Category: Sketches

Posted on by Shelley

Sara doesn’t like to think of herself as a ghoulish person, a person who reads obituaries, although she does, every morning at breakfast, the way some people read sports. She is less interested in the stories about the famous people who die, the people who rate two columns, with photos, their small contributions polished to shiny significance, certainly greater than anything she could do herself– the woman who walked across the United States to raise money for Leukemia after her son died of Leukemia, the first such gesture (according to the obituary) of its kind in the country, or the man who patented Velcro. She finds photographs of young people, and then scans the paragraphs looking for clues—cancer? suicide? Did they leave anybody (wife? husband? children?) behind? If the writing is vague—died at home, or just “on Saturday morning”—she imagines, frustrated by lack of confirm-able details, a bottle of pills, a car skidding off the road, co2 poisoning.

“Why do you do that?” Teddy says, coming into the kitchen from the hall outside the apartment, sweaty from running, wiping his armpits with his terrycloth headband. Same headband, not washed, not even rinsed, left hanging to dry on a hook by the door, and pulled over his curly blonde hair tomorrow morning, as yesterday, and the day before.

She says it’s interesting, like walking through graveyards, studying headstones, trying to get a sense of the lives that have come before her, other peoples’ struggles, it makes her own life seem less baffling and punishing. If Edna St. Claire had a daughter who died at two, and she died three years later at 34, how can she, Sara, complain about the fact that she works at a coffee shop, steals tips from the cup to pay for parking, because she hasn’t had a raise in the two years she worked there? If Vince Marlowe got cancer at 19, after being accepted at Harvard, and didn’t even get to go to his first year, leaving behind a loving mother and father (still married) three sisters and five nieces and nephews, how can she mind the fact that she flunked the take home English exam from the shitty community college she goes to, even though the correct answers were written on the study packet, which she was allowed to refer to, if she needed to jog her memory?

Teddy says there must be a better way to make your life feel meaningful, like volunteering in a homeless shelter, or learning how to Salsa. He’s standing at the refrigerator now, drinking pomegranate juice from the bottle, which should be fine, since she never drinks it, but drives her crazy, because what if she did? What makes him so entitled that he doesn’t even worry about whether or not she would?

Teddy is her brother, and they live together, with his sometimes boyfriend Leo, the first of Teddy’s boyfriends she has ever wanted for herself, he’s that hot. Not smart, but as long as you don’t talk to him much, you can imagine anything.

She reads the obituaries because you never know what you’ll find there. In New York City, obituaries are a perfectly acceptable way to find rent controlled apartments, and how else are people who work in coffee shops, with no raises, and no tips, supposed to pay the rent? She wonders if she might shock herself awake one day, seeing the death of her second grade best friend, or the high school English teacher who used to tell her that he wanted to be acknowledged when she won the Pulitzer prize. And then, when the news hits her, like a good slap brings a panicking person back to her senses, she will wake up from this stupor of indifference that has held her for the past year, since Panil disappeared.

That would be the thin line that divides her life, before and after, before, when she was purposeful, and focused, some might have said driven, and now, when rinsing a dirty cup in the sink so she can microwave some of yesterday’s coffee for breakfast seems like a PhD defense.

Who, you want to know, was Panil. Was he the love of her life, met at the baggage claim belt the way her best friend met her South Asian husband? Was he her mentor, the professor who read her short stories with such ruthless scrutiny? You might, given his impact on the shape of her life, assume that he was impactful all along. When in fact, he was almost nothing, the son of the woman who cleaned her building, lived in its basement, whose husband was the super, a boy she had known for only two years, from the time she arrived, when he was three, until this past November, when his mother woke the whole building with her screaming, screaming that he was missing from his bed.

Posted on by Shelley

The city is impassable. Cars in gridlock, snow humped as high as igloos, white elephants, giant sleeping mounds. We wonder if there are cars hidden underneath, decide no, then spot a splinter of chrome. Parking spaces are commandeered with garbage cans, defended like plots of land. Our neighborhood has broken into tiny fiefdoms.

