Mukoli

Aftermath

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What Moved the Judges

“…an interesting take on grieving, and finding peace in the aftermath.”

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The years went by, till enough had passed that they no longer seemed a significant unit of measurement from the days before the event. Instead she anchored those times with what else she remembered: When I climbed the volcano, it was still all there, and so was Brother—When he sent me that candleholder, he had a few months more—That poetry reading I went to a day or two before.

What she did still count in years and months was the stops and starts of certain friendships: A year and a half since I last saw Alec—A whole year since Molly came over. Most of these summings up were painful, yet she found a sort of satisfaction in making them, over and over, adding to them as the separations grew longer, till it had to be clear to anyone what they were, till no more excuses could be made for them, till she felt helpless to change their courses, even if she’d had guts enough and little enough pride to try.

When I was at Alec’s and Tim’s that night, I had a couple more hours of not knowing.

It had been a spur-of-the-moment but elaborate Thanksgiving dinner, her second of the day. She saw them in memory as a comical sort of family—just her and four guys—but a family nonetheless for those hours. She’d stuffed herself as fully for Alec and Tim as if they were her parents. 

The next year she’d invited them for Thanksgiving, and was surprised when they said yes.

They even seemed to have a good time. I wonder what they’d say this year if I asked.

She imagined the moment, a slight, apparently neutral pause, Tim’s surprise (after all these months-going-on-years!?!) not revealed over the telephone. Then some excuse: no doubt plenty of other people would have invited them already.

She’d never been sure—would they have told her if she’d asked, did they even know, themselves?—of the causes of their cooling. But she had her theories, chief of which—the timing would be right, the April after—was that they’d disapproved of her going home with that guy from their party on Easter Eve.

Bob, wasn’t it? No, Bill.

It had been his voice that most attracted her, warm and very deep, surprisingly so for someone so slender. They had talked a long time, about politics and drama and cartoons. But it wouldn’t have mattered what they’d talked about, the point had been the sound of their voices: hers, happy, carefree; his, making her for the moment feel so.

Near the end of the party—sometime between midnight and dawn—they had dyed eggs. Tim and Alec, always the bountiful hosts, had hardboiled dozens, enough for everyone’s breakfast, and then some. She and Bill had left with four between them, swaddled with tissues in plastic boxes. Eaten them with gusto, even the tinted whites; then polished off the chocolate rabbit party favors.

But did they even know he went home with me? 

At that hour, he could just have been being chivalrous. For a few moments, even she had wondered if that was all that was going on. She could wonder forever, much good it would do, whether they knew. (Did they know his girlfriend?) It would be too trivial a thing to ask, even if they still spoke.

He probably told them. He was the type who would tell.

And how much did I tell him?

She could well imagine the scenario for how she might have told him what had already begun to seem her secret: lying close, after the awkward and inauspicious beginnings of their embrace, after he’d said, in response to her question (probably thinking he had hinted the fact sufficiently at her party), that, yes, he had a serious girlfriend, someone he didn’t quite live with, she would have allowed as how the specifics of what they did together that night, or what he did with someone else elsewhere the rest of the time, didn’t matter: everything was fine with her because it felt so good for a change to leave off mourning, to be touched by an acceptable man, and not have to wake alone on this holiday. (Why am I so sentimental about Easter?)

No, surely she’d kept those words to herself, realizing—was this the first time?—that she didn’t have to tell: she wouldn’t get to know this man any better, so he wouldn’t have to know. Indeed, only by not telling could she have continued to feel like the life of the party—hours after the end of the last party of Alec’s and Tim’s she would be invited to.

I guess I wasn’t much fun in those days. No more Little Mary Sunshine. Wit gone dry.

Really, she was lucky they’d stayed around as long as they did, been around when they were, handled things so well. Just her one call to Alec, from the hotel, was enough to start the chain of letting friends know. Molly called her within the hour to tell her Lillian would pick her up at the airport. Even John called—the first words they’d had together since he moved out.

