The Bright Hour Read online

  “Yeah. Try adding Kant to that,” he says.

  “I kant,” I manage.

  I tell him I’m so tired I keep saying “kill-dren” by mistake when I mean to say children.

  “You’ll make a fantastic mother someday,” he says.

  Journal prompts for the graveyard: Steal a name and dates off a headstone and write a character sketch. Describe something you see here without revealing the setting. Imagine and describe your own death. Write the first paragraph of a love story that begins in this cemetery.

  John’s students read Kierkegaard and stare off into hand mirrors they’ve brought as props near my students. The grass in the graveyard is so sharp and dry and full of anthills you can hardly sit down, and there is never a single bit of wind to rile the rows of veteran flags. If there is any sound at all other than the occasional muscle car revving through the stoplight at the corner, it is the sound of bees. Big loud desperate bees and the quieter, tiny, metallic-looking bees that cluster at your ankles. Sweat bees, those little ones are called.

  One day, three girls from my class come find me at the oversize cement skirts and raised ramrod of the Molly Pitcher monument near the entrance gate and tell me that a man had just appeared near where they were sitting and loaded a trap with a groundhog inside into his pickup. They say the groundhog was jumping all around in the trap and the man whacked it over the head with a shovel until it stopped moving. One of the girls is crying.

  “Yikes,” I say. “But I guess now you have an amazing plot twist for your story.” They shrug and walk away. I decide it’s probably time to head back to the classroom.

  “See you at the dining hall,” I say to John with a meaningful stare, “if in fact you exist.” He rolls his eyes and goes back to explaining Heidegger’s Dasein to a thirteen-year-old with purple hair and wool hand-knit shorts.

  * * *

  I’ve always loved Molly Pitcher, that Revolutionary War supermom who traipsed into battle fearlessly stirring pots, tending wounds, scrubbing bloodstains, in all the fourth-grade history books.

  She’s the one who found a hidden spring during a one-hundred-degree day of gun fighting at Monmouth and brought cold, fresh water to the soldiers. And then later that afternoon it is said that she picked up her husband’s rammer after he dropped from exhaustion at his cannon and set to work swabbing and loading and blasting the British back to Sandy Hook, New Jersey.

  Also: There was the time when the skirt was ripped from her frock by a British musket ball that passed between her legs, and Molly supposedly exclaimed, “Well, that could have been worse!”

  I think about Molly Pitcher all the time these days—whenever I feel like I’m standing in a battlefield with my heart pounding and a gaping hole burned out of my dress.

  When my pubic hair all falls out at once in the shower and shows up like a drowned baby muskrat in the drain. When I’m summoned to the elementary school to discuss some unfortunate behavior on the part of my elder son, and a kindergartener in the hall sees me and starts to cry. When I try to dye Easter eggs with the kids and end up gagging over the smell of sulfur and vinegar in the bathroom. When I wake one morning covered in hives, my lips and eyes swollen like I was nearly punched to death.

  My friend Melissa, who is the closest real-life person I know to Molly Pitcher, picks my kids up from school, keeps them for hours while simultaneously running her own business, and organizes a parade of friends who show up on our stoop with dinner night after night: soups and roast chickens and eggplant parmesans. At first I try to look human when people stop by, but eventually I stop. Cancer removes whatever weird barriers we sometimes have with others. A mastectomy of bullshit, my mother suggests. All the oh-yes-everything-is-great stuff eventually gets carted off in a bag of medical waste.

  * * *

  One morning with my class in the Carlisle graveyard, I found a headstone near Molly Pitcher for someone named Molly McCauley. I looked it up in the local library later and it turned out she was the actual woman: a well-liked servant for hire—known for cursing like a soldier—who lived and died in Carlisle. And that Molly Pitcher is made-up—probably a legend from centuries of lore or maybe some tall tale the author of all fourth-grade textbooks made up when his wife asked him to help fold the laundry.

