lunge at
hope. Before he left, he only smiled, kissing her forehead, but his eyes spoke
the words: “We’ve beat them again, Cookie.”
{Rondo relaxed. If her disease had a
name, Rondo was it, but names were not a part of her kind. She gathered up the
moth, just about to take wing, and the cocoon, now as flat and useless as a
forgotten question, and removed them from Eliza’s mind.
From near the rowboat picture above
the chest of drawers, Rondo had watched Charles kiss Eliza’s forehead. It was
easy now not to be inside Eliza, not to be working, not to be ‘connected’.
Rondo knew, in the way her kind ‘knew’ things, that soon there would be endless
space and the swimming torrents of oblivion. Rondo relaxed. It had been a long
time since Charles had kissed Eliza on the lips. Rondo, in the way of such
beings, did not ‘wonder’ why and could not have known, that unaware, Charles
feared the Darkness of Rondo could pass through the lips, the mouth, the
tongue.
Rondo had been there when the kisses
had been different. (It was years before Rondo was discovered by the cancer
doctors.) Rondo remembered—if memory could even obliquely describe what Rondo
did.
After Charles left, Rondo moved inside
to do her work so Eliza remembered the Logos bag.}
The first card was for Edward, the
Host.
“Goodbye, my friend,” she wrote. “You
have been hospitable to me—welcomed me and made me feel at home. I am glad that
the last of my nights in this life was spent at your party. Grieve not. Rejoice
and be glad.”
She signed it: “Eliza, like a light.”
Eliza stared unbelieving at the words
she had just wrote. She had not meant to write them and considered throwing the
card in the waste can. Then she remembered more of Mordechi Spitzer’s wisdom—“trust the moment when few are left.”
She addressed the envelope and took up another card.
“Dear Peter,” she wrote. Smiling, her
eyes closed in unacknowledged pain, Eliza pictured him as he would stand beside
her coffin. He was a short, gnome-like man, prone to mis-dress, whispy hair
never quite combed, smelling of the breath mints he always feared he needed.
His surplice would have wine stains and his white stole slightly uncentered.
Long after the funeral people would be so moved remembering how he rested his
hand on her casket as he spoke of Eliza’s life and the promise of God that they
would forget how halting, inconclusive, almost
inconsequential his words had been. He was not a speaker or a typical Episcopal
priest—something too blue-collar in him, too public school, too unpracticed.
But as Eliza imagined him there, beside her body, she was glad it would be him.
Trying to dampen her dry lips with a
dry tongue, she continued writing.
“You have the information about the
service. This is something else. This is about you and me and how much I
appreciate—how very much I appreciate—your ministry. Does that sound too
formal? I know you’ll understand and realize I mean your love, your care, your
cure.
“You know more about my disease than
anyone without a medical degree. You always listened, as so few would. I often
would feel guilty about burdening you with the gristly details. But what’s a
priest for after all?
“This, for what it’s worth is to, is
to say thank you and goodbye.”
She paused, wondering briefly if Fr.
Farmer was used to getting cards from the dead—if he would tell Marta, his
wife, about it. Would he keep the card and find it, years from now, when
packing to move to a new church? She smiled once more, amused at how the mind
kept on pushing forward, toward the future, like an art moves always straight
ahead, driven by instinct, climbing over rather than going around, as if
waiting to be found.
“Eliza,” she signed it, “like a
light.”
She delayed writing the last three
cards, shuffling through the papers on her desk. A bill from Macy’s. Form
letter from Taft School where Bobbi was a senior. A flier from the New Haven
Symphony describing upcoming performances and urging season’s tickets. Eliza
laughed out loud at that. She found a recipe from Mary Harkness for veal with
scallions.
“Why ever did Mary give me a recipe?”
Eliza said to herself. Eliza hadn’t cooked in three years, yet people kept
giving her recipes, as if time for Eliza stretched out over an endless
repetition of veal and scallion dinners and late nights around her table with
friends.
Mary Harkness and Eliza had known each
other for 20 or was it 22 years. They had raised children together, spent
weekends in Vermont together, played tennis endlessly at the Lawn Club. Mary
had been a friend B.C., ‘before cancer’—according to Dr. Spitzer’s life line
dating—who had never crossed over to A.D.—after death notice. The only thing
that Mary had ever said to her that revealed she had seen Eliza’s hair falling
out, her eyes sinking, her finger nails turning snow white, was this: “Eliza,
if I may ask, do you vomit a lot?”
Memory and amusement flooded back.
