Talk Before Sleep (18 page)

I
n the morning, I push open Ruth’s bedroom door, lean in to see if she’s awake. There is a flock of birds in the trees outside chattering outrageously, ruffling up their feathers, cocking their heads in the too-bright way of the mechanical toy. I’ve been at the living-room window drinking coffee and watching them for a while, wondering as usual at the secret kind of consensus they seem to keep. Who will decide, and at what moment, that they should take off together, fly obliquely across the winter sky in their ragged but purposeful formation? Do they know where they’re going?

Ruth is sitting up, looking out the window at the same tree I’ve been watching. I nod a greeting, give her my coffee, then stretch out beside her. There is a slat of sun lying along her face, the light illuminating the tiny
golden hairs along her ear. Below the curl of cartilage, I can see the reddish glow of blood in her lobe. I remember holding Meggie when she was a baby and nursing her, seeing the same thing. She held tightly onto one of my fingers, and we rocked slowly back and forth in front of the tiny window in her room. I used to think that if someone about to commit a crime looked up and saw a silhouette on the shade of a mother rocking a baby, it would be enough to stop them. There was sometimes a wonderful breeze, and the curtain would billow out dramatically, then be pulled up close against the screen, tangolike. I would watch Meggie’s face, think of all that lay ahead of her. Someday she would say in words what it was she wanted; someday she would walk in the door, lunchbox clanging into her leg, and I would open it at the kitchen sink and see what she had chosen, what she had rejected, all without me. Every maturational milestone seemed a miracle to me, because it was Meggie who would be doing it.

Ruth is quiet, sipping coffee and staring straight ahead, and I close my eyes, continue thinking my own thoughts. Today we are going to a cemetery. I wonder how Ruth’s mother would feel if she were alive, watching the daughter she held in the rocker die, driving her to graveyards as though they were apartments for rent. It seems the most unfair and impossible of things: how can a baby you bring into life leave it before you? What sense is there in that? Of course, if there is one lesson grief teaches, it is that there is no sense in some things. Still, I know if Ruth’s mother were alive, she would handle this, draw from the reservoir of sacred strength that women are born with. She would wear clothes
whose very smell comforted Ruth, she would put on an apron and make her soup and butter her toast and help her to walk to the bathroom when she needed it; and when things turned the worst, she would not leave. Women do not leave situations like this: we push up our sleeves, lean in closer, and say, “What do you need? Tell me what you need and by God I will do it.” I believe that the souls of women flatten and anchor themselves in times of adversity, lay in for the stay. I’ve heard that when elephants are attacked they often run, not away, but toward each other. Perhaps it is because they are a matriarchal society.

I feel Ruth looking at me, and I open my eyes. She says, “You know what I was thinking? I was watching the birds and then I started looking at the branches of the tree and I was thinking how much they look like nerve cells. And then I was thinking how everything is so connected. I mean that there must be one thing, somewhere that ties everything together.”

“Yes, I think so, too.”

“Do you?”

“Yes.”

She readjusts herself on the pillow, takes in a breath. “What I mean is that if you could just get at the real heart of one thing, you’d understand everything else. Like linguine would have something to do with linguistics, there’d be a link there.”

“Yes, right.”

“You’ve thought this, too?”

“Yes.”

She stares straight ahead, blinks. “Oh. I thought I was having profound death thoughts.”

W
hile we are eating breakfast, Ruth asks me if I think she should have an epitaph on her tombstone.

I shrug, a bite of food in my mouth now refusing to do anything but he there.

“I’ve got a few ideas,” she says. “Want to hear them?”

I say nothing.

“Oh boy, time to read,” she says.’ “What do you think of that one?”

I smile.

“Or, ‘See? I
told
you!’”

“Ruth … ”

“Well, why not? Why not have some fun? Do you think they can do italics?”

“I don’t know.”

Ruth picks up a piece of French toast with her fingers, drags it through some syrup, and the absurd thought comes to me that she doesn’t have to watch her calories. “Know what Helen wants on her tombstone?” she asks. “‘Oops.’ Isn’t that great? Or, ‘Up, up and away.’”

“When were you talking about tombstones with Helen?” I ask.

“When it wasn’t real,” she said. “Remember when it wasn’t real?”

I nod. I feel sick.

“Michael’s picking us up at eleven,” she says, and
then, when I look alarmed, “It’s okay. He’ll be fine. He’s my son. He’s not chickenshit like you.”

She puts her dishes in the sink, runs water on them, then turns around, arms folded across her chest. “Here’s something else I was thinking. You know how you can make donations in peoples’ names to the American Cancer Society instead of sending flowers to a funeral?”

“Yes. Do you want that?”

“No. I want flowers. Really, tons of them. Tell anyone who talks about giving money to cancer to buy me roses instead. The most they can afford.”

T
he cemetery is small, off a well-traveled, two-lane highway. “Isn’t this road too busy?” I ask Ruth, as we turn down the central driveway.

“What, I might get hit by a car?” Ruth asks.

“No, I just … ”

“She means it should be quiet, Mom,” Michael says. “Right? Isn’t that what you mean?”

“Right.”

“Quiet for what?” Ruth asks.

“For … contemplation,” I say.

