When I am dead, my dearest
Sing no sad songs for me,
She turned off the tap and wiped her hands on a towel. Dry the dishes or leave them to drip? She looked around the kitchen: everything in place. Might as well dry them, she supposed. You never know what would get parsed for meaning later.
She’d bought these dishes before she repainted the kitchen, in fact they had inspired the redecoration. Not normally prone to extravagance, she bought them on a whim, spending an absurd amount of money. They had a designer’s name on the back, the kind of name that got dropped on the red carpet at Oscar time, and were square and smooth and only slightly curved. They looked to her like one should eat delicate rolls of sushi off of them, or perhaps something involving truffles that the fast choppers on the food channel could call “fusion.”
Mostly she ate meatloaf off of them, piles of macaroni, pallid baked chicken breasts when she began to feel diet conscious. These plates will never hold fois gras, she thought, no rosemary-infused triple-virgin olive oil, no Chilean sea bass. But they had inspired her to repaint her kitchen in shades of tan and slate, to reface the cabinets, to buy a new fridge and stove with shiny reflective fronts. And that, she supposed, was something.
Plant thou no roses at my head,
Nor shady cypress tree:
It was quiet in her little house, for a change—she almost always had the TV on these days, a droning news channel more for background noise than information. One of thousands just like it lining the streets of her neighborhood, the house had been built in the forties for the factory workers and their families. By the time she had bought it in an estate sale, the factories had closed and the families were grown. Just old people now, widows and golfers. She’d been proud of home ownership, like everyone says you are supposed to be, but mostly she was relieved to be finally free of a string of slimy and corrupt landlords. She could have a dog. She could plant lilacs in the backyard.
She did both of those things in her first few years. The lilacs still thrived out there, and every spring she thought about cutting them down. They’d grown and spread and for a few weeks every May the scent was so strong she could hardly stand it. She would think to herself that’s it, this time they go. Then something would come up, a project that needed overtime at work or some more pressing bit of home repair, and the time and the desire slipped away until it was summer again and the lilacs were just green and full and blocking the view of the neighbors behind her floating pale and whale-like in their pool.
The dog had been a mangy thing, picked out at the pound because it had managed to look simultaneously friendlier and more pathetic than any of the other dogs. For a long time, she worried about those other dogs, if they ever found a home. But the thought that perhaps they hadn’t made her sad, and she forced herself to stop thinking about it. Luckily, this was about the time George took to chewing on the couch cushions and she had other things to occupy her mind when it came to dogs.Even considering the couch cushion thing, George had a good dog. Didn’t bark a lot, except when someone was coming up the walk. Liked to chase tennis balls around the yard for hours and sniff anything not actively running away when she took him on walks. She always suspected that George had been more popular in the neighborhood than she herself was. Mrs. Slowinski would ask about him if they met at the market, Mr. Rinaldi would pause his endless laps of the block to slip a bit of a dog treat through the fence. When she finally had to put him down, she received sympathy cards from up and down the street.
Be the green grass above me
With showers and dewdrops wet;
She read through the cards with Martin on a Saturday night. She remembers it was a Saturday, even though it was eight years ago, because she also remembers that, when she was through crying, they made love on the living room floor while some forgettable pop star hosted Saturday Night Live in the background. The scratch of carpet, the canned laughter—she felt so much like a teenager that she tried to pretend her parents could walk in at any moment, just to complete the experience.
When she told Martin this, he laughed at her then made a joke about premature ejaculation and assured here that she wouldn’t be terribly impressed with his teenage self or performance. They sat naked in the glow of infomercials and exchanged embarrassing high school stories until dawn, then spent the rest of the weekend in bed.
Sitting in that living room now, with the same couch but a new TV, she wondered about Martin. Last she heard he was in Chicago—she had run into a friend of his in the beer line at a baseball game. The friend seemed uncomfortable when she asked passingly about Martin, and she assumed that meant there was another woman. Good for him, part of her thought. And rotten bastard, another part of her thought.
It had been good while it lasted, and lord had it lasted: two years before that night spent mourning George and their stupid youth and then another three years after that. Caught them both by surprise, she figures, because they were neither of them the type for that sort of thing. He went for one-night stands in bars; she’d had a string of starts that would fizzle after a few dates. Three-and-out, she’d told him. Like a bad football team.
