Shaking out the Dead (9 page)

Some marry Democrats who become Republicans. Some marry drunks who become Bible thumpers. Everyone marries a person who becomes an older person. Ralph had become a person with Alzheimer's. What did it mean to love him for who he was right
now
?

Geneva used curiosity the way other people used commitment or hope. Something to hold love's place while it was off-duty, in need of time to itself.

Her hand rose and fell with Ralph's audible breathing. His chest was too thin, and yet, at the same time, paunchy. She thought of how his body had been hers for creature comfort and for moving large objects. He had only asked one thing of her ever: that she trust him.

Geneva didn't like her thoughts. She fiddled with a button of Ralph's pajama top to distract herself and changed the direction her mind was taking. She unbuttoned it and slipped her hand through to the flaky skin below. She contemplated the difference between loving a memory of him and loving the man on the bed before her. She cocked her head, considering it while she undid the rest of his pajama top, pushing it to the sides. Her hand drifted down his sternum to his stomach and over the gray, curly hairs beneath his navel. She had loved his torso in their day, stingy with hair between the pecs but shaping an oval between his lower ribcage stretching down beneath the pants' line. Her eyes traveled with her hand. It had been so long, so long since they were lovers and she could use the bodily drumming between them to drown out her uncomfortable thoughts.

She made small circles with her fingertips on the soft skin above his pajama bottoms. Reaching further down then, she dipped her hand into the pants and patted at the crotch of his adult diaper. The coast was clear. She slipped her hand inside, and idly, she fingered his balls and the limp slug of his dick. As far as she could tell, Ralph hadn't registered a thing. She held his balls, stroking them with her thumb. Despite her intention to remain in the present, memories washed over her. Not weddings and vacations but simple things. Watching him stand in the yard watering a newly seeded dry patch in the lawn. The way he would set the alarm clock at night before going to the bathroom and then, on his way back to bed, he would flick the alarm button back off and on, as though for good luck. Ralph's penis grew meatier. Geneva withdrew her hand, tugging Ralph's dick upward with it.

She stood slowly and looked down at her husband. She considered leaving. She considered checking into her motel room and masturbating. But what she did was place a chair against the door. She returned to the bed and reached to each of Ralph's hips and yanked the diaper downward. There it was, Ralph's dick, with its strange two-tonedness, silky cream on the bottom and a bruise red on top. At attention, he hooked left. Geneva took hold, and Ralph responded, growing firmer.

Then he moaned. The moan was not sexy, was slightly grotesque, even. But Geneva pulled the diaper down past his ankles anyway and then kicked off a shoe and dropped her own drawers, allowing them to hang off one leg. She was sneaking. It made the moment quiver. She remembered the same feeling as she had passed through customs, contraband between her legs, sewn into Kotex. Those who struggle to Be Here Now, she thought, should consider criminal activity. It puts you right there.

She straddled Ralph at the thigh and looked into his face as she kept stroking with her hand, a rhythm she remembered. Ralph's rhythm. Ralph opened his eyes, a glaze of confused pleasure, a physical response that the mind couldn't comprehend.

Geneva eased him inside of her, vulva lips stretching around him, her membranes plumping with rubbery willingness if not dewy welcome. She kept an alert eye on his face, on his slightly opened mouth. It was like mounting a sleeping beast, like she were a woman in a myth, stealing the seed of some creature who might do her harm should he awaken. She reared back and delivered a stroke.

There was no word that she liked. Not
twat
, nor
vagina
. The problem with
pussy
, as a word, was that it didn't age well. Nothing was wrong with sixty-year-old pussy, but the expression “sixty-year-old pussy” was enough to clear a room. Sometimes Geneva had to go with
cunt
. Blunt-edged as it was, at least it sounded like something that might belong to her.

By whatever name, Geneva's drank. She had to close her eyes to the vacancy sign that was Ralph's face. So, eyes closed, she rode him, steadily, returning again to the past, mental images flashing through her mind. Ralph across a room at a party. Watching her. Admiring her. Not understanding her, not at all, but not caring that he didn't understand. Loving all the things he couldn't understand. Ralph's not understanding always made Geneva feel too large, like she had excess hanging over the edges of the marriage, stuff that wouldn't fit. Still, her hips pulled back and fell forward, the rhythm precise and steady. She knew how to get there. She lowered her chest toward his as she moved, increasing the pressure of her press into his pubic bone, in and up, softly grinding.

