Eggshell
Jacob’s face lay stark against the rich brown pillow, like a slick pink scar on a tanned arm. He’d lain there for nearly an hour without speaking. “There’s no wrong way to feel,” I finally said.
His soft eyes once loquacious and expressive had turned to hard boiled orbs quieted with grief. Lassitude crept into his pores. No more upset than a man should have been over the loss of his mother, but hungry for validation. “This is how I should feel,” he said defending an emotion he kept concealed from me.
“Yes,” I said and left the es suspended high as if to say Sweetie or Honey, but not.
“She wouldn’t want an open casket, you know.” He didn’t ask, but stated. I didn’t know. In our year of marriage, his mother had eluded me. She lived a thousand miles away and was in the hospital with a broken hip on our wedding day. Jacob used the same reason that he had then, “She wouldn’t want people to see her like that. Broken.” He exhaled, “I hope they know that.” They are his brother and sister who never left his hometown. Separated not only by location, but a span of fifteen years. He, the youngest, never quite felt a part of them.
“I’m sure they know.” I found it oddly simple to say the right thing, and he was docile, receptive to sweetness of which he normally would have been suspect. I took advantage of it and found myself vacuously repeating, “Everything will be okay,” the mantra of the wounded.
He rolled onto his side in our bed, away from me. His arms stacked on top of one another with back, neck and shoulders slack, dead weight. I stroked his hair. “Everything will be okay.”
As I lay beside him, I tried to envision his mother. Everything I knew of her lifted from a black and white photo and culled from his peculiar habits and mannerisms. He never told me much about her, but she looked like someone you could know. In the photo, she stood in the middle of a garden; her curly dark hair framed her bright face. Despite the photo’s obvious failure to emit scent, there was an apparent void where her scent wasn’t. I imagined standing beside her in the garden and being unsure whether the sweet smell arose from the flowers or her.
Jacob kept the photo in his wallet; a tribute to a young woman he never knew, part of a family I never knew or would ever know with father and now mother gone, there was no more connecting tissue, only common marrow.
“Why do you do that?” he asked but didn’t pull away.
“Do what?”
He motioned toward my stack of books on the nightstand. Four, all at different stages of completion, bookmarks peeking out, whispering secrets to one another. “How can you read more than one book at a time?” He sounded indignant as if I was betraying one book with another.
Resting my hand on his shoulder, I said, “Sometimes I want to read something happy. Sometimes I want to read something sad.” I squeezed his shoulder lightly, “I contain multitudes.” That was our inside joke, our excuse for everything.
When I met Jacob two years ago, he told me the Whitman quote while we sat in the park. We’d been dining with a group of friends at a nearby restaurant. Jacob and I had grown tired of their vapid obsessions with work and money signified by clandestine glances. I excused myself to the restroom, and when I came out, Jacob was standing there.
“Let’s run away,” he said.
“What?”
“Let’s run away. Just the two of us. We can live off the land, at least for a couple hours.” He grabbed my hand and pulled me outside, down an alley, across a street, and to a park. “See?” He dropped down onto the ground and pulled me with him. His fingers danced on my ribs. We laughed. “Isn’t this nice?”
“I love it,” I said, “but we’re not really living off the land.”
He immediately sprung up, “Just a second, my dear.” He searched for a moment, and came back with a yellow flower. As he handed it to me, he said, “You shall possess the good of the earth and sun, there are millions of suns left.”
I tucked the bulb behind my ear and said, “It seems against your character to steal cheap lines from dead poets.”
With a laugh, he continued, “Do I contradict myself? Very well then, I contradict myself.” He shot his arms to the sky in an overdramatic display and shouted, “I’m large. I contain multitudes.” He’d said it with an air of lightness. He’d laughed as if that uncomplicated the most intricate problems.
“And does that atone for your contradiction?” I’d joked.
“Yes. I contain multitudes. That pretty much covers everything.” It was a simple idea in simple terms, but in that moment, it was wholly ours.
Now at my squeeze, he flinched and rolled onto his back looking at me through slit eyes. He sighed, “You’re a civil war of emotions.” The statement that pretty much covered everything uncovered by him. His lightness gone. With his mother newly dead, I should have known he wouldn’t want to be drawn back into our world. “Maybe I should get her daffodils,” he said.
“Perhaps.”
“We had them lining our walkway growing up. I doubt they remember.” He seemed calmed by this idea.
“Daffodils would be nice.” This detail added appropriate color to the photo in his wallet. I wondered when it had been taken. I imagined his father standing there, taking the picture of his mother moments before asking her to marry him. Or maybe it was older than that. At that thought, I stopped myself. I felt as if I was stealing memories he’d so closely guarded. “What was she like?”
He turned toward me expressionless, a face I confused to mean, are you sure?
“I want to know,” I said.
“She once told me that I had a savior complex, but I thought I just liked to hear people laugh.”
