The Art Department closed down during the summer, so at the end of the semester I packed my belongings into boxes and stowed them in Celeste’s basement, as though I might be gone for some years. I was ready at last to make my longed-for pilgrimage back to Spain. The only things I took with me, besides a few clothes, were a thesaurus, dictionary, and a satchel full of writing that I hoped to weave into a memoir.
That spring my grandmother Edith died.
One dark overcast afternoon, branches blatting against the window, Seely spread out her palms on the cold glass, extending her fingers across the landscape, and thought of the shabby little mortuary where her grandmother was laid out. She saw herself poised precariously on a soiled rosette on the patterned carpet, beside the open coffin, as though she feared if she moved, she might lose her balance and topple in—into death. She knew she didn’t believe what she saw (her grandmother looked handsome, but not like anyone she knew), though she was trying hard to believe it—to know her grandmother was dead. As she gazed at the corpse, she was suddenly seized with the apprehension that it was about to set ghoulishly up in the coffin. It was then that she reached out, trembling, and touched her grandmother’s folded hands—they were soft and supple, comfortingly real, even with their chill, as though her granny had just come in from the cold.
Like most people with fibromyalgia, I have the sleep disorder that generally accompanies the syndrome; typically, fibromites can’t sustain level-four sleep, when muscles are repaired and the immune system replenished. Instead they pop back into level-one, or Alpha, sleep—or wake up. When I was first diagnosed, I was prescribed a low dose of Elavil, an antidepressant that increases serotonin in the brain, and for the first time in ten years I slept through the night.
Through the previous years of insomnia, however, I developed a technique for getting myself back to sleep. It worked eventually, though it took such concentration, it was exhausting in and of itself. After getting up for hot milk and letting my mind spin awhile—it wouldn’t work if I began too soon—I’d roll over on my back, with my arms at my sides, and imagine I was floating in the middle of an ocean that stretched out infinitely in all directions. Then I’d imagine the water beneath me, infinitely deep, which would bring on a chill, a shiver that lapped over my feet like a wave. With each breath, another wave would lap farther up my body—to my knees, my, thighs, my belly, until I was tingling all over. I would relinquish the ocean image then and lie absolutely still, not moving a muscle; gradually my awareness of my body would fall away and I would feel like disembodied consciousness.
I’d pretend I was looking through a window in my mind—at whatever random images my consciousness raised. At first I’d see only static, which made it hard to stay focused, but gradually I’d start to see fragments of things, then whole images, like a swooping bird or rushing train. And then I was dreaming. Often these were lucid dreams, more vivid that life—a hyper-reality. I would glance at a landscape or a row of Victorian houses or paintings on the wall of a gallery, and I would see every detail in an instant, as though my sleeping mind could apprehend a complexity far beyond what my conscious mind could. “How is this possible?” I would ask myself, wonder-struck.
In some dreams I flew. I’d start out on the ground, flapping my arms, then rise into the air and soar effortlessly, low over the skyscrapers of a city or far above the earth, its details diminishing beneath me. These would start out as ecstatic dreams, but sooner or later, they’d degenerate into nightmares. In one, I remember, I came to rest on my bed, and as I lay there, the bedding beneath me became hotter…and hotter. I had the presentiment then that if I could only stand the pain, I would break through to another dimension of consciousness. So I gritted my teeth, but the heat became so terrible, I finally couldn’t stand it any longer, and I woke myself up at the count of three, something I would do in future nightmares as well.
I’ve heard it said about meditating that there are places that you shouldn’t go without the guidance of a master. And I’ve wondered whether, in dreams, I’ve strayed to the borders of those places.
A friend suggested I might be traveling on the astral plane—that everything I saw was real. In one dream I hovered over a fabulous Victorian house, which had been preserved as a museum. On one of the gables was an extraordinary window. I’ll remember that window, I thought, and if I ever see it in life, I’ll know these places are real. But when I woke up some time later, I couldn’t for the life of me recall what the window looked like. And in the years since, whenever I spot an unusual window on the gable of a Victorian house, I find myself straining to remember.
One morning—I no longer remember the date—I was rereading Karin Fisher-Golton’s charming Amazing May blogs about gratitude and felt prompted to write about something, besides penicillin and the internet, that I’m grateful for:
My writing desk faces a picture window and half a vacant lot where a sprawling coast live oak grows, a sort of grand hotel for squirrels. (Actually, there used to be more than a dozen trees that screened out the properties beyond, so that I could imagine I was living on the edge of a wood.) Throughout the day squirrels cavort up and down the oak’s leafy byways. I’ve seen them hanging by their feet from branches like trapeze artists as they munched on acorns, swinging in the breeze. I’ve also watched them taunting the orange cat that likes to loll around on my car, leaving dirty paw prints all over it. They venture down the trunk of the oak to within a foot of him, then, at the same moment he lunges, they reappear halfway up the tree.
