The Underside of Joy (3 page)

Chapter Three

Frank drove me home from McCready’s, then left to pick up the kids. I sat at our kitchen table, staring at the pepper grinder. A wedding gift from someone . . . a college friend of mine, I think. Joe had made a big deal about that gift, thought it was the perfect pepper grinder, and I’d made fun of him, said, ‘Who knew? That there was a perfect pepper grinder out there and that we would be so lucky as to be its proud owners?’

Zach and Annie pranced onto the porch, in the front door. Their singsong
Mommymommymommy!
broke through to me, through my new watery, subdued world, and with them, a slicing clarity. I forced myself up, upright, steady. I said their names. ‘Annie. Zach.’ Joe told me once that they were his
A
to
Z,
his alpha and omega. ‘Come here, guys.’ Frank stood behind them. I knew what I had to say. I would not try to sugarcoat this, like my relatives had with me when I was eight and my own father died. I would not say that Joe had fallen asleep, or had gone to live with Jesus, or was now an angel, dressed in white with feathered wings. It would have helped if I’d had a belief system, but my beliefs were in a misshapen pile, constantly rearranging themselves, as unfixed as laundry.

Annie said, ‘What happened to your knee?’

I touched it but couldn’t feel the bruise from the fall I’d taken in the hallway only a day ago.

‘You better get a Band-Aid.’ She gave me a long look.

I knelt down on my other knee. I pulled both of them to me and held on. ‘Daddy got hurt.’ They waited. Frozen. Silent. Waiting for me to reassure them, to say where he was, when they could kiss him. When they could make him a get-well-soon card and put it on the breakfast tray.
Say the words. They have to hear them from you. Say them:
‘And he . . . Daddy . . . he died.’

Their faces. My words were carving themselves into their sweet, flawless skin. Annie started to cry. Zach looked at her, then sounding somewhat amused, said, ‘No, he didn’t!’

I rubbed his small back. ‘Yes, honey. He was at the ocean. He drowned.’

‘No way, José. Daddy swims fast.’ He laughed.

I looked up to Frank, and he knelt down with us. ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘Daddy is a good swimmer . . . Daddy was. But listen to me, Zach, okay? A big wave surprised him and knocked him off the rock. Maybe he bumped his head; we don’t know.’

Annie wrung her hands and cried, ‘I want my daddy. I want my
daddy
!’

I whispered into her hair, ‘I know, Banannie, I know you do.’

Zach turned to Frank. ‘It’s not true. He’ll swim back, won’t he, Uncle Frank?’

Frank ran his hand over his crew cut, covered his eyes for an instant, sat back on his heels, and took Zach onto his lap. He held him. He said, ‘No, buddy. He’s not coming back.’ Zach whimpered against Frank’s chest, then flung himself backward while Frank maintained his hold. Zach let out a howl that rang with the rawness of unfathomable loss.

I don’t remember what happened next, or I should say, I don’t remember the sequence of things. It seems that at once our long gravel driveway filled with cars, the house and yard with people, the fridge with chicken cacciatore, eggplant Parmesan, lasagna. Joe’s family took up most of the house. My extended family was just my mom, and she was still on a plane from Seattle. In a strange, sad way, the day reminded me of our wedding two years before, the last time all these people had caravanned up our drive, gathered together, and brought food and drink.

Joe’s family was loud – as they had been in the celebration of our marriage, and now in mourning, even in the early hours of disbelief. His great-aunty, already draped in black, was the only family member who still spoke Italian. She beat her shrivelled bosom and cried out,
‘Caro Dio, non Giuseppe.’

And then periods of stunned silence washed into the room while each person sat, anchoring his or her eyes on a different object – a lamp, a coaster, a shoe – as if it held an answer to the question, Why Joe?

His uncle Rick poured stiff drinks. His father, Joe Sr, drank many of those drinks and began cursing God. His mother, Marcella, held Annie and Zach in her large lap and said to her husband, ‘Watch your language, Joseph. Your grandchildren are in the room and Father Mike will be walking in that door any goddamned second.’

I sat in Joe’s favouurite chair, the old leather one handed down from Grandpa Sergio. Annie and Zach climbed up on me, curling themselves under my arms, the gravity of their small bodies like perfect paperweights, keeping me securely in place. Joe’s brother, David, kept calling from his cell phone in tears, as he and Gil, his partner, inched along in traffic on the 101.

