What the Living Do Read online

or lying awake, his face turned toward the door,

  and he would raise his hand….

  And the woman who lived below them played the piano. She was a teacher, and

  sometimes we’d hear that stumbling repetition people make when they’re

  learning a new song, and sometimes she’d play alone—she’d left a note

  in his mailbox saying she would play softly for him. And those evenings,

  when the sky was sunless but not yet dark, and the birdsong grew loud in the trees,

  just after supper, when the kids wheeled by silently

  or quietly talking from their bikes, when the daylilies closed up

  alongside the house,

  music would sometimes drift up through the floorboards,

  and he might doze or wake a little or sleep,

  and whoever was with him might lean back in the chair beside the bed

  and not know it was Chopin,

  but something soft and pretty—maybe not even hear it,

  not really, until it stopped

  —the way you know a scent from a flowering tree once you’ve passed it.

  The Last Time

  The last time we had dinner together in a restaurant

  with white tablecloths, he leaned forward

  and took my two hands in his hands and said,

  I’m going to die soon. I want you to know that.

  And I said, I think I do know.

  And he said, What surprises me is that you don’t.

  And I said, I do. And he said, What?

  And I said, Know that you’re going to die.

  And he said, No, I mean know that you are.

  Without Music

  Only the car radio

  driving from the drugstore to the restaurant to his apartment:

  rock and roll, oldies but goodies,

  and sometimes, softly, piano music

  rising from the piano teacher’s apartment on the first floor.

  Most of it happened without music,

  the clink of a spoon from the kitchen,

  someone talking. Silence.

  Somebody sleeping. Someone watching somebody sleep.

  Pain

  He rose on the surface of it like the layer of water on top of a wave

  that won’t break—you’ve seen those swells—

  cold and moving like something breathing you can’t see, collecting and

  collecting until it seems uncontainable, heaving on and on, rising and

  rising and growing bigger.

  When it got very bad, he’d say, Tell me a story,

  and after an hour or so, he’d say, We got through that one, didn’t we?

  Until a day came when he said, Marie,

  you know how we’ve been waiting for the big pain to come?

  I think it’s here. I think this is it.

  I think it’s been here all along.

  And he did take the morphine, and he died the next week.

  Faulkner

  During the last two weeks of John’s life, Joe was reading

  As I Lay Dying for his English class. He had to give an oral report,

  and John kept asking me to read it. You’re an English teacher, he said,

  you know what they want. OK, I said. But the book drifted

  from the kitchen to the bedside table to the pillows of the living room couch.

  What’s it about? I asked Joe, late one night

  when we were making peanut butter sandwiches. But I didn’t understand

  the story as he told it: the good brothers from the bad brothers,

  who was the mother’s favorite, really? And who was building the coffin,

  banging and banging the nails?

  The afternoon John died, I picked it up, waiting for the food from the aunts

  and the cousins. I tried to read it that night before I fell asleep

  and stopped. I don’t know what finally happened.

  Caddy smelled of trees, I kept thinking during those days and nights

  of the wake and the funeral. But that was another book, wasn’t it?

  That was the idiot brother talking.

  The Promise

  In the dream I had when he came back not sick

  but whole, and wearing his winter coat,

  he looked at me as though he couldn’t speak, as if

  there were a law against it, a membrane he couldn’t break.

  His silence was what he could not

  not do, like our breathing in this world, like our living,

  as we do, in time.

  And I told him: I’m reading all this Buddhist stuff,

  and listen, we don’t die when we die. Death is an event,

  a threshold we pass through. We go on and on

  and into light forever.

  And he looked down, and then back up at me. It was the look we’d pass

  across the kitchen table when Dad was drunk again and dangerous,

  the level look that wants to tell you something,

  in a crowded room, something important, and can’t.

  The Cold Outside

  Soon I will die, he said—that was during the heat wave that summer:

  the orange lilies bending toward the house beside the driveway,

  the heater in his car broken on, and blasting.

