Eat Your Heart Out (14 page)

“I wrote this.”

Under different circumstances, this would probably be funny, Meryl thought. Mr. Leavitt stared at her, still short, still fat.

“No, really. I did. Meryl Johnson, that's me.”

He looked down at the brochure, and there was her name in black on white. He looked back up at her, unsure what to say next.

“Do you want it, anyway?”

“No.”

As Meryl left the funeral home, she wondered how she could feel so unprepared. How death could feel so absolutely different when it happened to her.

“Meryl, it's Joan.
I just heard from Evelyn about Joe. I just wanted to call you and—I just wanted to tell you how sorry I am. I know, ah, I know we haven't spoken so much lately, I thought, I don't know, I thought it would be best to . . . I wanted to call. I can't imagine how difficult this is. Frank and I, well, ah, if you wouldn't mind, Frank and I would like to drop off dinner for you tonight. Would that be okay? You don't need to call back, I'll just come by and leave it, well, I guess I'll just leave it on your porch. And listen, if there is anything that you need, you know, anything at all, you just call here, okay? Well, I guess, I just wanted, I . . . Meryl, I'm so sorry. You just call if you need anything, okay?”

There were so many phone calls after the news spread, many that surprised Meryl, many that came from people she hadn't heard from in months.

When he first got sick, people came in droves. They were all so willing to give advice, to tell them it would be okay. Like every great tragedy, this one's first act was crowded with supporting players. But then, when he got sicker, the court jesters and kinsmen silently slipped away, without phone calls and without visits. As the curtain fell, only Meryl and Joe were left standing.

People scatter like cockroaches in the light when death gets too close. Anyone will come to your funeral. Not everyone will sit with you when you're on the way out.

So Meryl didn't remember having many long conversations with old friends. She remembered the absence. The loneliness.

She had come to realize that death and dying are silent.

It wasn't that she couldn't have children, it was that she didn't want them, and with no regret.

Until he got sick.

“Goddammit, Meryl, I
don't need your help with this.”

Joe was carrying in boxes of junk from the garage. It was six months after his diagnosis, and he had just started serious treatment. Nothing was certain yet.

“Joe, put the boxes down. They're too heavy for you.”

“Shut up, Meryl, would you? I've carried boxes my whole life.”

“Why are you taking all the boxes out of the garage right now?”

“Because, Meryl, all this junk needs to be dealt with. If I leave this up to you it'll never get done.”

“I don't want you hurting yourself, Joe.”

“Oh, Jesus Christ, Meryl! Leave me alone.”

He looked at her, out of breath. He was livid, but in his eyes, Meryl knew he was pleading with her to let him pretend things were fine. Meryl could tell the box was too much for him now. He was struggling to carry it.

“Joe, stop right now. Dr. Stein said—”

“I don't give a fuck, Meryl—”

“Joe! Keep your voice down, the neighbours . . .”

“I don't give a fuck about them either. Don't touch this box.”

“Joe! I'm only trying to help you! Put the box down,” she said, trying to take the boxes from him.

“Meryl, for the last time, I don't need your fucking help!” And with that he yanked the box out of Meryl's hands, causing her to stumble backward.

Meryl watched him getting smaller and smaller as he walked up their driveway. In all the years they were married he had never been as mean to her as he was after he got sick. He would break his back if it meant not acknowledging the reality of what was going on. He didn't need to be looking at old pictures and tools and records, everything they had accumulated over the decades. He needed to be resting. He needed to be fighting. He was so stupid when he wanted to be.

Meryl waited a good five minutes to go inside. Then, slowly, she walked up their long gravel driveway. If he's going to act like this, he can make his own dinner, she thought as she walked in the front door. She was going to walk right past him, say nothing, and spend the night in their bedroom reading.

But when she walked into the living room she found Joe lying on the couch, arms at his side, staring at the ceiling. The boxes lay scattered on the floor. He'd turned the baseball game on, but he wasn't watching it. As she walked past him, he caught her eye. His face was scored with pain.

