The bowl is cold and hard in the palm of my hand. How do you break a dish on purpose? Do you fling it sideways like a Frisbee or hurl it overhead like a softball? Maybe you could stomp on a cup the way you’d crush a tin can.
I don’t have any unwanted china—only my grandmother’s Limoges. My everyday dishes are the white retro-looking set with the black-and-yellow stripes that Ethan and I picked out before the wedding. There we were, a typical couple registering for kitchen accessories in preparation for our Special Day. The world was our oyster. Then red tide seeped into our oyster. Now the cheerful yellow trim annoys me.
I look at the tower of dishes in the kitchen sink; it seems it would be easier to smash them than to wash them.
I remember feeling overwhelmed by the choices of dishes at Macy’s and wanting to ask my mother’s opinion, wishing she were there to meddle in our decisions. Now I want her here, to fix me soup and tell me not to worry about my stupid boss and to help me arrange the photos of Ethan for the album that Dr. Rupert said I should make.
I last saw Mother on a snowy morning when I was thirteen and she sped off for work in her Chevette, even though ribbon-candy sheets of ice covered the roads and radio DJs said motorists should stay home. The museum wasn’t even
open
that day, but Mother was eager to prepare for an upcoming exhibit. She loved her job as docent. I think she liked being among the paintings as much as she liked being home with us. How I resented that job.
When the policeman came to the door to tell us about the accident, my father’s reaction was remarkably calm. He said nothing, just nodded, smiled faintly, and pushed the door shut as the officer described the icy conditions and sharp curve in the road. I remember the officer’s badge shining under the porch light and how his inky eyebrows shot up as the door swung closed in his face.
“Wrong house, I guess,” my father told me cheerfully.
After Ethan and I were married, I made him buy a big car with double air bags. Fortunately he was a cautious driver. Still, as he looked both ways and stuck to the speed limit, malignant cells crept into his lymph nodes.
There’s no milk for cereal. But who cares? Because now the bowl is flying out of my hand. To lose a mother
and
a husband! The bowl bursts against the wall, shards like pointy teeth shooting across the floor.
A heavy cape of nausea hangs over me, and my knees feel wrong. Cap’n Crunch smiles maniacally, his blue hat like a ship on his head.
Outside, silly,
he says.
You’re supposed to break the dishes outside!
I open the cupboard and peer in at the plates. They are inviting, smooth and white and neatly stacked. I recall how carefully I packed them when Ethan and I moved into our new house, sliding each saucer into a padded liner as if it were a treasure from King Tut’s tomb.
Now I understand why rock stars wreck hotel rooms—to shatter the relentless stillness of a room. My arms are prickly and my hands feel as swollen as baseball mitts. I’ve got to get hold of more dishes.
I drag the wheelbarrow clanging from the garage into the kitchen and load it with the dirty dishes from the sink, then plates, bowls, mugs, saucers, and cups from the cupboards. The wheelbarrow wobbles under the weight as I heave it through the French doors and shove it across the grass, dishes clacking and rattling.
As I fling dinner plates against the back of the garage, they pop and shatter. Pieces of china fly back at me. Teacups split into crescent shapes like shells. Little Pyrex custard bowls explode. I wish that
I
were the one who got cancer, since I can’t even do my stupid job. My legs give out and then I am on my knees, chucking saucers with both hands, my pulse a crazy metronome ticking in my head. Charcoal dusk envelops the yard. The wind picks up, the branches on the bushes beside the garage swatting like arms. As the French doors to the house blow shut, the blinds crash against the glass.
I know I should stop breaking my dishes, just as you know you should stop eating cashews or potato chips. But who needs twelve special bowls for pasta? My right shoulder burns as they sail through the air.
My neighbor Mrs. Selman pushes open her sliding glass door and calls out, “Sophie? Are you there?” I see her silhouette through the bamboo hedge lining the fence between our yards, standing on tiptoes and trying to look over. I dive into the grass and crawl on my belly into the bamboo, the ground soggy and cold beneath my knees. A branch scrapes my cheek and my glasses fog up, turning the world white.
“Hello?” Mrs. Selman says. She gives up and slides her door shut. I wait for the click of the lock, then scramble out of the bushes.
Broken dishes are spread across the lawn like remnants from an archaeological dig. It begins to rain. Maybe I should be kneading bread or yelling in the shower. Kneading bread in the shower? The air is moist and cold and my hands are raw and my nose is running. I dab at it with the sleeve of my coat and peer in the wheelbarrow, which is empty.
Just as I’m wondering whether I’ve got paper plates, a policeman rounds the back corner of the house, the automatic porch light clicking on.
