Tapestry of Fortunes A Novel

18


Friday night, I am brushing my teeth before bed. All of a sudden, I burst into tears. I have a sudden impulse to turn quickly around, to see who is doing this to me. But I’m doing it to myself, I guess. I try ignoring it, take a little walk down the hall with my toothbrush. Tears keep coming, and when I come back into the bathroom and lower my head to spit into the sink, they fall and mix in with the toothpaste. This seems wrong. Unholy. As though the least I could do for myself is to separate the pain from these mundane tasks.

“Sit with your pain,” a woman once told me when I was still a student. “Learn from it. It will make you strong.” I don’t even remember what I was upset about at the time. I don’t think that will ever happen with this pain, I don’t think I’ll ever forget this. Some things make for a psychic limp, and this is one of them.

I go downstairs into the kitchen, open the refrigerator, close it. Go into the family room, turn on the television, turn it off. I go over to the bookshelf to see what movies are there. A lot of Christmas movies. A lot of Disney for Travis. And there, the home movies. Videos of David and Travis and me. I reach for one of those tapes, then put it back on the shelf. And then I take it back out and put it on, wrap up in a quilt, and watch it. Once, I laugh aloud at Travis as an eight-month-old, crawling along the kitchen floor, a bagel in his hand. “Oh, look at that face!” I say aloud. To no one. Well, to David. Well, to no one.