Later, while the kids napped, David found me in the bathroom. He said through the door, ‘Sweetie, are you peeing or crying or both?’ Neither. I had stolen away for a few minutes and was staring at myself in the mirror, wondering how everything on my face was still as it always had been. My eyes sat in their assigned places above my nose, my mouth below it. I unlocked the door. He came in, shut the door. His arms hung at his sides, palms towards me. His face was ravaged and unshaven, but he was, as always, utterly beautiful; his Roman features so perfectly chiselled and his body so carved that his friends referred to him as The David. We leaned into each other. He whispered, ‘What are we going to do without him?’ I shook my head and let my nose run onto his shoulder.

That night, in bed with each arm around a sleeping child, my tears slipping back into my ears, I wondered how we’d get through this. But I reminded myself that I’d survived another grief that had threatened to undo me.

I had come to think of my seven-year marriage to Henry as The Trying Years. Trying to push a boulder up a hill. Trying to push Henry’s lackadaisical sperm up to my uterus. Trying to coax my stubborn eggs through my maze of fallopian tubes. The urgent phone calls to Henry to meet me at home for lunch. The awkwardness of sex on demand. And afterwards, lying on my back with my feet in the air, I’d will egg and sperm to
Meet! Mingle! Hook up!
(I was convinced by then that my eggs had shells, that I had tough eggs to crack.) I wanted children so badly that the want spread itself over me and took me hostage; it tied me up in it so that my days became as dark and knotted as I imagined my uterus to be: a scary, uninviting hovel.

Then I finally got pregnant.

And then I lost the baby.

I lay on the couch with old towels underneath me and listened to Henry make the phone calls in the kitchen, feeling as inadequate as the terminology implied. I
lost
the baby – like keys, or a mother-of-pearl earring. Or
spontaneous abortion,
which sounded like all of a sudden we didn’t want the baby, like we had made a quick, casual choice. And then there was
miscarriage.
The morphing of a mistake and a baby carriage.

More trying. Trying to get pregnant, trying to stay pregnant. Trying shots, gels, pills, hope, elation, bed rest, more bed rest. In the end, despair.

Again. And again and again and again. Five in all.

And then one Easter morning – while the neighbourhood kids ran up and down the dwarfed aprons of lawns, their voices pealing with sugared-up joy, wearing new pastel clothes and chocolate smears on their faces, filling their baskets with a plethora of eggs – Henry and I sat at our long, empty dining room table and decided to quit. We quit trying to have a baby and we quit trying to have a marriage. Henry was the one who was courageous enough to put it into words: There was no us left apart from our obsession, and perhaps that’s why we’d kept at it with such tenacity.

At that time, it seemed I would always be sad. Little did I know that the universe was about to shift just six months later, when I drove through Sonoma County and took the winding road someone had aptly named the Bohemian Highway. ‘Good-bye, Bio-Tech Boulevard!’ I shouted to the redwoods, which crowded up to the road like well-wishers greeting my arrival. At the bridge, I waited as a couple of young guys with dreadlocks, wearing guitars on their backs, crossed over to head down to the river’s beach, and they waved like they’d been expecting me. I turned into Elbow and stopped at Capozzi’s Market. Good-bye, Sadness in San Diego.

Joe and I were the same height; we saw things eye to eye. We slipped into each other’s lives as easily as Annie’s hand slipped into mine that evening in front of the store. We didn’t sleep together on our first date. We didn’t wait that long. I followed him home from the parking lot, helped him change diapers and feed baby Zach and tell Annie a story and kiss them good night, as if we’d been doing the same thing every night for years. Though neither of us was pitiful enough to whisper the cliché that we usually didn’t do that sort of thing, we both admitted later that we usually didn’t. But the deepest wounds have a tendency to seep recklessness. He helped me carry in my suit-case, found a vase for a bucket of cornflowers – my
Centaurea cyanus
that I’d set on the passenger-side floor, brought along for good luck. We talked until midnight, and I learned that the wife whose paisley robe still hung from the hook on the bathroom door had left him for good four months before, that her name was Paige, that she had called only once to check on Annie and Zach. She never called in the three years that followed. Not once. We made love in Paige and Joe’s bed. Yes, it was needy sex.
Amazing
needy sex.

