Maybe
There’s a man and a woman sitting on the bumper of a car with the trunk open, and they’re under a streetlight but mainly they’re lit by the screen of the laptop she holds.
They don’t know each other well. They’ve just chatted a bit in the dance class they’re taking. West Coast Swing, the other hard dance besides tango. He’s been telling her how frustrated he is, and she says, Yeah, me too. And she shares words of wisdom as she likes to do, about how dance may be like writing or anything in this way: the real skill, the most essential thing is to keep going, even when you don’t want to. Especially then.
Still, tonight they both chose not to practice after two hours of lessons, but instead to chat about cats. She doesn’t talk much about her cats, doesn’t tell fluffy little kitty stories, but she did write a piece about her dying cat, and when he says, “You’re so real, so open and willing to share yourself,” she is no longer tired and she says,
“Yes. I could go through life with a mask and goggles on and wrapped up in a blanket, and people do that, but for me life isn’t worth living that way.”
And because of the look in his eyes she offers to read him what she wrote about her cat. About the decline and the eight vets and the hours shoveling food into his little mouth, about taking him on a road trip across the desert to Pullman and the CAT scan that tells her what she hoped would not be so. Then the prednisone and the cat who seems to rise from the dead—his name is Phoenix, after all—but she knows how prednisone works and she knows her new cat isn’t really new, and she knows she’s going to lose him.
She reads sitting on the bumper with the trunk open behind her and the man she barely knows next to her, but not too close. This is not a seduction moment, it’s just human.
She reads and she can feel him listening, and when she finishes he’s silent. Then he says, “Ten years ago I sent my son into a spinal fusion procedure, and I expected him to survive.”
More silence.
“He didn’t?” she says.
“No.”
“Ouch,” she says. “I’m so sorry.”
“See,” he says and touches his cheek where a tear has run down his face.
She lays a hand on his arm and they hug and she is proud that she is able to touch him. Was a time when she would’ve been afraid to do that.
Back then her skin was tight and lovely and she was never, ever tired of dancing at 9:30 and she wrote and won prizes and sang, and shot pictures for a living and her time was all her own and she had a long string of boyfriends, and she always believed that the Promised Land was just around the corner.
Back then her dad was still alive and she was still a daughter, and she didn’t sit on noisy buses or walk the grimy streets of downtown or spend her days in gray cubes with computers.
Back then she didn’t sleep, either, and after the Promised Land days she thought she’d ruined her life. She had to write her way out of it. It took ten years.
Now here she is on the bumper of her car under a streetlight, and a man shows her a tear on his cheek, and now she questions wearing sleeveless tops and coloring her hair, and her feet hurt. What? Feet are supposed to take you to the tops of mountains and around the dance floor for hours and never, ever complain. Feet should serve and not be heard.
She questions and objects and resists the action of time on her body, and all that makes her much more tired. But…
But maybe it’s worth it. Maybe that is the price of being able to sit silently with a man grieving his son and not fill the space with empty words.
Maybe this is what it took to learn that we don’t get to keep anything. Not our all-powerful parents or our fragile animals, not even our own bodies.
We don’t get to keep anything and nothing looks as she thinks it should, and still there is beauty. There are words on paper that can make you cry. Leaves on a summer night lit from the bottom by a streetlight, and a tear on a cheek in the dark.