Some people wrote. A few notes were waiting when she got back.

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In the beginning, telling took a lot of time—telling those who’d call out of the blue not knowing (before I realized not everybody had a right to know) and those who knowing the bare bones asked for something more. Before Christmas, she wrote letters and postcards to friends who lived elsewhere, some of whom never acknowledged her news, sent instead, if anything, their own accounts of jobs, graduate degrees, business ventures, children born, wedding plans, dental work. She decided to write no more to those who had not responded, but a year later relented and repeated her story, starting with something like “Maybe you never got my postcard or couldn’t read”—typing this time—to the same results.

She thought she understood why.

Some people just can’t bear to say certain things. Resist clichés. And can’t imagine what else to say.

But Lillian never had any trouble. Lillian always said just the right thing. 

Four weeks after she stepped into Lillian’s little car at the curb of the terminal, they met for dinner near where Lillian had been Christmas shopping. At the end of the meal—obviously on impulse: they had never exchanged presents before—Lillian reached into her bag of goodies from a fancy food store, brought out a little earthenware pot of herbs, and handed it to her. Kissed her on the cheek, and said, “Merry Christmas.” Insisted on paying the check for what must now be seen as the Farewell Dinner. Despite a number of long telephone conversations, which she’d initiated every few months and which always ended in Lillian’s saying she’d call back to make firm plans to get together, they had not laid eyes on each other since—nearly four years. She never got to deliver to Lillian her reciprocal gift of chili-coated peanuts from Texas.

Others, though, more casual friends, reappeared from time to time, after a fashion.  There was Evelyn, who heard about the event a year later, from Molly, and called to say:

“I know from my own experience how important it is for friends to be around at times like that, and I’m sorry I didn’t know till now and wasn’t around. But if you ever need to talk—anytime—feel free to call.”

They had dinner, not far from where she and Lillian had gone the last time, and talked plenty.

At Evelyn’s encouragement, she told her story in detail, finally letting a few tears go, saying, “I wish I were over it.”

“You’ll never be over it,” Evelyn said, as if promising something. “Years ago I lost three of the people who mattered most in my life, and I still miss them as much as ever.  There’ll always be a gap in my life where they used to be.”

After listening to Evelyn talk on about those losses, she ventured to mention how certain friends had failed to respond to her news.

“You need different friends,” Evelyn said, sounding like an expert at a rare pastime she rather enjoyed, advising a novice.

Different friends, other friends, new friends—good advice, really.

Evelyn went on to tell how her husband before their marriage had been naively pleased at hearing from certain former best friends, who’d been out of touch since his father’s death and had left him very much alone during the aftermath. Evelyn had let him know such fly-by-night friends were not worth keeping, and after their marriage took measures to let them go:

“They’d call, and I’d always make some excuse to put them off,” Evelyn said. “I’m good at that. They never realize what I’m doing, and certainly not why.”

She herself had heard more than a few of Evelyn’s excuses, knew how charmingly Evelyn could seem to try to make room for the caller in her crowded life.

She told me again, on parting, how pretty I looked, as if giving me words guaranteed to please any woman, alleviate any pain.

Another year passed, and Carolyn called, for the first time since her return to the city months before.

“There’s someone I think you should meet,” Carolyn told her. “She’s a wonderful woman. I’m sure you’ll like her a lot. Her mother killed herself a year ago, and it’s been very hard for her. Her father refuses to say anything, express any feelings about it, and he’s all the family she has left. So she’s been trying to find other people with suicides in their families to talk with. She’s become interested in building a network for helping survivors of suicides.  She wants to write a book about their problems—which have been totally ignored—and she’s looking for people to interview, so naturally I thought of you.”

Had she thanked Carolyn for thinking of her (naturally)? Whatever she’d said amounted to, no, she didn’t want to be interviewed for such a book.

