“Maybe. She’s pretty tough. Right, June?”
I shimmy with my shoulders and wink. I can just imagine what that looks like, now that I’m eighty-two.
“There’s the spirit!”
“Okay, Miss June. I think you’re ready for a little rest now.”
I wish I could give Matt a hug, but my head flops forward and shakes a bit, I don’t know why, and he puts his hand on my chin and says he will see me on Thursday. And then, like he does every time he leaves, he sings:
“S’wonderful, s’marvelous, that I should care for you.”
And my head flops further forward. I can’t even see him leave, which is for the best, because I am crying.
Marshall will be fifty-four on his next birthday. That’s how old Del was when he died. He thinks of it, I’m sure. Partly, he’s just a bit of a hypochondriac. Goes to Scripps for daylong medical testing and all that fuss. Marshall knows more about his hormone levels and genetic profile than I know about my own hair.
Not that anyone wouldn’t wonder.
His dad drops dead without a hint, and his mom ends up a raving idiot. Singing Christmas carols at a Jewish wedding and asking the cute young man at the table on the other side of the restaurant for a dance. He thinks these things mean something—that they express deep down desires I no longer have the ability to repress—but if they mean something, I sure as hell don’t know what. They feel as random to me as they do to anyone else. I try to laugh. I mean, I would laugh if I could do what I intend. I think I must have had something to learn about humility, and now I am learning it.
Of course, Marshall’s hoping to avoid ending up like Del or me. I hope he doesn’t end up like this too. But the game’s rigged: there’s no way to win this one. It’s possible to play in an entirely different way if you really see that. That’s what I wish I could say. That’s what I wish I knew how to share. This is a game you can’t win, so don’t play to win. Play to play. Play to keep everyone else in play. That’s the long game here. That’s what I want to tell him.
Marshall moved to Santa Monica after he sold the El Capitan. He and Janie bought a condo years ago, and the kids spent all their vacations there, so it made sense to make a permanent move. When he visits, he asks me if I’m ready to come to California. He says there are some nice assisted living programs, or I could live in the old condo, with caregivers, just as I live now. He seems to think that I’ll go downhill if he moves me out of this house—this house and all its memories.
I don’t know.
I don’t feel like the house is me at all. I wouldn’t mind going to California and seeing the kids once in a while. But I don’t have a way to tell Marshall what I want, and I don’t try. I don’t empty my mind or start singing or make any effort to communicate what I think at all. This way, Marshall will choose what he wants. He’ll leave me here if he doesn’t really want me that close, or he’ll take me there, and I’ll live in the condo or in assisted living, and it will be what he wants.
But I do like seeing him. I love the kids.
I know that it’s not fun for them to see me. I don’t think there’s much in the experience for them. So I don’t want to want it. But I do.
I have hours, days, months to think about things.
I think just fine.
I think about my childhood. I think about my bubbe, and how she talked to me in Yiddish, and how I must have understood when I was small, even though I didn’t later. I think about the cabin at Kittatinny Lake that we shared with our neighbors two weeks every summer, and how it felt to have my back hot with the sun and then how cold the water was. I think about my neighbor’s dog Pal, who would come to the lake with us and then go with me as I rambled farther than anyone else in the woods. Momma would say that it wasn’t safe, but Poppa would say, “She’s okay. She has the dog.”
There were ponds all over that country, and Pal and I would find one, and then I would throw sticks, and he would chase them, over and over. I can almost feel those summer mornings, the smell of the water and the trees, the quack of northern shovelers in the reeds, the heft of a good solid stick in my hand. There was one pond Pal didn’t want to go in. He went in once or twice, then whined and barked and wagged his back end trying to get me to follow him away. “Come on, Pal!” I said, “Fetch!” And I hurled the stick as hard as I could, and Pal wiggled and waited and plunged in and jumped back out without fetching, and just as he barked again, loud, there was a huge sucking sound, and the water spun, and Pal barked madly while I watched, frozen, as a whirlpool formed right in the center of the pond. And like that, with one huge roar, all the water disappeared down into it.
They were old mines, those ponds, and if Pal had been in the water, he would have gone down that whirlpool with it. I ran all the way back to the cabin, yelling about what I had seen, and after I had finally gotten out my story, so that everyone could understand me, Momma started to cry. She kept saying, “Thank goodness you didn’t go in! For once, June, you thought before you acted.” She said it over and over, kissing me and crying, and Lew, who was my neighbor and in fourth grade with me, hugged Pal and said he was a hero, and looked at me and said, “Why did you take him? He’s our dog. He could have been killed.” And even now, more than seven decades later, I hear Lew saying this, and I hear the cracked fear in my mother’s voice, and I remember how it felt to see that water begin to turn and to hear the sound it made, and the way the pond disappeared.
I think about other things too.