Research: Journals
The Journal
Past Issues
26.2
Rebecca Meacham
Simple as ThatIf she is to grieve, Lila reasons, she will do so Hollywood-style, with exaggerated gestures, crescendoing sobs, flowing gowns that sweep her ankles. After searching her closet for diva-wear, she wraps herself in a pink bathrobe the shade and texture of marshmallow candy. The robe is spectacular—the perfect pitch of melodrama. It is a Christmas present from her mother, who has long tried to kindle Lila’s theatricality. Last week, her mother sent a box of beaded dragonfly hair clips that flutter from silver springs. One jiggles over Lila’s bangs. Inside the robe, Lila is tiny and rigid. She feels as if she’s in drag.
Still, she wants to wrap her sorrow in a turban, bejewel it fabulously, ride it to the hilt. Hilt is a word she never uses; the robe is making Lila think in a new vocabulary, in words like horror! and splendid!, in exclamation points, in vibrato. Wearing the robe makes her want to taffy-pull despair until it snaps and disappears. Wearing the robe, she believes it’s possible for sorrow to be whipped into frothy peaks—to be made confectionery—and so dissolve, melt away like sugar in rain. It seems possible that in this way, her husband’s absence could shrink to granules, something easily evaporated. Something that would leave and actually stay gone, and not return for forgotten books or visits with the dog.
But he does not want to stay gone, her husband tells her at every chance he gets. He does not want the marriage to be over. He calls from work every day and leaves rumbly, rambling messages. He e-mails her with haikus for their dog, with the requisite lines about sniffing, peeing, birding. He attempts good cheer on a limited budget: carnations, Hallmark cards, week-old Easter chocolates. In their separation, he constantly surprises her with clichés, and this, along with everything, is very disappointing. Lila had expected more from him, something swashbuckling in reconciliation. But then, she had also expected a more innovative break-up. In fact, what enrages her lately is that the break-up has made her a cliché—a jilted wife, a spurned spouse, a Dear Abby archetype. Couldn’t you be more original? she had screamed at him from her car phone on the day she fled, the Day of Discovery. She was driving distant country roads looking for motels, sleet spitting at her windshield, when he called her car to plead forgiveness. He rationalized: It didn’t mean anything, it happened once and now it’s totally over. He was trying to negotiate Lila’s surrender, trying to talk her in. But Lila held herself hostage and drove to a Motel 6. Huddled in her car in the parking lot, she told him to move out; her three-year marriage was ending, like a junior high break-up, with a histrionic phone call. When all was said and done, she still couldn’t believe the sheer triteness of it all: a strange credit card receipt, an other woman, a blond, for heaven’s sake. I thought you writers were supposed to be more creative! she had yelled into the car phone, her words floating through an open channel, carried over public airwaves so that somewhere, she was certain, perverts and sixth graders gleefully collected the cells of her distress.
But tonight, the pink cloud of the robe envelops her and softens edges, smears Vaseline on the lens of memory, and pulling the collar tight, Lila tries to locate a clean glass in the wreckage of their—now her—kitchen counter. Lately, she has been overwhelmed by the simple mechanics of order and nutrition. Looking around, it seems unreal that the kitchen was once a bustling aromatic place where she and her husband cracked peppercorns and sautéed shrimp in spontaneous sauces. That kitchen is a foreign country where they made weekend soups from scratch. And oh! the bounty once housed here—leeks, turmeric, andouille sausage. But now, crystallized ginger looks to her like mutant raisins or mummified kidneys. Feeding has been reduced to binary steps: toasting, buttering. Boiling, pouring. Microwaving, rotating. Her major food group consists of hydrogenated oils baked into various shapes—some cream-filled, some with corners. Lila worries about folic acid. “I’ve been eating nothing but cheese and crackers for dinner for two weeks,” she has told her mother. “At least you’re getting calcium,” her mother encourages her. “Calcium and grains.”
