December 2005
Ignorance is bliss, and she felt she would be much better off not knowing exactly what was wrong. She didn't want to know he was dying.
You casually hurry to get on stage. You look down at your beat-up leather watch, and it’s 4:10. Today you’re in Des Moines, Iowa at the Grand Theater, famous for those bright yellow stairs you’re climbing up that lead to the stage of the auditorium.
It was almost like a dare, the thought of jumping off the overpass onto traffic below. It was never a death wish, because back then it never crossed my mind that I could die if I tried it.
Tomorrow, Sal and I are going to Mexico, not for a honeymoon, but to go and live under an unknown sky for awhile. We both bought new boots this morning from St. Vincent’s, leathered all the way from Italy, big and brown. Sal told me they will carry us any old way the day decides to take us.
She pauses to let her next contraction rumble across her abdomen. As the pain grows, she bites off tiny chunks of air. With her left hand, she traces circles above her pubic bone. The muscles beneath clench tighter. She leans forward over the toilet bowl and vomits.
The hell of the thing was the tide was falling off the Little Bahama Bank to the Tongue of the Ocean, that one mile deep, one hundred twenty-five mile long, twenty-five mile wide trench between New Providence and Andros, and it was hard on him.
It was a gigantic print of my ex-girlfriend Caroline Hammond. I loved her so much, even though she treated me like dirt and slept with my brother. The photo had hung above my couch as a devotional piece. After the break-up, I couldn’t live with the thing, but I couldn’t destroy it either. Jon said he would hang it in the women’s bathroom.
The first time I saw my mother without makeup on, I thought she had died in the night. Stopped cold in the middle of the kitchen holding my cereal bowl; then I dropped the bowl and made a run for it. Took the nanny more than two hours to convince me that what I’d seen wasn’t a ghost, and by that time Mom was already on set, being made into somebody else.