They’d met in a bar, in fact. A woman she worked with was leaving for a new job and the whole department went out on a Tuesday night to pretend at camaraderie. Martin, she would later learn, came to the same bar every Tuesday night with old college roommates. He sent her a drink, she sent it back. Later in the night, when he sidled over and struck up a conversation, she couldn’t shake the feeling that it was the challenge he was attracted to, the wanting of something he couldn’t get easily.
In fact, she never overcame that fear. She felt it on and off for five years. Sometimes it made her angry and defensive and sometimes it made her pull away, as if to give him the chase she thought he wanted. She threw it back at him in the end, when he accused her of being cold and difficult. It hadn’t ended well between them and hadn’t ended for reasons that were easy to see. It wasn’t exactly because she was moody and contentious, it wasn’t exactly because he tended to get garrulous with other, younger women when he was drunk. They’d yelled things at each other for a while, words that burned off the tongue. Doors slammed, one of her smooth square plates broke against a wall. It ended because it ended, she thought, because things had to end.
She wondered how, or if, he would hear. The friend at the baseball game would see it in the newspaper and call him, or one of her coworkers would run into one of his college roommates at that bar and say, hey, did you hear? Maybe he would never know and the phone in his new place in Chicago would never ring, there would be no stuttering and solemn voice on the other end. Maybe he’d go his whole life thinking of her here, in this house, with stinky lilacs that never meet their doom and George buried out back beneath Mrs. Slowinsky’s statue of St. Francis.
And if thou wilt, remember,
And if thou wilt, forget.
The house was paid off, thankfully. The phone and cable and utility bills were paid through the middle of next month. She only had the one credit card and there was no balance on it. The dishes were put away and the fridge had been cleaned out. She took eight boxes of books to the public library before lunch and took eleven bags of clothes to a women’s shelter after. She declined a tax receipt from each.
On the dining room table was a will, updated two weeks earlier. There were a few charities that will be pleasantly surprised and small amounts set aside for her niece and nephew, not that she had been close to either of them. But they were the nextest of kin that she had, so the hassle would fall on their shoulders and she thought there ought be some consideration for that. They were good kids and her sister’s illness had been hard on them both.
She though that they would understand, or at least hoped they would. Her sister had a loving husband, an adoring daughter, a devoted son. She’d had things to fight for and so she fought. It was losing battle, fought by inches and lost inch by inch. She’d watched the whole thing and knew immediately that it would not be that way for her. Her body would not burn the way her sister’s had, would not wither to nothing from internal warfare. She would not treat her internal organs like a suspicious enemy population—kill ‘em all and let God sort ‘em out. Her whole life had been on her own terms and this would be, too. If her body set out to betray her, she’d double cross it right back and take into her own hands what rogue elements were trying to take for themselves.
I shall not see the shadows
I shall not feel the rain;
She walked down the hall, from the living room to her bedroom in the back. She ran her hand along the wall, under a series of framed pictures lined up at eye level down the length of the hall: her parents, her grandparents, her sister’s family. When she reached her bedroom, she stood in the door for a long moment, taking it all in. The bed, covered in a quilt her grandmother made. The dresser, devoid of daily clutter. The cheap jewelry had gone to the women’s shelter, but there was a wooden box with a few more expensive things she’d bought over the years, a pair of the quilt-making grandmother’s diamond earrings and the other grandmother’s wedding ring. Those would go to her niece, to sell or keep as she would.
Her closet was empty, completely bare except for a row of naked hangers. The dresser was empty as well (after packing the bags for the shelter, she filled one more with her garage-cleaning t-shirts, her socks, and her underwear. The thought of her niece—or worse, her nephew—sorting through them was too mortifying to bear).
It was not a sin, what she was doing, she thought. Not that she ever went in much for religion. Her mother dragged her to church every Sunday morning until sometime in high school, when she simply rolled over instead of waking up when Mom knocked on her door. It never took in her, though it had, a little, in her sister, who also dressed her children for church every Sunday until they, too, reached high school and started sleeping in. She wondered idly, if she had children, would she had done the same? Was that a mom thing, something that you just start doing the way you just start carrying band aids and tissues in your purse everywhere you go?
She never decided not to marry, never decided not to have kids. It had just never happened. Maybe, with Martin . . . but they had liked to drink a little too much, liked to stay up late. Her maternal instinct didn’t seem very strong as far as she could tell. She liked the smell of babies, the powder and the new of them, but always felt awkward around actual children, little creatures that could talk back but weren’t interesting.