She waited for the hand, for the sound of her name.
Gen
. But there was nothing. She pressed her palms into Ralph's, ribs sitting up now with her weight on her knees. Geneva pulled herself halfway off of him and paused. She felt a warm rippling through the folds between her legs. When she started back in, it was with short, urgent strokes, mindless of Alzheimer's and nostalgia. She leaned on his hip bones and let the interior friction lead, show her where to go until a focused, hot tingle turned electric and something deeper shuddered, opened and closed. Tears broke loose from the rims of her eyes, orgasm, sometimes a key opening some deep door that has little to do with sex.

She dropped forward. He was still hard. She prayed, again, for the absent-minded gesture, the reflex, some ancient physical knowledge that would lead his hand to the back of her head or the base of her spine. Eyes squeezed shut, she lay on top of him, hope and anticipation dropping from heart to stomach as he shriveled inside of her.

So be it, she thought, and pressed her cheek to Ralph's chest. She had chosen marriage, and she had chosen Ralph. Loving him well, as she had promised, was not among her life's accomplishments. But it was an open-ended intention. A promise without an expiration date. To trust herself, Geneva needed to know that her word meant something. Loving Ralph wasn't about Ralph. It was about her.

The moment was still and good. A near decade of celibacy brought to end. She placed her hand on Ralph's chest about to push up when a stink grabbed her attention then hit her senses full blast as Ralph crapped the bed.

Geneva managed to dismount unscathed, but as she adjusted her pants on her hips, the door to the room cracked open knocking up against the chair Geneva had used to block it.

“Just a minute,” she said, straightening herself as best she could in the few moments she had. She moved the chair as the social worker pushed in. She was young with a piercing in her nose, and she eyed Geneva with suspicion. Accident, Geneva reported. Trying to change his diaper, she claimed, the lie bulky and obvious.

Geneva slunk out like a high school slut whose boyfriend's parents had arrived home early. Safely behind the wheel of her Saab, she headed to the Super 8 where she always stayed. Her room was clean and without personality. Geneva sat on the end of the bed across from the mirror and looked at herself and what she had just done. She crossed a line. Violated a taboo. Took a shortcut to feeling alive.

She stood and stepped closer to the mirror. She leaned in. She examined time's work on her face. What she saw in herself was intelligence and a persistent tension that was not unpleasant. A face too interested to be peaceful, but at peace with her unpeacefulness.

The struggle in her marriage, she knew, had been the struggle between two beliefs. Not hers and Ralph's but between two beliefs that resided inside of her. One said, trust your instincts. The other said, trust love.



All wrinkles are not created equal. Some come from the inside, from the press of wisdom, like ripples on the brain. Margaret's were not of this nature. Hers were imposed from without, from the vandalisms and hit-and-runs that cause one to harden, to brace in preparation for the next blow.

Margaret leaned toward the bathroom mirror and touched a finger to the crow's feet that reached like ice cracking thinly. There was prettiness still but scarred by the ultraviolets of disappointment. She dabbed on cover-up. In truth, the lines were less noticeable than she thought, but still she was correct. The problem of aging is not one of decay but of the peeling back of all facades until your face is your confession.

Her fingertips moved in small circles, rubbing expensive cream into her neck. She watched herself in the mirror as her fingers slowed and came to a stop. Why try? Trying hadn't gotten her far. Not ever. Not with her face. Not with her husband.

Margaret had tried to fix it with Lee. Tried hard. She had tried to fix it by speaking in
I
statements and following the guidance of relationship how-to books. She did what the gurus instructed. She communicated. But if you feel unheard, invisible, and not of consequence, your communicating of those facts only meets the same fate: Unheard. Invisible. Not of consequence.

The relationship gurus had ignored a crucial fact. You can't communicate someone into loving you. Clear and concise articulation of what she needed only insulted Lee. He called it complaining. She always ended up apologizing for the offense, and nothing ever changed.

