My White Piano

I got my white piano the summer after I was married, from a company having a liquidation sale who had set up temporary shop in an otherwise empty storefront in my home town of Sayre, Pennsylvania. I was in Sayre the summer after I got married because I was taking care of my grandmother while she recovered from twin knee replacements. She was in her 80's then, and needed considerable help. I spent quite a bit more time at her house than at my own newlywed house, and that was fine with just about everyone except my mother, who spent quite a bit of her time muttering about how I was spending mine. One day she sat drinking coffee with her best friend and shook her head dolefully at me when I came in. What is it, I said. Nothing, she answered, just that Carol and I were sitting here saying that we sure don't want to be burdens on our kids when we get old. True to her word, my mother died exactly three months to the day after her cancer diagnosis, and was only 63 at that, so she scarcely had time to be any sort of burden at all and no one had to worry much about her getting old, either. Be careful what you wish for, I still tell my own two kids, and that's exactly what I'm thinking of when I say it.

I think as she often did, my mother was comparing who-I-was to who-I-ought-to-be and as usual, I was losing. Or maybe she'd felt she'd been a bad example to me, which was often at the real root of the things that were hard between us. My mother's first foray into marriage had lasted around seven years, start to finish. The accident of my conception had been the start, and this was the finish: one day my father kidnapped my sister and me--I was in second grade and my sister a kindergartner, and he just walked into the school and walked back out with us in tow, which no one thought twice about in those days. That's the part of the story that gets me the least, when I think about it now. Next he took us across a state line which would eventually make it harder for my mother to get us back, and now I'm a little more irritated thinking about it all, but what gets me even angrier was how he hid us at his mother's house and her being in cahoots with the whole thing, saying, when my mother called her, that she hadn't seen us. And after that, it was his turn to call around to various members of my family and hint that he might have drowned the two of us in the river--he was pretty drunk by this time--but really, to my mind it wasn't even that so much as it was the story about how my mother and her same friend Carol, who had been her best friend at twelve and still was then, at twenty-eight or -nine, how she and Carol drove over the back roads and through the hills that night hoping like crazy that maybe my sister and I had somehow miraculously been deposited at my aunt's house, my mother's older sister's place, and they'd find us there and that would be the end of this particular nightmare...

...but it wasn't, and what they found there instead was my aunt meeting them at the door and drawing herself up and not letting them in and saying to my mother, her baby sister, her baby sister who had no real reason to doubt that her own babies were lying at the bottom of the river in the dark, saying this: you know, if you'd been at home like a good wife, none of this would ever have happened...

But, that was my family, and when they weren't busy self-medicating or trying to pitch each other out of windows or ambushing us kids, you could usually find them all occupied whacking whoever was handy over the head with the imperfections they couldn't forgive in themselves and using each other for their passive-aggressive target practice. You can see it in all the photographs, the way we all have our teeth bared in those Gorgon smiles, Christmas, Fourth of July. You know, the way everyone showed up for all the holidays, no matter what. The way they all kept in each other's business. You know, love.

So probably my mother was concerned lest I become a bad wife but since my marriage lasted all the way up until death us did part, I guess she didn't need to be. That summer morning I passed by the formerly-empty storefront I glanced in and saw that overnight, it had filled up with pianos. Pianos! My friend Linda was with me and that is exactly how I ended up with the piano I got--it was a 1919 Fischer upright, and in the fashion of the day, was painted white, an ivoried white with gold lines of trim. Linda and I had walked right to it because her little brother Ed had had a white piano when we were all in high school. I could still picture it in their family room, on the wall that ran perpendicular to the sliding glass doors. I don't know if their piano was still there by then, but Linda and I had the same thought--just like Eddie's!-- and at that moment, me and that white piano bonded and that's how I knew it was going to be mine. Eight years later Ed died, and after that when I would sit down to play, I would think of him and remember how happy he was when he got his piano, remember him dying while I was late in my pregnancy with my daughter, and him telling Linda that if I had a baby girl, I should name her Lily.

The piano cost $600 which was considerable money in 1983, or at least was a considerable amount to me in 1983. But my grandmother bought it for me. She had always maintained that a home was not a home without a piano in residence and I tend to agree although nowadays, you see them less often than you used to. She had gotten her first piano when she was sixteen, when her foster father traded their old work horse, Molly, for it. She lost the piano again when someone, I think my grandfather, gave it away to a boy at their church and I know it broke her heart when that happened. Later on, it was replaced by a spinet which was the piano I always remember them having, although when I knew my grandmother she didn't play at all anymore. I didn't care for it when I first started out, and could scarcely see how the torture of practicing scales was any different from the torture of learning times tables, or, for that matter, how trading a horse for a piano had been any improvement in the fortunes of the household in general. I always wished they'd kept the horse. Also that the horse had lived for the next fifty years until it would had been time to meet me. My grandmother still had Molly's old horse blanket, and whenever I stayed at her house I always slept under it, in spite of the fact that I'm allergic to wool and it made me miserable with the itching.

My white piano got delivered to my newlywed home a few days after I bought it. The van was driven by two sullen men who informed me their normal job was hauling all the equipment around for a race car team but this was something they did sometimes to earn a little extra money. They didn't do this particularly well, as it turned out--a 1919 Fisher upright piano weighs a lot and is really more of a 4-person or even a 6-person moving job, particularly when it's coming down an unpaved and uneven path such as the one that led to my front door. Still, they got it inside, and just as they were getting ready to leave again what was about the biggest thunderstorm I've ever seen blew up and suddenly, you couldn't see their truck from the door for the rain and to try stepping outside in that seemed like a supremely bad idea, so I gave them each a beer and they stood by the door and drank, morose and silent, until the rain finally let up enough that they could dash back out to the truck and head off to their purer vocations as race car roadies.