It occurs to her that being alone could be more fun if she had a tall bright cup to sip from. Healing could be as simple as that. Beneath a Pop Tarts wrapper, she finds a note pad and writes a Thing To Do: Stop Moping Around! Buy Cute Tumblers! She has never imagined writing such a Thing. Perhaps the pink robe is making her write this. Perhaps the dragonfly hair clip is channeling messages from her mother. It is, after all, a night charged with psychic potential—thunderheads crackle the evening sky.
This spring has been turbulent, with hard snowfalls and explosive blossoms, pre-dawn thunderstorms that bring Lila’s dog bounding onto her husband’s side of the bed. Of course, she wishes that the weather, too, could be more original—could offer something beyond song titles or film noir when she’s suffering. But beyond their capacity for cruel metaphor, the storms are terrifying, and she has taken to moving her Chagall wedding print from the wall to the pantry every night. For a week, the storms have hit around four in the morning, whipping small trees onto the Interstate and clogging the morning rush hour. Downtown, people yawn on the streets, move flaccidly, thudding into one another with mumbled apology. In the food court where she lunches, strangers linger on benches to recount near-disasters: the sirens that sent them scurrying to basements, the trees uprooted, the shingles or sandbox toys swept into sky. Babies loll invertebrate in their strollers. Children are quick to whine. Lila watches and listens but eats alone, somehow soothed by murmured weariness. She is not in the mood for conversation; these days, even consonants seem like effort. Before the storms, she occasionally ate with Cindy, the other human resource secretary in her department-store office, but Cindy is a Pentecostal, and though Lila isn’t sure about their policies, the weather has rooted Cindy to her desk, where she reads the Bible instead of grabbing a cheesesteak.
The T.V. weathermen have become over-earnest, and now, like every other evening, most of the news is devoted to Doppler projections, battening tips, the sturdiest interior locations. Some of the channels quiz the audience on hail formation; some maps take viewers on rollicking rides through developing systems. Lila imagines it must be comforting to map and scale upheaval. On the screen behind one weathercaster, wind and rainfall intensities spiral in rainbow bands, swirling around the patchy Metro area like a tie-dye shirt design. It is horrifying and beautiful.
It is possible, she realizes, that she could die in a storm, alone, on the couch, in this robe, a dragonfly clip sproinging from her severed head. Dead at thirty in a pink confection, a beaded insect in her hair. She wells up at the thought—not because in the thought she is dead, but because it reminds her of a game she and her husband used to play, a game borne of their own bad habits: What Would the Coroner Think? As a child, Lila had been fascinated by the T.V. show Quincy, the way Jack Klugman linked a drowned teenager to bad weed, or traced killer spores to a stadium’s water fountain. For awhile, during puberty, she made it a practice to pack clues to her death somewhere on her body: if the Skittles she was eating looked old and funny, she left three in the pack, tucked in her pocket for later forensic testing. Even then, she was the kind of person who tried to make things easier for others.
With her husband, though, the game had grown sillier, especially when they left the apartment untended—when the laundry heaped and they wore desperate, ratty things, when all of their light bulbs burned out and they squinted like moles to find each other. Still, Lila knows there are worse ways to be found. She recalls the story her husband told of a body discovered in a caretaker’s apartment above a fitness club—a body wrapped entirely in athletic tape, with red high heels poking out. Nobody was aware of the caretaker’s murderous tendencies, but suspiciously, he was missing, too. When the police untaped the body, of course, they found the missing man dead inside, an astounding case of autoerotic asphyxiation. It was no wonder the red high heels were size thirteen and very, very wide. For crowds, her husband usually ended the story with: I just hope I die with a smile on my face! Alone, with her, when he wanted to appear soulful, he finished with a line from his favorite poem: There is no telling what we’ll do in our fierce drive to come together. Fierce drive. No telling. She considers this as she flips through T.V. weathermen. Should she have noticed his fondness for this poem? Was her husband tagging his own dying fidelity, tucking clues into the pockets of something he would later kill?
