Authors: Jill McCorkle
I once heard a preacher discuss the miracles of Jesus in a way that made total sense to me. He said that science could explain the act but that what was a miracle was the timing. And every now and then during that period of time we were seeing you, I would wake in the middle of the night to an old feeling, a sad
feeling. Some dream had transported me back to when I could feel. And I could remember what
hope
felt like. Not happiness necessarily, but hope, and there’s a kind of natural happiness that grows out of hope, a kind of longing and imagining of what might be. You can take this old rundown house and make it look good. Paint and fabric and the right lightbulbs. Soften the angles, open the windows.
You know, back when I was so miserable, I read true crime all the time, the grizzlier the better, and I wondered,
What is wrong with me?
But I needed to reassure myself about where I was. At least I wasn’t married to a serial killer. At least he didn’t make me pretend to be dead or a young boy when having sex. Those aren’t bodies stacked up out there in his tool shed but little Tupperware containers with sorted screws and nails. The fascination with someone else’s reality is a total escape (this is where I think you might come in). We look at a bad situation and say, “Whew,” or we laugh/judge/ridicule. We want confessions —car wrecks, true crime, divorce battles, someone’s nervous breakdown. Who is the fattest person in the family? But what kind of life is that, if you have to spend all your time filling up on all the awful stuff that is
not
your life? I had just ordered video biographies on John Wayne Gacy (sicko clown) and Jeffrey Dahmer (cannibal) when I caught a glimpse of myself in your bathroom mirror and thought,
Oh my God
. And that is when I had to slam on the brakes. I slammed on brakes, and with it the world crashed, and with the wreckage
I heard silence, and with the silence I heard my own voice. I had been screaming all the while. For years I had been screaming. It was just like in
Horton Hears a Who!
and that realization also made me see how selfish all this divorce/religion/self-analysis can be —I had not read to my children or just sat and watched their television programs with them in weeks. I had not stretched out beside them and rubbed their backs, whispered about all the good things that will happen in their lives until they fell asleep. I had not done a thing to my hair in months and I had worn the same jeans for a week straight, the same ones I had let my scarecrow wear the whole summer before. I was a mess.
Remember how I
finally ended our time with you? Remember how I made a big confession that I had fucked the plumber who stopped by to make a few repairs? Well, the truth is I didn’t do that at all. That’s the story you hear all the time, kind of like the banker and his secretary, the professor and his student. The carpenter, electrician, plumber. The butcher and the baker and the candlestick maker. That is a cliché right out of porn central. Bored wife wanders around the house all day wearing little to nothing and fucks whatever passes by. And you all believed it. Now
that
was
offensive
to me. I may be a lot of things but cliché is not one of them. And of course Jerry didn’t really believe it but jumped on it like a dog on a bone because then he could accuse me of something specific. Alienation of affection.
Boo hoo. And when he threatened to let it affect the decision about the kids and how we would divide household goods, I just started singing “(I’m) a Boy Watcher,” and we agreed to disagree and call it a truce.
