By Dana Salisbury
In this heat, everything is like taffy. The road undulates. The light undulates. My mind refuses form. You’d think I would soften at this temperature. But, no. I am trenchant—no to focus, no to accomplishment, no to anything more than deadheading my pots of flowers and watering them in their too-small earths several times a day.
I step into the stream I told you about last week, dragging a lawn chair in with me and read with my feet in the water.
I have been floating for eight years since dismantling my professional life and becoming simply a person. This period has been as creative as any. I’m just me now, on the downward slope and rising. I like it okay. So be it.
I’d write something unbidden today, surreal instead of this, but fantasies are not command performances, just strokes of luck.
You can see his bones in their sockets; you can see the veins running along the surface of his chest; you can see him walking down the hall holding the wall. You see him groggy, trying his damnedest. Do not speak to him of other matters; he cannot absorb another thing. It’s like watching a bull being taken down, staggering, trying to stand, not quite placing why not.
Prodded and tested for months now, he sits quietly, fully clothed in a chair next to me. They can find nothing. The doctor, clearly tired at the end of a long day, is by turns empathetic and defensive, aggravated by my rush of questions. I am patronized and blindsided at being chastised. I wonder, aren’t we on the same team?
“Now, Mrs. Salisbury, I understand you are frustrated but . . .”
“No,” I interrupt, “I am not frustrated. I am afraid.”
A few minutes later, starting again:
“I challenge you to look at my husband with his shirt off.” Seeing him with his shirt off, seeing his emaciated body, the doctor’s face melts.
“Oh, Neal,” he says quietly, almost involuntarily, in a way that shows he is capable of love.
He says feed him more. They all do. Dogged, he sits at the table seven hours a day, tries to carry on, gags, chokes, nods off with unswallowed mouthfuls, doesn’t want to die, used to love to eat, is so thin that when he gestures his wedding ring flies off.
We don’t speak of the uncertainty. He hasn’t arrived at this yet, though I have. We are not prepared for what lies ahead. Who could be? Why aren’t we?
This morning, in the heat and humidity, I rose early and shopped for the protein shakes the doctor ordered last night after the market closed. And now I am taffy, sitting here stretching all of me to fit the space of impermanence. It doesn’t feel so terrible to be this fully alive.
I am amazed that this is not terrible. I fall into language and attitudes that in the past I’d have pushed away contemptuously, like “cherish,” “honor,” or “gratitude.” I start a list of moments of exquisite beauty, all true occurrences in the last two weeks, and label it “A Surfeit of Sweetness” (Disney meets Hallmark):
– A fawn crosses just downstream of where I am skinny-dipping, delicately picks its way across (straight out of Bambi).
– A baby, a total stranger, comes to sit beside me on my mat spread on the pebble beach. Gigi, wearing fuchsia water shoes and a swimsuit with a flamingo, pats my arms and face, so I pat her, too, and snuggle my arm around her, hold her chubby thigh. We stare into each other’s eyes almost imploringly. Her mom’s abashed “She loves skin, she just loves skin.” I think Gigi, you and me both, sister. She cries when it is time to go.
– The musician holds his tuning fork to the mic. I lie back on my mat and close my eyes. He repeats the tone. I drift into the music that follows. When I open my eyes, I realize that after the second tone, the only sound was the hum of a nearby factory and the passing cars. I was hearing music. He was eating lunch.
– My cousin brings me an armload of peonies for my birthday; it’s so heavy it nearly topples a huge vase. Famously short-lived, the white and pink blossoms stay beautiful for days and days.
– I stand behind my husband who I can hardly bear to look at, encircle his waist with my arms and am flooded with love.
There are others to list; I don’t have time to write them all.
I like the density of this moment, its contradictions. The sky like taffy, my skin like taffy, flowers brilliant and static in the pots on my deck, the garden over-cared for and too precise, the well-stocked kitchen, the clean house, the heart overflowing with life being lived.
We all come and go; the timeline is very confusing. Rather, I refuse to make sense of it. Time— what is time? Who is measuring?