Posted on by Shelley

Lynette, with her maroon winter jacket, rust colored corduroy slacks, neat suede snow boots, and pink knit hat. Her skin the color of light coffee, a bright slash of pink lipstick, everything about her pressed, and impeccable. She says the doctor says she is healing very well, the bones knitting together as they should.

When she fell and broke her femur, and they carried her out of the house, she clutched my hand and said yes, she would like me to come to the hospital with her. And I put my name on the list of people they should call, and they called me and said that they had done the surgery, and she was doing very well. Later we came to visit her, with flowers, and she was already sitting up, wanting to get herself back home.

Who will lift her out of bed? Who will decide that she can’t be trusted with the stove, or her medications, or the stairs? Who will sell her house, and sort through the boxes of clothes, and letters, and bills, fold up the cover of her car, unplug the heater that keeps the radiator from freezing, and tow the car away? Where will she go?

We were talking, at Martha and Rob’s, about how we ignore the end of life in this country, how we can’t bear to think about old people. Roger Fisher, the brilliant Harvard professor who taught me when I was a freshman, the man who brokered negotiations between Israel and Palestine, advised presidents, tottering along the sidewalk, stooped and silver, quivering on his cane, living in the retirement home next to Jesse’s school, a place where they organize recreational activities in the afternoon—pottery painting, bingo, movies. I heard an advertisement this afternoon for a retirement home, promising activities that promote growth. It seemed deceitfully cheerful. And I wondered: is it consoling to paint pottery, after you have sat with presidents and kings, advising them on foreign policy?

Posted on by Shelley

I grew up in the South, but so close to New York, one and a half hours by train, that I didn’t even know it. In spite of my ignorance, my early memories feel peculiarly Southern— the high-ceilinged, wide-porched house that belonged to my grandmother, fans spinning lazily overhead, rugs rolled and stored and couches slipcovered with light cotton every summer. In the drowsy, sleep inducing heat, we watching my grandmother drink thimbles of bourbon starting at exactly five, tucked ourselves behind wing-chairs to listen to arguments about family politics, played invented games of chess with the tiny silver boxes on the multi-shelved mahogany display table. My grandmother wore her silver hair in a perfect bubble, had a closet lined with Lilly Pulitzer dresses, shoes in matching colors underneath. We hid between the dresses, trying to find the signature, “Lily,” hidden in the stems, petals, paisley swirls. Everything smelled faintly of gardenias.

Her husband, who died when my father was fourteen, still loomed over the house, his portrait across from the spiral staircase, hands larger than his head, in the distorting perspective they also used for Abraham Lincoln’s memorial. In the kitchen was Brit, a light-skinned African American man who spoke with a faintly British accent, like Carey Grant, wore white gloves when he served hors d’oeuvres and called my father “Mr. Tim.” In the kitchen was Martha, with white hair, watery eyes and milky skin, who came from Ireland when she was fourteen to work for my grandmother, only a few years older and newly married. In the kitchen was Mary, who kept a jar filled with Toll House cookies. We grabbed cookies by the fistful, racing dozens of times a day between the front of the house and the back. The front: finials shaped like pineapples, Corinthian columns, a tall, ticking grandfather clock. The back: watery fluorescent lights, everything painted hospital green.

Martha’s room was on the far side of the kitchen, along with a small sitting area with a portable t.v. that sometimes played, sound off, during parties. She died in her sleep, childless, far from the family she left behind. Mary died not long after, an event marked principally by my grandmother as an inconvenience— no cook ever understood the rules of the kitchen as well, they put their hands too chummily on my grandmother’s shoulders when they greeted her in the morning, suggested crude side dishes like Jello salad, failed to master the art of butter balls. I stood with my hands on either side of the empty glass jar and wondered why Mary died. Her hair, a pale shade of pink, made it hard to guess her age. Only years later did I remember Brit, bent with grief in the sitting area, shoulders shaking, eyes boiled by sorrow.