What the Living Do Read online

  a friend, so the men seem to do it together.

  The Attic

  Praise to my older brother, the seventeen-year-old boy, who lived

  in the attic with me an exiled prince grown hard in his confinement,

  bitter, bent to his evening task building the imaginary building

  on the drawing board they’d given him in school. His tools gleam

  under the desk lamp. He is as hard as the pencil he holds,

  drawing the line straight along the ruler.

  Tower prince, young king, praise to the boy

  who has willed his blood to cool and his heart to slow. He’s building

  a structure with so many doors it’s finally quiet,

  so that when our father climbs heavily up the attic stairs, he doesn’t

  at first hear him pass down the narrow hall. My brother is rebuilding

  the foundation. He lifts the clear plastic of one page

  to look more closely at the plumbing,

  —he barely hears the springs of my bed when my father sits down—

  he’s imagining where the boiler might go, because

  where it is now isn’t working. Not until I’ve slammed the door behind

  the man stumbling down the stairs again

  does my brother look up from where he’s working. I know it hurts him

  to rise, to knock on my door and come in. And when he draws his skinny arm

  around my shaking shoulders,

  I don’t know if he knows he’s building a world where I can one day

  love a man—he sits there without saying anything.

  Praise him.

  I know he can hardly bear to touch me.

  Beth

  I was going to sleep downstairs in the room we still called

  The New Addition,

  the wide bed the beat-up couch pulled out into

  made me feel safe and glamorous under the dimmed yellow lights,

  when my sister Beth came in quietly to tell me

  she was going to the secret field to meet Rusty,

  so that somebody would know in case anything happened.

  And I half waited for her in the dim dark,

  and passed the hour she promised to be back in gazing through

  the open New Addition doors to the pool-yard’s moonlight and water,

  almost sleeping when she walked in hours later, still shaking

  from the snarling dog that had chased her bike down the wide and empty avenue…

  Her warm weight pulled the bed off center when she sat to tell me,

  —the scent of that summer night pressing in through the screen doors,

  the crickets lightly shaking their salt,

  and my sister, still terrified and radiant, just come from Rusty’s kisses—

  I remember thinking: This is Beth

  knowing her face in the dimness so well, feeling proud of her beauty,

  so brave to have gone that far alone for him.

  How had she learned to love a boy like that, without irony or condescension?

  The Fruit Cellar

  My father’s tools were there:

  hammers hanging from nails by their heads

  and saws of diminishing sizes mounted on the wall

  like the heads of small animals.

  A vise screwed into the end of the battered worktable,

  and in the air, the scent of sweet old sawdust,

  although I never saw anybody work there.

  Above the table, inside the wooden cupboards,

  rows and rows of ketchups and mustards and mayonnaise,

  family-sized tubs of peanut butter, family-sized jars of jam,

  dozens of Campbell soups lined up like soldiers

  and the cans of fruit cocktail my father had loved best in the war.

  Dark in the corners, and darker inside the wooden bins

  half filled with onions and potatoes.

  The little kids were afraid to go down there.

  Someone had to stand at the top of the laundry room stairs

  and keep them talking, the way they do in coal mines

  when the rescue is narrow and long. The thump of overhead

  footsteps was no comfort, reaching into the fathomless bins.

  That sound belonged to the lamplit world

  carpeted with instructions and conversations,

  and would disappear forever if the door accidentally shut.

  Too far from the kitchen to be heard or found,

  you had to climb up on the table and reach in blind for the jar,

  scraping your knees getting up and down.

  But I loved it there, late afternoons, no need to be accounted for,

  I’d gaze at our family’s store of supplies

  and settle behind the door where my father’s trunk sat,

  opening it with a little internal ceremony

  and read the letters other girls had sent him during the war,

  earnest, sexless letters that they might have written in groups,

  as women roll bandages, all chatting together—

  girls I knew as Mrs. McDermott, and Mrs. Dollinger,

  women who’d married my father’s friends, interchangeable

  as the blue ink on blue tissue paper written

  in the convent school script I was supposed to be learning.

