His tone bothered me. His tone implied that we were not really sitting there, surrounded by a stove, a table, and a refrigerator, like this whole time we were only playing in a poorly furnished movie about ourselves, and in this movie Jonathan always stole the last line.
"Take me to your house," I said. "Show me how you lived with her."
"No," he said.
I walked out of the room and down the hall. I walked and walked and I wasn"t quite sure where I was headed, but I pa.s.sed more signs: JOIN THE DISTRIBUTIVE EDUCATION CLUB OF AMERICA (DECA) AND GO TO CALIFORNIA! CHOICES HAVE CONSEQUENCES. I could hear Jonathan"s footsteps behind me.
"Here"s your old cla.s.sroom," I said, standing in front of the door.
B27.
The room was almost exactly the same, and that was what I had been hoping for, that was why I had come-to remember something. The slate tiles and the gray walls and the chairs in rows. The windows with no blinds. Everything sterile, the air disinfected. This wasn"t romance.
"This is where you sat, remember?" I said. I sat down at the teacher"s desk. I opened the drawer and pulled out a piece of paper. "Mr. Browsdowski. American Perspectives College Prep."
"This is where you sat," he said. Third row, fourth seat from the window.
Or maybe his tone bothered me because of the way he always used our intimacy as a way to distance himself. Like, let"s get the f.u.c.k out of here, like, let"s always start over, every second, let"s start over and then relive the same life, it"s easy and painless, like everything we"ve been doing for the last ten years actually had nothing to do with us.
"It"s weird to see you on that side of the cla.s.sroom," I said.
"Vice versa," he said.
"What was your English teacher like?" I asked.
"No man is an island!" he said, standing up. "Any man"s death diminishes me because I am involved in mankind!
"And like this," he said. He put his hand over his heart. "How did Nathanael West die, cla.s.s? How?"
Silence.
"Wrong!" he said. "On the way to Fitzgerald"s funeral!
"And Oscar Wilde. Gay! Did you know that! Imprisoned for h.o.m.os.e.xuality!"
I was quiet. Jonathan sat back down and put his head in his hands. "That"s what he was like."
"And what were you like?" I asked.
He put his head down on the desk. "Like this," he said, his voice m.u.f.fled.
"And what was she like?"
"Smart," he said, his head still down on the desk. "Too smart."
"And how did she die?"
"I don"t know."
He nervously started tapping his feet.
"You don"t know?" I asked. "What kind of answer is that?"
"I mean, I"m not sure really."
We sat there in silence until I said, "Well, was it sudden?"
"Yes," he said. "Very sudden. But it felt slow. It felt like it took years."
He stood up. He sat on the floor between my knees.
"Do you miss her?" I asked. He rubbed my knees with his hands. He had touched me so many times, and it never felt repet.i.tive.
"Most of the time," he said.
He unb.u.t.toned my shirt slowly like we were going to make love. The b.u.t.tons were pearls. The shirt was nearly see-through. In the dark, I was a skin suit lined with pearls. In the dark Jonathan looked expansive. As though he should take care of everything. He looked like a person who would take care of everyone he loved when he was older. He would put thermometers in his wife"s mouth and he would make jokes about not being able to climb the stairs.
I undressed him.
I sat on top of the desk and pressed against him. We stayed like this, with our faces close together, until he became as solid as a color. At night, up close, we were solid like colors, but at dawn, we were edges and corners and had an unpredictable way of interacting with the light, and as we sat there naked, the sun rose through the cla.s.sroom window, and I thought, My father can"t feel his fingers.
"How can you not know how your wife died?" I asked him. "It"s such a definitive thing."
And silence was such an imperceptible failure so early in the morning. For the first half of my life, I had mistaken the silence in our house for comfort. After Mr. Resnick died, we barely talked for three days until my father took out a pan and said, "I"m making you ladies eggs!"
"Scrambled, please," I said.
"Don"t you think "quack" is the most appropriate sound a duck could make?" my father asked, cracking the eggs into a bowl. "There is no better sound a duck could make."
"Balooga," I said. "Hypotenuse."
My father poured olive oil into the pan.
"b.u.t.ter, Victor, you use b.u.t.ter for eggs," my mother said, and I only saw my mother"s eyes narrowed now, and I only noticed my father"s silence throughout the rest of the meal now. I only realized that he was making eggs to apologize to us. He washed out the pan and used b.u.t.ter and silently apologized. And during breakfast, my mother pushed the eggs aside and ate only her toast.
"In the delivery room," Jonathan said. "Is that what you want to hear? She just bled and bled and bled until she wasn"t alive anymore."
Jonathan leaned back to watch as I picked my bra off the floor. It didn"t feel right to be naked while he talked about his dead wife. None of it felt right: Jonathan stood up and pulled at his hair, his eyes suddenly red rimmed. This is what a crazy person looks like, I thought. This was a crazy man, crying. This was a man doubling over, holding his stomach, asking for me.
"I didn"t want the baby," he said. "And I didn"t want to be married. And that"s exactly what I got."
I was quiet.
"I just can"t believe it," he shouted. "It"s all so f.u.c.king weird!"
Despite his unreasonableness, I knew exactly what he meant.
"I love you," I said. "I love you I love you I love you."
I said it and I suddenly felt rid of something. Free in my chest. He looked at me.
"Mam t rad," he said.
I love you, in Czech.
"Say it in English," I said.
"Huh?"
"Why don"t you ever say it in English?"
Mam t rad, loveski, who cared?
"It makes me feel different to hear it in English," I said.
"Don"t you get that this is all very complicated?"
He waited for me to agree.
"Don"t you get that I was never supposed to touch you? Don"t you know that?"