That’s the thing about the traumatized, she knows from listening to herself, to her own wronged friends—they are so boring, so undyingly morbid. Terminal with their own darkness, the woeful could smother every light conversation, kill off all diversion. But the pink candy robe should protect her from solemnity. She thinks now she should wear the robe to bed. Some mornings, she wakes with mysterious aches. Sometimes she calls in sick. It has been too easy lately to lie in bed until noon, leaden with gravity; when she finally rises, she expects her body will have grooved the mattress like a snow angel. Lila is new to negativity. She is surprised by angry voices in her head, hateful characters who never existed before, not even when her husband waggled his finger at her numerous domestic failures. But being stunned—really stunned—has unleashed Lila’s cattiness, which has taken form in a campy voice that surfaces randomly to mock. A large woman in a bright green dress might walk up to her desk in search of a job, and handing her an application, Lila thinks, Mm-Mmm! You can’t wear that honey, that’s why God made the watermelon. Or when Bill, the ancient store detective, strides heroically by, the campy voice clucks, If brains were dynamite, that man couldn’t blow his nose. Lila resents her husband for creating this voice inside her head. She doesn’t want to think like this. She is such a nice person, inside and out—so full of integrity that she never reveals people’s salaries, never gossips about who’s taking lithium or neglecting child support. When she senses people may be talking about her, even nicely, she covers her ears and walks away. She really, really does.
At seven-thirty, her husband calls, which is odd because his apartment does not have a phone. However, he has taken up jogging to gas stations, and as he leaves a message, Lila hears city noises in the background. The station bell dings as he says he loves her; a siren rises as he says he misses her. He bids her a good night’s sleep to the enormous whoosh of a bus. He says he will be over tomorrow to walk the dog, the sad custody arrangement they’ve hammered out while she thinks things over—while he goes, and she goes, and they both go to therapy. Therapy has become something to conjugate, and Lila knows conjugation well. Despite the fact that she’s now a secretary, she has a Master’s in English Education, and her teacher’s training volunteers itself at inappropriate times. Like now: Lila is constantly struck by the grammar of separation, the renaming, the claiming, the circuitry of language. Pronouns have acquired a newfound importance. Moving out, her husband resented the couch Lila called “my couch,” even though it was. She loathes his account of the affair—“We decided it had to stop”—and can’t help wondering when, exactly, he joined someone else’s we. She reprimands his passive constructions: “No, you can’t say, ‘There was kissing.’ Where’s the Subject? Your we is the Subject.” Still, Lila is weary of being the Object of impossible, bullying active verbs. So what if she can diagram loss? Appositives, despite their optimism, never successfully restructure the rubble. The meaning always remains the same. No matter how he tells it, no matter how she grades, her husband’s story can never pass.
On the advice of her therapist, she decides to take a relaxing herbal bath. The robe makes her pour seven capfuls of bubbles beneath the faucet, and to honor the hair clip, she roots through facial creams until she finds one that hasn’t calcified. Upon noticing her absent wedding ring, Lila’s boss recommended Pastoral therapy, which Lila—trained to cull meaning from context—assumed would take place in the country, or with a preacher, or with a country preacher. Her boss gave Lila the name of a personal friend, and so Lila had to make an appointment, and so today she left work early to drive angrily through traffic. The therapist’s office was located above a store called “Cabinet Masters.” The therapist, Jaden, was fortyish, with long gray hair and light, serene eyes that Lila associated with Californians. She wore loose, maroon clothes and carved stone pendants. When she opened her office door, the smell of sage drifted out, and Lila was surprised to see a waterfall fountain and a pillowy bed surrounded by tall plants. This did indeed seem like the country, or perhaps a country all its own.
“I just want to honor you for coming here today,” the therapist began.
Lila immediately felt awkward, and said, “It’s an...honor...to be honored.” She had never been to therapy before, and didn’t want to do it wrong; what if she had a total breakdown right there, in the office, and had to be hauled away?