They were in Mary’s pantry—a year before or so—searching madly for bitters in
the liquor cabinet so a visiting British academic could have the drink he
ordered. Mary was a Vassar graduate, wife of the Dear of Arts and Sciences at
Yale, an equestrian of no small note, a patron of the opera. Friends with the
Bushes, Mary knew a nickname for the Vice President that would have made him
faint if called out at a State Dinner. She bought all her clothes at Talbot’s,
knew the ‘absolutely appropriate’ wine for any dish, had teeth so straight and
white they looked sculptured from Italian marble, and acted—as Bobbi once
remarked—“as if all bad taste was a personal affront.”
There was Mary, on her knees shifting
Grand Marnier and Bombay Gin bottles, looking for bitters that “I just know are
here somewhere,” stopping to look up at Eliza and ask, in her best Poughkeepsie,
Kennebunkport, New Haven accent: “Eliza, if I may ask, do you vomit a lot?”
At the time, Eliza had been so
shocked, and, in a disarmingly genuine way, so gratified that her disease had
been acknowledged, that she answered, truthfully. “Hardly ever,” she said,
“though it might be better if I did.”
They never found the bitters. The
Englishman settled for Port. And Mary never mentioned Eliza’s disease again.
Not once.
Eliza, had there been time, would have
considered what she might have said to keep Mary on that other side with her,
rather than have her drift, as some of her friends did, bourn by familiar
waves, back to the blank stares and denials of Before Cancer.
Eliza and Charles had agreed, early in
her illness, not to return invitations. But driving home from Mary’s dinner
party, warmed himself by Port, Charles had suggested the possibility of
something small—two other couples for a light meal. Eliza stuck to her guns.
“How would it look,” she asked him, knowing it would end the conversation, “if
you had to call from the emergency room and say, ‘I’m afraid there’s a problem
about tonight…you see, Cookie is dead.’” She had so completely captured the
inflection and cadence of his voice that Charles laughed, in spite of himself.
Eliza chuckled at the memory, rocking
in her chair.
Bobbi stuck her head in the door.
“What’s so funny?” she asked, delighted to find her mother laughing. She
stepped into the room—tall, slim, perfectly tanned. Eliza never understood how
Bobbi invariably maintained a mid-summer glow.
As Bobbi moved toward her, Eliza saw
her daughter, as if in mirrors, reflecting backwards. Bobbi was in diapers, in
tears on her first day of school, at her first violin recital, in the dingy at
the Cape, breathless and smelling of life after her first date, at the
spontaneous picnic Edward Adams had arranged on a deadly August Sunday five
years before because ‘nobody’s left in town.’ That day, with Bobbi almost 13,
Eliza had not yet felt the cold-chill, deep-down pain that took her to the
doctors…that day, Bobbi had worn her first two-piece bathing suit. Edward
Adams, looking up from the Sunday New York Times at Bobbi playing in the light
surf off Long Island Sound, said, “you know, Eliza, that child makes me long
for heterosexuality.”
Until then, Eliza had not noticed
Bobbi’s fierce femininity. She was still all elbows and knees and angles, but
she was powerfully sensual—tan, leggy, her thighs two inches apart at their
apex, newly forming breasts high and firm, like a runner’s. Form that moment,
Bobbi was a woman to Eliza, a peer, another female to comfort Eliza with
softness against the night.
Eliza turned and started to rise. An
unanticipated rush of pain forced her back into the chair. Bobbi saw it and her
face went blank. Her eyes never took on the Charles’ dog-like sadness. Bobbi’s
eyes were always calm, emotionless, and in their emptiness—compassionate. She crossed
the room in four effortless strides and enfolded Eliza in her arms.
Downstairs, Charles was on the phone
with Edward, assuring him Eliza would Eliza would be well enough to come to
dinner. He never knew how Bobbi and Eliza embraced and laughed through tears of
terrible loss. Such tenderness, perhaps, is best left to women alone.
OH, ALL OF IT…Eliza said, holding
Bobbi near, ALL OF IT IS SO FUNNY.
They were both crying, both laughing.
Eliza held her woman-child, hoping that someday it would occur to Bobbi to tell
a daughter of her own about that moment.
Eliza was happy. And tired. The
exhaustion came suddenly. Bobbi helped her into bed.
While Bobbi and Charles ate omelets with
bacon and mushrooms and Charles drank half-a-bottle of white wine downstairs,
Eliza slept and had her last dream.
A moth sat, wet-winged on the branch
of a myrtle tree. Eliza did not know it was a myrtle tree, but it was, to the
last detail. {Rondo knew well the myrtle, and it was Rondo who built this dream
knowing who Eliza was and from something else besides.}
The moth had never flown. It had just
emerged from the cocoon and was trembling in the breeze. Eliza reached out for
it and felt the tiny sticky feet on her hands. She held the moth up to the
dream-sun and saw, through wings of brown and amber, an indescribable light.