We are out of the car, walking past rows of graves, tombstones all in careful alignment with each other. Michael stops before one that has a stone dog lying permanently bereft at the base of a tombstone, his head on his paws, his mournful eyes fixed on a vision. The name of the person is on the headstone in formal
capital letters, then the dates the person lived, then a simple and essential listing of roles: father, husband, son. It occurs to me that this matter-of-fact reduction is the kind of reorientation we need from time to time, that there is a value and a comfort in being here and understanding what matters most is only who you were to someone else.

There are many flowers on the graves, some plastic, most real but frozen now, bent over as though in sympathy, the petals curled up and blackened. Ruth stops before the grave of an infant, a lamb carved into the stone above the baby’s name. She stoops down, traces with her fingers the dates of life. The baby lived six weeks. I had forgotten these things happen. Maybe Ruth is old.

We stop, finally, at an open area toward the back of the cemetery. It is the last row; beyond it are only trees, black and stark against the snow. There is a bushy gully and a frozen-over stream down a little hill from us, and the noises we make flush out a large bird. There is a rapid rustle of feathers, a cry of alarm, and he is gone. Ruth watches him fly away, then points to the ground. “Here,” she says. “This is it.” I look around, my hands in my pockets, inspecting the area, as does Michael. I don’t know what we’re looking for, but we’re being thorough. There are two trees, just as Ruth said. “These are dogwood, they’ll be beautiful in the spring. And there’ll be shade here in the summer,” Ruth tells Michael. He nods, avoids looking at her. “Are you all right?” she asks, and he goes to silently hold her. Between the sleeves of his coat and his gloves, I see the exposed flesh of his wrists and I look away.

Y
ou’ve only tried Western medicine,” L.D. says. “There’s so much else. Why don’t you go to another country? I’ll go with you. China. Tahiti. They know stuff we don’t. They could help you.”

Ruth smiles tiredly. We are eating an early dinner in Ruth’s kitchen, the three of us, and L.D. is not happy about Ruth having selected a grave site. “L.D.,” Ruth says, “at some point, we have to deal with what’s happening.”

“You can’t give up,” L.D. says.

Ruth shapes a pile of macaroni and cheese into a symmetrical mound. “My parents died in a car accident,” she says. “This is better. I can … plan. I can make provisions, say good-bye. What is wrong with us, that we are all so afraid of what we know will happen to every single one of us?”

“I’m not afraid!” L.D. says. “But this is too soon, Ruth!”

Ruth pushes her plate away, leans back in her chair. “You know, I read about these people, in Madagascar, I think, who dig up people’s bones from the grave and take them out. They take them out, like on a date! That’s what you can do, L.D. You can come get me, take me out somewhere.”

L.D. is silent, furious. “Where would you want to go?” I ask, more in an effort to break the tension than
anything. “Outdoor café? Movie? I guess not dancing.”

“Here,” Ruth says. “Here would be good. This table. This room. Right here.”

She stands up. “I’m tired. I’m going to lie down.”

I carry Ruth’s dishes and mine to the sink, avoid looking at L.D. Ruth’s parents died when she was thirty, before I met her. But I have always felt that I knew them, somehow. I have always thought I knew exactly how it was before they died. The radio in the car would have been on, low. Her mother’s purse would have been beside her, with its comb and lipstick and small calendar, with its coupons for the supermarket, and photos of Ruth and Andrew. There would have been a skidding sound, some flash of terrible warning. And just before impact, Ruth’s mother would have reached toward her husband, her earring that she had put on that morning in the usual ignorant way glinting in the sun. “Jack,” she would have said, “wait a minute.”

Ruth is right. This way is better. She has things to say to people. And some time to say them. Behind me I hear L.D. get up and put her coat on, walk out the door and slam it. I go to the window, watch her get into her car, pull away. She’ll be back, I think. But she’d better hurry up.

I go to Ruth’s bedroom, thinking she’ll be asleep, thinking I’ll pull her door closed so that the rattle of dishes doesn’t wake her up. But she’s not sleeping. She’s lying on her side, eyes open. Two white candles burn on her dresser top. When she sees me, she smiles.

I sit in the chair by her bed. “This is hard for her. She just needed to get out of here for a while.”

“I know that.”

“She thinks you’re giving up.”

“Well, I am. But it’s time to.” She pushes her pillow behind her, sits up. “How come it can’t be an ordinary thing? I mean, as smooth and natural as opening a drawer or something?”

“That’s how people are,” I say. “We resist death. Even if we don’t like it here, if we find out we’re dying, we like it here.”

“Not everyone resists,” Ruth says. “I like how the Indians say ‘It’s a good day to die.’ We ought to be like that.”

“Well, it’s hard to be like that!”

She sighs, smiles. “I know. I’m mostly full of shit. I think a lot about what I’ll miss. I mean, as though I
will
miss it, as though I’ll be standing around somewhere wringing my hands and looking down, like in movie heavens. And you know, it’s all the simplest stuff I’d miss. Sounds, you know, the clink of a teaspoon on a saucer. Folding towels. The way the moss grows up through the cracks on the sidewalk. I wonder why I was so wild and reckless when all I ever really wanted was so ordinary. I fought so hard against what I needed most. I made such big mistakes.”