Next, Jaden, if that was her real name, spent ten minutes discussing her fee, which Lila, embarrassingly, had to negotiate. She joked that she was a payroll secretary who earned almost next to nothing. “I should work harder on my figure...s,” she laughed, trying to make a good impression, trying to show the wit of someone trained to teach the puns of Shakespeare. Jaden smiled in a way that seemed to transcend the earthly and the material, but still wrote on Lila’s patient form: “Further Sessions Subject to Full Fee.” The rest of the session went downhill from there. No matter how tightly she closed her eyes, Lila couldn’t imagine herself as a disc of spinning sunlight, big enough to beam all over the city, all over the world, when even watching T.V. weather maps made her slightly carsick. She couldn’t cosmically rise and shine; even her breathing was too shallow to match Jaden’s tranquil sighs. All she could think was that if she was a wheel of sunlight, she’d burn her husband to a crisp like an ant trapped under glass.
And if she could be the sun, she wouldn’t have paid eighty dollars for this handout on self-care advice: Drink cocoa. Cry for thirty minutes. Hit a pillow. Give yourself a facial. As the bath water foams, Lila checks off each of these, removes her gay! and marvelous! robe, and steps into the tub to Soak troubled thoughts away. Healing could be as simple as that. Lather, rinse, repeat.
Through the bathroom window, lightning flashes, and Lila tries to recall what the weathermen said about bathing in thunderstorms. She is not on a golf course, not under a tree, not talking on a cordless phone. Still, she is in water, surrounded by gleaming metal fixtures. She interrogates the bathtub: Does it matter if the tub is porcelain? Is porcelain considered a grounding material? What, exactly, is a grounding material? Is the tub she’s sitting in even porcelain? She wonders if, sitting here, she could complete the circuit, a phrase she vaguely understands, but which is accompanied by a terrible image: a local electrician slumped over his own dryer, discovered by his wife, who couldn’t even touch his still-thrumming body. What would the coroner think? The coroner reported the poor electrician had completed the circuit—and Lila doesn’t know how not to. These are things her husband knows, things Lila hasn’t had to study, like which screwdriver tightens the bathroom door hinge, which red wine gives her a headache.
For a moment, she considers the lightning, the nature of the word shock. Until now, she had thought it cliché when people said something was shocking. She was a little cynical when Darcy in Cosmetics said she was shocked to learn that her sister was gay. And she thought old Security Bill exaggerated when he said his son’s dishonorable discharge hit him like a lightning bolt. Such expressions were, she had once thought, hyperbole. But now the words seem remarkably apt. She still thrums with the burn of discovery. All the circuits in her body, her brain, seem to be rewired; all the ganglion clinging to her marriage have been swiftly cauterized. Like lightning victims who develop strange powers, Lila now sometimes sees the mall crowds with a new and special vision—a sensitivity to blight, a keen awareness of secret griefs that people hide in hollows. To Lila, these spaces shine like an aura. Yesterday, a glow alighted the man at the fountain who offered his daughter sips of Coke. Was he giving his daughter a “dad’s night out,” a break to his wife, who lounged at home leafing Talbot’s? Or was this his weekly Visitation, like her husband’s long Saturday walks with the dog? Watching the man and the girl, Lila wondered if it was always awkward between them. She wondered if he still felt shock that he no longer book-ended his daughter’s days. No, shock and lightning, these were not hyperbole. Suddenly, she has the perfect title for her diva-memoir, the agonizing story of her first marriage and triumphant, inspiring recovery: It Was Never Hyperbole! She resolves to write Chapter One tomorrow.