With the memory of that light clutched greedily to her soul, she slept in
darkness, sweet and utter.
“How about some breakfast, Cookie?”
Charles asked her when she awoke. The sun was so high that the room was in
mid-day shadows. Eliza was hopeless when it came to directions. But once, when
she was in the hospital full of pain and resentment, Father Farmer had visited
her and said, “this is an east facing room. Must be hard to sleep late here.
“Hard to sleep at all when you hurt
this bad,” Eliza had replied, bitterness burning from the inside out.
Peter coughed, sniffed, shifted in his
chair. “Well,” he said, slowly, uncertainly, bravely, “I guess there is that
too.”
Trying to calculate the time that day,
Eliza considered Peter’s words. ‘Strange’, she thought to herself, ‘but comfort
uninvited runs like a tide.’
To Charles she said, “what time is
it?”
“Almost noon,” he said, “time to be up
and at ‘em.”
Eliza started to say, ‘I’m not
hungry’, but seeing the look on his face, she said “toast and tea would be
nice. The herb kind.”
Charles touched her face—an
absent-minded reflex, but one that filled her up with love for him. She noticed
that his hand was clammy and rough and thought about his days ahead, not
waiting on her.
“You aren’t at work,” she said,
“where’s Rosa?”
He seemed to laugh. “Saturday,
Cookie,” is all he said leaving to brew her tea.
Slowly she roused herself. Nothing
wanted to move. {Rondo gathered darkness away like a blanket from a bed.} Eliza
felt the way extremely drunk people felt—as if her body was not quiet a part of
her, an alien thing. When she moved her tongue against her teeth, it stuck.
LIKE A HANGOVER, she thought, though she had had very few hangovers in her
life. The thought was intuitive. She had cards to write. And a party to go to
at Edward’s house.
The third card was finished when
Charles returned with tea. It was for Richard Lucas, as associate professor of
English, who Eliza knew from St. Stephen’s. She had assumed he was a southerner
until he told her, almost angrily, “I’m an Appalachian, Eliza. That’s not the
same. Believe me, not the same.”
Eliza considered sending the card to
Dr. Spitzer instead. She hardly knew Richard Lucas, doubted if anyone knew him
well. He was shrouded in impenetrable mountain mists. Eliza had spoken to him
at church two dozen times, mostly at social events. Even if the conversation
were but a sentence or two, he always made her feel refreshed. She knew he
would be at Edward’s dinner party—Richard and Johanna, his dark, serene wife. A
former nun someone had told her. Perfect, she had thought, a mountain monk and
an ex-nun, delighting herself with the observation.
A year and a half before, at some
parish pot-luck, she had found herself at one of the round tables near the edge
of the room with Richard and Johanna. While Richard was at the dessert table,
their two-year-old daughter started complaining to Johanna. Without missing a
word of conversation, Johanna lifted her sturdy daughter, undid her blouse and
nursed her. Eliza floated free in the moment, as if suspended in body
temperature water, her soul hovering, anticipating something more.
Later that same super, she and Richard
were alone at the table. Everyone else gathered around a piano, singing
favorite hymns. Richard looked at her and said, in a voice like a mountain stream,
“You’ve got cancer, haven’t you?”
Shocked to silence, she nodded.
“My father died last month,” Richard
said, moving scraps around his plate, no longer looking at Eliza. “I kissed his
mouth as he died. He was in a coma and his mouth was hanging open. When I
kissed him, I tasted his last breath.”
Eliza started. She did not hurt, but
she was afraid. Her soul floated free and listened.
“It tasted sweet,” he said, again
looking at her again. His eyes were wide, hazel and amazed. “I do swear it,” he
said, and she knew he said it for her—“it tasted sweet.”
“Dear Richard,” Eliza had written. “I
am kissing that mouth now. And it does, I swear it, taste sweet. Eliza.”
She sealed the envelope and addressed
it. Then slowly, with much care, she parted the damp flat and took out the
card. After her signature she wrote— “like a light.”
Before clearing her writing desk and
putting her life in order, Eliza wrote the last two cards. One for Charles and
one for Bobbi.
Eliza winced when she touched the fine
paper of the cards. It was important, she knew, to do it right. She nibbled a
piece of Pepperidge Farm thin-white toast, sipped cooling tea, knowing all the
while about first things being first.
“Dear Charles,” she wrote, “we did
beat them, you know. And I love you. Enough said. Cookie.”
After more consideration, she only
signed Bobbi’s card—“Love, Mother.”