I sat and played my piano most of that afternoon, and some each day after that, or most days, and when it needed tuning a friend of mine who had been a music major at Ithaca College came over and tuned it. I have always regretted not learning to do that myself, even now, when I no longer have need of such a skill. A few years later we moved to Massachusetts, and hired people on both ends of that trip to first load and then unload the piano onto the truck for us. I worried the travel might be too much for it, but I didn't need to. When I got it, the salesman told me the piano had been living in Binghamton, NY, in the summer of 1972 when Hurricane Agnes blew through and flooded everything, and a week in water hadn't hurt it, or at least hadn't hurt it much, it had only needed a little refurbishing after that. We all lived together in the Massachusetts house for ten years, and the last time I saw my old neighbors they were saying how they still talked about it to the woman who owned the house now, pointing to the wall and telling her this is where Anne had her piano whenever she had them all over for a party.

In that house, though, the piano was hardly ever in danger of being played, ironically because it was a happy house for us: it's where my husband got sober, it's where we got our two kids. And once there are babies in the picture, let's just say that your priorities get rearranged, and piano practice turned out to be pretty low on my list, way lower than being able to get a shower, say. I spent a lot of my time when the kids were toddlers keeping them away from the piano, or trying to, because one after the other, once they were able to stand up on their own, they began crawling under the keyboard overhang and then suddenly standing UP and the sound of their heads smacking into the hard wood would ricochet around the room and I would worry that they'd grow up addled. But sometimes I could find a little time to play, and the dog I had in those years, a Rottweiler cross, who was generally on the grouchy side, always calmed down and flopped beside me while there was piano music in the air. She was made especially relaxed by listening to the third movement of Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata and the more expressively I tried to play, the better chance I had of lulling her right to sleep. When we finally left that house six men from our neighborhood came down and picked the piano up and put in on the truck, and then we all drove the five miles up the road to our new house and they brought it in and set it down on the stone floor there. My neighbor Tad pulled a muscle in his chest doing it, and he nearly dropped the piano on his foot from the severity of the pain. We all thought he'd had a heart attack, and I had the additional thought that quite possibly, my piano had just committed its first murder.

The day my youngest child started kindergarten I drove him over to his school and went in the classroom for a while and bolted back out again when I realized I was going to cry, and then I came home and decided I was going to celebrate this particular rite of passage by sitting down at my piano and starting to play my old favorite pieces and practicing every day until I was back in good piano shape. I played for a little while that morning and I think that was the last time I ever touched it. At least on my own: I taught both of my kids a little bit and when my daughter was in third grade, she and three of her best friends decided to form a girl group. Tuesdays after school they'd all come home on the bus together and all four would sit down at the keyboard at once and giggle awhile while I gave them a "lesson," which consisted of four giggling girls with their eight slender hands trying to play C, D, E in unison, or everyone stopping to hear one or the other pick out a tune, if she could. Then they'd troop off to my daughter's room to draw posters and eat and think of publicity ads for their band and decide what everyone was going to wear, and then it would be time for them all to go home.

If my white piano had been possessed of real legs I'm sure it would have walked out of the relationship a long time before I finally let it go, but the truth was, at some point along the way I had lost my interest and couldn't see my way to ever getting it back. I never was able to be the musician I wanted to be--I was at best middling, and at worst ambitious, because to have those aspirations without the talent to back them up only leads you around in circles for awhile until you figure out you're not making progress, you've ended up pretty much right where you started out. I don't know why I wasn't gifted when I so wished to be gifted, but there it was, I was not. I didn't have the drive, I suppose, and I only recently figured out that I also wasn't built for it. This occurred to me when I was looking at a picture of a musician friend, and noticing his impossibly long fingers--real musician's hands, I told him. You could look at those long fingers and know they'd have no difficulty conquering scales or speeding through the allegros of a song, and that mastery lends them an air of purpose and also a slight erotic charge. My own hands, by contrast, look better-suited to digging potatoes out of a field than hanging poised over the keyboard of a concert grand. I feel now as though I ought to apologize to my piano for having wasted so much of its time.

The piano did not care about any of this, of course, but I think it had long since started laying the groundwork for its next move.

It had been there in that happy house in Massachusetts, and when we lived there I had a friend across the road whose life was difficult, owing mostly to a right royal bastard of an abusive husband and the four kids he left so battered that the eldest son finally decided he was done. His suicide came a few weeks after my husband's death, and in those chilly months afterward his mother and I talked a lot and grew close again and when it was time for me to move, I gave her the white piano. I knew a piano was one thing she'd always wanted--well, other than her son back, which I couldn't do for her, but this was something I could. She lived in a little lake house, same as I had, and the last time I was there, she was planning to move her entire upstairs living room into the basement, and the upstairs was going to become The Piano Room. I know my white piano, and know it's going to like dominating a space like that. I've written to her a few times since we've moved though she never writes me back. I hope it's that she's occupied with the regular busy-ness of life, and that if she does have a few moments when her hands are empty, she's starting to find her way around that keyboard, and that when she sits down to play, at first she'll be remembering the years that we were friends and after that, she and that white piano music will head out together somewhere that's just a little ways off in the future and quite a bit happier than where she is now.

Ginette

Finally the day came when my husband needed to go to the hospital and was too sick to get to get there except by ambulance; and after they had driven him off I looked at the clock and its blue number winked at me and said 10:23 which was the date of our anniversary and that dropped me, and I sat there in the living room and put my head down on my lap and howled. That morning David had shambled down the hall with paralysis already taking over his face and his legs about to follow suit saying, something's wrong, something's wrong. I called the ambulance and let them pack him away and a friend of ours drove his car down behind the ambulance and I thought that, if David didn't survive the trip into Boston, at least Bill would be there to give me the call when they all pulled into the hospital again and discovered the bad news. That didn't turn out to be what happened; I thought that morning I probably wouldn't see him alive again but that didn't turn out to be what happened, either. But I sat there with my head bent way over and cried until I stopped, and then thought for awhile about my kids being in school and what was going to be waiting for them when they got home that afternoon. I thought about how, a few weeks before any of this had started, my husband and I had spent a morning at their school together. My son was a first-grader then, and it was the day before Thanksgiving break which meant it was Family And Friends Day when all the classes had different programs and parents or grandparents came and milled around and visited the classes and everyone talked about heritage, or memory, or what Thanksgiving traditions were like in that peculiar little Yankee enclave, our tight-knit little town. We visited my son's room first, and thirty or forty of us adults sat folded into those miniature chairs with the crazy-excited six-year-olds and listened to the presentation. Mrs. Roffman, the first grade teacher, stood in front of us all and asked, who among the parents here remembers their first grade teacher? My hand went up: I remember mine, I said, because later on, she made my wedding cake.