A month ago, she’d wondered if her life was getting too empty. She went to work, came home, read a lot, watched some TV, went to sleep, and did it all again in the morning. She hadn’t dated much since Martin, hadn’t seen her sister’s family much since the funeral, hadn’t gotten another dog since George. She’d thought about joining a book club, taking up a hobby, getting season tickets to the local baseball team. Now she was glad of it, glad that there was no one to explain things to, no one who would try and talk her out of this, or feel guilty about it later.
She came to the decision, not . . . easily, exactly. But with the same hard practicality she had showed in every other decision she had made, from choosing a college, to choosing this house, to choosing the stocks in the retirement plan that would be liquidated and paid out to the same women’s shelter that got her suits and sweaters.
I shall not hear the nightingale
Sing on, as if in pain:
Her doctor had careful to couch everything he had said in the language of hope. He explained everything in terms of how they, he, medical science, could win the coming fight. But she knew better, read between the lines of his surprise that the cancer had spread quickly. She would not be a survival statistic. The talk of remission rates was wasted on her. This was the same as what tore through her sister, an unstoppable blitz of disease. It wouldn’t matter what they would cut off or cut out or flood with poison. She knew what didn’t work. She wanted to do something else.
It was not despair that led her to this. It was not a loss of hope or a sense of depression. In fact, she thought it was the exact opposite. She was not giving into a feeling of powerlessness—she was taking power back, making a stand.
She changed jobs right after Martin left, had her first interview the day before the night when the plate was thrown, in fact. Not that she had disliked her other firm, just that she saw an opportunity and went for it. She drove a hard bargain at the table, and started with a higher salary than had been advertised.
The designer dishes, the dog at the shelter, the right shade of graying black for the kitchen cabinets—when she knew what she wanted, she went after it and almost always got it. Her sister thought she was cold and inflexible, several of those unsuccessful dates thought she was a bitch. It had not bothered her in either case. The guys were schmucks, by and large, and her sister had waited until she was diagnosed with cancer to show any remarkable backbone.
Compared to this, the rest is meaningless, she figured. If she didn’t bend on a close-enough color of her bed sheets, if she demanded a certain delivery time for her couch, there was no reason to leave this final and most important stage to fate or chance. She was a stubborn women, she knew this about herself. She was headstrong and decisive and ill inclined to compromise. She didn’t necessarily consider it a fault, though she knew others did. She would not surrender on a few measly grand of salary or to the jerk who tried to cut her off in traffic and she would not surrender to an unseen invader in her own body. She wanted to dictate this, too, this one thing they say you don’t get to control. She’d decided everything else in her life, right down to, if she’s honest with herself (and why not tonight, of all nights, be honest?), the terms and circumstances of Martin leaving.
And dreaming through the twilight
That doth not rise nor set
She snapped the lights out in her bedroom and moved purposefully through the house. She turned all the interior lights off and turned the porch light on. She stopped at her desk, tucked into a corner of the dining room, and took a sealed envelope out of the drawer and a strip of tape off the roll. Moving on, she paused at the bathroom door to tape the envelope at eye level.
Jimmy it read in her stiff handwriting. Her nephew, who liked people to call him Jim now. He’d always been Jimmy to her, though, a sticky kid in short pants with skinned knees and a willingness to put back in his mouth the lollipop that just fell in the dirt. She hated involving him in this at all, but it’s the one detail she couldn’t handle herself. He’d be there in the morning, lured under pretenses as close to the truth as she could manage.
She needs help with something and it might take all morning, she had told him over the phone before dinner. Come by around nine and don’t bother to knock because she may not hear him (when she said this last, she had to suppress a dark chuckle).
So stubborn, so determined, so independent, maybe she could have harnessed all this energy and determination and beaten it after all, she thought as the tub filled with warm water. But at what cost? Fourteen doctors, thirty pills a day, vomiting until her eyes bled, wasting to a skeleton? For what? If, at the end, the enemy surrendered, it would still not be victory—the battle would just turn to a siege, a constant vigilance against pockets of insurgency. And that would be the best she could hope for. To die anyway, on terms she didn’t get to dictate, overcome and stripped bare? The defeat all the more bitter for the fight? That’s not what her life was, and is not what her death will be.
She slipped into the tub, naked and calm. The heat of the water, the slight steam, she closed her eyes and sighed. She did not doubt this and she did not fear this and her hands did not shake as she reached for the razor.
She cuts this string, herself.
Haply I may remember,
And haply I may forget