  —one or two letters from my mother, years from knowing

  she would marry him. For last I’d save the sword my father said

  he’d stolen from a dead Japanese soldier,

  but even then I knew he hadn’t. And I’d lay the lie, curved a little

  and still shiny, across my lap like a secret, unrecoverable history,

  touching the blade lightly.

  Then I’d return it,

  return the letters, close the trunk

  and carry what I’d come for back upstairs.

  The Copper Beech

  Immense, entirely itself,

  it wore that yard like a dress,

  with limbs low enough for me to enter it

  and climb the crooked ladder to where

  I could lean against the trunk and practice being alone.

  One day, I heard the sound before I saw it, rain fell

  darkening the sidewalk.

  Sitting close to the center, not very high in the branches,

  I heard it hitting the high leaves, and I was happy,

  watching it happen without it happening to me.

  The Game

  And on certain nights,

  maybe once or twice a year,

  I’d carry the baby down

  and all the kids would come

  all nine of us together,

  and we’d build a town in the basement

  from boxes and blankets and overturned chairs.

  And some lived under the pool table

  or in the bathroom or the boiler room

  or in the toy cupboard under the stairs,

  and you could be a man or a woman

  a husband or a wife or a child, and we bustled around

  like a day in the village until

  one of us turned off the lights, switch

  by switch, and slowly it became night

  and the people slept.

  Our parents were upstairs with company or

  not fighting, and one of us—it was usually

  a boy—became the Town Crier,

  and he walked around our little sleeping

  population and tolled the hours with his voice,

  and this was the game.

  Nine o’clock and all is well, he’d say,

  walking like a constable we must have seen

  in a movie. And what we called an hour passed.

  Ten o’clock and all is well.

  And maybe somebody stirred in her sleep

  or a grown up baby cried and was comforted…

  Eleven o’clock and all is well.

  Twelve o’clock. One o’clock
. Two o’clock…

  and it went on like that through the night we made up

  until we could pretend it was morning.

  The Girl

  So close to the end of my childbearing life

  without children

  —if I could remember a day when I was utterly a girl

  and not yet a woman—

  but I don’t think there was a day like that for me.

  When I look at the girl I was, dripping in her bathing suit,

  or riding her bike, pumping hard down the newly paved street,

  she wears a furtive look—

  and even if I could go back in time to her as me, the age I am now

  she would never come into my arms

  without believing that I wanted something.

  The Dream

  I had a dream in the day:

  I laid my father’s body down in a narrow boat

  and sent him off along the riverbank with its cattails and grasses.

  And the boat—it was made of bark and wood bent when it was wet—

  took him to his burial finally.

  But a day or two later I realized it was my self I wanted

  to lay down, hands crossed, eyes closed….

  Oh, the light coming up from down there,

  the sweet smell of the water—and finally, the sense of being carried

  by a current I could not name or change.

  For Three Days

  For three days now I’ve been trying to think of another word for gratitude

  because my brother could have died and didn’t,

  because for a week we stood in the intensive care unit trying not to imagine

  how it would be then, afterwards.

  My youngest brother, Andy, said: This is so weird. I don’t know if I’ll be

  talking with John today, or buying a pair of pants for his funeral.

  And I hated him for saying it because it was true and seemed to tilt it,

  because I had been writing his elegy in my head during the seven-hour drive there

  and trying not to. Thinking meant not thinking. It meant imagining my brother

  surrounded by light—like Schrödinger’s Cat that would be dead if you looked

  and might live if you didn’t. And then it got better, and then it got worse.

  And it’s a story now: He came back.

  And I did, by that time, imagine him dead. And I did begin to write the other story:

  how the crowd in the stifling church snapped to a tearful attention,

  how my brother lived again, for a few minutes, through me.

  And although I know I couldn’t help it, because fear has its own language

  and its own story, because even grief provides a living remedy,

  I can’t help but think of that woman who said to him whom she considered

  her savior: If thou hadst been here my brother had not died, how she might

  have practiced her speech, and how she too might have stood trembling,

  unable to meet the eyes of the dear familiar figure that stumbled from the cave,

  when the compassionate fist of God opened and crushed her with gratitude and shame.