Eventually, she got sick of apologizing and learned to keep her mouth shut. Behind her sealed lips, the frustration built, was swallowed and came back up, and was swallowed again. It circulated and recirculated in her bloodstream. Frustration mutated into resentment. An overgrown thing, it smothered out other life and seeped beyond the boundary of her skin, a second layer of pain forming around the first. She hated the pain. She hated the hate. When the pressure got to be too much, she would pound her fists against tiles, sob and holler, in the privacy of the shower.

Margaret picked up a wide-toothed comb and guided it through her conditioned shoulder-length hair. She thought about her wedding day, as she still often did, behind the closed bathroom door. She mined the details of it, looking for evidence in that day, some warning or foreshadowing. But the day had arrived in a blue, cloud-puddled sky. The limo stretched. Everything preened. The clouds passed like cherubs, plump and cheery. By the time of the ceremony, the sky blazed. She remembered the gloved hands and lipsticked kisses and passed envelopes and flashing cameras and how that day seemed to her a culmination of so many careful steps, a series of right choices, a sign she had the power to make things right.

That such a supreme sense of certainty can turn out to be wrong is something from which her trust in her own judgment had never recovered. Her resentment was for herself. Her punishment. To teach her a lesson for making such a mistake.

Margaret screwed the lid back on her face cream. She swallowed the tears welling up. Crying was for the shower only, where the tears and curses would be drowned out by the water's rhythms, the spray's hectic drum and patter.

It was time again to move on. For Rachael. It was for Rachael that Margaret tried to conceal her bathroom breakdowns. She didn't want Rachael to hear. Their fates were not to be the same.

And yet, Rachael would flash through her mind as she sat chin to knees as the water fell on her back. Margaret felt Rachael watching, as though from the inside of her own body, as though she crouched in a corner against some interior wall. When pregnant with Rachael, Margaret had read that fetal cells remain in the mother for long after the birth and the mother can still sense the child that once lived within. Now, she wondered if by
long
they meant
forever
.

Margaret moved from the bath to the bedroom. There, she pulled on chestnut wool trousers and an oatmeal-colored sweater, outfitted, as always, beyond reproach and without imagination, which isn't to say that she wasn't well dressed.

She had a doctor's appointment. She wasn't well. She had undergone tests and was going in for the results.



Margaret had known her doctor for years, a middle-aged woman with fading blonde hair bluntly cut. She wore her glasses around her neck on a purple beaded chain, putting them on as she consulted files, pulling them off to view Margaret frankly. Margaret knew that it was bad. Her doctor suggested that she might wish to bring her husband.

She did not.

“Margaret, you're sick,” she said. She went on to discuss the C-word. Cancer. She presented treatment options. But the prognosis remained grim.

“I'm going to die,” Margaret said.

Her doctor took off her glasses.

“Your cancer is very aggressive. I can't tell you otherwise. But I believe in expecting miracles. It's the only way you'll ever get one.”

“How long do I have?” Margaret asked.

The doctor put her glasses back on as though there would be data to consult, but there was not.

“Months,” she said. “More or less.”

The appointment ended with a “talk to your family and let me know.” Margaret gathered her bag and coat and moved to leave. But she stopped and turned before opening the door.

“My husband's having an affair,” she said and nodded, acknowledging it as gospel for the first time.

“Do you want to talk?” her doctor asked.

Margaret considered the question and realized that she no longer did.

She did not feel shock. She felt inevitability. A mudslide. An avalanche. A power impossible to fight or resist. At home, she dropped her purse in the closet and went upstairs. She got into bed and never left the house again. She barely left her bed. Margaret would not get a miracle. She didn't want one. She clicked the door firmly closed in hope's face. She bolted it. Hope wouldn't keep her alive. Hope was what killed her. Hope was what had made her believe she could reverse mistakes of the past and lay claim to a life to which she had no right.

Lee was the first person she told she was dying — — Lee, who was having an affair. Intimacy isn't only about pillow talk and whispered dreams. There is an inherent intimacy in betrayal. Betrayal requires intimacy. Can't get by without it.

He was in the bedroom removing his watch and dropping his money clip on the dresser. Margaret still wore the wool trousers and sweater. She sat in bed with the covers at her waist.

“I went to the doctor today,” she said. “I'm dying.” Her affect was flat. “I'm not going to cook tonight.”

She saw him smile at her in the mirror as though he were humoring her.

“Go ahead and order out,” he said. “I'm playing racquetball tonight, anyway.”

