“It does!” I say. She told me. She told me. She told me.
Later in the conversation, she references a trip to Paris: “For my husband’s job we go quite regularly.” This is like Christmas. Gift after gift. Not only do I now know she has a husband, I know he is quite possibly French or at the very least EMPLOYED BY FRENCH PEOPLE. This is information I can work with. Next she is going to tell me about her Black Panther college boyfriend and her miscarriage and her best friend, Joan.
“HUGE NEWS!” I tell everyone who will listen. “My therapist has a husband. And he might be French.”
Why does Margaret deem me ready now? What test have I passed, what maturity have I displayed? Do therapists have a metric by which they judge our ability to work with information rationally? I wonder if she regretted it when she hung up, frowned, and gathered up her pretty hands, the hands with a gold ring on every finger so as to keep the mystery alive.
Maybe I have properly conveyed the truth and security of my romantic relationship and she is ready to admit me into a club of stable, balanced women with whom she shares. Maybe she just can’t resist gabbing when it comes to midcentury furnishings. Or maybe it was an accident. Maybe she forgot our roles for a moment, and we became just two women, two friends on a long-distance call. Catching up about our houses, our husbands, our lives.
I THINK A FAIR AMOUNT about the fact that we’re all going to die. It occurs to me at incredibly inopportune moments—I’ll be standing in a bar, having managed to get an attractive guy to laugh, and I’ll be laughing, too, and maybe dancing a little bit, and then everything goes slo-mo for a second and I’ll think: Are these people aware that we’re all going to the same place in the end? I can slip back into conversation and tell myself that the flash of mortality awareness has enriched my experience, reminded me to just go for it in the giggling and hair-flipping and speaking-my-mind departments because … why the hell not? But occasionally the feeling stays with me, and it reminds me of being a child—feeling full of fear but lacking the language to calm yourself down. I guess, when it comes to death, none of us really has the words.
I wish I could be one of those young people who seems totally unaware of the fact that her gleaming nubile body is, in fact, fallible. (Maybe you have to have a gleaming nubile body to feel that way.) Beautiful self-delusion: Isn’t that what being young is all about? You think you’re immortal until one day when you’re around sixty, it hits you: you see an Ingmar Bergman–y specter of death and you do some soul searching and possibly adopt a kid in need. You resolve to live the rest of your life in a way you can be proud of.
But I am not one of those young people. I’ve been obsessed with death since I was born.
As a little kid, an unnamed fear would often overtake me. It wasn’t a fear of anything tangible—tigers, burglars, homelessness—and it couldn’t be solved by usual means like hugging my mother or turning on Nickelodeon shows. The feeling was cold and resided just below my stomach. It made everything around me seem unreal and unsafe. I could most closely equate it with the sensation I felt when, at age three, I was taken to the hospital in the night with sudden hives. My parents were away, on a trip, and so my Brazilian babysitter Flavia had rushed me to the ER, where a doctor placed me on a high bed and pressed a cold stethoscope between my shoulder blades. On our way into the hospital I was sure I had seen a man sleeping inside of a mailbag. In hindsight, he must have been on a gurney, covered in a dark blanket. Maybe he was comatose or even dead. The doctor removed my shirt, checked under my armpits, and all the while I hovered above us, dissociated, observing.
This chain reaction of observations and implications would repeat itself throughout my childhood, in the face of this unnamed fear, and I came to refer to it as “hospital feeling.” I decided it could be cured by taking a swig of grape juice.