Though my little deck stood one story up from the ground, they had no trouble scrambling up the supporting pole at one corner, so I started hiding nuts for them—to see if they could find them in and around my pots and planters of flowers and vines. They did, of course, even though I took more and more elaborate pains to hide them. In those days, every spring, one or another of my three godkids and I would make a fairy garden in a large terra cotta basin—with tiny flowers, moss, polished stones, driftwood, and a bowl of water for a pond. In the fall when all the greenery died, I’d empty out the basin, leaving just a little soil at the bottom. Throughout the winter, the squirrels could be seen jumping into it and rolling around, giving themselves dirt baths—one of the funniest things I’ve ever witnessed because, like all squirrels, they lived in an accelerated dimension of time.
Sad to say, my deck was dismantled a few years back because the wood was rotting. Then the coast live oak was over-zealously pruned, and all but two of my other arboreal neighbors were felled. Now a cement parking lot covers half the formerly “vacant” lot. But I’ll always be grateful for the delightful memories and the squirrels that still come to entertain me.
Hint: For those of you who would like to make a fairy garden with the children in your life, I found driftwood and polished stones (for aquariums) in a tropical fish store.
Celeste was a friend of my mother’s—a social-worker colleague at Herrick Hospital. My first impression of her when I met her at a party she threw was of coldness. But then my mother told me a story Celeste had confided in her about her troubled first marriage to an army officer, describing a night she’d cried of happiness after lovemaking—it had been so long—only to learn years later that he’d thought she’d been crying with disappointment. Forever after that, I felt an empathy for her.
She’d divorced and married again—ill-advisedly, one of her therapy clients—a younger man who she eventually found out was cheating on her because, as he would complain, she was so perfect she made him feel inadequate.
She was a diabetic—slender, chic—kept a spotless house, drove a Mercedes—and had beautiful collection of lingerie I discovered in the dryer when I went to live with her. (Later, I would find out from my mother, she was having an affair with the boyfriend of a nurse friend of theirs at the hospital, which may have accounted for the lingerie.) She’d bought a Victorian house to renovate in in a poor section of Oakland, the realtor convincing her that the area was on its way to becoming an upscale neighborhood. She offered me a bedroom for free—a dilapidated room whose walls had been stripped—with the proviso that I would pay a modest rent once it was renovated.
My second night there, the battery was stolen out of my car and I was obliged to chain the hood of my car shut from then on—and not long after that, the house was robbed, one of the missing things, my beautiful embroidered Indian bedspread that I’d stowed in a storage room because it didn’t go with Celeste’s Victorian furniture. It was then she had an alarm system installed.
Mornings I used to wake up at dawn and drive to nearby Lake Merritt to walk —partway—around it, the water reflecting the still pinkish sky, a variety of large birds lined up wing to wing on a rope of buoys—mostly gulls and pelicans—that curved out of from the shore.
It was during this period that I began to cook in earnest, though I didn’t like Celeste’s stove, which had a smooth surface that I found a bit creepy. John had bought me The New York Times Cookbook for my birthday, and I bought myself San Francisco A La Carte. I found I loved making things like ratatouille that involved cutting up lots of vegetables because it gave me the feeling of being connected to the earth. I would make myself pots of leek and other soups that I divided up in plastic containers and took to work, where I heated them up for lunch in a pot on a hotplate.
And knowing how important it was to Celeste to maintain a spotless house, I made a concerted effort live up to her exacting standards—except in my own room, which was often a mess.
The Art Office was at the most remote corner of the Art Complex, which was the farthest outpost of the eucalyptus-shaded campus. It was a long, narrow, but cozy room, with wooden walls, an Oriental carpet runner covering the floor, and a window seat below a lengthy bank of windows opening on the small college putting green. In the center was a wooden table for faculty meetings and on the two far ends, my desk and the chairman’s respectively. As I’ve said, it was a quiet place that had few visitors, so I decided that on Tuesdays and Thursdays to come in at 10:00 instead of 9:00 to give myself more time to write, since mornings were when I was at my most creative, a decision I would eventually regret.
When I’d felt everything was falling apart, I’d moved in with Celeste, a friend of my mother’s who was renovating an old Victorian house with extra bedrooms she wanted to rent out. (As psychiatric social workers, she and my mom were working together at Herrick hospital at the time.) Nevertheless, there was a night I chose to spend at Linda’s. In my journal I wrote:
I remember thrashing around in Linda’s bed that night and her putting out her hand to quiet me—then my efforts to stay still and in one spot, feeling claustrophobic in my dreams, like I was going to burst out all over.
I remember sitting at her kitchen table earlier in the evening and starting to cry and not seeing anything after that, except her hand reaching out across the table and gently resting on my arm.
I remember telling her about my argument with Rick about money and his maxim that it was OK to borrow from family but not friends. “He doesn’t realize that for some of us, our friends are our family,” she said.