My son won't remember this part, but later on, just a few months later on, his first-grade teacher was feeding him, too. I had to leave my kids with other people a lot in those days, because I was always busy with my husband having cancer surgery, or having chemo, or needing a follow-up with his surgeon or oncologist or surprising us with a new complication from the radiation--and no matter what house my son landed at, Mrs. Roffman always sent over a quart of strawberry ice cream because he had told her it was his favorite. I thought about that, I thought about how much I wished my first grade teacher made my wedding cake could have always been the punch line to my marriage instead of the diagnosis is Stage III metastatic pancreatic cancer. I thought about what I was going to say to my kids when they got home. And that thought of course wound me back up howling, only this time it came with a fearsome physical component, as if my body had suddenly developed an allergy to something that it just couldn't get rid of again.

Luckily all the boring machinery of the world is there to pull you back at moments like these, and just then two things happened at once: the telephone rang, and then the doorbell. It was the state Democratic party on the phone, fund-raising, and Sid, our UPS guy, stood at the door. I didn't know the woman on the phone but there was never a time you weren't happy to see Sid show up; all us women adored him, all our husbands looked at us blankly or with exasperation when we'd talk about him: Who the hell is Sid? they'd all say. Sid, liberal like me, always arrived not only with a package but also with a critique of the latest Rolling Stone article he thought I ought to read or a new slam on the Current Administration. Once, back around the election, he drove his truck up our driveway just to tell me he approved of our anti-Bush bumper sticker. He wore an earring and nights, he played guitar in a blues band. Any time there was a scene worth being at in Kensington, New Hampshire, he was there at it. Earlier that summer he'd happened by my friend Dana's house just in time to help her clean up the carnage in the wake of a fox decimating her chicken coop.

Sid was delivering morphine, and I had to sign for the package while he stood there watching me bawl--that was what he got that day instead of the remains of a chicken massacre--while the woman on the phone yammered into my left ear until I said to her I'm sorry, I can't deal with you right now. She was letting me know how much that offended her as I hung up. There was a lot of morphine in the cardboard box Sid held: I wondered what it was worth on the street. I thought about the time the doctors were dragging their feet on David's pain (this was in the days before they discovered the tumor that had broken his neck) and I was out buying barbiturates from a junkie I knew. Today, they were delivering so much of it to the house because since his CT scan had revealed the story of mets to the liver a few days earlier, David had started to slide, fast. The list of things going wrong grew exponentially, he was already starting to die under the weight of it all and the pain was coming back then, too. I wished I could have told Sid all of this but decided I couldn't deal with him, either, and so I signed for the package and went inside and left him there where he paused for a moment, baffled and, I knew, not sure just what to do. Eventually I heard his truck grind into gear and pull away. I thought, even a guy who can handle dead chickens and bad Presidents has at least one thing that will stump him, and I guess I just found what it is. That thought distracted me enough that I didn't cry all the rest of the day.

That was all on Wednesday morning, and by Wednesday night I'd learned that the paralysis stalking my husband was not a stroke, it was Bell's Palsy, and would go away. I cheered up considerably, and told the kids that Dad was in the hospital but would be coming home again, probably pretty soon. A week after that, on the next Wednesday I called the nurse's station on his floor because he wasn't picking up his phone, and his nurse told me, he's not doing too well tonight. Had his oncologist called me yet? No? Well, why didn't I give her a few minutes, then call his room back and she'd be in there and would hold the phone up to his ear for him.

Which is how I got the news, a few minutes before I really got the news, because when I did call his room and the nurse helped him answer the phone, my husband asked me the same thing: did Dr. Ryan call you yet? Of course I hadn't really heard it before when the nurse asked me, just like I hadn't really heard what my husband was telling me the whole hospital stay, when he'd complain about the terrible weakness that had overcome him and his inability to even stand up on his own now. No, I said, Dr. Ryan didn't call me yet, I already told the nurse that. Oh, dear, said my husband, and by then I noticed something was ribboning its way through my stomach. We've come to the end of the road, is what he said next, and you can bet I heard that although by then, I was deep into that gut-struck reaction I'd had the week before and I realized that ribbon-y thing in me was some piece of poison that was trying to murder me and I needed to figure out a way to get it out as quickly as I could...we've come to the end of the road, he repeated, and I realized he must have rehearsed saying that to me. There's nothing more to do. Die? I said to him, David? Die? He said: Dr. Ryan's going to call the social workers to set up the hospice people, and I'll come home on hospice in the next day or two.

I didn't call anyone that night except his brother, and I sent the kids off in the morning without telling them either because I knew that they wouldn't have another normal day for quite a while. After I called his brother, I went to bed and laid there all night long. You've heard that when you're about to die your whole life goes in front of you; and that exact thing happened to me that night, only it was our whole 24-year-history that played itself out in my mind, starting with the night we went home together from a bar, both figuring on a one-night stand, all the way up to the crawling minutes of the days since he took that ambulance ride. I don't know if the same thing happened to him, because I forgot to ask, although I always meant to. In the morning I got up and started making my phone calls early. David's coming home today or tomorrow, on hospice, I would say to whoever was on the other end of the line. That turns out to be one right handy piece of code. It's like a signal that tells people it's time to start showing up with the lasagna, the Ambien, it lets everyone know the one thing they need to know without having to say what's obvious: David's toast, I could also have said, or Pretty soon, we won't be seeing David comin' round here no more. Over at the school, Barbara choreographed the teachers into a precise schedule of who would cook what meal when. She's the kindergarten teacher and good at getting people organized. The women in my town loved that kind of work, anyway. A few years ago when Karen suddenly died of a brain aneurysm, all of 38 years old and leaving two sons for her husband to deal with, the cooking round robin went on for more than six months, by which time the husband had a new girlfriend and the boys didn't bother coming home for dinner most nights anymore.

