an early spring saturday

After a months-long hiatus that I feared was the natural conclusion to my nearly nineteen-year-long career as a maternal read-alouder, Beatrice surprised me last week by agreeing with some enthusiasm to the idea of reading Pride and Prejudice together. Thus began our rather agreeable turn about the room with Elizabeth Bennett, which has had no influence on my speech and writing whatsoever. 

The only problem was I couldn't find a copy of it anywhere, which seemed crazy in this house. It must be in the basement, I told Bea, where so many of Papa's program books are (boxes upon boxes, filled with all the St. John's program and philosophy books I couldn't bear to part with). I promised I would search for it over the weekend, and in the meantime, I read to her off the dread phone. 

We've been reading at night before bed, and in the morning on the walk to school and work. I arrived at my office on Thursday and Friday glowing, both with the pleasure of all that fantastic funny dialogue and the effects of the outrageously cold and windy March weather we've been having. The thing is, when we're reading I don't mind it at all. The shivering adds to the fun. After we part ways and I head to my office, I find the cold intolerable.  

Yesterday it rained most of the day, and in the afternoon Beatrice and I went to see Perfect Days with some friends. We curled up towards each other in the reclining seats, heads and knees just touching, a bucket of popcorn tucked into the triangle of space my body made, and holding hands through many of the scenes. I wasn't sure what she would make of such a quiet movie, but she (and I) loved it, and we agreed we would have happily spent another two hours with this taciturn public toilet cleaner as he went about his solitary day, smiling up at the Tokyo trees.

After we said goodbye to our friends and came home, there was laundry and kitchen clean up to do, and some trip planning over cocktails with my mother, as she and Gabriel are taking a vacation together this coming weekend to make up for their Iceland fiasco in the summer. Then Gabriel left to play poker with friends, and my mom invited Beatrice and I to come over for dinner a little later. She left to cook, and I realized I still hadn't looked for Pride and Prejudice.

So down I went into the kitty litter-strewn basement, where one by one, I slid boxes off their shelves and tipped them towards me, balanced on my thighs while I rummaged in their shadowy insides. Philosophy, philosophy, and more philosophy. Some Shakespeare. Theology. More philosophy. What time was it? I squatted down next to the very last box and slid it out. Plato, Euclid, Aristotle, and ... a shoebox beneath these books labeled Mike's Keepsakes in Mike's handwriting. I've seen that box before, but surprisingly I can't remember ever opening it. 

You can guess what comes next! My feet were going numb in my weird squatting position, we were going to be late for dinner, and I cracked open the lid. Inside were birthday cards, letters, photos. A silly poem in rhyming couplets I wrote for him on Valentine's Day in 2003. I didn't go through it all, but most of what I found was from his twenties, perhaps because we communicated more often in those days on pieces of paper. 

There was a postcard dated March 6, 1998 addressed to Mike in Brooklyn, three weeks after we first got together and sent from Spain, where I was for spring break. And there was a postcard from the island of St. John, where my mother had taken my sister and me for a week-long graduation gift (we graduated from high school and college in 1998). I described some of the things we were seeing and doing, and ended it with this postscript: 

I've been thinking, we shouldn't honeymoon here. Too hot. Maybe in our flabby forties, when the kids are at camp. 

After I read that, I put everything back, closed the lid, and pushed the box back onto its dusty shelf.

I wrote those words when I was twenty years old, three months into my relationship with Mike. Where did I get that kind of ballsy assuredness? We loved fantasies about the future, about being middle aged with kids, about being retired (back to Brooklyn for long walks and cheap afternoon art movies and a tiny apartment!). In our very first romantic walk in the woods, that very first weekend, Mike - who was a year away from even applying to graduate school - told me he couldn't wait to be a professor emeritus. Now that would be living. To be a wise old man, give the occasional lecture, have lots of time for books and contemplation and yes, walks in the woods. He didn't mention the grandchildren gathered round his knees. We hadn't even kissed yet! But they were there, unspoken, part of his picture. 

I came upstairs, told Beatrice to get ready to go to Grandma's, loaded some dishes into the dishwasher. And in my quiet kitchen with the darkness falling outside the windows I was seized with the most painful anguish. The kind that makes you gasp and curl with its impact. March 12th marked six years without Mike, and March 22nd marked twenty-eight without my dad. I feel very attuned to the absence of my husband and my father at this time of year, and sometimes intolerant of the presence of everyone else's.

Beatrice came down and could tell I was off, despite my best efforts to conceal it. What's wrong Mama? she asked in her open, caring way, and because we had had such a connected afternoon together, despite my worries about burdening her with my own grief, I told her about the postcard. 

But I didn't get to have any of my flabby forties with Papa, I said. I hate feeling sorry for myself, but sometimes I do. 

And then I cried. She hugged me tightly, and cried a little too. 

I told her that I don't like being envious of my friends who have their dads to support them and their husbands to go on trips with. I wish those feelings didn't come up at all.

And Beatrice, who is entering a time of adolescent turmoil and growth, looked at me and said Mama, of course you're mad. I see my friends' dads do things with them, play with them, take them places, just be there, and I feel so angry. It makes you really mad! You have to just let it out!

We were in the bathroom together. I looked at her. 

You have to just - scream!

I still had so much twisted up sorrow in my chest and throat and face. And I held her eyes and opened my mouth and let out the strangest noise imaginable. 

We both laughed. Then she let out a big yell. We laughed some more. We tried out some pretty weird vocalizations, agreeing the low register ones felt best.

We ran in the dark, just because, to my mother's house, letting so much dark energy out our feet and our mouths, continuing to yell and make strange angry noises, cracking each other up the whole way there.

Who knows what the neighbors thought. Who cares. Mike and I didn't get our not-so-very-flabby (as it turns out) forties together, but we did get the kids. They weren't here when I wrote that postcard, and now they are! Three exquisite, loving, growing people that I cannot fathom the world without.

We found a hefty volume of the collected novels of Jane Austen on my mother's bookshelf. We read last night until we were both overwhelmingly sleepy, yet just awake enough to groan together over the absurdities of Mr. Collins. Gabriel had already gone to bed, a bit poorer after his game. I fed the cats, put the dog in her crate, locked the doors and turned off the lights. I slid my hand along the cool, smooth bannister that so many unknown people have slid their tired nighttime hands along before me on my way up the stairs, sank under the covers, skipped reading my own book and, exhausted and content, fell right to sleep.