Blue Shoe
Mattie located Harry in the bathroom, behind a locked door. "What will we do?" he bawled. He cried out in grief and pounded the door. "What can we do? I'm so afraid!"
"Please let me in, darling,"Mattie pleaded.
"No - no way. If I do, you'll talk to me about God."
"I promise not to."
"I don't believe in God. I think when you die you go blank. I won't go to church anymore if Marjorie dies. I don't like anyone at church, I don't even know their names, they don't mean anything yo me."
"I promise not to talk about God," Mattie repeated, and he let her in.
She sat on the floor near the toilet, HArry on the run in front of the sink. He cried with his head buried in his arms, and shook off her attempts to touch him. When he seemed done, he looked at her, his eyes lined in red, and asked if they could have Marjorie frozen.
"Like cryogenics, where they freeze you and bring you back someday?"
"Yeah, when they find a cure. Stefan's mom told us about it."
"Well, no one knows if it works. No real scientists think it does. And they don't freeze dogs. It costs a fortune."
"But wouldn't you try to get the money, if it was me?"
"Honey?"
"Mommy! I don't want to die. I'm so afraid." He started crying again.
"But darling, you probably won't die for eighty years."
"We're almost too sad about Marjorie to go on, aren't we?"
Harry didn't answer. Mattie handed him a box of Kleenex. He wiped his nose on his sleeve and then shredded a tissue. He shredded another. A snowdrift grew while she thought of what to do."
"What do you believe in?" she asked. "I thought you believed in Jesus."
"I do, I just believe in all the other gods, too."
"Oh," Mattie said nicely. "What other gods?"
"The Greek and Roman gods."
The snowdrift of Kleenex grew higher.
The pastor had said once that when people could not imagine surviving physical death, he told them that the bulb could not conceive of the flower it would become. Mattie tried passing this along to Harry. He moaned, butting his nose against the shoulder of her T-shirt, like a horse trying to get you to give it the lump of sugar. She found this touching, until she realized he was wiping his nose on her sleeve.
"Eewwhh," she said.
Harry lay on the bathroom rug, and Mattie gave him a backrub. He was tight and stiff. The red faded from his face, and she rubbed his shoulders until he yawned. "I'm going to fall asleep," he said.
"RIght here?"
"Uh-huh."
She stretched out on a small portion of the rug, and Harry moved closer so she could hold him. "I just really want to be frozen when I die," he whispered.
"Okay," she said. "You can be frozen."
They fell asleep on the bathroom rug. The cats sat in the doorway, watchful, appalled.
Anne Lammot's Bird by Bird is probably one of the best writing books ever published. I had never read her fiction before this one and I found it to be sweet but not amazing. It was a pleasurable and quick read but not very memorable. |