She watched him change for the gym. He didn't believe her. He had often called her “dramatic.”

She hunkered back down into her bed and stared blankly at the ceiling. For the first time in her life, Margaret stopped fighting. For something. Against something. It was always something. But she was done. She would not fight for her life. She would not return her doctor's calls. She wouldn't even fight for Rachael's sake. In fact, she decided, Rachael would be better off without her. What did she have to offer her daughter, anyway? Even what I had given her, Margaret thought, wasn't mine to give.

Rachael
.

The name was supposed to pass from mother to first daughter. It had been Margaret's aunt's name, not her mother's. But her mother's sister, Aunt Rachael, had only boys and then a hysterectomy. Margaret's mother, and then Margaret herself, had stepped forward to assure the survival of a legacy that had shut them out.

Margaret
knew the story well.
She
was supposed to be named Rachael, but her father's mother died a week before she was born, and Margaret was given her name instead. Later in life, Margaret's mother told her that her father's insistence on her name nearly resulted in divorce. Margaret's younger sister was named Rachael instead, but it never suited her because it was not her name. Not her birthright. Margaret knew it deep in her tissue, right from the beginning. She knew looking through the slats of the crib, though she was not more than three, that this baby had something important that was hers. Something related to hope, possibility. Survival, even.

As far as Margaret knew, none of the Rachaels had ever died of cancer. Margaret knew about Rachaels from seven generations back. There was actually a book — small, green, and leather-bound — first put together by a great-great aunt. There was Rachael Elizabeth, the abolitionist. Rachael Jeanne, who taught poor children to read. Rachael Claire had eight children, “God bless her,” six boys and two girls, and every single one of them, even the girls, went to college.

There wasn't a day in Margaret's childhood that she didn't know exactly where that damn book was. And whereas the litany of Rachaels played in her head like an annoying jingle, she knew nothing of any ancestral sister not christened
Rachael
. These invisible daughters were the ones she wondered about as a child, the ones whose stories she needed. These were the daughters whose destinies were tied to her own. Could she have learned from their choices and made her own differently?

Margaret knew that her Aunt Rachael had felt cheated that it was Margaret's mother who would pick up the baton and continue the legacy. But she was somewhat vindicated when Margaret's younger sister, the Rachael of the new generation, turned out slightly substandard. Margaret's aunt probably had her to thank for that, Margaret thought. She had refused to vanish in the shadow of what should have been hers, and she worked hard to make her sister curse her own existence. As the latest Rachael was instructed by her aunt on her pedigree, Margaret had stood by and decided she would not fade into obscurity like so many other sisters of Rachaels. She fed her resentment — and her mother's, long buried — of being born second-string. Margaret and her mother taught this sister in the silent language of family that to be a Rachael was an honor, but an undeserved one. None of them deserved it. And in their house, it may have provided one with a pedestal, but that pedestal was outside the circle at the hearth where mothers and daughters sit together and feel the common bond of genes and gender. Being Rachael came at the price of belonging. Besides, she already belonged to something else. She didn't need them.

When Rachael moved out of the family home, she started going by her middle name, Tatum. When Margaret had a daughter, she claimed what should have been hers all along. No one challenged it.

Tatum's name change had been satisfying, as satisfying as her gun shot in the garage, as satisfying as seeing her through her cracked bedroom door stabbing her own school photograph in the face with a pen. Tatum had rarely come home from college. After a while, though, Margaret felt more like Tatum had gotten away than been run off.

Some are haunted. Others have familiars, serving them, they say, as spirit guides. The invisible presence in Margaret's life was an imagined self. Her life as Rachael. The life she was due. The life meant to be. As Rachael, her husband would not cheat. She would not get cancer. She would not have had the choices she had made so carefully all turn into wretched errors and worse — wasted, lost time.

Shakespeare was wrong about his rose. A rose by any other name is a rose with its destiny thwarted.



The woman Lee hired had arranged for a doctor to come to the house. So Margaret had morphine now, which took the sharp edge off truths, making them blunter, softer, easier for the mind to hold. Watching Rachael play at the foot of her bed, Margaret weighed her soul, her sins against her virtue. Rachael's naming was an act of spite as well as one of redemption. It was an insurance policy Margaret stole for her at her birth to be there for her always. She was in the Book.