THERE IS NO REAL fight against death because death will always win. But death can be handled well or poorly.
The first death I saw happened when I was a child. My mother, who had been holding my hand, stopped holding my hand to scoop me up and to turn me away. But I had seen it. A hit-and-run. The man’s body facedown on the side of the street, with blood pooling at the elbows and knees; the skin ballooned outward, blue and thin, like plastic bags about to burst. A death handled poorly.
My father’s death had been handled well. In China, I had reviewed all his charts, alongside a translator, from routine checkups in his last decade to the adverse event itself, and deemed the stroke properly managed, with the right meds given and the right algorithms performed. Disease can have no reasoning to it, coming down to either bad genes or bad luck or a combination of both. Every death was sad, but in a hospital at least there was a process around it, a box, and once that process was clear, death, while always the victor, could be contained.
* * *
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ONE LARGE PIECE OF mail that did not fit inside my box was left on the floor beneath.
A thick silken envelope, color burnt orange, or rust, or autumn maple, with my name written in cursive and green foil lettering. The envelope came attached to a wicker basket.
I was cordially invited, at the end of the month, to Fang and Tami’s annual Harvest Bash. Activities would include an on-site horse-drawn hayride, a petting zoo (goats, peacocks, and mini horses), face painting (back by popular demand), and make your own cornucopias. Come taste our handcrafted seasonally spiced cocktails, the invite said. RSVP required two weeks in advance.
Last year’s Harvest Bash didn’t have a petting zoo.
I imagined someone with a peppermill cracking fresh flakes into every drink.
The basket came with one pound of Royal Riviera pears, two pounds of seasonal apples, six ounces of gouda cheese, four ounces of cheddar cheese, a cranberry orange loaf cake, a pumpkin spice loaf cake, trays of assorted nuts (pecans, roasted almonds, honey roasted cashews), one pound of cranberry pear chutney, one pound of caramel sauce.
Goats had rectangular pupils, I knew, and sometimes screamed like humans. But did they care for cranberry pear chutney? Or caramel sauce?
I didn’t know what to do with the sauces. The Royal Riviera pears I gave to my doorman, cheeses and nuts to Mark. Loaf cakes I could eat and in two nights they would be gone.
The day it arrived, Fang texted to ask if I’d received a basket.
I texted back that the basket was safe and mostly consumed.
Good, he wrote. Then he asked for my RSVP to the bash.
Right now? I wrote back.
Cool, he replied. I’ll put you down for two. Bring a friend. Anyone you like.
* * *
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I HAD NO WALL decor in my living room except for a giant wall calendar about half my height, with just the grid of the dates, all lines and numbers, no pictures. When the month was over, I ripped the half-body sheet clean off and, more than the breeze from my handouts, the calendar produced a gust.
Overheard in the elevator, between a young couple going up to the ninth floor with me. Same weight and height, this couple, woman and man both 143 pounds, five six and a half, and I wondered if this commonality had brought them together.
Books, the man was saying to the woman, 9B consults on books and culture. He tells you what you could write about and how you should think about yourself in this cultural moment.
What cultural moment? I asked, and the couple turned around. I said I lived in 9A but had nothing to do with 9B, I was just eavesdropping, just curious.
Curiosity killed the cat, said the woman.
Actually, it was cancer, I said, thinking of the former cat of 9B.
The man looked at the woman and vice versa. They both turned from me and we got out on the same floor, but diverged.
He did recommend a lot of titles to me. One evening, he dropped off a stack of books that he had multiple copies of but couldn’t bear to just donate. Books that he’d read in school that had been helpful and enriching at the time. Not necessarily his favorites, but classics that everyone should read. The bag was bulky, and he went through each title with me at my doorway, starting with Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath.
I turned the book over and read the description: a naturalistic epic, captivity narrative, road novel, transcendental gospel about the Great Depression.
Whose grapes again? I asked.
No, the author’s name is Steinbeck. John Steinbeck.
When I stared blankly back at him, he ran a hand frantically through his hair.
Dozens of books in the bag, some thick, some thin. I tried to pretend that I knew most of them. Oh yes, that one, I would say, pointing, when the last humanities class I took in college was the last time I had to read a book that did not contain only facts.
A page a day, Mark suggested. But well worth it. That was how he finally made it through Proust, he said.
And I said, Me too.
Besides books, he had many thoughts about the city and the kind of person who chose to live here. New York was a true melting pot, but what made a true New Yorker was this or that, a unified belief system of tolerance, of live and let live, that couldn’t be replicated anywhere else. New Yorkers weren’t rude, they were brusque, witty, sharp; they told you exactly what they meant, no bullshit or fake pleasantries. From here, somehow, we wound our way to the Yankees. Every New Yorker has an opinion about them, so what was mine?
I asked if he was talking to me about baseball.
Baseball? he said and kept tucking brown locks behind his ear. They didn’t look bad there nor did they undercut anything he’d just said. Brown with streaks of chestnut, thick and slightly wavy, no frizz. By a certain age I was told to stop playing with my hair in public and especially while I spoke. You don’t want to grow up into one of those, do you? a teacher or other adult would ask. A woman who twirls her hair while speaking is a woman never to be taken seriously.
What other sport is worth watching and discussing? he continued in a deeper, more somber voice. Football is too militant. The gridiron, the idea of gaining yardage and gaining ground. Baseball is in every way more perfect; there are no flaws in the game, hence why it’s America’s sport and pastime. Just consider how pastoral baseball is. It’s all about going home.
Huh, I said, because I’d never thought about baseball like that nor had anything profound to say about sports. Did a person then need to watch baseball to have America be her home? Neither of my parents had watched any and neither considered this country home.
That I didn’t have a television also surprised him.
You don’t have a TV? But how do you watch…He listed out the things I was supposed to have watched from both past and present. I was missing out on the ubiquity of NY1 news, game shows like Jeopardy!, famous movies set in this city (where to even start? he said), and famous sitcoms (only one place to start). The show about nothing. Jerry and Kramer, two neighbors who live across the hall from each other, like he and I, long-term pals who get into all sorts of shenanigans. And George, he ends up working for the Yankees.
When I asked if the show was actually called About Nothing, Mark fell into what resembled a catatonic state of shock. Then he looked down, for a long time, at my doormat. During the period of his shock, I thought about doormats and how mine was made from a fibrous weave and, if I was remembering the back label correctly, from the furry husks of coconuts. So, did my doormat also have hair, since it shed continuously like a human head? Those poor sacrificial coconuts, cut off from their trees to make wiping mats for feet. The long silence continued. I touched my neck and felt the flush of anxiety, felt my new cultured neighbor was about to tell me that I perceived the world all wrong.
The show is called Seinfeld, Mark said, still counting the coconut hairs of my doormat. As in Jerry Seinfeld, and it’s set in the Upper West Side.
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