  And the green shade flapped against the window screen,

  as if what was out there inhaled and exhaled,

  sliding away from the window, banging lightly against the sill

  sucked flat against the screen

  —peeling off and blowing out again.

  Today the cold outside is bright and brittle,

  heaps of hard snow between the sidewalk and the street,

  and look, someone has shoveled a narrow path in front of the bakery,

  so that, walking, a person has to step aside,

  and let another person through,

  or pass through as the other person steps aside.

  Soon I will die, he said, and then

  what everyone has been so afraid of for so long will have finally happened,

  and then everyone can rest.

  The Grave

  That first summer I lay on the grass above it as if it were

  a narrow bed, just my size, and—

  lying on the ground above my brother’s body like a log

  floating on lake water above its own shadow.

  During the first winter I drove there one afternoon

  after Tom and Andy and Beth and Dor and Bahia had been there,

  because when I stepped out of the car their footprints marked the snowy lawn:

  the men’s big boots, the women’s smaller ones,

  and Bahia’s little boot prints, as big as my hand, looping and falling down

  into a snow angel next to his grave, then another messy angel on it,

  and, a grave or two away, another one, and the little blotch where she got up

  and brushed herself off. For some crazy reason I was wearing

  black high-heeled shoes in the snow, and, walking back to the car, they made

  ovals and dots, fat exclamation marks,

  walking inside the steps of my brothers and sisters.

  One November, years later, I went there with Andy

  who was, by then, as old as John was when he died,

  and we lay on the frozen ground,

  I, using my scarf as a pillow, on John’s grave,

  and Andy, on top of our father’s grave, one grave away,

  and we talked like that for a little while, companionably,

  like an old couple talking in bed,

  our eyes closed against the sunlight,

  and when I cried, Andy didn’t seem to wish me to stop, and that

  was a kind of happiness,

  lying there with my living brother, talking about our family.

  The ground was cold.

  Eventually the chill crept through our coats and jeans and />
  we scuffled up—Andy reached down

  to give me his hand—and then it was over.

  We walked together back to the car and away from them.

  The Gate

  I had no idea that the gate I would step through

  to finally enter this world

  would be the space my brother’s body made. He was

  a little taller than me: a young man

  but grown, himself by then,

  done at twenty-eight, having folded every sheet,

  rinsed every glass he would ever rinse under the cold

  and running water.

  This is what you have been waiting for, he used to say to me.

  And I’d say, What?

  And he’d say, This—holding up my cheese and mustard sandwich.

  And I’d say, What?

  And he’d say, This, sort of looking around.

  One of the Last Days

  As through a door in the air that I stepped through sideways

  before reaching for a plate high in the cupboard

  I find myself in the middle of my life: May night, raining,

  Michael just gone to Provincetown, James making pizzas next door,

  lilacs in full bloom, sweet in the dark rain of Cambridge.

  On one of the last days I told him, You know how much you love Joe?

  That’s how much I love you. And he said, No. And I said, Yes.

  And he said, No. And I said, You know it’s true.

  And he closed his eyes for a minute.

  When he opened them he said, Maybe you’d better start looking for

  somebody else.

  Late Morning

  I was still in my white nightgown and James had drawn me down

  to sit on his lap, and I was looking over his shoulder through the hall

  into the living room, and he was looking over my shoulder, into the trees

  through the open window I imagine,

  and we sat like that for a few minutes, without saying much of anything,

  my cheek pressed lightly

  against his cheek, and my brother John was dead.

  Suddenly close and distinct, it seemed finished, as if time were a room

  I could gaze clear across—four years since I’d lifted his hand from

  the sheets on his bed and it cooled in my hand.

  A little breeze through the open window, James’s warm cheek,

  a brightness in the windy trees as I remember, crumbs and dishes still

  on the table, and a small glass bottle of milk and an open jar of

  raspberry jam.

  Wanting a Child

  I want to write about God and suffering and how the trees endure what we

  don’t want—the long dead months before the appalling blossoms.

