I tell Houndy we’ll call it a “Blix Out.” He doesn’t think much of this business of accepting death, but lord, he does love a party. I know him too well: he thinks that if I have a party, it will be such fun that maybe I’ll start answering the letters from the cancer center in which they plead with me to go through with our “treatment plan.”
“Who knows? Maybe they learned something after all those years in medical school and they can cure you,” he says.
Ah, dear, delightful Houndy, with his red, rough face and his white beard and squinty blue eyes, cloudy now from all his years of being in the sun without protecting them. I always tell him he has a poet’s soul. All that sea in him, generations of it. He’s been a lobsterman forever, now transplanted to the city, where he stomps around and acts like the land is a compromise he’s made. Who in their right mind would have thought I’d turn out to be a lobsterman’s woman, going out with him on the boat between the Bronx and Long Island, hauling in nets? But here I am.
“No,” I say. “They’ll cut pieces off of me, and I need all my pieces.”
“You don’t need the pieces with cancer,” he says. “I do not think you need this cancer.”
I just smile because Houndy doesn’t know what I know, that, as stupid as it sounds, sometimes you have to live alongside the things you don’t want, like cancer, and doing that helps you go deeper into life than you’ve ever gone before. If we all lived forever, I tell him, then life really wouldn’t have any meaning. So why not embrace it, prepare for it, love what is?
“Who needs meaning when we’ve got this life?” he says. He flings his hand out, taking in all of it—the apartment building, the chips of electric-blue sky between the rooftops, the park across the street where the children shriek with happiness in the swings, and miles away, the sea, that he claims he can hear.
But he doesn’t know. I’m at the point where I’m all meaning. I’m not going to have a body much longer, but I am certainly going to have scads of meaning.
At night, curled up next to me, he whispers, “Blixie, I don’t want you to die.”
And there is nothing really to say to that. So I just reach across the vast expanse of blanket and touch him.
His hands are like big warm mitts, but somehow their shape is as delicate as stars. Houndy is made from stardust, that’s for sure.
NINE
MARNIE
“How are you doing?” Sylvie asks me on the phone two days later.
I’m jobless and unloved and I’m currently lying under the covers, reading old issues of People magazine and eating granules of instant pudding out of the box, is how I’m doing.
I’m also having a little bit of a fascination with dust motes. I know, I know. They’re fantastic. But they’re really more than fantastic. They have a lot to tell us about ourselves, these dust motes. If you stay still for a long time, they stop falling, but when you move again, wave your arm in the air or shake your foot in the covers, then they come swirling around again, like little stars. Like whole universes. It makes you think—what if our world and the whole solar system are just contained on somebody’s dust mote? What if we’re that meaningless?
I throw tissues at the wall; I pace around the apartment and dance to wild music until the neighbors downstairs bang on my ceiling with their broom handles.
Maybe I could stay like this forever, suspended between worlds.
But what I say is, “Oh, well, actually I’m having all the feelings.”
“Are you looking for another job yet?” she asks.
When I don’t say anything, she says, “I’ll make some calls for you, if you want. When you’re ready. You really are a very good teacher, you know. This has nothing to do with that.”
Later I call Natalie and tell her the whole story, and she puts me on speakerphone so she and Brian can both work on cheering me up.
They say all the right things—things I know I would say to a friend who’d called with this story: wow, what a tough year you’re having; of course you’re not crazy; you’ll find something else; we love you; you could move back home. I chew on my knuckles while they talk to me so they won’t hear me crying.
I have to figure everything out, but right now I have a headache, and I need a nap. Besides that, I need to watch the dust motes lit up by the setting sun before it gets too dark to see them any longer.
So one day, without any warning, my parents show up.
My parents live three thousand miles away; when they show up, it means that airplanes and rental cars have been involved. And this doesn’t happen without about a million conversations ahead of time. But here they are, banging on the door, calling my name like they’re expecting to wake me from a coma. For a long moment, I think maybe I’m hallucinating their voices. Has it come to this? But then I realize. Ah, of course. I should have known. Natalie and Brian have told them what’s happened.
I open the door tentatively, aware suddenly that I’m covered with flour and chocolate and wearing a too-small Japanese kimono that my father brought back from Japan for me when I was thirteen years old. I have on one bunny slipper and one sock, and my hair is a tangled mess because I have let the braid from four days ago turn feral, like a bramble you’d step around in the woods.
I have been baking. Cupcakes with messages in them, if you want to know. Like fortune cookies, but cupcakes.
When against all odds Noah comes back to me, he will be so surprised to bite into a chocolate cupcake and see the message: YOU ARE NOW WITH THE LOVE OF YOUR LIFE.
Maybe this could be a business. Cupcakes with Messages. I’ll have to come up with a better name, of course, but first I have to figure out how you can tuck pieces of paper into cupcake batter without getting them all wet. I’ve been puzzling over this for days, and so far nothing seems to be working.
My mother puts her hand over her mouth. Her eyes fill with tears as she and I both take in the full horror of my situation. My father pulls me into his arms and hugs me. I start to cry.
“We’ve been trying and trying to reach you,” he says in a muffled voice. “Why don’t you answer your phone? We’ve been calling you for days and days. We were out of our minds. Your mother finally said we should book a flight and rent a car and see for ourselves what’s going on.”
“I wanted to call the police,” my mother says. “How could you do this to us?”
“I am so, so sorry,” I say. But really—has it actually been that long? I might have lost some track of time.
They come into the apartment warily, like they might be entering a crime scene. Suddenly everything looks awful: the sun shining on the countertop where I spilled eggs and cream and flour. And the little slips of paper everywhere, with their simplistic sayings on them, look stupid and childish. Out of the corner of my eye I see that my mother has picked up one off the floor that reads: WHO CARES WHAT OTHER PEOPLE THINK? BE YOU!
She hands it to my father and stares at me with round, tragic eyes. “Marnie? Honey? What is going on?”
“It’s . . . an idea . . . a business idea . . .”
“A business idea?” My father is all over business ideas. He looks at the slip of paper and then at me and then back at the slip of paper. It has chocolate smeared all over it.
“Throw that away, Millie,” he says in a low voice.