Points of View / Essais
Once, late fall, someone I love drove a car up to a farmhouse where they didn’t live; someone I love sat down on the couch; someone I love talked to the woman who lived there. What happened next I cannot say, either or both because I don’t know or because what happened was reported to me by someone who asked me not to speak. Later, I visited someone I love in the psychiatric ward of a hospital; they sat on their bed and mumbled words in a language I didn’t understand. In this room, someone I love told me they don’t want to do this anymore; I didn’t know what this meant. I took the phrase with me when I left someone I love behind the locked doors of the ward, when I drove four hours home, songs we both liked on repeat on the CD. I turned this over in my mind. What happened to someone I love isn’t mine to tell, although the worry was mine, and the time of the visit, and the gas in the car it took me to get there; I’ve been told by someone I love those minutes, days, years of my life do not belong to me.
*
The voice on the phone says someone you love has been hurt; they have fallen at school and need to be picked up. You say you are only fifteen, without a license or a car; they will have to wait for your mom. The voice on the phone says the person you love has been in an accident. Your phone number was listed in case of emergency. The voice on the phone says a person you love ran their car into a pole. The voice on the phone says a person you love has been in an accident. The voice on the phone asks if you have a phone number; a person you love hasn’t paid their bills, a person you love hasn’t filed their taxes, a person you love has decided they are exempt from what is now referred to as adulting. Do you know where they can be reached? Do you have a forwarding address? The voice on the phone says someone you love has suffered catastrophic injuries. Farmhouse, the voice says, telephone pole, hospital. Your whole life you have been the voice on the other end of the line.
*
You will not speak about the farmhouse. You will not speak about the car. You will not speak about the hospital. You will not speak about the medications taken and not taken, medical procedures, diagnoses. You will not speak about the boyfriend in jail, or the husband with guns. You will not speak about _____. You will not speak.
*
Someone we love has been hurt. We undertake acts of care. We make them tuna sandwiches, open cans of soup and diet coke. We clean up their blood and mucus and piss and shit, because that’s what we do when someone we love is hurt. We wash their clothes; we wipe their bodies with warm cloths. We call their friends, we answer their phones, we pay their bills. We drive them to therapy, we drive them to the hospital, we drive them home. We do not ask too many direct questions. We talk about them in the third person.
*
Someone I love has been hurt. Someone I love has hurt me. Someone I love ransacked my office; they went through my papers, they read my words in my notebook. Someone I love called me and ranted about what I’d written because I shouldn’t have written it in the first place. It was not my story, they said, it was theirs alone. Someone I love has been hurt; I drive them to counseling, drop them off so they can talk privately about the ways in which they have been harmed by the universe, by someone who loves them, by me. What they say is protected in their medical file, a lock on the door.
Someone I love is right; this is not their story. It is mine. It is ours. Alone, we tell our friends, we tell our therapists, we write letters, diaries, essays, the life we share between us.
Care/Work (excerpt)
shuffledown to feed cats and already the boychild is whining his belly hurts which makes it hard to read what with the moaning going on on the couch which makes me sound ungrateful I know for this child I so desperately wanted but it’s not yet 7:30 on a Sunday and we’ve done this before and will do this again I have no doubt that by lunchtime he will be outside happily playing /
at some point I make breakfast for me, oatmeal with sliced apple and the last bits of candied pecans, and check my email where there’s a request from an automated system to review an article so I click the box “decline” because there are too many requests for things I am asked by actual humans I know like my friend whose father has just died / I leave the boy with the TV and sleeping teen to walk and talk with her / when I get home my son is still whining but less and I do care I really do but can’t do anything about it so go to the grocery to pick up food curbside which is something I can do and back home I put bags away and make a smoothie that hopefully the boy will drink but he says “this is the WRONG JUICE!” / I ask the teenager to do the dishes I ask the teenager to do the dishes I ask the teenager to do the dishes / I am not sure how many times I ask the teenager to do the dishes / the boychild calls from upstairs “there’s a problem” by which he means he has dropped the sewing needle I asked him not to bring upstairs but to put away in the sewing kit and now he can’t find it and of all the things that might be a PROBLEM on a Sunday morning a lost sewing needle does not even register / I go down to the basement and put in a load of laundry and now that the teenager has finally put away the dishes I can load the dishwasher too and while I’m in the kitchen the boy decides he’s feeling better and wants a burrito I know he will not actually eat because he has never eaten a burrito but now he is riffing now on Baby Shark (“Winnie Cat Do Do Do Do Do Do Winnie Cat Do Do”) and today might actually be the day I have a nervous breakdown
instead I cook ground beef because there is no meat for the burrito he is now making himself and figure this can also double in some sort of casserole or somesuch and to be clear I do care that this child is only 55 lbs and the doctor used the words “failure to thrive” a few weeks ago the same words when they cut him out of me emergency ten years ago because my uterine environment was “hostile” and failed to care for him / I stand at the counter and watch while he eats
