The Living End Read online

  The big hand sits atop the twelve, the little hand on the five. How can a woman survive over half a century and still have to think when she sees a clock with a face? Give me digital.

  I went down to the cafeteria a little while ago. Nausea and lightheadedness had set in, so I fixed a cup of tea and bought a poppy-seed muffin. Only half of it went down before I threw it away and decided to take a walk. I know the machines are keeping Joey alive, so I figure I’ll get as much fresh air as one can here in the city before I venture back up to the ward.

  Humans hope naturally. It’s one of those things that separate us from the animals, I guess. A five-minute conversation in the waiting room proves that. And yet there seems to be a competition, some unspoken “my relative is worse off than yours” contest. Well, I can tell you, I’m not the winner today. There’s a set of parents whose two-year-old is dying with cancer. That puts my situation into an aching perspective. Yes, things could be much worse, but the fizz atop my world dissipates nonetheless. I don’t even deserve to feel the way I do, then, not if I compare myself to them. Plus, seeing that little family unit together there on the couches—Mom and Dad, a fourteen-year-old daughter, a twelve-year-old son and grandparents galore—the futility of my own existence rears up with ready claws. Woo boy, I married a man and worked at an insurance company all my adult life. There are no accompanying worriers here by my side. And this made me content? Why? Didn’t I once see this day coming? Didn’t I once think that maybe I needed people to fall back on for such a time?

  This is too much thinking. Joey’s still here. Perhaps a miracle will occur. Yes. Surely miracles have happened for people less worthy than my husband.

  But I saw the CAT scans earlier, and even to someone who knows so little, it looked bad. There is no hope. My whole world is fading away inside that head of Joey’s. They’re trying to be nice about it, to fashion their explanations in terms I can grasp if not fully understand, but I know better. I know my Joey, and I know he isn’t there. Not really.

  It looks so normal on the outside, that head of his. Same gray hair, nonexistent on top, scanty lashes, mouth soft in repose, white beard neatly combed. So typical in outward appearance. But what’s new there? We see only the surface when it’s the underbelly that seethes and swarms and empties out.

  But Joey and I have a good inside life together too. In thirty-five years of marriage only a few arguments erupted, and one so ridiculous—over what bag of potato chips we should take to his first end-of-school picnic as headmaster, green onion versus barbecue. That shook us both up so much it changed us. Sometimes it only takes something small.

  The commuters scurry home now, and I long to throw myself into their hustle-bustle, into their Habitrail-without-the-tubes existence. Where are they going? What kind of house awaits them? What kind of home? Will they stay in their work clothes before attending to dinner and baths, or will they change into their sweats or pajamas? Do they need to stop at Safeway for the ingredients to their meals, or are their larders full? Perhaps happy hour calls?

  I should call school. They love him so much. He gives them all he possesses, not only in his teaching and administrating, but in the informal sessions around our kitchen table with the older students. I love those nights. Having grown up on a farm on the Eastern Shore, I know how to feed people.

  There they sit, gabbing about literature, authors, poets, the novels and short stories they’re all writing. Words fly like water droplets off twenty simultaneously shaking wet hound dogs. Joey always includes me, saying things like “What do you think of that idea, Pearly?” or “Weren’t you reading a book with that sort of premise recently?” He’s only being sweet, because that is Joey. But their passion far exceeds mine.

  I love Joey’s mind. All the fascination that swirls around inside it has always intrigued me. Joey is the sponge; I am the soap dish on which he sits.

  We travel a lot, just Joey and me. But there are things left to do. A list to be ticked off. See the pyramids for one. Joey always did talk about that. Although I always thought he meant the Egyptian pyramids. Joey laughed at himself for that one. “It’s so typical, Pearly. But how can one understand the mind of men without seeing the pyramids firsthand?”

  He’ll never get there now.

  Joey dropped his mind there in the Jell-O salad and can’t go back to pick it up.