  I ended up feeling kind of annoyed at the myth on behalf of Real Molly—and became increasingly fond of her lesser-known story of hard work and quiet survival with the help of a few curse words.

  And I got fonder of the sweat bees, too—even though they stung me a couple times. They like sweaty, sweet, humans for goodness sake. Don’t we all: John and I got married exactly two years later.

  I love the gutsy cement hero woman and I also love the real potty-mouthed housemaid with a ruffled bonnet who is buried somewhere below that crooked, faceless grave. I love the musket ball not hitting me, and I also love the musket ball. I love goddammit motherfucker, and I really love Well, that could have been worse.

  14. The Transparent Eyeball

  Steroids: I wake up with the oily taste of chemo in my mouth—even the flavor of coffee slides off my tongue. I don’t belong in bed, but I don’t fit in out in the world either. I have a sense of myself as a broken camera—focusing on something out on the horizon (the future, cure, recurrence, death) and then, without warning, zooming in on a blade of grass (what is that weird taste in my mouth, is that a new lump, thank you for this beautiful card, this beautiful meal, did anyone remember to pack a snack for the kids). And then zooming out to the horizon again, and then back, and then again. I can’t figure out where I’m supposed to point this thing.

  I know I can’t sit inside for one more minute so I head for the woods, where today it is so brutally green and alive it almost hurts, and I feel I am being drugged with the scent of wisteria. At first I am nearly running—I cannot slow my body—and I can feel in my chest and my fingertips the thrum of some electric-like current and my heartbeat in my ears. But then my breathing takes over and I start to slow down—and that steadying step pulses in the leaves and roots and through the moss that lines the forest floor.

  There is a striking sketch from the late 1830s by transcendentalist artist and writer Christopher Pearse Cranch that was made to illustrate the concept of the “transparent eye-ball” in Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay Nature. Emerson felt that nature was the closest we can get to experiencing God, and he believed that in order to truly appreciate nature, you must not only look at it and admire it, but also be able to feel it taking over the senses. The transparent eyeball absorbs—rather than reflects—what it perceives:

  Standing on the bare ground,—my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite spaces,—all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eye-ball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God.

  In the Cranch illustration, a giant eyeball on long, gangly legs and bare feet stands in an open meadow with hills on the horizon. The eyeball wears a top hat and an Emersonian waistcoat. It’s a funny and beautiful image, and it is exactly how the drugs make me feel: I am a ludicrous eyeball: I edit nothing out: All currents circulate through me and I take them all in. Emerson rolling in his grave: Steroids and chemo are the closest I get to God.

  * * *

  One afternoon my dad stops by on the way home from work to tell me he heard on the radio that all humans have a physiological blind spot located about twelve to fifteen inches out from our faces. My dad, a retired builder, now works as a handyman at several apartment complexes in town. He wears a pager and gets beeped at all hours of the day and night to replace a kicked-in door, reseat a toilet, refloor a flooded kitchen, rekey a lock. He doesn’t mind it at all. In fact, I think he loves it. He hates sitting still, and in this job he gets to zip around town in his minivan listening to NPR and dash in and out of hardware stores and people’s lives.

  “I’m hardly ever bored,” he says. “And I get to hang out mostly in my own world—and that�
�s where I make the most sense.”

  He’s known for being a little spaced-out and sometimes saying off-the-wall things. There was this famous time in my early twenties when my mom and John and I all smoked a joint together before going out to dinner at a fancy restaurant, and my dad—who smoked one joint too many in the ’60s and ’70s—abstained. We all agreed he had never seemed more lucid or made more sense.

  About the blind spot: He tells me that apparently it is the place in the visual field where the optic nerve passes through the optic disc, right where all the light-receptor cells are located. We rarely notice it because our other eye can often see what is happening, and if not—if the blind spots overlap—our brain does the work of filling in the missing information.

  “Kinda cool, huh?” he says. “Interesting metaphor. We’re perfectly imperfect designs.”

  Cool—unless all you are is one single giant eyeball. The blind spot stretches and grows.