“I must say I’m surprised,” Carolyn said, her voice as stagily round as her eyes were, displaying incredulity and annoyance. “It’s just like Rhoda said: ‘No one will talk.’”

“It’s not that I necessarily wouldn’t talk with her. I just don’t want to be interviewed.”

“That’s what everyone tells her,” said Carolyn. “It must really be taboo.”

“Look, your friend has my sympathy,” she said. “I know how hard it is. It was hard enough for me, even being able to talk with my sisters. It must be a lot worse for her. The thing is, it’s still hard, it’s still something I think about, and have to think about—a lot.  Maybe there was a time when it would have felt good to talk with someone who’d gone through something similar, but right now that’s not something I need, and it would be painful to go into it at length with a stranger, for a stranger’s book. Plus maybe I’m a little jealous of it, as my own material that I haven’t decided what to do with.”

There was a pause. She imagined Carolyn sorting through her repertoire of appropriate tactful phrases for one that would convey she was ever so slightly miffed.

“Well, if that’s the way you feel about it. . . .”

“You might mention to your friend that there may already be such an organization,” she said, wanting to be of at least a little help. “And I wouldn’t be surprised if someone else is already writing that book. Has she done much on hers yet?”

“No, because she hasn’t been able to get people to talk. So she’s mainly still looking for people, and doing some academic research. She had in mind something like Children of the Holocaust.”

“What else has she written?”

“Nothing that’s been published. She’s not a professional writer.”

Which gave her another excuse: she wouldn’t entrust her story to a nonprofessional’s hands.

But really I just didn’t want to be a Case. Even for a well-meaning fellow sufferer who Understands.

The way outsiders didn’t. Or wouldn’t. Even best friends, like Molly. Or former best friends.

She still implies she and Molly are close as ever when asked about Molly by a mutual acquaintance at a party. (Is that just to avoid being rude, or because I don’t want my loss known?) One of these days they were bound to meet again unexpectedly.

Funny how you imagine seeing this person you’re estranged from, imagine acting cold or contemptuous, or saying something straight out to show your anger; then you actually do run into her and all you feel is happy, and you embrace warmly, as if nothing had changed. Except that you go your ways, and that’s that.

Or would be if she could stop thinking about Molly almost daily, like Brother. She knew better. She’d learned at last how limited the friendship had been, but ten years was ten years, and like a young girl mooning over a caddish lover, she had trouble letting it go.

The memory of it, anyway, and the fact of the separation. Maybe feeling hurt by Molly—and Alec and Tim and Lillian—was to feel less hurt by Brother, to miss him a little less. Though he had given her an absolute standard for missing: what he had made himself miss by doing it; what he had made her miss.

“You’re holding on to it,” said Jan, after listening to her talk about Brother eight months after his death, and cry for the first time in a long time.

I’d felt good about crying again for a change. Thought what a relief to be able to cry.

But Jan, who’d been perhaps her most reliable friend during the aftermath, spoke with the authority of one pursuing a doctorate in psychology: “You should think about why you’re holding on to it.”

She wanted to argue, but didn’t:  Of course I’m holding on to it. It’s what he left.

Later she read something somewhere about time required for recovering from traumatic events, and felt like calling Jan to say:  You were wrong. Other psychologists say I’ve got two years.

Only now four had passed, and she hadn’t yet learned to speak of it without feeling moved to cry. Often, or course, she just didn’t tell. Only a few needed to know, and not everyone asked the right questions.

Getting to know had become a test of sorts, and a source of some suspense. She still felt in the early days of a possible friendship or romance as if she were playing a game of chance in which she had a slight edge because she was the only one who knew it was going on.  

The results sometimes surprised her. One person who’d never learned was a lover a year ago whom she’d been sure she’d tell at some point, if only because he’d made considerable effort to find out other things about her. Late the first night they spent together, they talked on and on, and when finally he mentioned his parents and sister, she thought that any minute she would end up telling. Only then he was saying how he hoped neither of his parents would outlive the other by much, and she said she felt the same way about her parents, and he said, No, he didn’t mean what she meant, he meant because of what his parents had gone though.

