In Nightmares We're Alone (26 page)

This one is Storage.

This one is Home.

This one is Trash.

That certificate you got in high school for outstanding achievement in English. Where does that go?

An hour of crying here, a shot of vodka there.

When you were young all this felt like your identity. Something unchangeable. Then one day people from a mortuary come in and load Mom’s body into a hearse and you are no longer what your parents said you were. Nothing they ever did matters aside from where it sits in your mind, and where does it sit? Somewhere between Harper Lee and Aristotle? Somewhere amid all that accumulated knowledge of other people’s opinions and experiences you tucked away in a nice little mental filing cabinet but never found a practical use for?

“Our dead are never dead to us, until we have forgotten them.”

Go to college and spend five figures and they’ll tell you George Elliot said that, but they won’t tell you how to get through the day when you’re fifty years old and for the first time you don’t have family to turn to, when all you’ve got is yourself.

A breakdown here. A fit of anger there.

The moving company comes in and helps take stuff away. Helps you haul those things from the Storage pile into a truck to be taken where you can hold possession of them but never look, where you can pretend it all still belongs to you without ever having to face how useless it’s become.

Throw your college degree in your Storage pile while you’re at it. Toss in your memories of your family. Maybe your marriage.

You’ll know they’re there, but will you ever take them in your hands and cherish them? They’ll still be yours, but do you give a damn?

A cigarette here. Another one there.

That tire swing Dad used to push you on when you were six years old, where you used to fly up over his head and scream and then laugh and feel as safe as you’ve ever felt when he’d lift you out and hold you up and kiss you, toss that in the Trash pile because there’s no room for it in storage. That part of your life is dead. Dead as Dad. And so is tea with Mom and watching
The Twilight Zone
curled up with Dad and eating popcorn in the living room and closing your eyes at the scary parts.

That’s all gone. Your eyes are open now and it’s all scary parts.

“The fear of death follows from the fear of life. A man who lives fully is prepared to die at any time,”
said Mark Twain.

Well tell me, Mr. Twain, who might that be? Who ever sat at her mother’s open casket and took her cold, stiff hand and regretted nothing? Nobody who ever lived a life without regret really lived, really felt or thought, and I pity that person more than any regretful soul.

But it doesn’t make regret any easier.

Grab that painting over the couch and bring it home to your apartment and put it in the bedroom and say it’s for sentimental value. There’s less value in sentiment than the old folks say. Your sentiment won’t bring back the days before the sight of beauty got stale.

A marital row here, a makeup there.

This is where your life is going. Savor each laugh, each kiss, because soon nostalgia will be all you’ve got. One day they’ll rip all the good away from you—
they
, whoever
they
are—and all you’ll have left to cling to is the pain because it’s the closest thing to the pleasure you’re welcome to now.

Time heals all wounds? Please. Time is the greatest wound of all.

When the weekend is over and I come back into the classroom, I’m glad to be at work for once, away from the empty house, and sorting out my belongings and my life. The idea of coming in and spending time with naive and optimistic young children and imparting wisdom gives me a sense of relaxation for all of thirty seconds until I walk into the classroom and find my board written on again.

This time I can’t just raise an eyebrow and wonder about it. This time there’s cold feeling in my throat and my stomach sinks and I stand there stunned as I look at it.

The quote on the board reads:
“I know not all that may be coming, but be it what it will, I’ll go to it laughing.”

I can’t explain this. I expect to wake up from a nightmare but it doesn’t happen. I can’t shake the thought that this wasn’t written for a class, for a student, for anyone but me.

I storm out of the room and down the hall to Principal Van Berkum’s office.

“Who is using my classroom at night?” I ask before he even notices I’m in the room, and I wonder if the strain in my voice comes off more angry or distressed.

“Pardon?” asks Mr. V.

“There has been stuff left on my chalkboard the last two mornings I’ve come in. I’d like to know who is using my classroom after hours.”

He just shakes his head with a puzzled expression. He’s about to answer when I interrupt him.

“Never mind. It isn’t important.” I turn to leave.

