Matchmaking for Beginners
Page 9
“I don’t think I want a big life,” I blubber at her, and she says, “Oh, my, my, my,” and folds me into her massive, soft bosom and we sway back and forth, kind of to the music that’s playing inside but kind of not. “I just want to be ordinary,” I say into her scarves and beads. “Can’t I be ordinary?”
“Oh, my sweet girl. Oh my goodness. No, you can’t be ordinary. Oh heavens no. I feel like I’m standing in front of a magnificent giraffe, and she’s saying to me, ‘Why do I have to be a giraffe? I don’t think I’m going to go around giraffing anymore.’ But that’s just the way it is: you’re a wonderful, incredible giraffe, and you’ve got a life to lead that’s going to take you to amazing places.” She squeezes me and then lets me go. “You know, sometimes I wish I wasn’t at the end of life, because I just want to stick around and watch your creations. All of them.”
“Wait. What do you mean, the end of life? Are you dying?” I dab at my eyes with a handkerchief she produces.
She gets a funny look on her face, and I’m sorry I asked the question. Of course. Noah told me she’s eighty-five. Any way you look at it, that’s got to be pretty near the end of life.
“Hey, so listen, Ms. Giraffe, I came out here to tell you good-bye because I’ve got to go back to the hotel now,” she says. “My plane leaves early in the morning, and Houndy called me to say that he’s invited about twenty people over for lobsters tomorrow night. He can’t help himself.” Then she smiles at me. The wind blows some sparkles around.
“And you,” she says. “You’ve got some miracles to perform, honey child. Please try to remember that for me, okay? The world needs your miracles.”
“I don’t know how to perform miracles,” I tell her.
“Well, then you better start practicing. Words are a good first step. They have a lot of power. You can summon things by believing in them. First you visualize them being true, and then they come true. You’ll see.” She kisses me on both cheeks and then she heads through the door, but when she gets there she turns around and says, “Oh, I meant to tell you. You need a mantra to help you. You can borrow mine, if you want: ‘Whatever happens, love that.’”
When I get back inside, Noah comes over to me and holds out his arms, and we finally dance.
I put my head on his shoulder, and I say, “Are you feeling a little better? Did you get something to eat?” This is probably a very wifely thing to say, and I realize he’s probably resenting the hell out of it.
“Yes,” he says in a weary voice. “Yes, I’m better. I ate some protein.”
I feel so careful around him. “Good. And you were singing a lot, you and Whipple. That must have been okay, right?”
Then who knows what makes me brave enough to say this—maybe it’s all the alcohol I’ve had, or Blix’s words, or the fact that I’m feeling disconnected from reality—but I say the scary thing: “What’s next, do you think?”
“I dunno. The honeymoon?”
“Okay,” I say. “What about tonight?”
“What do you mean? Tonight we’re going to the hotel and we’re going to have great sex and sleep late. Like newlyweds.”
There are some other things I want to know. Like, is he going to be my husband? And am I really his wife? Are those words we can use? He puts his arms around me and we slow dance to another song, and then they turn the lights on, and I see that Noah’s eyes have no light in them. The air around him is a muddy beige I’ve never noticed before.
So I guess my first miracle will have to be to try to light him back up.
FIVE
BLIX
It’s a week after the wedding and I’m back home now. My tumor wakes me up before sunrise. It is thrumming right below the surface of my skin, like something alive, running under its own power.
Hi, love, it says. What shall we do today?
“Sweetheart,” I say to it. “I was hoping for just a little more sleep this morning. Would you very much mind if we did that—and then later we can talk and do whatever you want.”
The tumor hardly ever goes for this kind of reasoning. And why should it? It knows I’m at its mercy. I’ve made friends with it because I don’t believe in that whole battle metaphor for disease. You always read about that in obituaries, you know—“So and so battled cancer for five years” or worse, “He lost his battle with cancer.” I do not believe cancer appreciates that kind of thinking. And anyway, I’ve made nice with trouble my whole life, and I’ve noticed that what happens is that problems just curl right up like declawed kittens and nestle at your feet and fall asleep. Later, you look down, and they’ve wandered off somewhere. You bid them a fond farewell and get back to what you wanted to do in the first place.
In the interest of friendliness, I have given my tumor a name: Cassandra. She was the prophet nobody believed.
I turn over in the bed and listen to Houndy softly snoring beside me, his grizzled, beautiful face tipped toward mine. I lie there in the grayness of dawn and watch him breathe in and out and feel the magic of the city waking up. After a long time, the sun comes up for real, and a long time after that, the 6:43 bus comes wheeling around the corner and hits the pothole at its usual breakneck speed, causing the metal chassis to complain and screech as it always does. The windowpanes shudder. Somewhere, if I listen, there’s a siren starting up.