Though we never
discussed it, I think deep down Jerry must know that I am too loyal a person to have screwed the plumber —loyal to the kids, loyal to my own moral code, and loyal to my own sense of aesthetics (no offense to the plumber, of course, but
not
my taste at all). No, my biggest betrayal to Jerry is that I quit trying. When I finally found my own voice, I realized there was nothing else I wanted to say to him. I stopped talking, nothing feeding nothing until nothing was huge and nothing begot nothing. Feeling nothing is not good, but it’s where a lot of people stop and stay. The nothingness is so delusional and numbing. It’s like stretching out in the snow and taking a little nap, and the comfort of discomfort is a scary thing. The lull into nothingness should be feared by all. Your daughter had a look of nothing that day, and I keep hoping she’s better, that something in this world woke her back up. And I hope that as you read this letter you are actually able to identify me, to place me among the assembly line of broken parts and broken hearts that pass through your business. I hope you are able to remember how I often had to pee at the most unlikely (boring) times and how you have always wished that you had gotten my grandmother’s pound cake recipe I
described so well one day when you asked me to talk about something I was proud of, or that you wish you had gotten my advice on your entryway, which —if asked —would be to get rid of some of those primitive masks and weaponry. I know you are proud of all those times you went to Asian and African places but I just have to tell you, it’s depressing. Maybe I got speared and boiled in a pot in some past life, I don’t know, but those things give me the creeps. I’m afraid you’ll come out there one day and find a client speared right there in the hallway with what came off your wall and her husband just a trail of exhaust in the distance and then you’ll never sell this place. But what I’m most afraid of is that you’ll make it too easy for people to come there and stay, get comfortable with the little games and the burden of trying to fix something that just can’t be fixed. I hope you will remember that whatever I was, I was not apathetic. Bored? Oh dear God, yes, I was bored much of the time, but whenever I said I was bored or lonely or tired, it was my own voice saying it. I heard a voice that said,
Feel something
. And so I did, and I continue to. I wish you peace and love, Dr. Love. I wish you a happy daughter and a smooth-running vehicle and better décor. I thank you for the time you have spent reading me free of charge.
Sincerely,
Hannah from three suburbs over
PS: Enclosed is a photo of me and my kids at Disney World right after we rode Space Mountain, which is why the little one looks kind of scared. She barely made it up to the height mark that will let you ride. It was so much fun we went as many times as we could and even after screaming and carrying on and getting slung back and forth, I am proud to say that I no longer look one bit like shit on a stick.
DRIVING TO THE MOON
“What I really
hate about major disasters,” Billy was fond of saying, “is how they take away from all the smaller disasters, none of them any less disastrous.” He had more or less introduced himself that way to Sarah and the whole small town of Fulton, North Carolina, in the fall of 1974 when he showed up late for football season their senior year. He’d continued through the years to connect with her at odd times with that line. He had called on 9/11 in fact, as the twin towers crumbled again and again on the television while Sarah waited for the school bus to bring her sons home. Until that day in 2001, the disaster associated with September 11 was the plane crash in 1974 of a domestic flight from Charleston to Chicago that claimed the lives of his
parents and older sister. Billy went from being a prep school kid, son of a surgeon, to being the orphaned grandson of an old tobacco farmer in eastern North Carolina. The plane’s black box revealed that the crew members were talking and laughing too much —talking about politics and used cars, telling jokes —and as a result the Sterile Cockpit Rule came into being. Billy said the last thing you want to be is part of a lesson about how
not
to die. Studies were also done on how much more severe the burns were on those dressed in polyester, prompting his classic line about how his mother wouldn’t have been caught dead in polyester. She was in gabardine. Armani. The suit she got his dad to buy for her the year before with the promise it would last her a lifetime.
The information about the crash preceded Billy’s arrival, but it was clear that he would have had all the attention anyway —he was one of those boys “too handsome and smart for his own good,” the principal was overheard saying when Billy got sent to the office for refusing to stand for the Pledge of Allegiance. The fact that he was an orphan just made everyone want him more. The boys wanted to
be
him or at least to befriend him, and the girls wanted to be
with
him, to be the one who could bring some happiness back into his life. For better or worse, Sarah was right in there with the best of them and had remained so through thirty-odd years of a friendship that had cycled through puppy love and youthful lust, being a couple and then not, years of anger
and then regret, and finally back around to some claim on that strong affection they knew in the beginning.
