* * *
…
Is it the amount or the frequency of these thoughts that causes concern?
Do these thoughts cause marked distress?
Do these thoughts significantly interfere with your normal routine?
* * *
…
“You can’t tell anyone this,” he says. “Lizzie, you have to promise.” I feel like he is tying me up with rope. “I’m bad at secrets, you know that.” He shakes his head. “Not when it counts.”
He won’t even bathe her. He’s washing her with a squirt gun now.
Lizzie, what’s going on? Lizzie, what’s going on?
Repeat ten times.
So yeah, I tell Ben.
* * *
…
There is a tradition in Judaism that happiness and sorrow must be intermingled. On Passover, you are instructed to remove drops of wine before drinking it to lessen your pleasure. Each drop removed represents a tragedy that befell those who went before you.
It’s the same at weddings. The couple breaks a glass by stepping on it together. This is so they will remember past sorrows in the midst of their present joy.
Sometimes I think my family just brought a pile of broken glass to Ben’s doorstep. He’s been quiet since I told him about everything. Well, not quite everything. There was one thing I left out. I think Henry’s stopped going to meetings. He told me he goes, but I waited outside the other day and I didn’t see him.
“This can’t go on forever,” Ben says. “Just give me time to stabilize him,” I tell him. He nods, looks away.
The pieces of glass from a wedding were meant to be saved. If the husband died first, the wife prepared his body for burial by weighting his eyelids with the shards. If the wife died first, it was the husband’s job to do this. I wish I had known this. I wish I had kept those shards.
* * *
…
Sylvia quit the foundation last week; there’s no hope anymore, only witness, she thinks. She tells me that she feels like she is in a car, trying to accelerate. Some people she works with are trying to get in the car. Some are throwing themselves in front of it to prevent her from leaving.
She’s started forwarding me jokes.
The leaders of Russia, Syria, and America are arguing about who is the best at catching criminals. The secretary-general of the UN decides to give them a test. He releases a rabbit into a forest and tells them they must catch it.
The American team goes in. They place animal informants throughout the forest. They question all plant and mineral witnesses. After three months of extensive investigations, they conclude that rabbits do not exist.
The Syrian team goes in. After two weeks with no leads, they burn down the forest, killing everything in it, including the rabbit. The rabbit was a dangerous rebel, they report.
The Russian team goes in last. They come out two hours later with a badly beaten bear. The bear is yelling, “Okay! Okay! I’m a rabbit! I’m a rabbit!”
* * *
…
Eli asks if he can look up something about robots. I hand him my computer and go to the kitchen to make him some macaroni and cheese. When I come back, he is watching a video from a British morning show. It’s about a robot named Samantha. She is made to look like a human and has two settings, the inventor says. In sex mode, she can moan if you touch her breasts. In family mode, she can tell jokes or talk about philosophy.
* * *
…
Tonight it takes four stories before I can get him to bed. The one that does the trick is about a dog who is on his way to a dog party being held at the top of a tree. On his way there, he meets other dogs headed to the festivities. They stop to talk.
Do you like my hat?
I do not.
Good-by!
Good-by!
This is my dream of how neighbors should talk to each other.
Instead, it’s Mrs. Kovinski knocking at seven a.m. “I see you’ve got your poison paper,” she says. She’s picked up the Sunday Times from the hallway, brought it to my door.
* * *
…
All day, Ben lies on the couch, reading a giant history of war. But he got it at a used-book store so it only goes up to World War I.
In the summer of 1914, there was an electric tension in the air. It would not be long until the descent into the madness of the first fully mechanized war. The British statesman Sir Edward Grey famously predicted what was to come. “The lamps are going out all over Europe; we shall not see them lit again in our lifetime.”
At bedtime, Eli and I start Prince Caspian. At the beginning, the children are pulled out of a train station and land on an uninhabited island. They wander around until they find a bit of a stone wall. Eli realizes it is the ruins of the Narnia castle before I do. Then he starts asking questions. Will he still be alive when I die? If not, what will he do?
I tell him that old dodge. That it will be a long, long time before I do. That we will all live a long, long time.
But this is not what he wants to know.
* * *
…
Lately, Ben has been sending up trial balloons about other neighborhoods. But when we look up the rents they are ridiculously high. I keep worrying he will suggest New Jersey, but he never does.
He has an idea for the summer though. He wants to send Eli to camp at a historic estate where they teach kids to churn butter and herd goats. Eli does not want to go. “It’s you that wants to go,” I tell him.
* * *
…
I keep wondering how we might channel all of this dread into action. One night Ben and I go to a meeting about justice at the Unitarian church down the street. Good people all around, making plans, assisting—so why do I feel so embarrassed?
Most are older than we are; they speak of how others have helped them; they give thanks for those who have reached out and call on us to think about the less fortunate.
It’s church. I remember now how it went.
“I thought you wanted community,” Ben says afterward. But not so much. Not like that. All that eye contact. “Not my tribe,” I tell him.
Q: How does a Unitarian walk on water?
A: She waits until winter.