So the teachers set to cooking, and Laura showed up with an envelope which, because she's pragmatic, didn't contain a sympathy letter but did contain a handful of her sleeping pills, and Jane came over with stacks of paper plates and pounds of coffee, the things she said she most wished she'd had on hand when her own husband had died from cancer a couple of years before. And all of this was the prelude to how I met Ginette.

Dave was finally supposed to come home on Friday morning, and so Ginette, the angel-of-mercy hospice nurse assigned to our case, arrived mid-morning that day. She liked to get in a little ahead of the patient, when she could, to go over things with the family. Meaning me, although by then my brother-in-law had come for the duration and the kids were home from school because I'd had to tell them the night before. I tried getting through my daughter's four o'clock flute lesson first, I really tried. Five years earlier, when she was nine and her father was first sick, it had taken her months to getting around to asking me whether her father had cancer, but that day it only took looking at my face and she knew. We'd been on our way to her lesson but I turned the car around and we drove straight home instead, both of us holding it in the whole way, because I knew she'd want to wait for her brother so they could have the news together. They're like that on Christmas morning, too, nobody making a move toward the tree unless the other one is right there. I think I had this image of myself opening my arms and folding them both back into me somehow and meanwhile managing to find some gentle language that would protect them from what I was about to say. A hieroglyphic sort of tongue that could both hide the truth and be the truth. I wanted to reassure them I'd been telling them the truth when I'd told them we'd be fine no matter what but I was clumsy, and rooted to the floor at the moment I should have been gathering them up and in the end I think I only said that we'd all tried really hard, Daddy most of all, but...he's going to die, I'm sorry to have to tell you this, but he's coming home to be with us and he's going to die. I couldn't move, and they couldn't move and so nobody moved and everyone stood where they were and sobbed. I realized that I had absolutely no energy left for any of this. I'd already been holding my breath for five years. So we all didn't do anything else besides howl for awhile and finally, Uncle Don showed up and proved to be enough of a distraction that they were able to go to sleep pretty much right on time.

I guess Don took them out somewhere, probably to lunch, that Friday morning, which left me and Ginette alone in the house and as it turned out, we had a lot of time to get to know each other. Dave was supposed to have been home by 11:00 but missed that by hours; it wasn't exactly the same thing as being late for his own funeral but it was close, and the ambulance didn't arrive until after five in the afternoon. Ginette and I sat there looking at each other for a time, and then she decided to give me a run-through on the medications list. There are a lot of medications that come along with coming home on hospice, most of which are there under the funny moniker palliative which, never mind my English degree, I always think means the same thing as the word pall. They're just too close: you're under palliative care now, we're going to be laying that pall over your box now, pretty soon, you won't be comin' round here no more. Ginette would show me a vial of this liquid or that, tell me what the dosage was, what it was for. I wasn't paying any attention, and would nod to show I understood, and she would note the directions and the dosage on a little sheet of paper. Every now and again she would hold up a medicine vial and say, now, if you give too much of this, it can stop the breathing. She'd pause, and repeat it, to make sure I got it. I got it. Those directions, she didn't write down at all. I wondered whether it would be the same thing as murder. David had been a lawyer and would know, but either I decided I didn't want to bother him with questions like that, or I forgot to ask him that one, too.

Ginette was from Alsace, she told me, which explained her odd accent and the unusual way she spelled her name. She seemed historically inaccurate, somehow, like she could have been a child late in the 1800's or maybe a young married woman in the 1930's, and had somehow survived into our century as a woman of a certain, but still indeterminate, age. Later on, after I'd had the chance to study her a little more, I concluded that what she probably really was, was some manner of statuesque troll out of Alsatian folklore, that if only I could travel there and find an antique library and go through the musty shelves and pull down an obscure town history and open it at random, I'd find a description of Ginette and her hijinks and her ways of terrorizing the villages, probably all illustrated with old woodcuts done by some medieval hand. The stories would have been set down there finally after having been passed along orally for many, many years, and there is no doubt in my mind that they all would have cautioned the same thing: she lives still, they would say, she disappears for a time but then always comes back. Probably generations of young children had been threatened into obedience and prayers by the specter of a Ginette dangling in front of them. Ginette as shorthand just like coming home on hospice is shorthand. You know what they mean.

So my husband was dying and we were all about to go walking through that gate in the company of an 800-year-old pseudo-European vampiric troll nurse who now sat with me at the table and wouldn't go away no matter what because she was determined to be there when my husband finally got home again. She told me the set-up I had for him was all wrong, that he was going to need that hospital bed even though he had stressed to me he wanted the couch. She told me she had another patient to see that afternoon but he was pretty far gone, might even be dead by the time she got there. She told me the pharmacy would deliver everything from then on out, I would never have to go to the drugstore even if it was the middle of the night. She told me, you know, your husband's going to the light.

I don't know if language like that makes you cringe the way it makes me cringe, but I guess she must have seen how I took to it because she reached across the table and laid her hand on mine and said, now, I'm a Christian but I'm not here to push my beliefs on you...and I thought about that for a moment and even though I never believe it when I hear it I said all right, then, very well, we're not a Christian household but my husband is a Taoist.

And then Ginette, dear, confused Ginette looked at me with her searching eyes and an earnest desire to understand written all over her face and the furrows on her forehead proof of how hard she was trying to comprehend and said, all serious and searching and earnest and furrowed, you mean, he's one of those people who finds water?

On the inside I was bent right in half with laughter and was also swearing up a storm, because goddamnit, the one person who really should have heard that wasn't here, and that was David of course who would have been laughing even harder than I was. So on the inside I was laughing and swearing and thinking to myself that this is how you get your stories, and on the outside I was looking at her mildly and saying no, Ginette, that would be a dowser.

