dark—even his imaginary worlds were mere villages next to the travels on which my soul was embarked that spring.
It’s no wonder that I came to dress up as Edie, to dance around the studio half drunk in my underwear. I was suddenly aware, almost in a panic—a joyful panic—of the wealth of possibility out in the world, and also within myself. My everyday Appleton life, my phone calls to my father, my occasional beers with friends, my Saturday-morning jogs around the reservoir—what was all that, but the opiated husk of a life, the treadmill of the ordinary, a cage built of convention and consumerism and obligation and fear, in which I’d lolled for decades, oblivious, like a lotus eater, as my body aged and time advanced? I felt all this with the zeal of someone newly wakened—by God, I felt and felt and felt.
In those heady weeks it seemed clear that I owed it not only to myself, but also to my mother—that my fear (the fear that had kept me from pursuing my art more seriously, that had kept me in Boston, that had kept me employed, and surely had kept me single, also) was in fact just her fear, that I’d shouldered all her anxieties and disappointments, along with her basic good-Catholic-girl-ness, an inability, ironically, to have faith—truly to believe in the value of my own efforts, in the uniqueness of my own soul. Oh great adventure! Life there, before me, the infinite banquet lying in wait.
8
The two weeks before my mother died are branded in me, each hour of each day of her final hospitalization. I remember where her room was in the unit, how it was, and what was in it, the print on the wall, and at any time, where I was in the room and what the light was like and when my father was there and at what point Matt arrived—without Tweety and the brat, who appeared only for the funeral and seemed chiefly to have seen it as the occasion for a dark-colored shopping spree. There are times in life like that, where you know intuitively that everything hinges on this time and nothing will be the same again, when, as a consequence, your brain remembers, it notices the small things—the male orderly with splayed feet who hummed Chopin waltzes while he mopped, or the young respiratory therapist with heavy brows, who couldn’t look at you when he was explaining that your mother’s lungs, even with help, were now giving out—he looked about six inches to the right of you, as though you were a shadow of some other self that stood, just there, just beside you, which, in that strange time, felt almost possible. Your mind retained all these things of its own accord, as if they might be necessary to know—simply because it was Important. The mind will do this.
And sometimes—as with my mother dying—you have some idea of what it is that must unfold, and some inkling, however inadequate, of what it will entail. Whereas at other times—as in the last weeks of April and the beginning of May 2005, when it got warm and cold again, when it rained a great deal, it rained as if the gods were disconsolate, as if spring were a sorrow, although I was filled with such joy—you sense the importance, but only that. What it is and what it means you may not fully understand, not for months but for years.
I can tell you that it was on a Tuesday night that I walked with Skandar all the way to Belmont and back again, and it was a night when it had rained earlier but the rain had stopped, and the dark sky was streaked with scudding clouds. There was a smell of earth about, of soil, rich and dark, as we passed the cemetery where my mother was buried, and again when we reached a neighborhood of houses, of small, square gardens that were laid out like open chocolate boxes on the modest street. The new leaves rustled in the breeze over us, and sometimes drops of water fell upon our heads.
That evening, I remember, I’d played chess with Reza after dinner, and he’d let me win—it was one of his favorite things, magnanimous child, to see his own superiority and then to relinquish it. Afterward, at bedtime, I read him an abridged Three Musketeers that he enjoyed; and when it was lights-out, he’d asked whether, instead of sitting in the