She stood and stared at him for a few seconds. Then she walked into the kitchen and brought him out his painkillers and a glass of water. He accepted.

After a few minutes, she sat next to him on the couch while the television yelled, “Swing! Batter, batter, swing!”

Meryl had just
finished forcing her breakfast down when Evelyn and Larry rang her doorbell. They had offered to drive her to the service.

Meryl came to the door, dressed in a black dress that she would never, ever wear again.

“Hi,” said Evelyn.

“Thanks for coming,” said Meryl.

“Of course,” said Larry.

They stood in the doorway. They seemed nervous. Meryl didn't know if she should invite them in.

“So it's ten-thirty, sorry we're a little late. Do you think maybe we should get in the car now?” asked Evelyn.

“Oh, yes, sure. Let me just get my purse.”

“Oh, Meryl?” interrupted Larry.

“Yes?”

“You . . . have a little jam on your face.”

“Oh.” Meryl raised her hand to face and wiped the left side of her mouth.

“The other side.”

She quickly turned around to find her purse and wiped the right side of her mouth, embarrassed.

Evelyn moved closer to Larry when Meryl's back was turned. She forced her face to his. Her eyes widened and her lips spread tightly across her teeth, concerned. When Meryl turned around they jumped apart, and Evelyn smiled to cover the sudden movement. Larry quickly whispered something to her. While he was in her ear, Evelyn looked Meryl up and down, nodding in agreement.

“Wait, Meryl, do you think, you maybe want to have a drink before we go?”

“At this hour?”

“Well, I was just thinking, if you wanted to. We could. Only if you wanted, though.”

“No, no, I don't.”

“Okay.”

Larry looked around.

“So, we should maybe hit the road then,” he said.

“Yeah, we should,” agreed Evelyn.

Meryl nodded and looked around her living room one last time. Turning back toward the door, she caught her reflection in the mirror. She was shaking like a leaf. She hadn't noticed.

“Will you two just excuse me for a second? I'm a little chilly, I think I'll go get a shawl.”

Meryl went upstairs but not to her closet. She went to her bathroom. She opened the medicine cabinet and took two of the tranquillizers that Dr. Stein had prescribed, against her will, months ago when she told him she had trouble sleeping. She threw some water on her face and looked at herself in the mirror once more. She took measured breaths and tried to make her trembling stop.

A few minutes later, she came down her stairs.

“Meryl, where's your shawl?” asked Evelyn.

“Oh . . . I couldn't find it,” Meryl said, a little more slowly than she should have.

Meryl had only
been drunk once in her life. It was very late at night, decades ago. She had found an old bottle of gin that Joe had got as a present from some colleague. It burned her throat as it went down.

She sat in her dim kitchen, with her bare feet against the linoleum tile, drinking. Her elbows were pressed hard on her cold plastic table. Her wrists supported her tired face. She was half dressed. That night she let her newly soft stomach stick out and sag. Joe was sleeping in a motel twenty miles east.

“Meryl, it was a slip. It was a mistake,” he had told her.

That's how he described it to her. A “slip” with the woman down the street.

As the alcohol moved through her, she asked herself what she had missed. How this could have happened. What she had done wrong.

She got up and staggered across the kitchen to get a glass of water. She hadn't realized how drunk she was until she stood up. Everything around her blurred, she couldn't feel her feet. Then, without noticing until she was on the floor, she slipped on the new tile. She hit her shoulder on the way down.

“Joe!” she yelled out when the pain came a few seconds later. Then she remembered he wasn't there.

She picked herself up, like a child learning how to walk, and went to her telephone. She asked her operator to dial the number of the motel. She was transferred to his room.

“J-Joe. Joe. Come home. Please come home.”

“Meryl, are you all right?”

“No . . . no. Come home now.”

Before he came in the front door, Meryl steadied herself against the banister as she made her way up the stairs to their bedroom. The pictures of them on the wall spun next to her. She went to their bed and didn't get under the covers. She fell asleep immediately and didn't stir.