I explained a little bit about what Taoism was, and once again the lines emerged on her forehead and I could see her searching her memory for something and she finally began speaking to me in a language I didn't understand. What's that, I asked her. It's from one of the Vedas, she said, it's Tamil. I was wondering how a woman from Alsace happened to have learned sacred Hindu texts in the original, and decided that the centuries-old part of her must be rather adventurous and probably at those times she had disappeared from her own countryside she was off stalking other continents, poaching bits and pieces from other places and storing up everything she learned in her Interior Monster Encyclopedia Of Stolen Knowledge. It occurred to me that maybe that was why she was a death worker, maybe through some weird alchemy she was able to absorb knowledge from the spirits of the dying she attended. You can see what kind of stature she was acquiring in my own psyche. I wondered, briefly, if she was here to initiate me into her mysteries. I will be there to help you lay that pall over him in the morning, I will show you how it's done. I have to tell you, David, this whole business of your dying has cast a real pall over pretty much everything else these days.

The full and rather stunning range of her language abilities came on display when my brother-in-law got home with the kids. She spoke to them and discovered my daughter studied French, and launched into a dialogue with her in that. My son, who was just in sixth grade and so didn't take a language yet (not to mention being a shy and depressed kid with a speech problem whose father was dying and frankly, we were all pretty pleased that he could still manage English) was off the hook. When the dog, who up until that point had wisely been making himself invisible in the corner, emerged, Ginette took after him in German. I know she was giving him commands and the dog, being a dog, wanted to obey but alas, he does not speak German and neither do I, so I couldn't translate for him. He walked back to his corner, sorrowfully, but at least now we all know the preferred language for the owners of the Hounds of Hell to train in, is likely German.

For the next ten days we kept her out of the way as much as we could. She'd call in the morning and I'd say, cheerfully, oh, heavens no, nothing's changed, there's no need for you to come by at all today. Some days she insisted, she had to take his vitals, she had to lay her eyes on him for herself. Those days, I'd get the kids out of the house if they didn't happen to be off at school, and I'd hope that, if I couldn't keep her out of my life I could at least minimize her contact with it. And to tell the truth, I kept thinking, any day now it's going to happen and Dave's going to surprise us all and pull this one out, he'll fool them all after all. I was still thinking that when he died, when I woke up to hear him saying to me, curl your toes, curl your toes because a charley horse was tearing through my leg at the same time he was dying and I was waking and his voice was skimming across the top of me and out of the room and on off into wherever it was he was finally headed.

But that came after Ginette was gone, and the end of her time with us came, I am sorry to tell you, in the company of blood. I should have known it. When he'd been home a week and a half or so, David stopped feeling like sitting up any more, which meant that Don and I no longer had to lift him up and down to the chair or the toilet, but it also meant it was time for a catheter, and although I was uneasy about Ginette being in charge of that particular procedure, there it was, she was our hospice troll and anyway, I knew she had years of experience and that inserting a catheter wasn't exactly the same thing as brain surgery. She loaded my husband up with morphine and Lorazepam and sat him in a chair, and inserted the tube as he began to scream through the meds, and I stood there and watched as a line of bright red plumed out through the plastic tubing and into the quart-sized bag at the end. You hurt him, I said, look at that, he's bleeding. Why is he bleeding like that? No, she said doubtfully, I think it's okay, and she left a little while after that and my husband said, never again, that woman is never again to come into this house. Fire her, he said, and so I had to pick up the phone and call the office and speak to the man in charge and I told him, she hurt my husband, she fucked that catheter completely up, he's in pain, I need another nurse here now and Ginette's fired, I told him, she can't come back here.

And the office man-in-charge said, I'm sorry, you know Ginette is one of our most experienced nurses, if you're really sure you don't want her back I'll take care of it, of course, but you know, she's very experienced. And I said yes, I'm completely sure and more to the point, my husband's completely sure he doesn't want her back here again. She's fired. And the man was quiet for a moment and then finally said to me, I guess it's just as well. You people were really flipping Ginette out.

So a little while later our new nurse came, and we liked her right away: she was direct and compassionate, she had cropped hair and wore LL Bean Maine hunting boots. She fixed the catheter and got to know my husband a little bit and was there with me on the day we peeled off his socks and discovered his feet were turning blue. They were the same color as the blue patch that had developed on his nose. That was the day of his 55th birthday, and as she left she turned at the door and said to me, I can come back and sit with you tonight, if you like. I said to her, you don't need to do that, why would you want to do that? She nodded and said, well, sometimes the families are...nervous. Sometimes they don't want to be alone. But, she added, you don't seem like you're nervous. You know I was surprised to find out you're not a nurse, because when I got assigned to you, all the other hospice nurses said they think you're a nurse, too.

And your monster thinks I'm a monster.

I shook my head no, meaning yes, I agree with you that you don't need to stay, and after I shut the door behind her I turned back to the house where lights were already on in the dim November afternoon. It was my husband's birthday, and he was going to die just before the following dawn but after I'd said goodbye to his nurse I went back upstairs and fed him small bites of ice cream and he ate as much as he could until he finally told me, I think I've had enough, I think it's somebody else's turn now.