But if he was right, if he wasn"t supposed to touch me, and I admitted that, then it meant my whole life was wrong. It meant he had changed who I was supposed to be, and whoever I was, sitting on his desk, was wrong.
"You are always leaving me," I said. "You"re leaving me right now, I can feel it."
"I"m sorry," he said. "You were just so young."
"I was young," I said.
"In the bas.e.m.e.nt," he said. "I remember. Only seeing your eyes. You have old eyes. And on your stoop, you were sitting there so sad in that stupid T-shirt, your hair was a mess and your foot was bleeding and you didn"t even cry. That"s what I remember most about you."
"You are talking like I am dead," I said.
"I feel as though I have killed you."
I laid my back on the desk. I closed my eyes. I heard his footsteps. I imagined throwing up and just by imagining it I could already feel the lesions lining my throat. I felt him leaving my body. My father always said that we see things not as they happen but one nanosecond after they happen, so by the time I saw Jonathan put on his shoes, he could have already been gone.
And what"s even harder to understand, my father said, drawing me a map of the solar system on his napkin, is that if I were 186 trillion miles away from Earth, I"d see things a trillion seconds after they happened. "And what if you were even farther away than that?" I had asked. He had said that if he were peering at Earth through a telescope from even farther away than that, he might still see us, sitting around our kitchen table, making the sandwiches, your mother making the coffee, and me at the table, me not combing my hair, me at the mirror with my hands over my eyes.
I heard Jonathan say good-bye, good-bye, as in, I won"t be seeing you anymore, and then, "Look at me, Emily," but I couldn"t look. "Good-bye," I said. I heard the cla.s.sroom door close and I felt short of breath, but I stood up, and thought of my mother, taking me away from her mother"s funeral, in my urine-soaked dress, with my hands over my eyes. Even when you can"t see yourself, my mother said in my ear, you are still yourself, and even when you can"t see your father, he is still your father, just because you can"t see someone, it doesn"t mean that they aren"t someone, and what a relief! my mother had cried, taking the hands away from my eyes, what a relief.
Everything Is Like My Mother Says
38.
For your father to die properly, we need three hundred and fifty slices of cheddar cheese, it was his favorite-do you remember that, Emily? How he used to slice too many pieces of cheese and eat them with a steak knife in front of the television? I"d say, Victor! You"re eating cheese with a steak knife! Why would a human being do that? And he"d look at me and be like, it feels better this way-I can"t explain it, Gloria. We need to clean the toilets and dust the curtains and put out framed pictures of your father looking his best. We need platters of cavatelli and broccoli and if Alfred walks by his picture and says, what in G.o.d"s name is on Victor"s head, we need to explain: he just thought that hat was funny.
"Alfred is dead," I tell my mother. "Remember? Four years ago. He had a tumor in his pancreas."
"That"s right," my mother says. "I forgot about that."
My mother looks at the picture of my father and smiles anyway.
"Your father had a real sense of humor, Emily," my mother says. "You know that, right?"
"I know," I say. "He was a funny man. Did Bill leave to get the beer?"
"He did."
It"s like my mother says: Italians love and then Italians die and then Italians cry and then Italians drink half a bottle of sambuca and say stupid s.h.i.t.
I am by the eggplant when I see Mrs. Resnick and Mark and Laura show up. I am pretty sure I am the only one who notices the way my mother"s mouth quivers when she sticks out her hand to take the bottle of wine.
"I"m so sorry for your loss," Mrs. Resnick says to my mother, holding out a bottle of red wine.
I cannot decide if this is a vengeful, or sweet, or forgiving act. My father"s funeral reception has just begun.
"Thank you," my mother says. "I"m sorry for your loss."
Mr. Bulwark is beside me, explaining how the eggplant isn"t falling apart in his mouth like he wants it to. Ladies are on the patio arguing over whose lipstick is melting faster.
"Dorothy, your lipstick is melting right off your face," Mrs. Ewing says. "See, it"s dripping right onto your teeth."
"Yours is dripping down the side of your chin," the other one points out, and they both laugh.
Children I don"t know are tossing carrots back and forth under tables. Adora is pa.s.sing out clear drinks. Mr. and Mrs. Trenton have come and left, quiet and always absent now that Richard has been dead for years. The wind is starting to pick up. It howls in my ear like it"s mad n.o.body is listening. I watch the two women stand by the gate entrance to our yard. Mrs. Resnick is wearing a black suit with a beaded collar. Her hair is gray. She has on bright red lipstick and thick black gla.s.ses that hide her eyes. My mother is wearing a black dress with a scoop neck. Her blond hair is not in her normal French twist. Her hair is not even blond anymore. I noticed the gray two years ago, when she stopped dying it, and cried all night until my throat scabbed. Her hair is half-up and curling around her face.
"I used to curl my hair for your father," my mother said, standing in front of the mirror earlier this morning. "Oh my, Emily, when your father and I first started dating, I would curl my hair for him every night. I"d sit up the night before we were to go out and roll fifty tiny pink rollers in my head. Then I"d go lie down and feel the p.r.i.c.ks of the rollers dig into my scalp and I thought, This is what Jesus meant by sacrifice."
"Mom," I said.
"I"m just joking, Emily. Come on. Lighten up."
Mark stands between my mother and Mrs. Resnick, a six-foot-four man who is wide at the shoulders. Mark has dark brown hair that is parted to the left. He is in a black suit with a red striped tie. He is holding the card that has white lilies on the front. He is very sorry for everything.
I watch my mother give Mark a hug. I walk over to them. I think of something better to say with every step I take.
"h.e.l.lo," I say.
"This is my daughter, Emily," my mother says. "She"s all grown up now."
My mother started saying this after I turned twenty-three, as though my person before and after twenty-three was so different, n.o.body could tell it was the same person.