Carol Black

23. Forsythia

Arthur Gray stepped carefully between the two forsythia bushes by his back porch. The long, arching branches were laden with golden buds and wet from the morning’s light rain; they pressed against him as he reached in with the pruning shears, springing back and showering him with droplets of water that showed dark on his freshly pressed khaki slacks. He carefully clipped several thin branches whose buds were swelling almost into bloom, cutting at an angle just above a leaf bud as his wife had once shown him. The blossoms were a deep buttery gold against sleek reddish brown stems; almost too rich and syrupy a color for Arthur’s taste, more autumnal than springlike, he thought, although it was not lost on him that this was just one of many matters on which his opinion had not been asked, and apparently was not relevant. His wife loved the forsythia, in all probability because it was the first bloom of spring, or perhaps because of some memory or association from her childhood, when everything was fresh and brought with it a trembling thrill of joy and exhilaration; or possibly in some abstract and automatic way, because it was a flower and she was a woman and she felt she ought to love it, or because her mother had loved it –– he had no idea, really –– but in any case, she had always gone out into the yard with her pruning shears in late March and brought a bouquet of it into the house.

A light, chill wind uncoiled itself through the back yard, exploring with its many fingers the wet grass, the rattling branches of the budding maple trees, the small silver hairs on the nape of Arthur’s neck. Dark gray clouds fringed with brilliance moved steadily across the sky, pulling pools of coolness across the lawn and then releasing floods of surprisingly hot spring sunshine. It was one of those late March days that could go either way on you, where you waited with a slight feeling of tension around the breath and spine to see if the day would declare itself for light or for darkness, for warmth or for cold.

He clipped a few long sprigs of pussy willow and arranged them around the forsythia, then breathed deeply. He was freshly showered and shaved, with just a touch of after-shave lotion — not too much — so that his fragrance mingled with the scent of wet earth and new grass. He had enjoyed the feeling of putting on clean clothes still warm from the iron, and the sharp clear feeling of chill air and hot sun on his skin. He fingered one of the velvety pussy-willow buds –– “mice” as Anita had called them when she was little, insisting that they looked more like mice and therefore ought to be called “mouse-willows” (demonstrating, perhaps, that the propensity to form unasked-for opinions could be passed on genetically) –– and, disappointed at the lack of sensation in his slightly calloused fingertips, on an impulse, touched it to his lips. He felt slightly giddy, really, as if he might suddenly laugh out loud; as usual, his body did not feel quite solid to him, but today there was inside him an uncoiling tendril of excitement, exhilaration, even, if that were possible, happiness.

Arthur went into the kitchen and wrapped the cut ends of his bouquet carefully in a wet paper towel and then aluminum foil, securing it with a rubber band. As he unlocked the car, he thought about laying a towel down on the passenger seat to protect it from the wetness, but let this thought vanish almost as soon as it arose. Lately he had taken to watching all of his little compulsions float out into the air like bubbles that burst at the lightest touch of wind. It was astonishing to him to realize that the murky labyrinth of unnamed beliefs, obligations, terrors, yearnings, and animosities in which he had lived his life had no more substance than this, that those towering walls existed only in his brain, and that he had lived his life like the flies in that science experiment, who were held for a period of time in a covered jar, and then, when the lid was removed, would not fly out, choosing instead to continue buzzing in the same zig-zagging circles, steadily battering their many-eyed heads and fragile transparent wings against the glass. Anyway, he said to himself, the seat was vinyl, and it was old.

The old Dodge (which he still thought of as the new Dodge, despite its fading paint and rusted spots and that whirring high-pitched noise it had started making at around eighty thousand miles) had the kind of loose, springy American suspension that turned every bump or pothole into a swinging bounce and every curve or hard turn into a swoop of centrifugal force. Arthur remembered Johnny and Anita sliding, laughing or fighting, into each other across the slippery back seat of the car. That was before the seat belt laws, of course; they had worried about different things in those days. They had worried about the H-bomb, Communists, inflation; they had not worried about global warming or genetically modified organisms or their children sailing through the windshields of cars onto the hot black oil-stained pavement. As he drove to the nursing home, Arthur looked down periodically at the flowers lying on the passenger seat beside him to make sure they weren’t sliding around too much. The thought actually entered his mind to put a seat belt on them, and he had gone so far as to imagine the pressure of the belt snapping off the pussy willow buds before he caught himself again. The impulse to worry and imagine had a life of its own, like the robin’s impulse to weave a nest out of twigs and dry grass, or the cicada’s impulse to begin burrowing up toward the light after seven years deep in the soil. But the things he had always worried about, the dark scenarios he had given up the starry nights of his youth to imagining and the sunlit days of his life to striving to prevent, had not happened, of course; had not come close to happening; quite other things had happened, had blind-sided him and swept his life away like a sapling hammered out of the earth by a tidal wave.