“Ma’am?” he says, blinking and peering into the yard.
My hands shoot up over my head. “Yes?”
“Do you live here?”
I hear my voice bark an enthusiastic, “Yes!”
He looks at the broken dishes. “Everything all right?”
“Sure. It’s just that I’m sick of these dishes. And believe it or not, the doctor advised me to break them. She’s not a
real
doctor, she’s an MSW.” Stupid. Babbling.
“Do you mind if I see some identification?” The policeman’s face is round and chubby. He’s probably younger than me.
“Yes, of course.
Please,
come in.” My voice slides into jovial unctuousness. We step through the French doors into the kitchen, the officer taking care to wipe his feet.
In the front hall, I show him my driver’s license, with my address and photo, tiny face surrounded by hurricane hair. He looks at me, looks at the picture, looks at me.
“Okay, thank you.” He hands back the license. “Your neighbor called and said she thought someone was breaking and entering over here.”
“Just breaking.” I laugh.
He tries to laugh. “Right,” he says. Then he says good night and ambles down the front walk to his cruiser, the radio scratching out a message that I can’t hear.
“You can break the rules now,” Dr. Rupert said during our last session, encouraging me to do something entirely different for Thanksgiving. “The big rule was broken: Your loved one died.” But I’m pretty sure he meant fly to Hawaii or eat roast beef instead of turkey. I don’t think he meant break all of my dishes, and I don’t think I should leave the house anymore.
Since Ethan died our bed has grown from the size of a California king to the size of an aircraft carrier. It seems to take up the whole room now, the vast white bedspread screaming:
empty, empty, empty.
I decide it will be easier to sleep alone if I lie on Ethan’s side. That leaves my side open, but I’m here, so it’s not as though anyone’s missing, right?
I try the middle.
The sheets remain cold and indifferent.
I give up and drag the covers to the living room, inflate our camping air mattress, and push it against the wall where the couch used to be. Without furniture, the living room rug is as expansive as a lawn and there are little things that fell underneath the sofa: a dime, a Frito, a Scrabble tile with the letter O.
Oh. Friday night. Two more days of this dreaded four-day holiday weekend. I remove the key to the house from the realtor’s lockbox, so Melanie can’t get in for her drive-by showings, which are like scary surprise parties. I should take my medication and wash my hair and rescue the pies from my trunk and find a place that rents living room furniture. Instead, I curl up on the air mattress with a blanket, stick my legs in the sleeves of Ethan’s down parka for extra warmth, and turn on the TV.
It would be better if my mother were here. When I was home sick from school, she’d fix a tray with soup and crackers, a Pyrex cup of Junket custard, ginger ale, and two tiny orange aspirin tablets. We’d curl up on my bed and watch
Perry Mason.
I remember the swell of her breasts against my back and how the tickly down on her cheeks was as supple as tennis ball fuzz.
The blanket is as soft as an animal, and I pull it over my head and knead the nubby fabric between my fingers. I would like to touch someone. It seems the last time someone touched me was a few weeks ago when I went to the dentist and he had to wrap his arms around my head to check my fillings. He patted my chin and cheeks and asked me to say
ahh.
I liked the comforting curve of the chair and the sweet, soapy smell of his hands and my eyes teared up and he asked if he hit a nerve and I nodded yes.
On a TV program called
Cops,
a shirtless man strung out on something called sherm stick beats down an old girlfriend’s door to reclaim a box spring. There’s a channel that’s showing a weekend marathon of
Cops
episodes, and now I see the attraction of the show: It makes your own life seem pretty together.
Mother would insist that I turn off the TV, shower, get dressed, eat a piece of fruit, and call to rejoin the grief group.
I will call Ruth and then the hospital to find out when the next group meets. I
would
call, if I could get to the phone. But my limbs are weak and heavy and won’t go. My brain says,
Get up,
and my body says,
Screw you, I’m watching
Cops.
If Ethan were here with his annoying habit of clicking through the stations, I wouldn’t be stuck on
Cops.
A police officer on the TV talks over the backseat of his patrol car to the camera. He says, “Some folks don’t know how to stay out of trouble.”
Instead of showering, I build a fire. The reindeer lawn ornament makes excellent firewood. You don’t even need a saw. You can just break him apart like Ramen noodles and toss him into the flames. I forget to take off his nose, though, and it pops and oozes, melting like a candied apple.
The phone rings and the answering machine picks up. I hear Melanie leaving a message, asking if I’ve had a change of heart about selling the house. Even though it’s nighttime, she’s still working. Her voice is tinny on her cellular phone. It sounds as though she’s calling from another world: the land of the capable.