  We look it up on my laptop and find an online test that simulates the blind spot—a plus sign and a circle next to each other on a white screen. Sure enough, the circle completely disappears when you shut one of your eyes and hold the screen about a foot away.

  “I wonder how big the blind spot could be, hypothetically, before your brain wouldn’t be able to compensate accurately,” I say.

  “I like the idea that it’s inaccurate at any size,” says my dad. “One little spot of guesswork everywhere you look.”

  On chemo, I’d like to crawl inside that blind spot, whatever its size—scrunch up my body and disappear. That, the brain imagines, is a drop of rain on a windshield, the abdomen of a bee, a tanager on a high branch, a crescent of moon—no—wait—a full moon.

  * * *

  The thing with blind spots: you never see them coming. The night my dad graduated from high school he was in a head-on accident with a car he never saw. When his vision was later checked, they discovered he was nearly blind. Youngest of six kids: high-powered often-absent father, self-reliant mother with aristocratic New England breeding who did not do anything she was not called to do—and preferred taming horses to taming children, and a family with too much of a Puritan edge to consider employing help. He ran wild and mostly below the radar—never had his eyes checked, his learning difficulties diagnosed, or was taken to a lesson in anything. His parents didn’t even give him a middle name.

  “I was amazed to discover that tree branches were full of individual leaves and that brick walls were an arrangement of hundreds of separate red stones,” he remembers. “I had never considered the idea of grout. After the accident, when I first got my glasses, I walked around in a state of constant disbelief.”

  Somehow he survived. Somehow he grew up into the most competent person I know. He can: ride a horse, head a soccer ball, fry a chicken, fix a washing machine, fix an engine, tether a boat in a storm, dance the foxtrot, build a tree house, work out a tune on the piano, calm a baby, win at rummy. He never complains about anything, even though in my lifetime so far he’s been struck by lightning, been bitten by a brown recluse, and lost his life partner.

  * * *

  My parents met in San Francisco in the early 1970s. My mom was living in the Haight, recovering from her first marriage, which had ended when she came home early one day to discover her husband in his underwear in the living room with another man.

  “And amazingly it almost didn’t end then,” my mom told me once. “I almost said, ‘Oh, that’s okay.’ That’s how naïve I was. He had to sort of prompt me through the breakup.”

  At eighteen, she had moved to San Francisco—the city where her mother grew up—from her home in the very sheltered Panama Canal Zone, where she’d lived as the daughter of an angry, domineering boat captain and deeply depressed nurse. She found rebellion, close friends, a good job as a medical transcriptionist—and eventually my dad, who was working at the time for a Fred Astaire dance studio and who recruited his real estate agent and my mom—her roommate—to help him get an extra twenty dollars that the studio paid for bringing in new clients.

  They had a quick and rocky romance: my dad goofy and kindhearted and young, rebelling against the war and his overbearing Yankee family, my mom a little more mature and already tortured by her uncertainty around the role she was supposed to play in the world.

  “The first night I spent with him I woke up to a car honking outside at dawn,” she often remembered. “He leapt up from bed and threw two pairs of underwear and a toothbrush into a paper bag and told me he was going rafting in Colorado and would be back in a week. I should have got up out of that bed and walked away right then.”

  She didn’t. They got married at City Hall. They had a ball together and also fought about the meaning of “getting your life together.” I was born in 1977. In 1982, my dad working construction and my mom still typing, they came to a tenuous agreement about what that might be, and one day we hopped in our Volkswagen Rabbit with a little trailer pulling behind and drove East—to Concord, back into the arms of the family my dad had left behind fifteen years earlier. We were offered a little cottage on my great-grandparents’ estate to set up a home.