I smiled, a smile urging him to go on, wanting to hear about a time when he’d saved her, made her smile, spread the lightness and laughter he’d given to me so many times.
“She was right about me though. I didn’t know it then. I learned it from her, who martyred herself daily for her family, closed herself off afraid of splitting the fragile shell of her marriage. Her codependence kept her with my father long enough for me to be born. If my mother was well adjusted and healthy, I wouldn’t exist. I exist because of fear and weakness. I exist because an abused and frightened woman couldn’t leave a man.”
In a way, I reveled in his sudden openness with the sublimity of a train wreck, not knowing its exact cause.
“Frailty made flesh,” he said and his instincts took over with a fractured laugh recoiled by the gaze of a deeply sad man. I didn’t know, I wanted to say, you never told me.
“I learned to hide in laugher at an early age. It made everything go away. It made me forget. It made me feel happy and loved. I crave it so much that I taught myself to laugh at everything. I laughed at my dad passing out in his truck in the driveway. I laughed at mom, so frantic and scared. I laughed at flunking out of college. I laughed at myself most of all. Haha, everything’s okay. Can’t you tell? I’m laughing.” Again he paused for a long time, and I recognized that the piece of him I loved was farce. “It’s not so funny anymore.”
Initially overtaken with a conglomeration of sympathy and pity, I couldn’t react. The ugliness of his story enunciated by his callus expression, as if he was reciting a story he’d told many times before. Like an addict going through the first step for a second time. Like a published love letter debased by the eyes of others. A potentially shocking manifesto that failed by revealing nothing but his own endeavor to keep himself secluded and safe, verifying everything I already knew. So pathetic, I hated him.
I thought back to the phone call he’d received an hour earlier. In our Sunday evening tradition, we’d been eating popcorn and watching a movie, Miller’s Crossing, his favorite movie. He threw kernels up in the air and caught them in his mouth only pausing for key quotes. “Nah, it stayed a hat and no, I didn’t chase it. Nothing more foolish than a man chasing his hat.” He liked the nonchalance of the characters.
“Open up,” he said with his hand aiming for my mouth.
“No, I know you better than that,” I joked turning my head and contorting my face.
“Come on.”
Feigning reluctance, I tilted my head back and opened my mouth like a baby bird awaiting regurgitated worm from its mother, trusting. He threw the kernel at my chest. “Hey!” I lunged forward and tackled him on the couch. My fingers dug into his sides, half tickling half scratching.
He laughed. “Oh, Baby, Nobody knows anybody. Not that well,” he said quoting a previous scene. I moved back over to my side of the couch, eyes on the movie. His phone rang. He picked it up and hit ignore. “My sister,” he said and set it back down.
A second later, she called again. “Hello?” He listened for a second, “Oh.”
Oh punctuated with a period, solemn and static. An oh understood universally. An oh always followed by what’s wrong? He hung up the phone, and before I could ask, he said, “My mother just had a heart attack and is dead.”
“Oh.”
For a long time, we just lay there. The soft spin of the ceiling fan was the only sound. Like turning gears, it approached with subtlety, but resonated inexorably. “Our whole life is nothing but preparation for death,” he said regaining himself.
“That seems reasonable.”
“No,” he said, “that’s not what I mean. There is far more revelry for leaving than solemnity. Birthdays, graduations, vacations, marriages, anniversaries. All these celebrations indicate the end of one thing for another. Divorce and death being the obvious two not celebrated, but softened by our aptitude for leaving. Some people say those moments change a person. New beginnings. But that’s not what affects us. It’s the leaving. We’re forced to revert to the person we know we are. The one that’s been with us thus far.”
Although I tried, I couldn’t help thinking of Song of Myself again, “All goes onward and upward, nothing collapses,” I quoted, “And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier.” The memory lives on, I thought. Or does it? Constantly mangled and revised, and worst of all rationalized. Maybe we truly die when our diluted memory does. Whitman’s luck.
For the first time, I realized how similar the photo of his mother was to our moment in the park. The flower he’d picked for me, a daffodil. I’d first read Song of Myself my sophomore year in college, perhaps he had too. Or a former girlfriend had read it to him while they were lying in bed together, as we were, and in her mind, that moment, wholly theirs.
All of our memories were stolen. They were his memories I’d captured for us. Stretched and contorted, pried from his mind in the name of us. I hung onto them like a blanket; wrapped myself in them to ward off the cold. Marriage should not be the leaving of one’s self, but of singularity. My multitudes, layers of soft warm blankets, have cushioned his thin eggshell but kept us separate, singular. Even if I could release these stolen memories and hold him in my naked hand, he’d remain unbroken.
It wasn’t his sentiment I disagreed with. It wasn’t his mother I wanted to know. It was him. A death stole his laughter and revealed a seamless blank shell whose contents I’d never know. I pulled him close to me, “You’re right. Our whole life has been preparation for this.” Just as I’d thought, he was stiff in my arms. “Everything’s okay.”
