A Land of Grace Down Under
My mother dreamt of visiting Australia. She fancied everything about the continent, up to and including the Aussie cooking star she watched on TV. When I was a kid, I took this fascination as a given and never asked why. When I was older and on my own and began to see my parents as people, I figured I would eventually get to Australia through some serendipitous turn of events. And when I did, whenever that happened, I would plant a mental flag there for my mom’s desires, or bring a pinch of soil back home. Now I was facing the likelihood that I would never see that special place of hers. I could not help her in this.
As time went on and I was not able to get well, Ross started calling me Amy again, as if his sidekick had already departed, as if he was politely but most assuredly removing himself from the clutches of the stranger now camped out on the living room couch, who seemed focused on nothing more than arguing on the phone with her nurse practitioner. He preferred the more familiar phantasm in his mind. That phantom girl was his; he had won possession of her. He couldn’t let her go; he couldn’t suffer another intimate loss. If he had the sense to realize how much this hurt me, he would have stopped himself somehow, but the split emerged and gaped slowly, almost imperceptibly.
Everyone was eager to tell me to go this way, go that; do this, do that. None of it made sense. I was mad and had the right to be. That’s all I wanted anyone to acknowledge, but no one did. I wanted to follow Ross as he turned his back on me and returned to the past, but what if I didn’t have it in me? What if I couldn’t do it? Darling, don’t forget me as I once was. Your inner vision will eventually fail you, I’m afraid. Don’t forget . . . my voice, how we pushed each other higher and lower, higher and lower than we’d ever been before . . . my paints and oils, my dreams and aspirations. I’ll never forget you. How fierce your love could get, like a storm blowing through; will it still capture you? I remember the day we buried our Napoleon. Leaving his grave with the sun shining on it, I labored under an almost unbearable loneliness for him, as we left him there, at the mercy of the elements, the living trudging back to their cars. Only now did I understand that he had made his departure long before and we were taking our parting that day from no one.
One day late in the afternoon, Colleen called on me. It had not been a good day, the air hanging hot and still. I’d rarely gotten off the couch since early morning. Ross had recently hired a high-school girl, Rachel (though she had recently taken to pronouncing it Rachelle), to stay with me part of the day and run errands—a babysitter. She was sitting outside on the stoop in the sun, reading, and let the visitor in. Rachel had no truck with my woes of possible misdiagnosis, my doctor’s initial hesitancy to prescribe antibiotics because of their overuse, and yet more tests. She was skeptical of all higher authority, especially the medical profession, and was convinced I was suffering from the long-term effects of a tick bite, though one was never found on my body. It could have been years ago, she said. This was only now beginning to be understood and accepted, and it was only last year that a law was passed requiring doctors to report cases to the state. No one was as sure of anything as Rachel was of her facts. Just go down the road to Mrs. Dent, such an old lady has to have stashes and stashes of meds. Grab some doxycycline and get rid of this “lemon/lyme” thing, she counseled.
I was surprised by Colleen’s appearance; we had lost touch with her. She left HRI several months ago, never to be heard from again—giving up her good works and unfaithful dreams simultaneously, I’d supposed, but here she was. She looked exceptionally vibrant to me. Here’s her opening at long last, I thought to myself. She had brought me an arrangement of white flowers in an emerald green glass vase: airy baby’s breath and roses and lilies, beautiful and expensive. The gesture touched me, but their heavy scent was too much.
We had a bit of rudimentary conversation, and then she told me why she had come—to pay her penance for wishing in the past I would just go away. She told me of her feelings for Ross. I said I knew. She shrugged; that was to be expected. You know, she had often thought to herself, when she finally allowed that Ross and I were in love, that if I were to just disappear, have an unfortunate accident or something, that would work out well for her, wouldn’t it? Mentally she had been ready to go that far. I was a little taken aback by this, more by the unflattering honesty than anything else, but not too much, because I knew how her mind worked, it worked like mine. She went on, determined to tell the full story: well, now she didn’t want him. And she was afraid, irrationally but unwaveringly so, that something would happen to her husband as punishment for her not wanting him while he was here, for being so ready to dispose of him, and me, for that matter, for something assumed to be far better. “All of this has forced me to look at myself and gain a better understanding of love and loss,” she said in the formal phrasing that was typical of her. “So, I wanted to come here and tell you all this, and wish you and Ross the best . . . you two belong together. Get well—I believe absolutely that you will—and, and . . . live happily ever after.” She waved her hand, laughing self-deprecatingly, as she proclaimed this last letting go; the silly gesture contrasting with an empathy in her eyes that had been lacking there before, making her quite lovely. Rachel paused in her reading and looked up from her book, lifting her shoulders and shuddering just perceptibility in disdain at the sentimentality.