“There’s always a
most popular dead person,” he called to say when the
Challenger
exploded. “It really pisses me off, too. So unfair.” Sarah had been dating her future husband for only a few months and he was there with her, half dressed and a little impatient that she had stopped to answer the phone. They had already watched the explosion many times over, had already spoken so sadly about Christa McAuliffe —ordinary schoolteacher on a mission —the dream of a lifetime. “Hey, are you there?” This was the first time she had actually heard his voice since their own blowup at the end of the six months they lived together at the beach. The decision to share space came during a long winter day while watching the rescue attempts of Flight 90 that went down in the Potomac. Billy had said he couldn’t stop watching, that he kept hoping the guy who passed the rescue line to others so many times would wise up the next time it played and get selfish, choose to save his own neck. He then said he could get used to not being alone and they went on from there.
Four years had passed, days on end when she assumed he would do the right thing and at least call or respond to her angry messages and letters. Instead he had taken off and gone to Alaska for a while. Then he was somewhere way up in the mountains of
Tennessee. She had gotten a postcard in the summer of 1985 on the heels of the catastrophic Air India and Japan Airlines flights. His scrawled note said, “Shitty summer for travelers. Thinking of you.”
“Sarah?” he said again, the
Challenger
blowing up in slow motion on the screen.
“Yes. I’m here.”
“Got a husband? A boyfriend?”
“Yes.”
“Which?” He laughed and in the background she could hear bottles clanking and music playing. Out her window, the winter trees were as stripped bare as she felt in the moment, their lean rattling limbs more comforting than the arms opening to her from across the room, a finger beckoning her to hang up the phone.
“The second.”
“What’s it to you? That’s what you want to say, isn’t it.” She could tell he had been drinking. “If the boyfriend wasn’t right there breathing down your neck, you would say that, too.” He laughed again. “What’s it to you, asshole? I don’t know anybody on the
Challenger
. I don’t give a shit about you.”
But she knew that he knew better than that.
He called when
183 people died in a crash in Poland and then 290 more on Iran Air. He called right after the explosion
over Lockerbie and asked her to sit quietly with him while they timed what those thrown from the plane at 31,000 feet had lived through. He told her how it was likely during that two-minute fall that passengers, still strapped in their seats, woke while passing through lower altitudes —nightmare to end all nightmares. Afterwards the rescue team found one young man they were fairly certain was still alive on impact. There was a mother holding her baby, a couple holding hands. “I bet my parents were holding hands when they went down,” he said. “I bet my dad was saying all the right things.” Sarah was holding her infant son at the time, nursing him in her darkened bedroom; she could see the Christmas tree lit and glowing down the hall, where her husband was building a fire and wrapping gifts.
He was a voice
through the wire, a voice in her head, even as she passed through major milestone moments: her second son born, a graduate degree, father dying, new job. There was a progression of houses, moves for more bedrooms, then a bigger yard, better schools, and then just because it was something she and her husband might enjoy doing, something new, something different. There were clubs and dinner parties and Neighborhood Watch meetings. Books read and vacations taken, anniversaries celebrated with dinner out and the perfect gifts chosen. Still, she thought of Billy often. He sent the occasional postcard from exotic places, and then she spent days wondering why
then
, what
was going on in life that made him stop and think of her
then
, take the time to write. He had married several times, moved around with different jobs, but he was always successful, and who knew if it was due to the magic orphan card he had learned to play so well or just great survival techniques. The calls from Billy marked her life like little train stations, dim hamlets that she moved toward, sensing they would be there when she least expected, the glow she would look over her shoulder to glimpse for miles and miles in the distance.
The call to come
tell him good-bye was not a surprise. Sarah had heard a month before that he’d gotten a bad diagnosis, and though they were too young to be dying, barely fifty, she seemed to know more and more people heading that way. She might have gotten by with cards and a phone call, the occasional “remember when” letter, had he not called her himself to request her presence at his going-away party. When he finished the well-rehearsed invitation, he added, “Besides, you still have some of my albums you never returned. Isn’t that the classic cliché? I say, ‘You have my
White Album
, Pure Prairie League, and the Clapton with “I Shot the Sheriff,” ’ and then you say something like, ‘But they’re mine. I used my paycheck from IHOP.’ ”