“What happened to them?” she asked.

“They were in concentration camps,” he said.

She thought she should have guessed, should have asked a question that would have led him to tell, when hours earlier he’d mentioned that his parents had been born in Europe and come here after the war.

“Which ones?” she asked.

He said: “What other ones were there?” She said she was asking the names.

He told her the names. They had been in different camps. They had met in another country after the war.

“Do they ever talk about it?” she asked.

“Not a word,” he said.

“Have you asked?”

“I’d never ask. I wouldn’t want to hurt them. I know they don’t want to talk about it.”

“How do you know that?”

“I know them,” he said. “They don’t have all that much time left. They’re not in good health. The camps took years off their lives. It’s bad enough that they were deprived of their youth and that they had to see what they saw. They don’t want to have to think about it anymore.”

Someday I won’t think right away about whether or when to tell a new man. It’ll just be too long ago to matter. Or there won’t be any new men.

Over the years she’d become skillful in avoiding telling when she didn’t want to tell or wasn’t ready. The sequence of questions that usually led to telling could be stopped short:  To questions about siblings, assuming she’d waited for the other to ask first, she could say, “I have two sisters. What about you?” If brothers were asked about, she would just answer, “I had a brother, but he died a few years ago,” and most people would refrain from asking more.

But not her recent blind date—the first in years—a psychologist friend of Jan’s.

“How?” he asked, as the waiter set down their plates of eggs and pancakes. She couldn’t tell an outright lie and didn’t think to say, I’d rather not talk about it. So there she’d been, crying and telling, in front of a stranger. Spilling coffee, dropping eggs.

I’ll bet he knew. She guesses this now, for the first time.

I’ll bet Jan told him: just part of my curriculum vitae. In memory, he seems lying in wait for me. Why couldn’t he have let it go?

Was it on some professional principle: that she should tell the whole truth, that doing so would be good for her, that she must deep down want to tell? Or was he fool enough to think her telling him would bring them close? She hadn’t been attracted to him, though their conversation had been pleasant enough till then.

Next time, she got away without telling. But next time was a lot different—Because of you.

You. I write that pronoun, and images of you flood in to claim it, as if your limbs composed its letters: you, lying down, curled around me; you, bending over your music; you, slumped against a wall, exhausted, racquet in hand.

You, facing me across a Ping-Pong table the night after the day we met. 

Now you know what I chose not to tell you, as I crouched, back to you, scooping the ball out of a corner, talking over my shoulder so you wouldn’t just then see my face.

I denied my brother—almost reflexively—because I didn’t want to stop playing Ping-Pong, denied not only his existence but the continuing power of his death to disrupt my life.  Which it did at that moment, even though I kept on playing.

Days later, it began to seem strange that you didn’t know, and I wanted to tell you, but unobtrusively, in some natural opening in a conversation. Not like this.

This I thought was just for me. This was what came from thinking about how hard it was to tell you, after the implicit denial, and why. And from sitting around, once more brooding about these events, and feeling more than a little sorry for myself but at the same time tired of feeling so.

Why not write this down? I thought (though not in words). Try to tell yourself calmly and clearly what happened. Try to separate out the bad feelings, say in type the things you’ve been muttering to yourself over and over, get rid of them for good. 

So I did. Or tried to. But when I’d written so far, I came back around to you, wanting you to know what’s in these pages, wanting you to know as much of me as you can

Tolerate—the way I want to know you.

I’m wondering now, with some embarrassment, how all this will strike you, and what more to say before putting this into an envelope. I wish I could come up with something

Beautiful—about you, about “us”—something that would justify the implicit promise in whatever I’ll have said, giving this to you: “Here’s a story to read.”  

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