I felt my previous dislike of Colleen slide off me, replaced by a kindred feeling for those for whom things did not come easily or gracefully. “Ross and I would like you to come back. We need you,” I said. “You were good.”
We’re expecting our first child in February, she said; she was going to see where that took her. I stretched my lips in what I supposed was a smile, but the news seemed irrelevant to me; the corporal, procreative world that I used to share and hoped to share with Ross had faded out of reach, not able to be appreciated at this moment, like the beauty of her flowers.
“But I’ll be back sometime, please understand that. Despite all the crap, my intentions were good. They are good.”
“I don’t question that.”
Colleen got up and hugged me lightly. I clung onto her for a moment before letting go. “See you soon, sister,” I said as she was walking out. She turned around and gave me a salute, the exact same gesture I’d made to Lawrence a thousand years ago, and went out the door.
* * *
At night we’d sometimes sit on the beach across the street. The house was too oppressive, the lit-up air yellow and close. I could walk, but it was a laborious process, and I would sit down on the sand as soon as I could. It was a comforting thing to do. The dark ocean merged with the black sky, nature mysteriously veiling itself in the night; you could hear the surf crashing, but couldn’t see it, just an occasional silver fringe scuttling up the sand still warm from the sun’s earlier heat. We’d sit silently staring into this inscrutability, the night wind scouring our faces. Eventually Ross would leave me to my isolation and walk along the water’s edge, often for a long time until only his white shirt glowing palely marked his presence far up the curve of the beach. Boxed in a corner—the one thing in our relationship I’d always been wise enough to know not to do—he was just withdrawing further into it.
Hunkered down there on the sand, my thoughts managed to break free at times and run down to the tide line, poking a toe in the water. Recently, these thoughts and memories had become more willful and wayward, appearing suddenly and more often, unnerving in their immediacy—startling, sharply-focused shards of the past: my beautiful Izzie and Ben . . . the fuzzy feel and smell of tennis balls . . . my burnt sienna and madder pigments . . . my old bedroom . . . Michael’s charismatic victory grin . . . entering that church basement the night I met Ross . . . . standing barefoot in the backyard at dusk, looking for Venus in the summer heavens.
The memories were crashing in on me tonight, landing, taking off again, like birds tormenting an unwelcome cat. I remembered . . . we had gone out to dinner at Scribner’s down the block and had polished off a considerable amount of wine. When we got back home, we were too smashed to want to go inside, so we made our way down onto this beach—Ross conducting an imaginary pitcher/batter’s duel, me hugging the permanently damp blanket we kept in the trunk of the car. We shook the ratty thing out over the sand and sank down on it heavily and none too gracefully. “You like this, uh?” Ross teased, slipping off his deck shoes. “Romantic, right?”
I kicked off my sandals in reply, sending a shoe high into the air with each kick, almost hitting Ross in the head with one of them, which I found hilarious. “Bring the outfield in!” I commanded, just a tad too loudly. Ross evidently had had enough of this and pushed me ever so gently on the shoulder with his finger. I lost my balance and fell backwards, legs in the air, the heavens spinning above me. Straddling me, Ross slid his hands up under my dress, making me shriek laughter up to the skies and to the cars that came racing and squealing around the bend behind us, their occupants neither seeing or hearing us, caught up in their own night dramas.
These memories would splinter and break up as quickly as they came, dropping me back into dark solitude. Their increasing frequency and capriciousness—starting, stopping, turning on a dime—confounded me. What was their meaning? Was this a returning life force trying to gain a foothold, or the last vestiges of a fading soul? What I would miss most were the aspirations. It was good to dream of a world down under, even if you never got there. It's what gave our lives a hint of grace. There were angels flying right above this girl’s head tonight on her sanctuary beach. They could be bringing her more time; they could be taking her home.
Image: Hope and grace. Source: British Library digitized image from “Songs for Little People, with illustrations by H. Stratton,” London, 1896. Public domain. Edited by J. Weigley