He relaxed into the drive, allowing his mind to go blank, his eyes and limbs to function autonomously; red light, braking, green light, accelerating; the movements of the car, the shudders and bumps, friction, gravity, thrust, drag, centrifugal force, he allowed to pass freely through his body without resistance. It was his habit to use this time to prepare himself for the moment of arrival, the opening of the steel and glass automatic doors and the thick wave of depression that ordinarily submerged him as the interior air of the nursing home settled on his skin and filled his lungs. It required a state of complete attentiveness to avoid being felled by it like a tree. The first time he had walked into the place he had been overcome by the feeling he would vomit, not from the faint scent of urine and disinfectant but from an almost completely overwhelming vertigo of guilt. Completely out of his body with guilt, he had watched himself from above as he moved over the maroon carpeted floor with the admissions director, inspecting rooms, scanning brochures, articulately and conscientiously discussing meal service and medical supervision and recreational programs. Disbelief, he discovered, was a sensation able to fill his entire body and begin expanding beyond the boundaries of his body to fill the air around him. When he had returned home that first afternoon and his wife had turned her eyes to him, he felt that he would stop breathing. He didn’t, though, and borne along now in a prescribed sequence of actions, he signed the papers, wrote out the first check, and one day left her there. All around him people agreed that he had done the right thing, what he had to do; they murmured the appropriate phrases, he needed a break, couldn’t do it alone, had to get on with his life; but his life, of course, did not get on. The vertiginous feeling didn’t leave him; it waxed and waned, ballooned and shrank and ballooned again, and although his body appeared to move along the ground, he did not inhabit it.

It came as an unexpected discovery, then, that, despite this disembodied state, certain sensations came to him quite clearly, or rather, they occurred as if on their own, their existence independent of his, with a force and a clarity that could be startling; certain sounds, certain movements of the air, even certain small comforts and pleasures. As he got out of the car he anticipated greeting the nurses, the way they would look up from their clipboards and smile, the melodic rising and falling of their voices as they exclaimed over the forsythia, the slight movements they would make rocking forward to meet him and then back on their rubber-soled heels, as if the space between them were a living thing and breathing. The cheerfulness of the people who worked in these places was quite clear and decisive, it was quite shocking, actually, the way they sliced through the dense atmosphere of despair without a flicker of hesitation. It pleased him that he could smile back and speak to them in similar tones, that he could successfully complete that transaction and momentarily enter the clear space that they inhabited. It pleased him to have the unfamiliar sensation of being a ray of brightness in their day: they liked him: he was a polite and conscientious visitor; he asked about their health and brought them poinsettias at Christmas and sometimes muffins on Sundays; he did not question their authority. Here in this gray world of women –– there were few men here, either patients or staff –– here in this world of women dying and abandoned by their families, and women who take the jobs no one else wants, caring for them, changing their diapers and bedlinens, feeding them and wiping their chins, bathing them and sometimes, when they could bear to, holding their hands and comforting them while they wept or moaned in terror and despair –– here in this world, Arthur Gray was a gallant, a young and healthy and even powerful man. It was comical, he knew, pathetic, but even so he allowed himself the luxury of enjoying it.

These nurses were worth ten doctors, a hundred doctors, Arthur thought as the automatic doors whooshed open to engulf him. His excitement flowed easily into anger at the memory of all the little intentional humiliations prescribed by the neurologist who jabbered calmly about neurofibrillary plaques and symptom progression and diagnosis by exclusion. The technical jargon had a comical smallness to it, a complete inadequacy of scale; the words buzzed over the surface of what was happening like insects; like Johnny, who, at two, had called the ocean “the big pool,” they had no frame of reference that could encompass the enormity of the thing that they were seeing. They could not hear the resonance of the symptoms, their prophetic voice; they could not grasp that the celebrated human brain, the brain that they could slice up at autopsy, the brain that got them their good grades in medical school, the brain that Norah was losing, was turning out to be a puny, almost irrelevant thing, and that life no more revolved around human consciousness than the sun revolved around the earth. Consciousness, Arthur could now see, was nothing but a temporary agreement between the parties to define things in a certain way; without that agreement, life escaped its chains, changed shape, grew gigantic, monstrous, luminous, unimaginable. The social workers and neighbors and relatives who proposed to “offer support” were saying, in effect, hold on to us, take our hands, we will keep the agreement, rebind the chains. Let go of your wife; she is outside the circle now, unconscious, detritus, an object. Your odd views and your mental lapses are stress-induced, they are normal, don’t worry, but take our hands and they will go away. But Arthur did not take their hands; he found that it was they who felt like objects, and his wife who felt more alive than she ever had, and he held instead to her, and with her began to float away to sea.