  Just Now

  My brother opens his eyes when he hears the door click

  open downstairs and Joe’s steps walking up past the meowing cat

  and the second click of the upstairs door, and then he lifts

  his face so that Joe can kiss him. Joe has brought armfuls

  of broken magnolia branches in full blossom, and he putters

  in the kitchen looking for a big jar to put them in and finds it.

  And now they tower in the living room, white and sweet, where

  John can see them if he leans out from his bed which

  he can’t do just now, and now Joe is cleaning. What a mess

  you’ve left me, he says, and John is smiling, almost asleep again.

  A Certain Light

  He had taken the right pills the night before.

  We had counted them out

  from the egg carton where they were numbered so there’d be no mistake.

  He had taken the morphine and prednisone and amitriptyline

  and Florinef and vancomycin and Halcion too quickly

  and had thrown up in the bowl Joe brought to the bed—a thin string

  of blue spit—then waited a few minutes, to calm himself,

  before he took them all again. And had slept through the night

  and the morning and was still sleeping at noon—or not sleeping.

  He was breathing maybe twice a minute, and we couldn’t wake him,

  we couldn’t wake him until we shook him hard calling, John wake up now

  John wake up—Who is the president?

  And he couldn’t answer.

  His doctor told us we’d have to keep him up for hours.

  He was all bones and skin, no tissue to absorb the medicine.

  He couldn’t walk unless two people held him.

  And we made him talk about the movies: What was the best moment in

  On the Waterfront? What was the music in Gone with the Wind?

  And for seven hours he answered, if only to please us, mumbling

  I like the morphine, sinking, rising, sleeping, rousing,

  then only in pain again—but wakened.

  So wakened that late that night in one of those still blue moments

  that were a kind of paradise, he finally opened his eyes wide,

  and the room filled with a certain light we thought we’d never see again.

  Look at you two, he said. And we did.

  And Joe said, Look at you.

  And John said, How do I look?

  And Joe said, Handsome.

  How Some of It Happened

  My brother was afraid, even as a boy, of going blind—so deeply

  that he would turn the dinner knives away from, looking at him,

  he said, as they lay on the kitchen table.

  He would throw a sweatshirt over those knobs that lock the car door

  from the inside, and once, he dismantled a chandelier in the middle

  of the night when everyone was sleeping.

  We found the pile of sharp and shining crystals in the upstairs hall.

  So you understand, it was terrible

  when they clamped his one eye open and put the needle in through his cheek

  and up and into his eye from underneath

  and left it there for a full minute before they drew it slowly out

  once a week for many weeks. He learned to, lean into it,

  to settle down he said, and still the eye went dead, ulcerated,

  breaking up green in his head, as the other eye, still blue

  and wide open, looked and looked at the clock.

  My brother promised me he wouldn’t die after our father died.

  He shook my hand on a train going home one Christmas and gave me five years,

  as clearly as he promised he’d be home for breakfast when I watched him

  walk into that New York City autumn night. By nine, I promise,

  and he was—he did come back. And five years later he promised five years more.

  So much for the brave pride of premonition,

  the worry that won’t let it happen.

  You know, he said, I always knew I would die young. And then I got sober

  and I thought, OK, I’m not. I’m going to see thirty and live to be an old man.

  And now it turns out that I am going to die. Isn’t that funny?

  —One day it happens: what you have feared all your life,

  the unendurably specific, the exact thing. No matter what you say or do.

  This is what my brother said: Here, sit closer to the bed

  so I can see you.

  Rochester, New York, July 1989

  Early summer evenings, the city kids would ride their bikes down his street

  no-handed, leaning ba
ck in their seats, and bump over the curb

  of the empty Red Cross parking lot next door where Joe’s car was parked, and

  John’s white Honda, broken and unregistered…everything blooming,

  that darkening in the trees before the sky goes dark: the sweetness of the lilacs

  and the grass smell…

  And the sound on the front porch steps was wooden and hollow,

  and up the narrow stairway stuffy and dim, and the upper door maybe a little

  open—and into the hall and left into his room: someone might be sitting there

  reading, or sometimes only him, sleeping,