“Are you talking about vandalism?”

I sigh and turn to face him. “Forget it.”

“Nobody’s supposed to be in there after school. What are they leaving on your board?”

“Nothing.”

“Profanity? Lewd drawings? What?”

“No, it’s… nothing like that.”

I guess I look more distressed than I realize when he lowers his voice and asks, “Personal stuff?”

I shake my head, but I realize as I’m doing it that I don’t actually know the answer to that question.

“No,” I say. “Just literature.”

“Literature?”

“Chekhov and Melville. I thought maybe a writing workshop was meeting or something.”

“Hm.” Mr. V looks around the room, twisting his face in confusion. “I have no idea. I’ll ask around.”

“I’d appreciate that. Let me know if you find out, I’d really like to know.”

“I will. They didn’t harm anything?”

“No. Just… for personal reasons, I’d really like to know.”

“Okay. I’ll see what I can find out.”

I turn for the door.

“Edna?”

“Yes?”

“I just wanted to say I’m sorry about your mother and if you need to take some time away or anything, we can definitely work that out.”

I nod. “Just find out who wrote on my board, please.”

* * * * *

I’ve erased the text from the board and I’m still staring at the ghost of it during Show and Tell when I ask Macie Giddings to speak to the class and she stands up and screams about how witches are controlling a doll in her house and her mom doesn’t care because her mom doesn’t love her. This little girl with a mother who’s still alive, still buying her dolls and packing her lunch and sending her to school with her hair in curls. This girl who’s too young to be cynical, too young to be burned out, but there she is, just like me.

All my students hide their eyes and their mouths drop open, boys laugh and girls look out the windows to see if witches are coming to kill them.

Macie. Little Macie. You’re young. Your world is paradise. For all these little boys and girls it should be. How dare you send their thoughts to witches and bogeymen coming to take them away in the night? These witches, these bogeymen, they come when you’re my age and you have to call into work because your husband’s knees won’t let him stand up out of bed. They come when you’re my mother’s age and your ailing mind tells you your dead love is calling to you to come be with him.

The dolls. The toys. The playtime. That’s all you have. That’s what matters now. If you don’t have something to cling to when it gets bad, you’ll never make it.

I taught her older sister a year ago and she was spoiled too. Their mother always wears a cross at parent teacher conferences and says “God bless you” when she leaves. That household, it’s no wonder they get to believe in childish nonsense like witchcraft.

Whether she heard it from Heather or her mom or an older student from the fourth grade studying Salem, Macie says a hundred years ago people burned witches at the stake and the same thing ought to be done to her doll. Some sort of black magic voodoo to do away with evil spirits.

If I told this stuff to my mother when I was her age, my bottom would’ve been bruised black for a week.

I don’t react as well as I could. I don’t tell her to cherish her childhood and dream these dreams because fantasy is cleaner and happier than reality and if that’s where her mind wants to go she should let it. I tell her to shut up and sit down. And when she won’t, I tell her to go to the office and let her know I’ll be calling her mother.

Let Mom deal with this, that’s how they would have done it with me at her age. Let Mom come home and tell her not to shout spook stories hysterically to the rest of a class of eight-year-olds and cause nightmares and keep the rest of the parents up late. This isn’t fair. One child with disturbed dreams shouldn’t spread her cynicism to the rest of a group of children in these few years of their lives before the glumness and gloom of reality sets in to destroy them in their teens.

When Macie is out of the room, Martin asks, “Is it true, Mrs. Harris? That there used to be witches? That people used to burn them.”

“No,” I say. “There’s no such thing as witches. Macie probably just saw a scary movie and has been having bad dreams. You should all be very nice to her.”

“If there were no witches, then who did they burn?”