Neighbor Lady

We first meet Mrs. Gorden in the wake of a 20-inch snow fall, when she called the house to see if the kids could come over and shovel her out. She'd gotten our number from a flier my daughter had posted around town, trying to find odd jobs to help her finance her summer school. I finally met her face-to-face when she came around collecting for the Cancer Society. I invited her in & wrote as big a check as I could, mostly because I don't dare not to now, even though I spent all the years my husband was sick with cancer doing as much as I could and karma didn't seem to notice, he died anyway. But you don't take any chances. Mrs. Gorden came in and sat for awhile and took a keen interest in my situation. She's got nearly 40 years on me, but she's a widow two times over and has this all pretty well figured out by now and seems determined to show me how it's done. I must go dancing with her, she says, she goes every Sunday afternoon. Two hours for five dollars, and although the women there generally outnumber the men, the instructor will be busy with me at first, since I'll be a newcomer. I can learn the fox trot and the cha-cha. I think to myself that it's a crap shoot whether dancing with the elderly will turn out to be how I want to spend my Sundays, but I already know that how she is, is exactly the kind of old woman I hope to turn out to be. Eighty, ninety, cha-cha-cha. She dances at the community center in some nearby town, I think she said Pelham Mills. As she's leaving, she mentions to me that on Saturday nights, there's a singles' group that meets down in Painted Post, and I could go there, too. Her eyes light right up when she remembers that tomorrow is Saturday night! Why, I'd hardly have to wait at all!

Recently she called and asked my daughter to come over a few hours a week, hauling things up from the cellar, washing windows, the things she's slowed down now just enough to need help with. My daughter went over in the morning on her first day of spring vacation, expecting to be cleaning out the attic. She dreaded it; I explained to her that helping old women maintain their homes was a time-honored tradition for teenaged girls, practically a rite of passage. That morning, they spent most of their time standing on the kitchen counters, climbing up there on a rickety stool, while Mrs. Gorden explained to Maeve that her climbing around like this always upset her children. Together they cleaned out the kitchen cupboards; too cold for the attic that day, they said, too wet for the basement.

When she got home I asked whether Mrs. Gorden had talked all morning, and my daughter nodded her head and how and because my daughter is likewise a Constant Talker but also very respectful of adults, I imagine she kept herself silent the entire time, polite, listening. I know this would have been difficult for her. What did she talk about, I ask. Different things, said Maeve: She told me about the local historical society that she heads up, and a building here in town they want to buy. She wants you to draw a picture of it for her, one that would show how good it could look, if they got it. I tell her, let her know I can't do that, she needs an architect or at least a draftsman or maybe somebody with a good CAD program for that. Maeve continued: She told me the woman we bought our house from had a new boyfriend two months after her husband died. Yes, I said, I had heard that. Maeve adds, Mrs. Gorden said that people who had good marriages often want to get married again as soon as they can. She looks at me suspiciously. I've heard that, too, I say, I guess it makes a certain amount of sense.

Mrs. Gorden the historian does have spring cleaning on the agenda but something altogether bigger on her mind, and tells Maeve that the next project they're going to tackle is cataloguing the contents of her house. This is her plan: she will cut a little slip of paper for each item, she'll dictate to Maeve what to write down about it, and Maeve will then tape the paper to the underside of the object. Thus, on a crystal vase: My mother gave me this on my wedding day. I find this charming beyond my ability to say so. I think how her kids are going to feel, after she's died, when they wander through her house and find the rooms full of their mother's short stories like this. I know how I felt, going through my mother's things in the silent rooms of her house after her death. There are little Etruscan bowls that have come down to us with these kind of messages, inscriptions that, once we figured out how to read them, say: so-and-so made me.

She's got me thinking I should do the same thing with all of my stuff. When you really start to look around it's a bit of a surprise, the things it occurs to you to say about it all. For instance, on my copy of Sylvia Plath's letters: She was brilliant, but failed so early, I hope I did better than this. On the back of my diploma from Cornell: I was awarded this on the date set down on the front, but I have never once felt as though I really earned it. This is the post-it note I would attach to the bottom of my daughter's right foot: Your father and I got you on the night between our birthdays, exactly fifteen years to the day before he died. And to embroider on a slipcover to wrap around my son: After you were born, your father came home and wrote in his diary: "Wednesday, June 8, 1994. Wyatt came today. Partly sunny."

April's Is The Insomniac Moon

All this week the full moon has been bad-neighbor noisy and began waking me up overnight back on Monday. It's been like living with a ghost out of somebody else's imagination come calling night after night, and is disorienting, too. When I say the moonlight is noisy I mean I wake because I think I'm hearing something. The light pours in through the blinds--despite them--on the south window of the bedroom and I lie there blinking in it for a moment, trying to remember whose voice it was I heard, what it was we were just talking about. And then it's just me and the moonlight again, and is going to be that way for the rest of the night. Unlike Scrooge, for instance, who you knew was going to get the message eventually, I never arrive at morning with any clear idea what it is the light wants from me.

The first night I was annoyed, and after that I got resigned, and since then this string of sleepless nights hasn't been so bad. Like anything else, it's what you do with it, and anyway, it makes me think of life back in my little New Hampshire town. There, most of the people I knew started getting up by about four in the morning, lots of commuters, everyone anxious to beat the traffic into the city, and their spouses getting up then too, figuring they might as well. I spent most mornings in those years at my writing desk, my husband having left the house by five, the kids still asleep, and I could guess when my friend Frank's truck was driving up the road on the other side of the woods behind my house, and I knew his wife was up doing her paperwork, and a quarter mile away my landlord was awake tinkering in his garage, his wife starting laundry. Across the road from me, the gay couple who owned the landscaping company were awake, one outside in the garden, the other tending to his daily hangover. The farmers were all up by then, of course, and the retired people who had just always done it that way and never thought to change. We had some odd habits in that town, I suppose. For instance no one thought a thing about walking around outdoors in their nightclothes, and sometimes even in their underwear, which is how I used to find my next-door neighbor, watering his flowers after supper on summer dusks. I never bothered to get dressed first, either, mornings when I went down to the road to fetch my Boston Globe. Another thing we all had in common was never using our clothes dryers; we all hung laundry outdoors even through the winter, since we figured most days it'd reach above freezing at some point. I still prefer it that way; clothes that have hung out all day have a more soulful way of being worn than they do after they've been stuck rolling around in a dark, overheated cylinder somewhere. I knew a woman who owned a lobster boat, and she taught me the trick of adding salt to the rinse water to keep the sheets from freezing on the line on bright January days. In my new neighborhood I'm the only one who uses her clothes line, although I did notice on the day after Thanksgiving last year, when I was hanging out all my table linens, several other households had done the same, and so you could see how pretty everyone's dinner must have looked the day before, with the backdrop of those cotton napkins and harvest-colored tablecloths.