She woke up nauseous, but next to Joe, just like every morning for as long as she could remember.

Meryl walked into
the red-brick funeral home with Larry and Evelyn.

They were greeted by a blond girl with tight ringlets. She looked sixteen.

“Hi! My name is Anna. Who is Mrs. Johnson?”

Meryl raised her hand. She didn't know why she did that. It wasn't school. But she stood still with left her hand suspended in the air. Evelyn noticed and guided her hand back down.

“I'm very sorry for your loss, Mrs. Johnson. Mr. Leavitt told me everything, so everything is in order for today. We have a room, downstairs, in the basement if you'd like to go sit there for some privacy. For you and family.”

“Can these two come?” asked Meryl.

Anna looked back and forth between Evelyn and Larry.

“Yes, certainly. I'll show you where it is.”

As Anna walked them down the hall and then down the stairs, Meryl noticed a lot of posters on the wall. Posters of Jesus, posters of Mary, posters of God. They were all sepia or black and white, too much grey. Everywhere she looked, the eyes on the posters followed her.

After Anna left them in the small, windowless room, Meryl turned to Evelyn. “Such serious pictures everywhere, don't you think?”

Looking around the room at all the religious artefacts, Evelyn nodded and said, “Well, no one's laughing at God in a funeral home.”

And with that, Evelyn, Larry, and Meryl sat in the three armchairs provided. Meryl crossed her legs, and no one spoke. She remembered how at the few funerals she attended for the people she worked with, she told the families the person was watching everything unfold from a better place. Meryl wondered if Joe was watching right now.

Was he laughing?

It was late,
and Meryl and Joe lay in bed together. They had just got the test results. It didn't look good.

Meryl rested her head on Joe's chest. She felt herself rise with every inhale and fall with every exhale. The wind whipped their window, creating an erratic tapping noise. They both knew the other wasn't asleep.

“What are we going to do, my darling?”

Meryl raised herself up and looked at his face. For the first time in a long time he was without the confident mask he wore for her.

“Well . . . we are going to fight,” she said.

“What if I don't win?”

“You will win.”

“But what if I don't, Meryl? I don't know if, I'm so tired.”

“You will,” she said louder than she wanted.

“What if I don't?”

“You will. You and I will. Together, Joe. You are going to beat this, remember?”

He went quiet for a moment. Then, almost silently, he whispered, “I don't know.”

Meryl was so angry.

“You can't think like that. You know at work I always say, and I mean it, Staying present is an important part of staying functional, of beating this. We have to think about right now, not what might happen.”

“I don't know,” he said once more.

“No, Joe. You have to believe that you can do it. And you have to talk about it. We have to talk about it. We have to own it.”

He looked at her like he didn't have the strength to keep talking.

“You can't give up. I always say that you have to believe you can beat it. You have to believe it.”

“What if that's all just bullshit?”

She felt the tears burn her eyes. She turned away and lay on her side, her back to him.

“It's not.”

“Okay.”

The tapping continued at the window. The space that separated their bodies lay between them. Meryl wouldn't move. She didn't want him to know she was crying like that. She watched the clock tick, and twenty minutes passed where they didn't say anything.

Then, once more, he asked, “What are we going to do, my darling?”

Then she turned to him and lay her head back on his chest. He would feel the wetness of her tears on his bare chest. He moved his hand back and forth on her shoulder.

“It'll be okay,” he promised.

The funeral home
was almost full. Halfway through, Meryl looked around and saw a lot of faces she didn't recognize. She put her hand on Evelyn's hand and held it tight.

“Who are those people to the left and two rows back?” Meryl whispered.

Then the minister spoke loudly, drawing her back into service.

“Joe, knowing the nature of his illness, asked to write his own obituary. He also asked that it be read at his funeral. I am going to now share it with all of you, his friends and loved ones. Joe Johnson was born on April 18, 1942, just outside of Delaware. He died on August 4, 2008, just outside of Baltimore, Maryland. He was sixty-six years old.