An early summer morning in Brooklyn. The heat is already pressing against the window. I close my eyes and stretch. Cassandra, satisfied that I’m awake, goes back to whatever she was doing before she felt the call to wake me up. Sometimes she is as silent and worn out as time, and sometimes she’s a rascally kindergartener wanting only to thump against something living.
I place my hand against her, and sing her a little song in my head.
Call me crazy, but the day I named her Cassandra, I also started giving her nice things to wear. Some days, when she is fierce and hot, I picture her in a hard hat, and other days—like maybe today—I think of her in a lacy dress and invite her for tea. I tell her to imagine she has been given the most delicate and beautiful of my china cups, the one I hang on the hook over the stove.
“I will not forsake you,” I say to Cassandra. “I know you came for a reason, even though I’ll be goddamned if I can figure out what that is.”
Last week, when I got back from the wedding, on a day when I was nearly doubled over in pain, I gave myself a huge reward for making it through and to celebrate meeting Marnie. I told Houndy and Lola that I’d found the person I’d been waiting for all my life, the someone I probably knew from many other lifetimes, and who was my spiritual daughter. And then I painted the refrigerator bright turquoise. I was so proud of myself for not letting anyone in my family know that I am dying that I had to paint the refrigerator as my own little reward.
Houndy—sweet old family-oriented Houndy—thinks I should just tell my family about the mass. “Why not?” he says. “Don’t they deserve to know? Maybe they’d want to be nicer to you.”
Ha! My family wouldn’t want to be nicer to me. They’d want me locked up in some hospital, treating Cassandra with needles and knives and making me talk to doctors, people who would speak to me in that condescending, medical way, people with clipboards and appointment books and computers. Office assistants who would speak too loudly in my presence, as if Cassandra had somehow interfered with my ability to hear.
No thank you. I went to the doctor and got my diagnosis, which I will not dignify by using its medical terminology, because to say the words makes it feel fatal and incurable, and I refuse to go with that. Except I will say this: I got up from the examination table, and put my clothes back on, thank you very much, and I tore up the pieces of paper they gave me—the treatment plan—and I walked out. And I will not go back.
If Cassandra leaves my body—and she may, it could still happen—it will be of her own volition, and this will be the reason: our work together is done. I don’t want to die, but neither am I afraid. I won’t use chemotherapy or put poison into my body. I won’t suffer. Instead, I have taken energy drinks and done chants; I have consulted a shaman in an African village online; I have buried talismans and sowed seeds and performed yoga poses at midnight under a full moon. I have danced and primal screamed and practiced laughing out loud and had massages and acupuncture. And Reiki.
“Oh, my sweet girl. Oh my goodness. No, you can’t be ordinary. Oh heavens no. I feel like I’m standing in front of a magnificent giraffe, and she’s saying to me, ‘Why do I have to be a giraffe? I don’t think I’m going to go around giraffing anymore.’ But that’s just the way it is: you’re a wonderful, incredible giraffe, and you’ve got a life to lead that’s going to take you to amazing places.” She squeezes me and then lets me go. “You know, sometimes I wish I wasn’t at the end of life, because I just want to stick around and watch your creations. All of them.”
“Wait. What do you mean, the end of life? Are you dying?” I dab at my eyes with a handkerchief she produces.
She gets a funny look on her face, and I’m sorry I asked the question. Of course. Noah told me she’s eighty-five. Any way you look at it, that’s got to be pretty near the end of life.
“Hey, so listen, Ms. Giraffe, I came out here to tell you good-bye because I’ve got to go back to the hotel now,” she says. “My plane leaves early in the morning, and Houndy called me to say that he’s invited about twenty people over for lobsters tomorrow night. He can’t help himself.” Then she smiles at me. The wind blows some sparkles around.
“And you,” she says. “You’ve got some miracles to perform, honey child. Please try to remember that for me, okay? The world needs your miracles.”
“I don’t know how to perform miracles,” I tell her.
“Well, then you better start practicing. Words are a good first step. They have a lot of power. You can summon things by believing in them. First you visualize them being true, and then they come true. You’ll see.” She kisses me on both cheeks and then she heads through the door, but when she gets there she turns around and says, “Oh, I meant to tell you. You need a mantra to help you. You can borrow mine, if you want: ‘Whatever happens, love that.’”
When I get back inside, Noah comes over to me and holds out his arms, and we finally dance.
I put my head on his shoulder, and I say, “Are you feeling a little better? Did you get something to eat?” This is probably a very wifely thing to say, and I realize he’s probably resenting the hell out of it.
“Yes,” he says in a weary voice. “Yes, I’m better. I ate some protein.”
I feel so careful around him. “Good. And you were singing a lot, you and Whipple. That must have been okay, right?”