That short, warm day last November is a long way around the sun from where I am this week, though, and my outlook has gone a long way around with it. Right now I know a lot of people who say they aren't sleeping all that well and mostly, it's work, or it's worry, or it's shifting hormones that's making them sleepless. For my part, I find I'm not minding it so much although sometimes I think it's just too damned bad that we can't find a signal to send to each other when we're all laying awake in our beds like that. I'm thinking a system of pagers we could rig up beside our beds, and when you wake up at night you can press a button and a light will come up on everyone else's pager, and if someone is awake and wants company then they can call-light you back. If everyone else is still asleep that little unobtrusive glow won't disturb them. And if you're awake and don't mind being alone with your thoughts there's no need to grope your way to your pager at all, it having no opinion one way or the other as to what it is you should be doing with yourself at that hour.

One of literature's most self-aware insomniacs is Charles Halloway in Bradbury's Something Wicked This Way Comes, and an early scene in the book finds him on the edge of his bed, immobilized by despair, caught between his sleeping wife on one side and the void that is the hour of 3 a.m. everywhere else around him. I copied over that passage for a friend recently, and as always it made me want to weep. This is how it is for Charles: But no, you lie pinned to a deep well-bottom that's burned dry. The moon rolls by to look at you down there, with its idiot face. I recognize the panic from my earliest experiences of insomnia, which came to me in adolescence. The certainty I had in those years that life was nearly over, or was going to turn on me like my own immune system gone haywire, turn murderous and try to snuff me out. I'd roll over and watch the night from out my bedroom window then, smoking sometimes and wondering how it was I'd come up for sentry duty this way. What it was I was supposed to be watching for. Historically, in the middle of the night, despair was the appropriate--was the only possible--response to that wakefulness. It is what we all have experienced as the standard.

Curiously, that despair now resists all my efforts to summon it.

I turned that idea over in my mind for a long time this morning, because of course through the wakeful night there is plenty of time to tell yourself a story this slowly, sentence by long-considered sentence, getting each one just so before memorizing it the way you hear prisoners do, or anyone else without means to write things down. And knocking it into place with your rubber mallet before moving along to the next one. It's a paradox, to be so crackling busy in the head while the body remains so motionless, pressed to the night sheets in the dark; it's a paradox too, needing both to be sleeping and to be awake. I am writing while I dream--that is what I'm really hearing, when I think the sounds of conversation are what woke me--and then I dream while I am writing in my head in the dark-and-light of the middle of the full moon night, letting the sentences unwind the way they want to unwind and always, as in a dream, watching but not directing where the next scene will go.

In Welsh the word is huil and in Irish it's imbas--there is no word for it in English but the concept is translated as "fire in the head" and it means something like inspiration--but, the full-body inspiration that seizes you first by the hair and then blows through you and leaves you, all lit up and shaking, in its wake. Lately that is what my insomnia feels like, waking up eager, waking up wanting, and not caring how tired I may be later in the day or whether my fatigue will show overmuch in my face. The other day I wrote so furiously that the imbas bloomed there, causing my daughter to ask later how I got a sunburn. Thus rouged, I no longer imagine that the night is pressing on me like a board and I may be dying beneath it. Curiosity wakes me, and there's something I'm looking forward to without being able to name it that keeps me glad I am awake there, enjoying the anticipation of it. I think myself through these peculiar nights with their peculiar fire, and then after a while I get up and drink coffee, and watch the gray light of the morning begin to come up while the moon slides off to the west and there, a little to the south and through the tree branches, Jupiter gleams in the twilight of dawn.

Requiem For A Bridge

The town where I grew up was built between two rivers, and when I was a little older we moved to a house just one street over from one of them, the Susquehanna. We lived about a block and a half from the bridge that spanned the river there, and I spent a lot of time walking across it. My grandmother lived a mile away on the other side of the river from us, in a rural area full of farms, old houses like hers, and the occasional trailer belonging to a family a little less well-off in the world. I adored my grandmother and walked to her house most days. Other times I just spent my afternoons on the bridge, looking at the clouds reflecting in the wide water and, if I was looking north, watching the river come at me. That was my preferred view of it, but if I turned south I could watch it flowing away and that would make me wonder whether there was a different message I was supposed to be getting depending on which way I watched the water go, up, down, toward, away. The best reflections came near sunset, which must have been early there since the town was in a valley and the high hill to the west obscured the sun fairly early on. At sunset, the sky to the north grew pink. A few years ago I learned this pink band appearing on the horizon is considered an astronomical phenomenon and is called the Girdle of Venus. I was not surprised to learn that there was a goddess muddling about there. The name Susquehanna means "muddy water" and is Algonquin. And the water is dark and silty in a lot of places, silty and slow and deep. But that also makes it reflective, and from above it looks as though it is made of clouds or shimmering blue molecules or whatever the sky happens to be doing at the instant you look down. If the people who named the river had had access to a bridge the way I did, and if they could have seen it from that vantage point, I think they would have named the river after the sky, instead.

The bridge that was there when I was growing up was an old steel truss bridge and not long ago, someone made the decision that it had to come down. This caused many of us to shake our heads. My friend Dennis, who grew up in that town with me and walked there a lot with me too, says that steel truss bridges should be put on the endangered species list, that they were the product of work and accomplishment and gave families their living. Nowadays they replace them with sleek arcs of concrete. On the old bridge you could look down and see the water running by below because the floor of the bridge was an open grate. Horses didn't like to go across it. The new bridge ran right into a slew of problems when they started to build it, and was many months delayed. There was a flood; there was the discovery of the corpse of the previous bridge still down on the bottom of the river, where they'd let it fall when they put the steel one up all those decades ago. Maybe they thought it would never be a problem; maybe they thought the bridge they were building then would never come down. I've driven over the new bridge once since it opened, but haven't had occasion to walk across it yet. As with all bridges in this style, there is a pedestrian walkway only on one side, the north. Harder to turn your back on the water now, and let it carry your thoughts on away from you.