“Maybe the men we might have been interested in died in Vietnam,” she mused later. And gave me a little book to read with bad poetry and good advice about how to get over a lost love. It made me laugh a little and cry a little until I started to doze off with it in my hand. She got up to turn off the TV and the lights—and then got up five minutes later to get a some warm socks to cover my cold feet.
Another night I dreamed I was to go alone by kayak to an island I had never seen. It was a gray, watery, utterly hopeless dream that had a bleakness difficult to describe. I remember a long wait in a queue of people in front of a narrow canal. When my turn came, I squatted down in the hole of a welded-metal kayak and fitted a steel chest plate over myself and put on a boxy helmet with glass eyepieces to keep out the spray. Then I remember a journey through labyrinthian blank tunnels that went on and on—and only ended with my waking.
BRAGGING
The union intervened on my behalf, as I’ve said, and saved my job at Tiburon College.
A year or so later, I ran into Lisa in the card shop where she now clerked.
“So have you heard from Rick?” I asked.
“As a matter of fact, I talked to him a couple of weeks ago.”
“And how’s he doing?”
“Getting rich, I guess,” Lisa shrugged. “He bragged that he’d bought a new Mercedes—and admitted he was putting a lot of money up his nose.”
Sometime later—months…years?—I remembered the dream I’d had about Rick, his head covered up to his eyeballs in dough, and finally made the connection between the two meanings of dough.
Seely let herself in stealthily with the key she had kept, glanced around, then set the electric blanket she’d borrowed on the raunchy old pelt on his bed. As she stood before it, she envisioned his sleepy Pan face, swathed in bedclothes. And suddenly there it was again—sprouting and blooming out of the obdurate ground of her hurt and anger—her love for him.
A bunch of shirts on hangers were sticking out of his open closet door as she passed down the hall. She fingered the sleeves. This, at least, was one touch he couldn’t recoil from. Abruptly, she felt like grabbing them all—this heap of starched laundry—to have and hold the last of him who didn’t want to be held.
She thought of a day Zeke and she had showered together. She hadn’t had a shower cap, so she chose a black hardhat from his fanciful hat collection. The water drummed on it like rain on a roof, while Zeke lathered her up from the bottle of amaretto soap he kept in a pocket in his shower curtain—and lathered himself up too, face and all, till he looked like a snowman; patting her cheeks with foam, he promised it wouldn’t sting her eyes.
As she reached for the doorknob, a sense of loss pierced her through like a rapier—and she buckled against the door.
They sat across from each other at the dining room table just as they had the first afternoon he told her he loved her. When he said he was so busy he couldn’t make much time for her, she wasn’t surprised, only wondered why he thought it was necessary to state the obvious.
When she didn’t respond, he said with evident satisfaction, “Seely, I am the dance-away lover. I like the fantasy, the rush of falling in love. I don’t like it when it gets too real.”
She stared at him then, realizing she was really seeing him for the first time.
Something in her face must have arrested his attention because he went on, “OK, maybe I used you, but I think you used me too.”
“No,” she said quietly, “I don’t think I did.”
“Well, if it’s any consolation,” he sighed, “when I’m settled in Chicago and have a chance to think about all this, I’m going to feel guilty. I can’t get away with anything.”
And as she continued to scrutinize him, she felt herself rending in two, a ghastly tear down her center, one half beginning to hate him for his cruelty, the other half loving him still.
He’d said if he got his asking price on the house, he would take her away for a romantic weekend—maybe stay at a cozy bed-and-breakfast along the northern coast. But now, jubilant that he’d gotten even more than he’d hoped for, he said he expected her to pay her own way, though he knew she was on the verge of losing her job.
Incredulous and stung, she flew down to LA to spend a weekend with her best friend to collect herself and sort things out—her finances so precarious, she borrowed the money from her friend for the standby ticket.
No sooner was she back than she and Zeke had another argument.
“Zeke, there wasn’t any room in the fridge for my groceries. When I got back from the store, somebody else’s stuff was on my shelf and when I tried to move it, smelly fish water spilled all over the floor.”
“Your shelf! So you’re getting territorial about the refrigerator? The space is for all of us to share.”
“But Lisa told me when I moved in to take the bottom shelf. I thought…”
But he refused to listen. “I didn’t know you were so selfish,” he muttered, walking out of the room.
Later, when she tried to explain again, he changed the subject, saying it turned him off that she’d borrowed money from a friend.
“But you just borrowed $50,000 from your parents!” she cried.
“That’s different—I borrowed money from family.”
“Well, my family doesn’t have any money to lend me.”
She felt panicky then about everything coming apart—that she was going to lose her home, her job, her lover… Maybe if she went ahead and found another place to live, began to settle herself in a new life—maybe it would take some of the pressure off their relationship… So she did.