The Age of Grief - Jane Smiley [74]
There is the permanent threat of death. In the fifties, people used to grow trees through the roofs of their houses sometimes, and I often think of death as an invisible tree planted in our living room. When the doors are closed and locked, the insurance paid, the windows shaded, injury and the world excluded so that we, thinking that we know what we are doing, can sit complacently at the dining room table, that invisible tree rustles, flourishes, adds a ring of girth. Any flight of stairs is treacherous, the gas furnace is a bomb waiting to go off, Renuzit may stray, unaided by the human hand, from top shelf to bottom. A child carrying a scissors might as well be holding a knife to her breast; bicycles beside the door yearn to rush into traffic. A tongue of flame can lick out of the wall socket, up a cord carelessly left plugged in, and find the folds of a curtain. From time to time, unable to sleep, I have lain in bed counting household hazards: radon in the basement, petroleum products in the carpeting, gas fumes in the stove. I don’t often think of illness, but a child in the next block had meningitis last year. When Eileen, that is the mother, went to the hospital, they looked her in the face and said, “Twenty-five percent chance of death, twenty-five percent chance of severe brain damage, twenty-five percent chance of minimal brain damage, twenty-five percent chance of full recovery,” and they were so matter-of-fact, Eileen says, that she just nodded and said, “Oh. Thanks,” as if she were taking a rain check on a sale at K-mart.
I wonder once in a while how my father would have reacted if one of us had died. It seems to me that he would have noticed something missing, that my absence, or my brother’s, would have prickled at him through the day, and he would have upheld the forms of grief, but I don’t know that he ever really looked at us, or perceived enough about us so that the removal of one of us would have been a ripping of flesh. Soon enough he would have gotten behind the stove or the clothes dryer or the dehumidifier with his electrical meter and forgotten about it entirely, as he did about us alive. Dana said that I often underestimate him, but in this case, I think he was a wise man, to have addressed himself to the world at large like that, to have stood in front of us, only half perceiving us, reassured by the shuffle of our feet and our sighings and breathings that all of us, whoever we were, were back there.
When you are in the habit of staring at your children, as almost everyone my age that I know is, of talking about them, analyzing them, touching them, bathing them, putting them to bed, when you have witnessed their births and followed, with anxious eyes, the rush of the doctor and nurses out of the delivery room to some unknown machine room where some unknown procedure will relieve some unknown condition, when you have inspected their stools and lamented their diaper rash and, mostly, held their flesh against yours, there is no turning away. Their images are imprinted too variously and plentifully on your brain, and they are with you always. When I agreed with Dana that I wanted to be “an involved father,” I foresaw the commitment of time. I didn’t foresee the commitment of risk, the commitment of the heart. I didn’t foresee how a number on a thermometer would present me with, paralyze me with, every