She also resolves to ignore the lightning that is flashing more rapidly outside her windowsill —a windowsill she can’t help noticing is lined with metal objects. Fittingly, the instruments of her doom are also wedding gifts: a chrome canister for cotton puffs, an ivy-coiled towel rack. She traces a Rube-Goldberg path from a lightning strike to the window ledge, to the canister to the towel rack to the faucet, down the stream of water pouring from the faucet, to her big toenail and the rest of her naked body. Could the dragonfly clip’s metal spring serve as a lightning rod? That would certainly be one for the coroner. She is pleased that in some ways, she can still think generously.
But the coroner would have to wonder about the black fabric paint on her fingernails, stubborn under the washcloth, and for clues, he might have to ask her husband. In fact, she would like her husband to be interrogated, or at least made to feel guilty about the wickedness of the separation—its awful, spiteful timing. To make matters worse for Lila these days, Julia in Furs is getting married in May, and Lila is a bridesmaid. Julia’s bachelorette party is next weekend, and for a party game, Lila has been charged with drawing and cutting out twenty life-sized penises from pink felt. “Of course, every penis should be felt,” she had quipped to her dog as she cut and sketched. It seemed like a joke her husband would enjoy. An advertising copywriter, he understood the value of a pun: his biggest campaign had been a tennis promotion slugged “The Agony...and the Agassi.” Humor drew them together, and sometimes it winks at them, even now. Her husband jokes about the pathetic state of his new apartment—the ironing board that hosts a Frisbee for an ashtray and various unidentifiable food stains. Healing could be as simple as that. Laugh and the world laughs with you.
If nothing else, she recalls with a sigh, he always laughed at her jokes, which, because of her special training, Lila thought to be exceptionally droll. In graduate school, she learned the anatomy of humor: burlesque, parody, low and high comedy, Juvenalian satire. She has been trained, for example, to know that the fact she now works as a secretary is not exactly irony; it would be more correct to say that it is ironic that she knows she is not living in irony. It is also correctly ironic that she trained to spend her whole life molding youth when she realized, suddenly before a class of seventh graders who kept giggling when she said “period,” that she really hated kids. All of them, in all their forms—for Lila, there are no redeeming ages. Her husband, on the other hand, relates well to toddlers. It might also be ironic, she notes, that the storm outside is whipping into a frenzy—a frenzy in a series, a frenzy amply forecasted—and she can’t imagine where on earth her husband has stored the flashlights.
Is it possible that he has taken all the flashlights? Is it possible that he isn’t just weak and self-centered, but truly diabolical?
She pictures her husband sitting in his apartment, all their flashlights trained on his hands, fashioned dumbly into horses’ heads. Although they’ve camped many times, her husband is still a hand-shadow amateur, relying on Lila’s bats and lions to heighten his adventures. Because he is limited to horses and dogs, his plots are usually Westerns. As a clap of thunder rolls the sky, Lila reasons that if he forgot saline solution when he moved out, he likely left the flashlights. But he has no phone, so she can’t ask him where they are, and despite herself, she hopes he hasn’t ventured out in this weather. For now, she thinks she would be sad if he died at any hands but her own.
Still, this is not quite tenderness. Tenderness matters to her husband, who seeks a soft spot to plant himself again. He wants to improve and have her notice; he wants her not to harden. He plies her with take-out Indian food and poems on her sexier parts. It matters to him that Tuesday nights, they still watch detective shows together, even though in the lulls between programs, they fight and he begs and she sobs. Still, he searches for a place where repentance can find purchase, a sidewalk crack where a seed might land and grow beneath the concrete. But Lila can only see the marriage for its craters, its pits. It may as well be moonscape. In fact, long before the separation, they’d poked sticks in rocky soil: they didn’t embrace so much as pat and detach; they left the bathroom door open; they rolled their eyes and mocked each other in explosions over dry cleaning. She tried but could no longer ignore the way his teeth gnashed over forks. Then he started discussing children. She had assumed he wanted babies to justify why they never went out anymore.