IF THE SUN EVER FAILS…HOLD FIREFLIES
IN YOU HAND FOR WARMTH. That would be, Eliza knew, enough for Bobbi.
{From then, except for a laughing
moment in a doorway the next night, Rondo slept…though ‘sleeping’ is a poor
metaphor for what Rondo did. When what may to called ‘Eliza’s light’ went out,
Rondo would be fully present. A journey to begin.}
Eliza paid the Macy’s bill; wrote a
check for $25 to the YWCA, asking to be taken off the mailing list; sent three
month’s of pledge to St. Stephen’s and carefully balanced her checkbook. She
cancelled the New Yorker since Charles never read it, and informed the Lawn
Club that she would not attend the November membership luncheon. She threw away
all the circulars and junk mail of three-week accumulation. The notice from
Yale-New Haven radiology about her next appointment was folded carefully and
placed between page 460 and 461 of the Book of Common Prayer. Those pages
contained prayers for doctors and nurses and prayers for a sick person that
Eliza knew by heart and would use no more. It pleased her to think of such a
nicety all by herself.
Eliza had never felt so alone. It was
new rather than oppressive. She was isolated within her mortality. No one else
knew, but she was counting hours now—not years, months, or days but hours. With
that knowledge, she gathered dirty clothes from various chairs and hooks and
placed them in the laundry hamper just inside the bathroom door. Her mind was
clear, clean. Her thoughts crystal, precious.
Would Rosa wash the clothes next
Wednesday, like always and take the woolen things to Jet Cleaners? Would Rosa
make routine into ritual?
Eliza remembered the women who had
shaped her life done her work since Diagnosis Day—three years, two months, a
week and four days before. Eliza hadn’t believed the doctor—not for a moment.
“three months” he had said, patting her hand and showing his teeth to Charles
in a determined gesture. “Six months if you’re lucky.” That was unacceptable.
Eliza would outdo that, if for no other reason than it was too presumptuous.
Riding home with Charles, Dr. Spitzer’s number clutched in her hand, she
realized that doing the dishes and washes and cooking and cleaning the silver
and polishing the furniture would have to go. So the first words she spoke
after hearing her death sentence were to a cleaning service she found in the
Yellow Pages.
Four ‘girls’ came and went within six
weeks. They were either too slovenly or too uncommunicative for Charles, who
seldom talked with Blacks or Hispanics without Ph.D.’s. He grew increasingly
impatient, but one night—somewhere between girl three and girl four—Eliza told
him, “I need this, Charles, this is part of the agenda, a way of fighting back.
Trust me.” And, not surprisingly, he had.
Tiffany stayed two years, moving in,
becoming part of the family. Tall, ebony, and beautiful, Tiffany was a refugee
from Lynchburg, Virginia. Eliza had imagined Lynchburg to be near Atlanta until
she looked in a Rand McNally Atlas one morning after Tiffany challenged her
geography. They became friends. Tiffany went with them to the Cape and learned
to swim in the chill north Atlantic. They introduced her to lobster and taught
her how to cook. Charles never fully surrendered the kitchen to her, but, in
the end, she could cook almost as well as him.
Once, in a bad time, when the disease
was ravaging Eliza faster than the physicians’ skills and her determination
could burn it away, Eliza had a cloudy dream about Charles and Tiffany. She
found them in a room at the end of a long dream hallway, passionately entwined
on the couch from Charles’ study. For several months Eliza pondered that dream,
thinking how wondrously inexplicable it would be if, after her death, Tiffany
stayed on, sharing the life she had come to love and frequenting Charles’ bed.
Had there seemed time to do it, Eliza would have written it all down and hidden
it away, to eventually be discovered. Melancholy was her constant companion in
those months.
But Tiffany met a graduate student
from Nigeria—a gentle, kind man who Eliza eventually forgave the African
appreciation of body odor. Tiffany conceived his child and he took her back
with him to his home in a dark, dusty land.
The day before they left for Africa,
overcoming her shyness, Tiffany partially undressed and laid on Charles’
couch—the couch of Eliza’s dream—so Eliza could lay a trembling white hand on
that black swelling belly. The taunt, young skin gave Eliza life. She drew strength
from the slumbering child, from it’s potential, it’s strange future.
Then
Rosa came—fifty and fat, half-speaking English, newly from San Juan. Her
husband had died suddenly and she came to New Haven to live with nieces and
nephews and a younger sister. Rosa became the mother of Eliza’s will to live.