Over the weekend, my sleeping schedule moves around the clock because I can’t sleep at night and I can’t stay awake during the day, and pretty soon I seem to be missing daylight altogether.
One morning (
what morning?
) a garbage truck (
Tuesday morning!
) screeches and roars down the street, and then I am awake, floating on the air mattress through the middle of the living room. The good news is that the four-day Thanksgiving weekend is finally over. The bad news is that I forgot to take out the garbage and I’m at least a day late for work. I hear my neighbor’s car door slam as he pulls out of the driveway.
The grief is up already. It is an early riser, waiting with its gummy arms wrapped around my neck, its hot, sour breath in my ear. Now it follows me down the hall to the bathroom, tapping my shoulder the whole way.
Try to pick up your toothbrush,
it says.
I clutch the edge of the sink and stare at the drain. A spooky
Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea
monster that’s all dark circles and chapped lips peers out from the bathroom mirror.
I’m sure that the toothbrush is as heavy as a hammer. My hand won’t go, won’t pick it up.
My skin itches, probably because I haven’t showered all weekend. Sticky dribbles of ice cream are caked to my pajama top. Instead of showering and dressing for work, I carry the tube of toothpaste back to the air mattress. I rub a little across my teeth as a guy on
Cops
in a Firebird screeches away from the police, speeding the wrong way down an exit ramp. They shoot out his tires, but he keeps driving on the rims, sparks spraying everywhere, oncoming cars spinning out and crashing into the guardrail, and then I am asleep again.
When I awaken again there’s a square of sunshine on the carpet and I hear the mailman’s feet shuffling on the porch. I resist the urge to throw open the door and embrace him.
A J. Crew catalog. You shouldn’t have!
Instead, I creep to the kitchen and root for carbohydrates. I stack a plate with toasted frozen waffles and pull a carton of Cherry Garcia from the freezer. I know I should be eating fruits and vegetables, but they don’t carry produce at 7-Eleven.
Tomorrow will be different. Tomorrow I’ll start a high-protein, low-fat diet and sign up for yoga, as Dr. Rupert suggested, and start walking thirty minutes a day. Order that light box. I will overcome my fear of the produce section. Speaking of tomorrow, I scan the kitchen calendar, trying to find today. Here it is: Tuesday, November 27. Ethan’s birthday. You are here. I swallow a bland, dry lump of waffle.
The night Ethan died I wasn’t even
with him.
I went home around eleven to get clean clothes and a book of Thurber essays that were the last thing that made him laugh. Even though he hadn’t spoken for two days, and he lay so still that you couldn’t tell if he was breathing unless you stared straight at the little snowflakes on his hospital gown and made sure they were rising and falling, I read to him. Because they say hearing’s the last thing to go, even when you’re on morphine. So like an idiot I went home for a shower and the book. Marion stayed at the hospital with her cup of Sanka and her knitting, the steady
click-click-click
of the needles filling the room. I was packing jeans and a sweatshirt into a paper bag when she called.
“We lost him,” she said.
We’ll find him, then,
I thought.
Christmas is coming,
the calendar says now.
What are your plans for Christmas?
It is a bossy gardening calendar that wants me to start a mulch pile and stock my pantry with pretty jars for impromptu floral arrangements. I do not have a pantry. I rip the thing off the wall and stuff it into the overflowing garbage. A tuna fish can clatters across the floor.
I
see
myself bending over to pick up the can. I
see
myself taking out the garbage and rinsing off the lid, which has smudges of food all over it. I
see
myself loading the stack of dirty dishes in the sink into the dishwasher and showering and ironing something to wear to work. But I don’t do these things. Instead, I call our department secretary and tell her I’ve got the flu. She reminds me to get a flu shot; it might not be too late. It could be, but she’s not sure. I tell her that I will put that on my to-do list.
Taking a shower is a good thing. I know this, but I can’t seem to turn on the water. I’m staring at the insanely busy scallop-shell pattern on the shower curtain when the phone rings. The answering machine picks up and Marion’s voice echoes through the house. She says that she tried my office and cell phone, and she wants to know where I am and whether I’d like to drive over to Half Moon Bay, where Ethan’s ashes were scattered, and maybe have lunch. She sounds a little frantic. I trudge through the kitchen and pick up.
“Sure,” I say. Somehow this plan seems easier than taking a shower. I’m surprised that Marion sounds relieved. I’ve always assumed that she calls and takes me places to be polite. But maybe she needs me. Although she has her volunteer work and bridge club and luncheons, she lives alone, too. Maybe she needs me to be her basket case. Just as sometimes you need a person to be strong for you, maybe sometimes you need a person to be weak for you. Maybe I am to Marion what
Cops
is to me. Kooky screwups who help you tell yourself:
Hell, I could be worse.