I’ll tell you who they burned. They burned regular people like you and me for being free-spirited, for not being easily controlled, for not ascribing to a societal doctrine telling us what to do and think and feel. They burned individuals because their personalities strayed too far from the herd. And that stopped. That’s gone. All of you can do whatever you want and nobody will set you on fire for it and you ought to be damn well grateful every waking second because there will come a day when you wish you
had
been stuck to a tree and burned just to spare you the dull, throbbing emptiness of your every day, broken only by the intermittent surge of unbearable pain as, one by one, every staple of your life you can’t live without is ripped up, even after you’ve hit the point of feeling you have nothing left to lose. Time and time again, you’ll lose more than you thought you had.

“Nobody,” I say. “Just forget it.”

* * * * *

“Let’s not even go inside,” says Arthur at the house. “Let’s forget the rest. It’s too full of loss in there. It’s not good for us.”

“We’ll pull through. There’s not much left. If we work hard we can be done by the end of the week and put it on the market and be done with it.”

“I don’t like it. I don’t think it’s good for you, or for me. Each thing we take out just adds to the feeling of emptiness in there. We could hire somebody else and we wouldn’t even have to look at it.”

“Arthur, what’s wrong? We’ve come this far already. I’m handling it. Has it been that rough for you?”

“No. Yes. I don’t know. It just gives me a sinking feeling.”

I nod. My husband. More sensitive about my own mother’s passing than I am. “It’ll be fine. Let’s work hard and finish it as quick as we can.”

He follows me inside uncomfortably and we work until nightfall gathering up belongings and putting them into boxes and piling the boxes together sorted by category.

“What about the TV?” I ask. “We could put it in the bedroom. I bet it wouldn’t cost much to get them to run a second cable in there, watch TV in bed?”

“We never watched TV in bed before, why start now?”

“It could be fun. A new adventure.”

“All right. Sure. Bring it.”

A new adventure. I say it half-joking, but still… How old have I gotten?

I strain myself to lift the TV and carry it over to the Home pile. I grunt and struggle to move my legs forward.

“Edna, Edna. Jesus. Let me get it.”

“No. I have it.”

I stumble and almost drop the set and Arthur gives me a questioning look. I assure him again that I have it, now more focused on pride than anything else. I’m halfway across the living room when my fingers are about to slip and I cave in.

“Take it, take it, take it!”

Arthur grabs the TV from me and carries it the rest of the way to the pile without much trouble. He sets it down on top of a wooden box of china. The way he limps around with that cane all day, I’m surprised how mobile he can still be any time there’s an opportunity to show me up.

“You okay?” he asks, grabbing his cane from against the wall.

“I’m fine. Just…” Actually, I suddenly feel badly fatigued. I lean against the couch and breathe hard.

“Sit down,” he says. “I’ll get you some water. It’s just exhaustion.”

“Oh, I’ll be fine.”

“I know you will. Just rest for a minute.”

I lie down on the couch. Arthur goes into the kitchen and I hear the tap running. I lean my head back on the armrest with my hair hanging over the side and I shut my eyes for a while and breathe deeply.

All of a sudden I feel Mom’s hand running through my hair and I hear her voice whispering.

“That’s right, Edna dear. Deep breaths. In through your mouth, out through your nose. Nice and slow.”

It starts off as a fantasy and gets progressively real as her words string along until my eyes snap open in fear at the end of her last sentence. I breathe in hard.

Nothing. An empty room. Of course it’s an empty room.

“You all right?” asks Arthur.

I grab my hair and look behind me again. “Yeah. Yeah, I just… a bug or something, I guess.”

“Here.” He brings me a glass of water and feeds it to me like I’m a child. I guess this is what people picture when they romanticize growing old together. Heatstroke and MS, taking turns nursing each other with tap water. It doesn’t feel as dignified when you experience it as it happens. Not even now, and neither of us has needed help wiping yet.

Maybe I just don’t appreciate it the way I should.

Friedrich Nietzsche said:
“We love life, not because we are used to living but because we are used to loving.”

What they didn’t teach me in college is this: If too often I find myself not loving life, which is it I’m not used to doing: living or loving?

I sip the water and catch my breath but I don’t feel like standing up anymore. I just lie here for a while. After some time I begin to have trouble keeping my eyes open and Arthur says, “Go ahead and have a little nap. I’ll keep packing.”