She was never the apt student Tiffany had been. The coffee was always too
strong, the fish overcooked, the desserts disastrous. But what she lacked in
cooking, Rosa made up in caring. Stranger in a strange land, acquainted with
grief, sisters of loneliness—Rosa and Eliza grew close. They seldom talked—the
language barrier seemed to become stronger with time, but they exchanged
glances. Rosa would shake her head and sigh when she noticed the look of an
unanticipated pain in Eliza’s face or recognized Eliza’s sudden anxieties. Rosa
would cross herself and say “Mother of God” in Spanish. Through anguish, Eliza
always laughed.
Rosa would stay, Eliza knew. She would
unpack Bobbi’s clothes from Taft and repack them for Smith in September. One
day she would bounce Eliza’s grandchildren on her knee. And, to mourn Elilza’s
parting, angry with the impertinence of death, Rosa would take the woolens to
the dry cleaners. Undressing for her last shower, Eliza knew Rosa would wash
those dirty clothes, fold them reverently, and put them neatly away, baptized
by tears, in drawers that would be long unopened.
As Eliza pinned back what was left of
her hair, she unexpectantly thought of Robert Delgatto. Once she had found his
family in the phone book, remembering his father’s name from the obituary the
day of her visit with Robert. At the time, she considered sending them a note—I
MET YOUR SON ONCE, HE WAS A WONDERFUL BOY. I KNOW YOU MUST MISS HIM. Luckily,
she thought better of it.
Like an explorer stepping onto an
unnamed continent, Eliza stepped into the shower. Soothed and calmed by the hot
water and familiar smells, she thought to herself: ‘Eliza, like a light.’
*****
Edward’s party gave Eliza a reservoir
of strength. She ate well, without nausea, buoyed by three glasses of Edward’s
finest sherry—one before dinner and two after. Enthroned on a comfortable
couch, Eliza spoke with other guests, as if granting them an audience. Mary
Harkness was there, asking Eliza if they would meet at the Lawn Club luncheon,
chattering about a new sailboat they were considering seriously. Eliza touched
Mary’s hand as she was about to go for another drink. “I was looking at your
veal recipe,” Eliza said. “I wish I had time to try it.”
Mary laughed, nodding at someone
across the room. “You will, dear,” she said, “I just know it.”
Edward spent time with her,
sardonically and woeful and quoting T.S. Eliot since it was his 50th
birthday party. Marta and Peter Farmer visited for half-an-hour, one on either
side, giggling like children because Marta thought she might be pregnant and it
was still a secret. Richard Lucas, between outrageous tales about his mountain
relatives, told Eliza that he was working on a new writing that might turn out
to be a novel and she was in it. Edward’s latest friend was charming,
confessing to Eliza his undying affection for things Italian. A man who
designed costumes for Long Warf Theater and a woman who counseled AIDS patients
talked to her about their lives and became new friends. With the innocence of
children and smiling warmly, they left her with a cherry, “see you soon.”
Her evening ended, as Eliza imagined
it would, beside Johanna Lucas. Portuguese, Eliza decided, judging from her
skin tone and the darkness of her eyes. Portuguese, Eliza decided.
“I have something to ask of you,”
Eliza said, reaching for her purse, “something I need you to do for me.”
Johanna sat absolutely still, waiting.
Eliza found the cards and handed them to her as if passing something at the
table. “Would you mail these, one is to your husband and the others, well, to
other people.” Eliza grew suddenly nervous, unsure, confused. Johanna took the
cards and held them with both hands near her heart.
“When should I mail them?” she asked.
“After I die,” Eliza said and took a
deep breath.
Johanna did not blink. “Certainly,”
she said.
Tears filled Eliza’s eyes. Like so
much of life, Johanna’s answer was unexpected. She could not name the feeling.
Since ‘thank you’ would have come out awkwardly, she said, “I seem to have
forgotten the stamps.”
Johanna smiled and touched Eliza’s
hand. Eliza looked into those dark Iberian eyes. “I’ve had other things on my
mind.”
“A dollar twenty-five,” Johanna said.
“You can owe me.”
Later, when everyone was by the door,
a swirl of people, leaving—Johanna embraced Eliza and asked, in a whisper, “Is this goodbye?”
Johanna smelled faintly of garlic.
Eliza realized that many people she had loved in her life smelled, faintly, of
garlic.
Then Edward was there, hugging her.
Eliza turned back to Johanna, speaking over Edward’s shoulder. “Yes,” she said,
“yes.” And because of the noise, she repeated it, laughing.
{When Eliza laughed, Rondo stirred,
shifted, rested again.}
Somewhere in the doorway, full of
people departing, Charles called out, “Ready to go, Cookie?”
“Yes,” Eliza said. “Yes.”