I pull on overalls over my pajamas and tie a kerchief around my snarled hair. As I’m getting a coat out of the closet, I notice spotted brown mildew creeping up the wall near the leak under the house. It smells funny—damp and sour. Maybe the house is filling up with invisible spores. Spores that drain the energy I would otherwise have for renting living room furniture. Maybe the whole place is going to rot and crumble and sink into the swampy earth with a giant sucking noise, taking me with it. They might find me thousands of years from now in my pajamas, like those bog people whose leathery brown bodies they discovered curled up under miles of earthy peat, their woolen cloaks still clinging to their limbs.
Marion doesn’t mention my pajama top. Normally she would ask if I wanted to go back inside and put on a blouse or turtleneck. Her posture is always perfect—straight spine, chin leading her through a room—but today her composure seems manic. I notice she’s got her coat buttoned crooked.
Ethan was an only child, and he said his mother always planned lavish theme parties for his birthday when he was little—dinosaurs or cowboys and Indians, with hours of games and bulging goodie bags. Even when he was grown she still baked his favorite, banana cake, every year for his birthday.
We head up I-280 and over the hill on Highway 92.
“Is this the right way?” Marion asks, suddenly panicked. There’s really only one way to get over the mountain to Half Moon Bay, so I’m not sure why she’s asking. Certainly she wouldn’t forget this route. I nod and her grip loosens on the steering wheel.
“Beautiful,” she says vacantly, pointing to the wisps of fog strewn through the eucalyptus trees, which smell sharp and clean.
We stop at a greenhouse, where I choose six yellow roses to throw out to sea for Ethan. It takes me a while to decide how many: A dozen seems like overkill, hard to throw into the surf, yet one or two seems too sparse, like when only a few people show up at a party.
“Good afternoon, ladies,” says a white-haired man behind the counter, bowing ceremoniously at the flowers. “Will that be all?”
“I’ll get those,” Marion says, waving a $20 bill at him.
“You look
just
like your mother,” the man tells me. I glance up from a package of crocus bulbs and realize he means Marion. She looks shyly at the floor, her lips turning up slightly at the corners.
I say, “Thank you.”
We pass fields striped with rows of brussels sprouts as we head toward the sea, which is gray and chalky on the horizon.
Ethan loved the ocean—scuba-diving and boogie boarding. After we were married, we had time for only a short honeymoon because he had just joined a start-up company and could take only five days off. We drank champagne on the beach and stayed in bed until two in the afternoon. But then engineers from his company started calling on his cell phone and he’d talk them through fixing bugs in the software code.
“Enough,” I told him after we missed the sunset and our dinner reservation one night. I snatched his phone and tossed it into the bushes outside our room.
“This is for
us,
” he said, running out to get the phone. It was always for us. He said I needed to realize that and focus more on the future.
Now, here I am in the future with a handful of yellow roses.
At the beach, angry waves pound the sand. I take off my sneakers and socks and roll up my pants, but I can’t make it out to where the water is even a little bit deep. A thorn on one of the roses pricks my finger.
Marion stands facing the sea with her hands on her hips, as if commanding it to settle down. The wind blows her white hair straight back, and I see her pink scalp underneath. Her eyes tear from the cold.
The weather was almost this blustery on the day of Ethan’s memorial service, even though it was summer. Marion, Dad, Jill, Ruth, and our friends Sonia and Alfie and I gathered on the shore to sprinkle the ashes. The wind whipped everyone’s hair into their faces, and sand stung our eyes, and the ocean churned impatiently, tugging at our ankles as if to say
You, too; I want you, too.
Technically we were supposed to get a permit to disperse the ashes, but no one had done this. Marion looked around furtively and struggled to open the stubborn lid on the urn. She finally pried it off and tossed out the ashes, which tumbled straight down into the foam around everyone’s feet. She glared disdainfully at the urn. Clearly, this wasn’t what she’d had in mind. She must have imagined a crisp but windless day, the sky a big blue bowl overhead, the ocean twinkling, the ashes flying in a graceful arc toward Hawaii.
Now, I fling the roses as hard as I can. They’re airborne for a second, spread out like a fan. Then they bob and rock in the white foam just a few feet away. The waves push them to shore, drag them back, push them in again.
A German shepherd splashes through the surf, barking at the flowers. “Shoo!” I yell at the dog, who clutches one rose between his teeth. “Scram!” There’s no owner in sight, no one else on the beach. The salt water stings my calves. My feet are numb.