I miss the great metal heft of the old bridge, but I miss other pieces of it more, and I want you to know that there were things that happened on that bridge, and under it, and on the way there and the way across. There are plenty of pieces of history that no one ever writes down. I can tell you that it was walking across that bridge that taught me how to write a poem, or at least gave me the idea that I wanted to write poems. It's what I imagine crystal-gazing is like, and to this day I can't look at a body of water without seeing little lines or words or sometime syllables, depending on the water I'm looking at, starting to break out and organize themselves on the surface. Early evenings after supper I'd go out and walk to the midpoint of the bridge and look at the water until I was pretty sure that when I returned home and opened the notebook I used to write in, I'd be able to summon something to the page. It was unusual to encounter other pedestrians there, and I liked that. Sometimes in the summer kids would jump off the bridge. I never dared--it was a 30 or 40 foot drop and you were taking your chances, there were spots in the bed of the river that were deep enough to catch you up, holes, they must have been, but other parts were shallow. Especially in the summer. Come August you could see right to the bottom along the river's edges, look down and see the sluggish whiskery carp nudging along in the few inches of yellow silt.

I want to tell you that the bridge is gone, but when it was there, things happened on it. Once I had just won a poetry contest, and as I walked across the bridge, on my way to tell my grandmother the news, I encountered a boy I went to school with, and told him about it first. He reacted by dropping the bicycle he was riding, pinning me against the rail, and kissing me full on the mouth--this from a boy who barely spoke to me most days--I don't know, maybe he thought that kiss was the correct pronunciation for congratulations or maybe he'd heard that girls who write poetry were easy. I pushed him off. This happened at that exact early-dusk hour that I loved so well, though, so later I just filed it away on an inner note card and sometimes now I take it out and think about it.

On the far side of the bridge there was a steep path you could climb down and that would lead you to the riverbank directly under the bridge's far wall. Dennis was my close friend in high school and the two of us had another close friend, Ed. Dennis and I got ourselves entwined on some level that has stayed solid and endured, but Ed and I had a relationship that was complicated and sexual. Dennis and Ed were best friends; the three of us made quite the constellation. One afternoon Ed came to my house and we watched a PBS show about artists, and then walked over to the bridge and climbed down to the bank underneath. We talked until it got dark, and then we took off our clothes and climbed into the water. The riverbank at that spot was crowded with large trees; we found the root system of one of them reaching out into the water, and sat down on the slippery steps it made. Ed had a taste for having sex in odd places, preferably out-of-doors: on the rocks of a dry creek bed, on the forest floor at night, me picking the sticky slugs off his back in the dark. We had made love in his swimming pool before but that night, it was living water, and its current made me feel a little scared and a little high. We sat on those submerged branches back-to-belly, while he held my hips and pinned me to him and my legs floated free in the slow current and eventually, the fish either got curious or accustomed to us and started bumping my legs. Later, we climbed out of the water and stood in the dark, waiting to dry off again. Because it was August, and humid, it was a long time before we were able to put our clothes back on.

When the three of us were together we spent a lot of our time walking around and in my memory, at least, mostly we walked by the river. Some twenty or more years later Dennis's father and my mother died a few weeks apart; that summer I spent many weeks at her house trying to clean it out, settle her estate. On the morning of the summer solstice, which wasn't quite three weeks after my mother's death, I got up early and went for a swim in her pool, and though I meant to work very hard then I spent nearly all day walking back and forth across the bridge, watching the sun at the height of its powers hammer the water there, and after hours of that I went back to my mother's house and wrote a 3-sonnet series about her death, about summer's longest day. It's the only time in my life I've written a sonnet. I still do not write about my mother's death easily or well.

That same summer Dennis spent time at his mother's house, using the days to work on clearing his father's things but spending his nights with me. We took a walk; we took a walk that lasted for many hours across multiple nights. On one of those nights we walked over to the other river, which was spanned by an old stone bridge, and stood over those waters and pretended it was a wishing well and we both threw something in, I don't remember what. I do remember what I wished for, and though we didn't tell each other, I know that Dennis knows what I wished for, too. What his wish was, I'm not so sure. I have my ideas. We walked back around the corner from that bridge and paused in front of the town's library, a columned building that I, a solitary girl with a tilty life, had spent a lot of time in. We looked across the street and there were three teenagers walking, two boys and a girl between them and for a moment, I thought that perhaps I was seeing our ghosts, but Dennis saw them, too. What would you say to them, I asked Dennis. He shook his head; he didn't know, and neither did I. Now, several years later, I do know. I'd tell her, the destination is not going to be at all what you imagine. Enjoy this, hang onto this walk down the street as long as you can, remember how it feels to be next to that boy in the dark summer night. It's the part you're going to want back.

As we had crossed the bridge, my bridge, earlier that night, the large florescent lights that illuminated it had been swarmed by even larger clouds of white-winged insects, not quite moths, not even quite of-this-world looking. We came across the bridge around nine in the evening, both a little hungover from having had too much to drink together the night before. Three people sat on folding chairs on the side of the bridge, fishing poles in hands, talking in low voices and smoking in the dark. We said hello but they didn't say it back. By the time we returned across the bridge, it was long past midnight and a waning moon had risen, orange over the hills. The fishermen were gone, and the lights were clear because all of the white insects had disappeared, too. As we stepped onto the walkway of the bridge, we discovered where the insects had gone: they had all died, and the path was ankle-deep in their thousands of wings and ghostly evacuated bodies. I am sure an entomologist would know what that was all about but to us it was--is--a mystery. As I said, things have happened on that bridge. We walked across it that night kicking up that white mystery like summer rain turned to leaves, and I imagine that as we moved across, we also caused those little bodies to sift through the open grating of the bridge floor, eventually falling to the depths of the wishing stream that moved unseen below us.