The lights waver then hold, and the dog runs up to the tub. “It’s okay, Beaker,” she tells the dog, a regal German Shepherd named for their favorite Muppet character. Now seems a good time to rise and dress and batten down. She stands quickly and reaches for a towel, when there’s a terrible pop by the window ledge. Beaker whines. The lights disappear.
Lila stands naked, calf-deep in water, surrounded by silent blackness. The coroner would think, You took a bath in a thunderstorm? Didn’t you watch the local forecast? She feels her way out of the tub and towels herself urgently. Lightning flashes again, and she squats into a ball, trying to remember: is this the Reader’s Digest tip to surviving lightning strikes, or is this how you should fool grizzly bears? All she can recall is that you have to hit certain sharks flat on the nose. Her husband probably has read more carefully, but what does that mean? Did it ever mean anything? She realizes he has honed his skills for wholly improbable consequences, but flails at dangers easily averted. But is she any more agile? Better focused? When will she finally be prepared?
She crawls along the floor, patting the tile in search of the pink robe, which should radiate like a beacon. Impossibly, the robe isn’t anywhere near the tub. She will have to wrap the towel like a sari. She moves close to the floor, orients herself, feels for hostile objects. The edge of the porcelain-or-not-porcelain tub. The sharp-cornered radiator. The inflexible door.
Lightning illuminates Beaker’s terrified face in front of her, and she takes the dog by the collar. In his ear, she apologizes for all the terse walks he has endured lately, how she has yanked him past fire hydrants and fascinating trees. For this, too, she blames her husband. Beaker has been good to her, and Lila has been ungrateful, and now they will both die this way, huddled in terror, melted together by a lightning bolt into a mass of flesh and fur, a biological grilled cheese sandwich.
She pulls Beaker, who crouches too, alongside her to the bedroom. She can tell it’s the bedroom by the carpet, which she generally won’t touch with hand or vacuum. She feels her way to her husband’s dresser, and with one hand on Beaker, she rifles through the drawers. No flashlight. A tornado siren sounds. She feels blindly for shoes that aren’t high heels. She yelps with joy when her hand finds Birkenstocks. But they are her husband’s Birkenstocks, large as canoe paddles. She gropes along the carpet until, thank heavens, she finds her own sandals and shoves her feet inside. The basement, she has to get to the basement: it is four stories down a rickety staircase, a place where it’s rumored a woman was strangled in 1966. She reconsiders the weathermen’s advice to seek interior rooms.
She finds her way to the doorknob where Beaker’s leash hangs. She clamps it to his collar. The tornado sirens rise and fall, the cry of prehistoric beasts. Lila is unsure what to rescue from her home—long ago, it would have been wedding photos—unsure where anything might be in this darkness, unsure how she’d juggle anything in her one free hand. Her husband is the carrier, the lifter, the one with the rebounder’s reach. What is he doing in this storm? Should she care if he has a basement? She pulls Beaker with her into the pantry—her most interior room—and pulls the door. The towel slides to her feet. She locks the door as the rain pelts, the windows rattle and wheeze. She can’t tell if she hears a roar like a locomotive.
She listens hard to the weather outside, perhaps inside, her apartment—it is now her apartment, for better or for worse. She tries to take comfort in a way to map and scale upheaval. Sifting the wreckage, the coroner might uncover an archeology of loneliness: a naked female body untouched by sex for at least a month. Twenty hand-cut pink felt penises. A cryptic note on glassware. A live dog in need of therapy. Picking over this sorry rubble, her mother wouldn’t even know Lila had finally worn her gift. But perhaps, she thinks, as she finds enough hands to clutch Beaker tightly, to pull the door and hold everything together in the howling dark, another story might be woven. Something brighter could thread the pieces scattered, even missing, in the wake: a Chagall wedding print on a pantry shelf, among faint and shriveling spices. A splendid—splendid!—candied robe. The grains of something once large and whole, evaporating into a wheel of light—an enormous sun, rising, shining, expansive in its warmth. One brilliant beam could catch a dragonfly. It could be as simple as that.