But now I lay in bed thinking,
All I want to do is go back.
‘We want you back,’ I whispered. I slipped my arms out from under Annie’s and Zach’s heavy heads and tiptoed into the bathroom. There was Joe’s aftershave, Cedarwood Sage. I opened it and inhaled it, dabbed it on my wrists, behind my ears, along the lump in my throat. His toothbrush. His razor. I ran my finger along the blade and watched the fine line of blood appear, mixing with tiny remnants of his whiskers.

I turned on the basin taps so the kids wouldn’t hear me. ‘Joe? You gotta come back. Listen to me. I can’t fucking
do
this.’ The sleeper wave had come out of nowhere, and now I felt that wave in the bathroom, the inability to breathe, fighting the thunderous slam that ripped away Joe . . . Annie and Zach’s daddy
.
They’d already been abandoned by their birth mother. How much could they take? I had to pull it together for them. But at the same time I knew that their very existence would help hem me in, keep all my parts together.

I dried my face and took a few deep breaths and opened the door. Callie pressed her cold black nose into my hand, turned and thumped me with her tail, licked my face when I bent to pet her back. I wanted to be there for the kids when they woke, so I climbed back into bed and waited for the sun to rise, for their eyes to open.

Annie stood on a stool, cracking eggs. Joe’s mom was going at my fridge with a spray bottle, the garbage can full of old food. I went over and hugged Annie from the back. The yolks floated in the bowl, four bright, perfect suns. She broke them with a stab of the whisk and stirred them with concentrated vigour.

She turned to me and said, ‘Mommy? You’re not going to die, are you?’

There it was. I touched my forehead to hers. ‘Honey, someday I will. Everyone does. But first, I’m planning on being around for a long, long time.’

She nodded, kept nodding while our foreheads bobbed up and down. Then she turned back to her eggs and said, ‘Are you, you know, planning on
leaving
anytime soon?’

I knew exactly what she was thinking.
Whom
she was thinking about. I turned her back around. ‘Oh, Banannie. No. I will never leave you. I promise. Okay?’

‘You promise? You pinkie promise?’ She held out her pinkie and I looped mine in hers.

‘I more than pinkie promise. I promise you with my pinkie and my whole big entire self.’

She wiped her eyes and nodded again. She went back to whisking.

People kept arriving and fixing things: the unhinged door on the chicken coop, the fence post that went down in a storm months before; someone was changing the oil in the truck. Who had driven it home from Bodega Bay? Who had put Joe’s jacket back on the hook, and the blanket back on our bed, and when? The drill started going again. The house smelled like an Italian restaurant. How could anyone eat? David, the writer in the family, who was also one helluva cook, was working on the eulogy out on the garden bench he’d given us for our wedding, while some of his culinary masterpieces graced the table. Everyone seemed to be doing something constructive except me. I kept telling myself that I had to be strong for the kids, but I didn’t feel strong.

My mom, who’d arrived from Seattle, hadn’t let Zach out of her sight and was digging in the dirt with him and his convoy of Tonka trucks and action figures. Joe’s mom and Annie kept busy cleaning, stopping to wipe each other’s tears, then going back to wiping any surface they could find. I found myself wandering back and forth between Annie and Zach, drawing them in for a hug, a sigh, until they would slip down off my lap and back into their activities.

While she cleaned, Marcella sang. She always sang; she was proud of her voice, and rightly so. But she never sang Sinatra or songs from her generation; she sang songs from her kids’ generation. She loved Madonna, Prince, Michael Jackson, Cyndi Lauper – you name a song from the eighties and she could sing it. Joe and David had told me that when they were teenagers, blaring stereos from their bedrooms, Marcella would shout up from the kitchen, ‘Kids! Turn that crap
up
!’

While she scoured the grimy tile grout in my kitchen with a toothbrush, she started singing in an aching soprano:
‘Like a virgin . . . for the very first time.’
I let out a strange, sharp laugh and she looked at me, shocked. ‘What, sweetie? You okay?’ She hadn’t intended to make a crack at my housekeeping, was so preoccupied with sadness that she didn’t even realize what she was singing. But I knew Joe would have got a kick out of it, that on another day, in another layer of time, we both would have pointed out the lyrics, laughed, and teased her. She would have responded by swaying her big bottom back and forth, adding, ‘Oh yeah? Take this:
The kid is not my son . . .’
But instead she searched me for further signs of grief-stricken insanity to accompany my shriek of laughter. I shook my head and waved to say,
Never mind.
She took my face in her thick hands. ‘Thank God my grandchildren have you for their mother. I thank God every day for you, Ella Beene.’ I reached my arms around the massive trunk of her.