  My breath catches like a fly in a spider web. It stops. And so does the world. Joey is gone. My Joey is gone. It struggles, caught, unable to free itself. My head spins, almost lifting me off the pavement as colors flood my vision in swirls of gold and violet. I rub my eyes and shake my head.

  I want to succumb there on Green Street. I want all the flowers to fade. I want all of life to recognize that something is happening that shouldn’t be. I want the drivers to stop and salute Joey’s window. I want them to drive home and say, “Well, all is not right in the world tonight, honey.”

  But they continue driving, lost in their own tragedies. How many people have I driven right by, judging their everyday, fleshy shells, failing to see the drama beneath the stony, placid faces? I’m walking by them right now, committing the same crime of dispassion.

  I turn around, right there on Green Street, and head back to the hospital, the early summer sun line-driving its light across the eastern faces of the buildings, cars tumbling past on their way to seemingly better things, the hollow heels of pumps and loafers drumming on the concrete sidewalk.

  I decide.

  He’d hate living like this. He’d hate that the world he loves so much moves on while he twilights in never-never land.

  The Golden Corral is Joey’s “nasty little secret.” The fact that he met his final fate there almost makes me want to laugh. “Actually, Pearly,” he once said, “I fit in here about as much as a Dostoevsky in the romance section.”

  “Are you Dostoevsky or the romance section?” I asked.

  “At this point, I have no idea. And I don’t think I actually care.”

  Joey’s poetry, essays, short stories, and novellas have achieved that smaller measure of success the cream of writing does. I call him “Mr. New Yorker” to keep his head from swelling. But his books have given us a nice little nest egg, primarily from the speaking invitations they garner. Still, he’s said more than once, “I should just write a couple of genre novels under a pen name and make some real easy money.”

  “Providing they become bestsellers.”

  His brows sailed high. “Why wouldn’t they?”

  Oh, Joey. His naiveté endears him to me. I’ve chosen to limit my view; Joey comes by it naturally.

  No bestsellers now. I always felt that writing one wouldn’t be as easy as Joey suggested, but I never said that. I never said anything like that to Joey. The world beats us down enough without our spouses pummeling our abdomens.

  I hold my lighter, which sports a picture of a sunflower, up to a cigarette and inhale. Checking the tip to make sure it’s lit, I stick it back in my mouth. I’ve been quitting for years. One day on, one day off. It’s agony, that’s for sure. And yet I go back, like the same polluted wave onto the same seashore, back and back and back, grating along the sand, depositing tenacious slime and muck. But if I can’t smoke a blasted cigarette before I tell them to take my lifelong love off life support, I don’t know when I can.

  I sit in the park across the street from University Hospital. Teaching hospitals give me cause for nerves. My mother died in this hospital. It seems like everybody in Baltimore dies in this city of a hospital. They actually have a food court now. It will rain soon.

  Ozone blows in with the air, cutting through the smog of Baltimore and running across my warm face. I breathe in the fresh scent of a soon-coming shower. The cigarette burns down quickly. Too quickly. I light up another.

  And another.

  And the sun is below the horizon, and the world plums to night.

  I wanted to go back up to that hospital room, but something stopped me right at the massive revolving d
oor that sucks people in and out of the complex. I realized I didn’t want to enter our home with Joey already dead. I needed an interim going-home. I couldn’t just lock up and head to our Sunday outing at the Golden Corral and then unlock the door with Joey dead. That didn’t seem right.

  I’m sitting on the back deck of our house right now.

  We reside in the town of Havre de Grace, about forty or so miles northeast of Baltimore City. It sits at the confluence of the Chesapeake Bay and the Susquehanna River. Our backyard affords us a limited view of the Bay, and it overflows with my flowers and Joey’s herbs. A concrete pool sits in the middle, a place for Joey’s summer boarding students at Lafayette Classical School to convene after hours. We’ve built our life around these stunning boys and girls, handpicked from a world of foster care and violence and neglect and stupidity. I’ve enjoyed our life. I’ve enjoyed watching them arrive, unpack, and learn how to grow. They’re smart, these kids, or they wouldn’t be here in the first place. We’re not for everybody. We’re for those who want to be here. We’re not a reform school. Joey says that kind of education is a job for better people than him!

