Extraordinary Ordinary
Ilana quickly raised her own barricade. She was furious at me for even broaching the subject. This time I frightened her. She faced me, blinking rapidly, a dry-eye tic, a subtle symptom of systemic deterioration, her fluttery eye movements making a disconcerting clicking sound. It was hard to look at her.
“See here, why’d you think I told you that—it’s such a great idea you’d copy me? That’s what you think—I wanted to start a fad?” Her voice was not a good medium for her sarcasm. Ilana turned her back on me and hobbled into the living room with the aid of her support cane, blinking and clicking. I followed uninvited. We stood opposite each other, Ilana adamant this would go no further, refusing now to look directly at me, though my eyes bore into her. My own knee throbbing, I eventually had to sit down on the edge of her sofa.
“This isn’t something you do on a whim,” she scolded, jabbing her free hand at me. “It’s taken over a year to do what I’ve done.” She told me how hard it was not to take all her medicine; how she had to hide it from the caretaker her son, who lived out of state, had hired; the caretaker who came to the house three times a week to check on her and monitor her medication. How sometimes she’d give in and gulp down some of the extra pills she’d saved, then not remember the next day or two. How you had to remain focused and keep the pills current because their potency expired over time—she was no idiot; she always talked to the nurses. Unable to continue, she turned her back on me again, her shaking hand covering her mouth, staring at the curtained window. “I’m sorry." she eventually said. “But if you think you can just sashay in here . . . I’m an old woman. It’s wrong for you to come here and try to confuse me.”
‘That’s crap,’ I thought. ‘You’re as sharp as anybody.’
The battle continued in silence. The fact that Ilana had made no inquiry or remark about the raised red scratches that ran up and down my arms and criss-crossed my hands from my falling into the bramble earlier increased the eeriness between us, two isolated beings without a means of common communication. Ilana shook her head, slowly turning toward me, planting her cane in front of her, leaning on it with both hands. “You’re a nice girl, Amy. Go home and let your husband take care of you.”
My head was now throbbing as well as my knee; the air of the house so thick, its molecules drawn into the lungs and exhaled so many times, recycled so many times over the decades, I could hardly draw in any oxygen. “Ilana,” I said, picking my words carefully. “Don’t pretend you don’t understand; we understand each other perfectly, that’s why you confided in me in the first place, right? Right? Of course Ross will take care of me. There, you see, that’s just the point, isn’t it? You know exactly what I’m talking about. He’ll do it even if it kills him. I’m not asking for your entire stash, you know, just something to break through this fogginess in my mind and stop this diminishing . . . just something to bring back the joy—any feelings—in my heart: antibiotics, probiotics, herbals, uppers, medicinals. Anything. I’m not trying to do myself in; I want to make myself well. I’ll take an uncharted course; I’ll take an unsanctioned risk to get well, to get back what I’ve lost. I’ve lost the best part of myself and whatever it was that made Ross fall in love with me. We find ourselves in a different relationship now. Not one of our choice. Did you feel that way with your . . . Mr. Dent?
No response. But my head cleared, momentarily, and so it seemed crystal clear to me.
“I’ve been so lucky, Ilana. What makes the ordinary extraordinary, uh? I’m an ordinary person, how did I come by this extraordinary merger with Ross. We’ve had some extraordinary times. There was a length of time, Ilana, with our good works and with our love—it filled up everything; we were at the top of the world. The top of the world. The last thing I’ll see, the last thing I’ll know when I close my eyes for the last time will be those extraordinary times, that extraordinary man. And I could have missed it. I could have been born in another time or place. I could have looked right rather than left. I could have stayed with Michael; I could have gone home. What makes the ordinary extraordinary? I have to find that out. I want to recapture it tonight.
“I know you’re terrified, Ilana, terrified. Like me . . . but now, I don’t know . . . I don’t know; I don’t think I am terrified anymore; I think I know what I have to do. You want to free yourself. I think I’d like to free him.
Maso, driven into a fit by the incredible tension in the room, flung himself about in the ensuing silence, meowing, jumping on and off the furniture as if receiving electric shocks at each station. Ilana angrily shooed him away, poking her stick at him, but he refused to leave, flopping down in the doorway instead and proceeding to frantically wash himself.
I looked at the woman across from me. I could see that she just wanted to be rid of me. An all-embracing calmness engulfed me. “Ilana,” I said softly,“ . . . an extraordinary gesture . . .”
Incandescently pissed, blinking furiously, Ilana went away and lumbered painfully back carrying her treasured medicine box. She sat down and took the key to it out of her dress pocket, then put it back. She stared at what she considered the fruits of her labor. After an eternity, she lifted up the lid; it was unlocked. She rummaged around her precious collection—taking out bottles and containers, holding them about an inch from her face, squinting at the labels, putting them back—until she closed the lid gently, stared at the box for what seemed like another eternity, then looked at me, not unkindly, and said, “Get out.”
* * *
I left her house, but instead of going home, turned left and limped down to the waterline. I stood looking out over the Sound, letting the sand slip away under my feet. Too agitated for the tide to hold me, I turned and headed home along the road paralleling the beach, past the booming breakers churning with white foam; through the silvery-tinged shimmering blackness, leaves rustling underfoot; past the blacked-out houses. I hobbled along—I had to get back home—but just as in a bad dream, time and motion were loath to go forward, loath to make progress, and I wondered if I would ever make it there. I had to stop and lean against a parked car, immobile and unmoved, for support. Looking up at the sky, so hopelessly far away now, I tried to think clearly, tried to catch my breath, my throat so dry I could barely swallow. All my ingenious plans shot to hell. Just shot to hell. Dreams of brilliancy slipping through my fingers. And there was nothing—nothing extraordinary about it.
The wind began stirring and shifting around as I continued to stare up at the black sky glittered with stars. I don't have the strength of will to overcome this, I thought. I was just an ordinary person with an extraordinary love, not capable of extraordinary things. The stars blinked back at me, but without suggestion. The wind picked up even more, making currents and eddies in the sky, causing the stars to shimmer and flicker. My thoughts billowed up one after another, joining the dark forces in the sky. Due to my exhaustion, no doubt, the wind and surf seemingly combined in harmony to mimic the squawking of the starlings I had disturbed earlier; sea and sky joining forces to surround and taunt me. Messengers in the form of birds or angels, but I could not pull them down to me; I could not touch them. What were they trying to tell me? The wind died down and the disturbance above me vanished. Had it actually ever existed beyond my own illusions? I was afraid I was losing my mind, and the shock of such a possibility brought my thoughts back to earth. I gave myself a good shake.
And I realized, then, that what I was trying so hard to do—looking to Ilana’s pillbox, looking to the heavens, looking for validity from without rather than from within— was understandable, maybe, but as ordinary as it comes. Giving in was ordinary; letting go was ordinary. So ordinary. I thought of the people we stood witness for over the past years—holding on in cells, in jails, in the fields; I thought of people laboring, stuck among and hidden in the reeds, surviving through a similar will. The extraordinary gesture would be to not casually fade into oblivion, but to carefully nurture whatever life force one could muster. And to pass along that force through the connections one was lucky enough to forge; as Ross passed it along to me. As I had tried to do with dear Izzie and Ben. As Sinh did for his master; as his master did for Sinh.
Image: I could have gone home. Source: British Library digitized image from "The Earth, a popular treatise on universal geography for G. Marinelli and other Italian scientists, etc [With illustrations and maps.]"Marinelli, Giovanni. Milan, 1898. Public Domain.