As his wife had dissolved, as the mind of Norah Jane Linton Gray had parted like a cloud, her husband had often been surprised by what emerged from behind it. Norah had been a highly intelligent woman, well read in history and economics, active in local precinct politics and the League of Women Voters, always liked and respected by those who knew her. She had been a conscientious mother, closely following her children’s education, listening to their troubles, reading books about nutrition so as to improve their diet. But when Arthur closed his eyes and pictured her as she had been, he could see there had always been a slight furrow in her brow, a tightness in her neck muscles, as though she were trying to solve some difficult problem, or see into a glaring light; as though she were clenched against some attack, some blow that might come from any direction. The tightness had not been softened by her children; she had tended their scraped knees with care, gently washing their wounds with soap and warm water, applying antiseptic and band-aids when appropriate; but she did not enfold them in her lap the way he had sometimes seen other women do, stroking their hair, murmuring in their ears, absorbing their tears into her warm skin. She tried not to yell at them, she tried to be patient; she modulated her voice, and tried to assure that her position was always fair. The anger that sometimes buzzed and crackled through her like the excess voltage in an overloaded power line she directed at the kitchen pots and pans, the cabinet that wouldn’t latch properly, or at some witless Republican congressman on “Meet the Press.” On the one occasion when she had spoken sharply to Arthur in front of the children, they had stared at her as though seeing the dark, barnacled back of something enormous just below the surface of the water, but whatever it was disappeared quickly and did not resurface.

Norah had wanted to have a career, she wanted to work in international relations and diplomacy, but in those days, of course, there were obstacles. It was only later on that he fully grasped how brilliant she was, how tragic it was that her ability had been wasted. It hadn’t even occurred to him at the time that she didn’t really want children. She may have hinted at it, in fact she probably had said it outright once or twice, maybe more, now that he thought about it, but it didn’t register and she let it go. He had never even thought about whether he himself wanted children; it was just what you did. It happened. It was the way life was.

And yet in both of them there had been something that held them back, initially, from marriage and family. They had met in their mid-twenties, at a point when most of their cohort were already married with a couple of kids. Norah was a rare beauty, breathtaking really, with what men would call an incredible body; but she seemed disconnected from it, as though she stood just behind or outside it. Shortly before the wedding, she cut her hair short, almost cropped like a boy’s, and chose a simple tea-length dress instead of a gown. The wedding was small, restrained, sedate; nobody cried, nobody got drunk, nobody danced, nobody broke a sweat, except for the groomsmen standing in the parking lot in dark suits waiting for it to be time to go in. 

And yet, after they were married, it had seemed, for a time, that they really loved each other. Once, lying in bed, he had stroked her hair, and tears had streamed down her face. Then, after the children were born, something changed. He didn’t know what it was. She receded, like a wave at low tide. She drew into herself, became something apart, unreachable. It was almost like she wasn’t really there.

The tightness in Norah’s body had increased at any touch, or even the possibility of a touch, from Arthur. It had gotten so circular that it was impossible to tell where it had begun; her body tightened and withdrew from his hands; his hands became nervous, insecure, too tentative or too sudden -- he would somehow always elbow her, or pull her hair, or pinch or tickle in some way that she did not like. The veil of frustration between them became so thick that it was impossible to pull aside –– it was always there, the anticipation of frustration just at the thought of touching, the two inextricably associated, like the sight of a cat makes the allergy sufferer’s eyes begin to itch. The way she responded to him filled him with revulsion at himself, and mutely he accepted her body’s rejection of his body. In time, it became easier not to try, to just take a chair a few feet away and read the newspaper, and occasionally point out an interesting article or show each other the political cartoons if they were good. And so the years had slipped away.

But then on that last visit to California, just before the fire, Norah had looked at Arthur with pure hatred in her eyes and called him Jack. A jolt of electricity had run through his body. There had been many low moments, many sinking feelings as her illness slowly declared itself, but the moment when a man’s wife of forty-two years no longer knows his face and name is a sweeping kind of moment, a sudden sweeping away of things that will not be returning. Foolishly, he had tried to correct her. Jack, of course, was her father’s name. It’s Arthur, he said. Your husband, he said. But all that this had accomplished was that she had turned her face away, and then she had begun to weep, her body shaking with sobs that had continued almost without stopping for over two and a half hours. This event had repeated itself again and again and again, each time with uncanny similarity, down to the pitch of her voice as she called him and the angle of her face as she turned away, over a period of three to four months. The ocean of tears that flowed from her was astonishing; the muscular effort of her convulsive sobbing so overwhelming that it seemed impossible she could maintain her physical shape and not shrink to nothingness. At first Arthur had been beside himself, trying in every way he could think of to comfort her, finally sinking to the floor at her feet and weeping along with her; but as time went on, and he lost count of the hours and days of tears, he retreated into the other room and turned on the TV, paid the bills, or read the paper, only checking in on her every so often to bring her a glass of water or juice to keep her from becoming dehydrated. From time to time Arthur asked himself how he could have lived with a person for forty-two years and not known this was inside of her; but then, almost immediately, he realized that he had known, or known and not known, known somewhere at the base of his skull, or down in his spine, or in his hands; just not up in that little walnut where you put things into words and make your conscious plans and decisions, that little convoluted gray thumb we use to plug the dike holding back the flood of knowledge that resides in the body and the universe outside the body. Norah, he could see now, had strained every muscle in her body trying to hold it all back, and the sheer effort of it had worn her out, like the fan belt frays on an engine that is idling too fast.