  But I think about James instead,

  how last night, when he stood in the doorway bare-chested, I leaned down and

  pressed my cheek against his belly,

  and drew the side of my face up over his chest, his shoulder and throat

  and chin and cheek. I did it over and over again,

  leaning down and dragging my cheek up against him.

  Tonight Jane sleeps between white hospital sheets. She’s already lost her hair

  from treatment. Two more years of it: six months on, six months off,

  I almost envy the simplicity of her life,

  deprived of a certain future.

  Snowy evening in a dark snowy winter:

  daffodils in the glass vase on the mantel over the fireplace that doesn’t work.

  The radiator’s squeak and whine.

  Plows soon, their deep and decent rumbling. Then more night,

  more snow and wind, and in the morning, somebody shoveling.

  Tulips

  The purple tulips I bought this week at the Evergood market

  dip from their brown clay pot like little wolves

  bringing their throats low to the table, their petals wide open.

  They are so beautiful, I stand in the hallway a long time

  looking at them. Who said: Their face and their sex

  is the same, about tulips?

  And when James comes through the door with his head bowed, when

  he stands in the porch alone, smoking,

  I tell him: Come into the living room and look at these tulips. And he does.

  He sits down in the rocking chair, and he looks at them.

  And when I say: Look how the gold from the stamen has fallen

  to the inside of the purple petal, so the petal holds it,

  he says, Yeah, I see that. But he’s sad.

  I think of my father and my brothers. I look at the tulips.

  And James holds his head in his hands.

  Watching Television

  I didn’t want to look at the huge white egg the mother spider dragged

  along behind her, attached to her abdomen, held off the ground,

  bigger than her own head—

  and inside it: hundreds of baby spiders feeding off the nest,

  and in what seemed like the next minute,

  spinning their own webs quickly and crazily,

  bumping into each other’s and breaking them, then mending

  and moving over, and soon they got it right:

  each in his or her own circle and running around it.

  And then they slept,

  each in the center of a glistening thing: a red dot in ether.

  Last night the moon was as big as a house at the end of the street,

  a white frame house, and rising,

  and I thought of a room it was shining in, right then,

  a room I might live in and can’t imagine yet.

  And this morning, I thought of a place on the ocean where no one is,

  no boat, no fish jumping,

  just sunlight gleaming on the water, humps of water that hardly break.

  I have argued bitterly with the man I love, and for two days

  we haven’t spoken.

  We argued about one thing, but really it was another.

  I keep finding myself standing by the front windows looking out at the street

  and the walk that leads to the front door of this building,

  white, unbroken by footprints.

  Anything I’ve ever tried to keep by force I’ve lost.

  The Dream

  Jane’s voice on the phone is grave and soft and strong.

  Her hair’s gone. I cut it off, she said. She’s Joan of Arc now.

  Dogs bark at people they don’t know.

  All those barking dogs in my dreams! And now

  they know me and don’t bark. A cat screams from the yard.

  I’d live with you, but I wouldn’t marry you, is what

  my father said, offhandedly, from the couch.

  He’s dead now. And the sentence burns in my heart.

  Jane’s voice belongs to another world:

  the world I entered when I decided to leave my father.

  Sometimes the island wavers and shimmers underfoot,

  but the bridge appears when you walk across it—that’s

  how it works, right? There’s no end to this.

  More

  More snow falling, and the scrape of a shovel…

  a layer of snow on top of the seeds in the feeder outside the porch window.

  It looks like a geological map now: the little world in layers: water then silt

  then rock. Wishing a rock into water doesn’t work.

  I can reach through the open window and scoop off the snow, scattering it

  down the four stories with my hand.

  But nothing I can do will hurry him or promise it. It might be hours or days

  before he appears at the door and sits me down and lays his head in my lap.

  Separation

  Driving out of town, I see him crossing

  the Brooks Pharmacy parking lot, and remember

  how
he would drop to his knees in the kitchen

  and press his face to my dress, his cheek flat against

  my belly as if he were listening for something.

  Somebody might be waiting for coffee in the living room,