  I closed up the pool last week. September isn’t for swimming or leisure. It’s for cutting back plants, mulching, tending to their needs. It’s for driving through tunnels of turning leaves, for the blue of the water reflecting a deeper sky, for cheering Joey on at the soccer games he referees, for making autumn wreaths and arranging pumpkins and gourds. It’s for spicing up cider and picking out which Halloween candy to distribute even though the trick-or-treaters won’t be by until the end of October.

  I used to love the month of September.

  I can’t bring myself to open up the door yet, so here I sit. I see Joey there in the water, wearing plaid trunks, goggles, and a bathing cap. I see him trying to do the butterfly stroke, wanting desperately to do the butterfly stroke, year after year, and never being able to raise his body up out of the water as high as it needs to go. He’s never given up, though.

  He stands in the water, his older-man chest drooping a bit, and he waves, his lion grin spreading over his sharp canines, his beard dripping water.

  I wave back, then remember the cover protects the pool and the leaves are just beginning to turn. I remember it is already dark and all that I see really lives inside my head.

  What will I do once I get inside? Shower, I guess. Rid myself of hospital stench. That settles it. I arise from the lounge chair and let myself into the back door of the Tudor-style house we bought twenty years ago, when Joey’s speaking engagements began to pile one upon another. The mullioned window over the kitchen sink holds black diamonds, and the brick floor glimmers when I turn on the kitchen light.

  Pumpkin, our tabby cat, races in and rubs against my legs. I pick him up, feel comforted by his purring, and tend to his needs. Poor thing. Only a few drops of water bead in the bowl, and no food, not even a stray bit of kibble by the baseboard, promises a bite. The kitchen table, long and scarred yet glowing with orange oil, sits empty, and I know it will never be completely peopled again.

  One instant, one Jell-O salad flash.

  I flip the light switch by the back stairway, illumining one part of our art collection that zigzags up the stairwell walls. Nothing valuable, really, just student art Joey offered to buy when someone needed cash. And a few of my photos from college days, when my dreams were my own and my life was only about me.

  I cannot go up to our bedroom. So I walk down the hallway and into our living room.

  He’s everywhere in here. His old typewriter on an antique secretary we found in Tennessee. His collection of steins from all over Germany. His attempts at string art, macramé, watercolors, wood-carving, and bottle cutting litter the walls and mantel.

  This place, which everyone always said was warm and cozy with its knotty pine support beams and floors and golden stucco walls, just appears gloomy and faded as I see it through my own eyes. My own lonely eyes.

  Old sofas. Odd end tables and knickknacks. Antiques of various periods and nationalities that once mingled like old friends at a cocktail party now look like strangers gathered together at a newly opened bar. They’re almost begging me to stick a Purple Heart sign on them and banish them curbside.

  I realize how much Joey filters my view. My eyes catch a prayer book resting on his favorite chair near the front bay window. An Episcopal prayer book. A mysterious Episcopal prayer book. Joey loves the mystical mumbo religion affords. I’ve never understood it. Never really wanted to, honestly.

  My lack of interest seems silly now. But I needed to keep some part of myself separate from him, and even though I could have chosen his book collection, his big band recordings, or his love of imported beer, I chose to divorce myself from his religion. I believe I picked the right thing, because Joey never brought up what went on at mass, and he only insisted I accompany him to the Christmas Eve candlelight mass.

  But there were times when he’d sit out on the deck overlooking the gardens, and he’d stare at the sliver of water visible through the next block of houses, and the sun would penetrate the leaves like strips of bridal veil, and he’d look as though he weren’t really there at all.

  That’s the only way I know how to explain it.

  He has a journal he’s kept for years.

  My skin recoils under the hot droplets of the shower, and I wonder if the water will wash away my liver spots as it sluices away the hospital. My true wish, however, is that it would sluice me away, disintegrating Pearly Laurel to nothing more than liquid spiraling around the lip of the drain, swirling down into the pipes to work her way into nature via a smelly treatment plant, to come back as something like a mushroom or a forsythia bush.