  * * *

  My great-grandparents on my dad’s side are Emersons, and RWE is my great-great-great grandfather. Speaking of Molly Pitcher’s legendary cement skirts, descending from someone who casts a shadow isn’t simple work. Like many members of my extended family, I am still searching for the edge of the shadow that Emerson casts: He draws me to him, he pushes me away. Particularly that American monolith Self-Reliance: “Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string.” Close one eye, the iconic essay is a handbook for geniuses and a rallying cry for quirky individualism. Close the other eye, and it’s a recipe for indulgent self-obsession and a parenting nightmare: “What I must do is all that concerns me, not what the people think.”

  The people: That’s what Freddy calls us when he’s not happy with us. “Benny, the people say we can’t watch any TV tonight.” They are Emerson’s descendants, too—another kind of blind spot altogether.

  * * *

  Emerson tracks me down anyway—another round of chemo, another tromp in the woods. One small spot I chant, giant eyeball crunching down the path, as though repeating the little phrase will keep me better attached to the spinning planet. But also I think of what the great man wrote in my favorite of his essays, Circles: “The universe is fluid and volatile.” I’ve been rereading. “Permanence is but a word of degrees.”

  I try to hold both of these ideas like two little magnets in my hand: his and mine. One small spot and the universe is fluid and volatile. They push against each other: “One small spot” requires the constant energy to keep things contained. The “universe is fluid and volatile” is scary, but allows for the idea that there are things that cannot be contained. These two thoughts flip around and now cannot be pulled apart.

  Thirty-three years ago: I am five years old, standing on a hillside with my cousins. It is the centenary of Emerson’s death, and we are all holding a giant wreath at his grave site. We are his great-great-great grandchildren. A reporter takes our picture. I remember the weight of the giant wreath and the nip of Massachusetts spring on my bare legs where I had refused to wear tights.

  “The eye is the first circle; the horizon which it forms is the second,” he says at the opening of that essay. Circles—like cells, like planets, like families, like the spots of light that dance in your eyelashes at morning’s first opening. He writes:

  Our life is an apprenticeship to the truth, that around every circle another can be drawn; that there is no end in nature, but every end is a beginning; that there is always another dawn risen on mid-noon, and under every deep a lower deep opens.

  Here is the small spot; here the densest nut. Here is the musket ball hole. Here is the shape in the world of your child, you wrapped around your child. Here is the dark pool in the thickest woods. Here is the sun that sets in your eyes.

  Thirty-three years ago: My mother is
frowning. You should have worn tights. I am running with my cousins in the graveyard after the ceremony. “Come here,” someone whispers. It is my cousin Bonnie, who is also five. She has found a hiding spot for us. We are behind a gravestone. “Everyone will find us here, and then we will all laugh so hard,” she says—the best idea I have ever heard.

  15. Shave

  When the hair falls out, it is patchy and not vaguely pretty.

  “This isn’t working for you, is it?” says Tita. “I think we need to give you a nice badass Sinéad O’Connor vibe.”

  John performs my first official shave with his electric clippers on the front porch where I used to give the boys their trims. “Lift your chin really high and try not to breathe deep or anything.”

  “No problem,” I say. “I haven’t had a deep breath in years.”

  16. Empty Ocean

  At chemo, they can never find my veins anymore. It’s a side effect of the chemo itself, which has a way of frying whatever it touches. Dr. Cavanaugh is resistant to my getting a port put in: “I don’t want anything unnecessary messing with your immune system at this point.”

  “It’s like I’m fishing in a big, empty ocean,” says one of the nurses, examining my arm with one of their high-tech vein-finders as I stare out the window. “It’s pretty lonely in there. I’m so sorry I can’t find anything.”

  Just outside the treatment area is a roof deck with picnic tables and lounge chairs and huge planters full of flowers. A family is unpacking bags and bags of Chick fil-A.

  “Once we get the drugs going can I take my IV and go sit out there?” I ask the nurse. “I think the sun would feel good.”

  It’s always chilly in the cancer center, and early on you learn to never say no to the warmed blankets they offer you. They might be the very best thing about the place.

  “No,” she says. “Sorry. Patients aren’t allowed out there. Just family members. Isn’t that ridiculous?”