Later in the week, there’s a meeting, and the upshot is that I’m not supposed to come back anymore. In the write-up they give me, they say that they’ve “decided to go in a different direction” with the nursery school—by which maybe they mean they’ve decided not to let crazy people teach the children anymore—and they write me a check, which if I cash it, means that I won’t sue them or anything.
My cheeks are numb from trying to smile through the meeting, from trying to insist that I really am okay.
Sylvie walks me out to my car when it’s all over. “This is going to turn out to be a good thing,” she says. “Right now, you’re just in shock. But it’s time for you to move on with your life, and this is the push you needed.”
I hate that so much that I can’t even.
So much for the big life I’m supposed to be getting. So much for the love spell.
And I just wish to hell that people would stop telling me that all my sucky tragedies are going to turn out to be good things.
EIGHT
BLIX
I am going to die very soon, and I want a big Irish wake, even though I am not Irish. And even though you’re supposed to be dead when they hold a wake for you, I say you don’t have to be dead. There aren’t any rules about wakes, not as far as I know. And if there are, there shouldn’t be. I am here to change the rules on wakes.
And anyway, I have so many people I’ve loved, and I yearn to have them all together so I can hug them and kiss them and tell them good-bye. I can give them little presents, and tell them my wishes for them, and we will eat barbecue and big old salads and drink whiskey, and we will talk and laugh and dance and cry. I want paper lanterns and twinkly lights and candles. I want a little séance maybe, and loud music, and Jessica to play her lute, and Sammy to play the drums. We’ll light the fire pit and I’ll burn things I don’t need anymore, the things I want to offer up to the universe.
I want us all to hold each other’s hands and dance in a conga line. It’s been too long since I’ve had a conga line. And when Cassandra has used up the best of me, it’s going to mean so much if I can just remember that conga-line moment, the moment I looked up and saw everyone I love all together—maybe it would make the leaving hurt less.
I’ll try to talk Patrick into coming upstairs, even though he won’t want to. But maybe he’ll come because it’s the end for me and then he’ll see that people are kind, and he’ll change his life, start to be among the living again. Maybe I can find a way to tell him that there is love coming for him, that I know something surprising and miraculous and magical is lining up in the unseen realm. Maybe I can get him to believe. Before the good can happen for him, he’s got to open himself up just a little, and believing in something like a conga line might be a good start.
I tell Houndy we’ll call it a “Blix Out.” He doesn’t think much of this business of accepting death, but lord, he does love a party. I know him too well: he thinks that if I have a party, it will be such fun that maybe I’ll start answering the letters from the cancer center in which they plead with me to go through with our “treatment plan.”
“Who knows? Maybe they learned something after all those years in medical school and they can cure you,” he says.
Ah, dear, delightful Houndy, with his red, rough face and his white beard and squinty blue eyes, cloudy now from all his years of being in the sun without protecting them. I always tell him he has a poet’s soul. All that sea in him, generations of it. He’s been a lobsterman forever, now transplanted to the city, where he stomps around and acts like the land is a compromise he’s made. Who in their right mind would have thought I’d turn out to be a lobsterman’s woman, going out with him on the boat between the Bronx and Long Island, hauling in nets? But here I am.
“No,” I say. “They’ll cut pieces off of me, and I need all my pieces.”
“You don’t need the pieces with cancer,” he says. “I do not think you need this cancer.”
I just smile because Houndy doesn’t know what I know, that, as stupid as it sounds, sometimes you have to live alongside the things you don’t want, like cancer, and doing that helps you go deeper into life than you’ve ever gone before. If we all lived forever, I tell him, then life really wouldn’t have any meaning. So why not embrace it, prepare for it, love what is?
“Who needs meaning when we’ve got this life?” he says. He flings his hand out, taking in all of it—the apartment building, the chips of electric-blue sky between the rooftops, the park across the street where the children shriek with happiness in the swings, and miles away, the sea, that he claims he can hear.
But he doesn’t know. I’m at the point where I’m all meaning. I’m not going to have a body much longer, but I am certainly going to have scads of meaning.
At night, curled up next to me, he whispers, “Blixie, I don’t want you to die.”
And there is nothing really to say to that. So I just reach across the vast expanse of blanket and touch him.
His hands are like big warm mitts, but somehow their shape is as delicate as stars. Houndy is made from stardust, that’s for sure.
NINE
MARNIE
“How are you doing?” Sylvie asks me on the phone two days later.
I’m jobless and unloved and I’m currently lying under the covers, reading old issues of People magazine and eating granules of instant pudding out of the box, is how I’m doing.
I’m also having a little bit of a fascination with dust motes. I know, I know. They’re fantastic. But they’re really more than fantastic. They have a lot to tell us about ourselves, these dust motes. If you stay still for a long time, they stop falling, but when you move again, wave your arm in the air or shake your foot in the covers, then they come swirling around again, like little stars. Like whole universes. It makes you think—what if our world and the whole solar system are just contained on somebody’s dust mote? What if we’re that meaningless?
I throw tissues at the wall; I pace around the apartment and dance to wild music until the neighbors downstairs bang on my ceiling with their broom handles.
Maybe I could stay like this forever, suspended between worlds.
But what I say is, “Oh, well, actually I’m having all the feelings.”
“Are you looking for another job yet?” she asks.
When I don’t say anything, she says, “I’ll make some calls for you, if you want. When you’re ready. You really are a very good teacher, you know. This has nothing to do with that.”
Later I call Natalie and tell her the whole story, and she puts me on speakerphone so she and Brian can both work on cheering me up.
They say all the right things—things I know I would say to a friend who’d called with this story: wow, what a tough year you’re having; of course you’re not crazy; you’ll find something else; we love you; you could move back home. I chew on my knuckles while they talk to me so they won’t hear me crying.
I have to figure everything out, but right now I have a headache, and I need a nap. Besides that, I need to watch the dust motes lit up by the setting sun before it gets too dark to see them any longer.
So one day, without any warning, my parents show up.
My parents live three thousand miles away; when they show up, it means that airplanes and rental cars have been involved. And this doesn’t happen without about a million conversations ahead of time. But here they are, banging on the door, calling my name like they’re expecting to wake me from a coma. For a long moment, I think maybe I’m hallucinating their voices. Has it come to this? But then I realize. Ah, of course. I should have known. Natalie and Brian have told them what’s happened.
I open the door tentatively, aware suddenly that I’m covered with flour and chocolate and wearing a too-small Japanese kimono that my father brought back from Japan for me when I was thirteen years old. I have on one bunny slipper and one sock, and my hair is a tangled mess because I have let the braid from four days ago turn feral, like a bramble you’d step around in the woods.