Then who knows what makes me brave enough to say this—maybe it’s all the alcohol I’ve had, or Blix’s words, or the fact that I’m feeling disconnected from reality—but I say the scary thing: “What’s next, do you think?”
“I dunno. The honeymoon?”
“Okay,” I say. “What about tonight?”
“What do you mean? Tonight we’re going to the hotel and we’re going to have great sex and sleep late. Like newlyweds.”
There are some other things I want to know. Like, is he going to be my husband? And am I really his wife? Are those words we can use? He puts his arms around me and we slow dance to another song, and then they turn the lights on, and I see that Noah’s eyes have no light in them. The air around him is a muddy beige I’ve never noticed before.
So I guess my first miracle will have to be to try to light him back up.
FIVE
BLIX
It’s a week after the wedding and I’m back home now. My tumor wakes me up before sunrise. It is thrumming right below the surface of my skin, like something alive, running under its own power.
Hi, love, it says. What shall we do today?
“Sweetheart,” I say to it. “I was hoping for just a little more sleep this morning. Would you very much mind if we did that—and then later we can talk and do whatever you want.”
The tumor hardly ever goes for this kind of reasoning. And why should it? It knows I’m at its mercy. I’ve made friends with it because I don’t believe in that whole battle metaphor for disease. You always read about that in obituaries, you know—“So and so battled cancer for five years” or worse, “He lost his battle with cancer.” I do not believe cancer appreciates that kind of thinking. And anyway, I’ve made nice with trouble my whole life, and I’ve noticed that what happens is that problems just curl right up like declawed kittens and nestle at your feet and fall asleep. Later, you look down, and they’ve wandered off somewhere. You bid them a fond farewell and get back to what you wanted to do in the first place.
In the interest of friendliness, I have given my tumor a name: Cassandra. She was the prophet nobody believed.
I turn over in the bed and listen to Houndy softly snoring beside me, his grizzled, beautiful face tipped toward mine. I lie there in the grayness of dawn and watch him breathe in and out and feel the magic of the city waking up. After a long time, the sun comes up for real, and a long time after that, the 6:43 bus comes wheeling around the corner and hits the pothole at its usual breakneck speed, causing the metal chassis to complain and screech as it always does. The windowpanes shudder. Somewhere, if I listen, there’s a siren starting up.
An early summer morning in Brooklyn. The heat is already pressing against the window. I close my eyes and stretch. Cassandra, satisfied that I’m awake, goes back to whatever she was doing before she felt the call to wake me up. Sometimes she is as silent and worn out as time, and sometimes she’s a rascally kindergartener wanting only to thump against something living.
I place my hand against her, and sing her a little song in my head.
Call me crazy, but the day I named her Cassandra, I also started giving her nice things to wear. Some days, when she is fierce and hot, I picture her in a hard hat, and other days—like maybe today—I think of her in a lacy dress and invite her for tea. I tell her to imagine she has been given the most delicate and beautiful of my china cups, the one I hang on the hook over the stove.
“I will not forsake you,” I say to Cassandra. “I know you came for a reason, even though I’ll be goddamned if I can figure out what that is.”
Last week, when I got back from the wedding, on a day when I was nearly doubled over in pain, I gave myself a huge reward for making it through and to celebrate meeting Marnie. I told Houndy and Lola that I’d found the person I’d been waiting for all my life, the someone I probably knew from many other lifetimes, and who was my spiritual daughter. And then I painted the refrigerator bright turquoise. I was so proud of myself for not letting anyone in my family know that I am dying that I had to paint the refrigerator as my own little reward.
Houndy—sweet old family-oriented Houndy—thinks I should just tell my family about the mass. “Why not?” he says. “Don’t they deserve to know? Maybe they’d want to be nicer to you.”
Ha! My family wouldn’t want to be nicer to me. They’d want me locked up in some hospital, treating Cassandra with needles and knives and making me talk to doctors, people who would speak to me in that condescending, medical way, people with clipboards and appointment books and computers. Office assistants who would speak too loudly in my presence, as if Cassandra had somehow interfered with my ability to hear.
No thank you. I went to the doctor and got my diagnosis, which I will not dignify by using its medical terminology, because to say the words makes it feel fatal and incurable, and I refuse to go with that. Except I will say this: I got up from the examination table, and put my clothes back on, thank you very much, and I tore up the pieces of paper they gave me—the treatment plan—and I walked out. And I will not go back.
If Cassandra leaves my body—and she may, it could still happen—it will be of her own volition, and this will be the reason: our work together is done. I don’t want to die, but neither am I afraid. I won’t use chemotherapy or put poison into my body. I won’t suffer. Instead, I have taken energy drinks and done chants; I have consulted a shaman in an African village online; I have buried talismans and sowed seeds and performed yoga poses at midnight under a full moon. I have danced and primal screamed and practiced laughing out loud and had massages and acupuncture. And Reiki.