  I comb my white hair back into a tight ponytail and throw on the last outfit I’ll wear while my Joey is alive. I choose carefully. Joey’s always loved the way I dress in artful, flowing, handmade pieces. I love wearing things others have loved in the creating. It makes me feel as though I’m part of something far bigger than my own risings and settings.

  I pull on a pair of black pedal pushers, a black tank top, and an embroidered batik throw. Joey loves this throw that sparkles with silk thread and little mirrors.

  I stand in front of the mirror of our small London hotel room. No big swanky places for Joey. “I want to hear their stories, Pearly.” Joey’s never cared much for the affluent, who, unfortunately, are the ones who read his writing and support the school. But they sure love him! Who couldn’t love a guy like Joey?

  Joey approaches me with a smile and swats my behind. “Hi, lover.” He kisses my earlobe.

  He doesn’t say “Hi, lover” in a sexy manner but in a comfortable “Hi, sweetie” way.

  I brush my bobbed brown hair, each harsh stroke electrifying it to more mammoth proportions. Oh goodness. Sighing with drama, I reach for a barrette.

  Joey’s smile broadens. “You need to learn to love your hair, Pearly. I do.” And he hands me a package. I gently tear open the tissue paper, and an exquisite yet simple delight fills me as a beautiful embroidered shawl spills onto my hands, its tiny mirrors capturing the evening sunlight streaming through the window.

  So I loan my hair to nature’s whims that night as we walk along St. James’s Park, feeding the ducks and swans. Joey finds an old couple to mine for stories, and I settle in beside him, content to listen.

  The phone rings, jerking me out of my sleep. Sleep? Oh, dear. I had sat down on the sofa to recompose my decomposing self. Just for a minute, mind you.

  But the morning sun now shines through the picture window in front of me, casting white diamonds on the wood floor. The leaves outside, just starting to yellow, jangle on their stems like golden charms on a bracelet.

  I scrape the receiver up from the end table and punch the ON button. “Yes?”

  “Pearly?”

  “Hello, Maida.”

  Maida lives across the street. She calls the Bay her backyard. Lucky Maida. A spinster, she’s spun like an electro
n in that huge house all her life. She maintains the place all by herself. “Me and Time-Life Books,” she says. Despite its frightful resemblance to some odd three-dimensional patchwork quilt with its various widths of siding and trim—usually whatever’s on sale at Hechinger’s or Home Depot—the house stands in solid defiance to men everywhere. Maybe too solid, like a pair of orthopedic shoes, or one of those sea captain beds with the hideous cannonballs on top.

  “Something’s wrong over there. I can tell.”

  Maida thinks she’s clairvoyant as well as handy.

  I’m glad she called. I need something usual. “Maybe the fact that the car was gone all the night before last had something to do with it?”

  “Oh, no, it’s more than that.”

  Maida’s my age or thereabouts, but no gray hair sprouts from her head, just cool, ashy brown. And she lets it air-dry in a curly halo around her head. No barrettes for Maida. No bright colors either. Maida wears khaki bottoms and white tops. Period. Every morning during the school year she straps on her Clarks and foots it down to Lafayette School, where she is the cook. If Maida carts food over to the house, you can be sure the pot’s cubic inches are pretty much that of a Custom Cruiser.

  “Well, you’re right about something being wrong.”

  I tell her everything, and she cries, sniffing whenever I pause. I stop several times to swallow the tears. But I manage the story somehow, leaving out the Jell-O salad aspect for my sake and Joey’s dignity.

  “I’ll be right over, hon.”

  “Don’t bother, Maida. I’m heading back down to the hospital after I eat some breakfast. I guess they’ll take him off the ventilator soon after.”

  “You want company?”

  “No, thanks. It’s always been just Joey and me. It needs to be that way at the end.”

  Maida understands. “Let me know when you need me, babe.”