Increasingly it was difficult to remember the sequence of events: images came to him out of order, like a pile of loose snapshots: Norah looking at him with fire and contempt in her eye: Norah hurling obscenities and spitting at his feet: Norah standing in the yard with her blouse unbuttoned and her eyes vacant: Norah backed into a corner of the laundry room and poised as though ready to defend herself from a vicious attack, a kitchen knife clenched in her hand. And then the idea that Norah wanted a divorce: the young lawyer with the slightly shiny red face and the thinning blond hair: the low voice that mingled pity, irritation, and mockery, speaking the words mentally incompetent and durable power of attorney: the impression of something giving way beneath his feet: heat rising in his face. Arthur saw as if from above what a fool he had made of himself in his full stumbling incomprehension, in his sputtering attempts to insult the idiot lawyer, all the while being distracted by the distinct sensation of darkness falling like a veil from the upper left hand corner of his brain.

The sensation always rippled across his skin like fear if he forgot to prepare for it in advance: his wife’s hairbrush, the white linen mat with the hand-crocheted lace edging made by her mother, the framed photo of the children in first and third grades, the smaller sepia-toned one of her mother on her graduation day; all the familiar objects that had lain on the dresser of their bedroom for over forty years, now suddenly encountered in this unfamiliar place, produced in Arthur, even after a year of regular visits, the sensation one has when arriving home and discovering one’s house has been burglarized; that sudden awareness that something has been moved, that strange hands have touched objects meant only for oneself; that something has been damaged or lost and that the extent of the loss is not yet known. What is it? What has happened? What should I do? And immediately upon this fresh impression the facts would superimpose themselves, his brain would crackle with information spreading inexorably into this new, surprised corner of the self, and like a spider who must construct a new, elaborate, identical web every day, his mind would, once again, construct the whole story: Norah’s illness; the nursing home; pain; no one to call; nothing to do. Freedom.

That was the unexpected chapter of the story. Freedom. He could feel it in his body as he walked down the hallway; he could see it on Norah’s face as he entered the room. She sat in a rocking chair facing the window, the outline of her face and hair silvered with light. Her hair was short, silvered, freshly washed. Her skin was softer than before; no longer lustrous, as it had been in her youth, but infinitely soft, velvety, lined with silvery down; her eyes the color of creekwater, clear, no longer shining but now also soft. And above them, her brow, her long-furrowed, intelligent, tense, thoughtful, worried, angry brow, its lines laid open in the sunlight for the first time in over forty years. Open, unspoiled, like a field of newfallen snow. 

She turned and looked up at him as he entered the room. It was no longer clear who she thought he was. It no longer mattered. They were nameless now, homeless; the architecture of their life had not held. The foundation or the frame had been riddled with some rot, some decay, some great evil beetling its way through the wood. Now it was gone, collapsed, dissolved into a little pile of dust at their feet that shifted with the slightest movement of the air, drifting into the corners of the room, rising as motes into a shaft of sunlight.  

He knows what lies ahead; they had gone through it with her mother. Muscle wasting will follow brain wasting. Speech will drift away to silence; lips and tongue will lose their bearings; then bladder and bowels; arms and legs; teeth and throat. Skin will forget how to be skin; sores will not heal; eyes will go dead. Will pain remain? Will touch give comfort? Or will there be only reptile life, to which human touch means nothing? In the end there will be no sign.

“I brought you these,” he said, holding out the flowers.

 He sat down next to her and laid them in her lap. She looked up at him, and then down at the damp budding stems, her mouth formed loosely into a smile. A flicker of something passed across her face, a brightening, a darkening, light on a March day. “What is this one again?” she asked, seriously.

“Forsythia,” he said, tears streaming down his face, as they always did. 

“Forsyth––” she began. 

The word was like a pebble thrown into still water. It rippled over Norah’s face, once, twice; reflecting its small lights in broken circles. Then softly it sank to the bottom. Falling to rest in darkness, where silt shifts slowly, mud, dead leaves, the skeletons of leaves. The memory of how to be a leaf: atoms unjoining hands, tenderly, without reluctance.  

Norah reached out and took one of the pussy willow buds between her fingers. Slowly she moved her fingertips over the gray down. Then raised it to her lips.