times lately, cheer her up. But now Pete’s got a cancer diagnosis. The bladder, I think. Or maybe the prostate—but not the easy kind, if it is. Beth’s very discreet, and it’s clearly something with his waterworks, something private. She didn’t want to say, exactly. It looks bad, though.” She sighed. “Don’t you think it’s worst when both people in a couple are sick? I always do. It’s different when you’re on your own—you’re both more of a burden and less of a burden. I mean, you’ve got to get into a home, no question about it, and that’s that. No gray areas. Take Alice and Robin Meynell, for example—do you see who they are? Well, she had a stroke last spring and …”
And on. I cleaned pots, Baby cleaned out the medical closets of all her acquaintances, and my father, phlegmatic, digested. At the door, between warm and cold, I kissed her soft, grainy cheek, I held her clawlike hand in mine, I took my father’s arm, shepherded him across the residual ice—a black swoop here and there along Baby’s tarmac walk—and settled him in his seat. At the other end, I pulled the car under the porte cochère—his building, concierged, had salted assiduously—and accompanied him all the way up to his apartment door, carrying for him his Trader Joe’s grocery bag modestly half full of presents (a new electric razor; a biography of Hamilton; a pair of cashmere-lined gloves) with a Tupperware container of mushy yams on top.
I was, by then, burning, not sleeping. Who would do the same for me, in my dotage? Who would be my good girl? Would it be Matt and Tweety’s precious Charlotte? I couldn’t see it. No: I derived a certain bitter thrill in thinking that I’d manage to the end on my own, a thrill of denial and austerity, a thrill not unlike a dieter’s pleasure at her gnawing stomach. I will be continent. I will continue. I will not spill into the lives of others, greedily sucking and wanting and needing. I will not. I will ask nothing, of anyone; I’ll just burn, from the inside out, self-immolating like those monks doused in gasoline. Spontaneous combustion, almost. Almost. Merry Fucking Christmas to You.
In my fury, I did the strangest, most unlike-me thing: at ten o’clock on Christmas night I drove myself through the slick and empty streets, festooned with pagan lights, to Somerville, to the deathly quiet of the warehouse, where I scuttled nimbly up the sagging stairs, my keys between my fingers like a weapon (even in my fury I had room around the edges to be afraid), and I let myself into the studio and locked the door behind me.
It was freezing—the heat had obviously been turned down for days—and at that I hesitated, wondering if I’d made a mistake. But I fixed some coffee, and I turned the music on, and I rifled among Sirena’s things and found a pair of fingerless gloves made of soft black wool. When I put them on I felt like a character in a Masterpiece Theatre production (“Please, sir, can I have some more?”), but they did the trick; I could wiggle all digits without stiffness. I sat down at my table, not in my pool of light but with every fucking overhead light and standing lamp and desk lamp in the entire studio on full blast, as much light as I could get, a Ralph Ellison ocean of light, and I got to work, at long last, with Emily D.
Every time I thought I heard a noise, I’d listen harder to the music, or sing along with it, or stomp my feet. It was Christmas night: there wasn’t anyone in the building. There wasn’t anyone in the street. I was all by my own, as the children say, and I would stay that way till the end. Fuck them all, and if anyone tried to break in or scare me or rape me, I’d give them a piece of my rage.
I worked without moving for four hours, and then, too chicken to go to the bathroom down the hall, I peed in a bucket in the corner of the room and washed it out in the sink and sat down again to work for another four hours, only I got very tired, a blind sort of tired, the sort where your eyes can’t see anymore and go all blurry as though you were having a stroke, to the point where