Reprieve

I walk down the blaring avenue, across Klingle Valley Bridge, past condo buildings and side-street bungalows to the place where pavement dead-ends and forest begins. A flock of blackbirds whirls from a leafless tree, swooping and soaring above me and everything. Down the path I go toward Rock Creek. The air smells fertile, of winter’s rot and mold come clean and soil freshly remade. Along the valley floor, amid browns and grays, spring’s greening has begun. Bloodroot blooms. It’s their time in the sun, before the tree canopy convenes. Branches are bare against the sky, but up close, I see they’re budding. All that life, on the cusp of bursting. I take it in. I do. Even the plastic bag snagged on the bark of a fallen oak, and a red sneaker jammed in river rocks. The wind blows. I zip my jacket, and—ow!—a jolt to my chest. Catch a breath. It’s not my heart. It’s not cancer; the scans showed that. It’s pain. N’s spot was cancer, but they cut it out once, cut it out twice. Gone now. To feel such gratitude! Our good luck. Marvelous luck. A reprieve. Reprieve. As in temporary? A body carries its own death, a promise it will keep. 

I imagine it. (My mind goes where it goes.) Not death, but the sentence imposed. A doctor’s words. Test results. Scans explained. The rectangular images, all black and shady gray, pulled up on a screen. A tissue box slid within reach, and N beside me. She’ll drive us home, take us upstairs to collapse on white linen sheets, my forehead on her cheek, night creeping to our windows. I refuse to imagine our roles reversed. I couldn’t bear it, but I’d be there for her. Who will go first? Someone will be left behind. Unless it happens simultaneously. No. Don’t think about that.

Listen to the creek, full of March rain, charging boulders, rushing to the Potomac. Far away, the Atlantic awaits. I’ve heard its waves, felt the pull of its all-consuming embrace. I feel it now. Squirrels chase crackling leaves across the valley. A lifetime ago, Dad raked hickory leaves into big piles and I ran through them, half looking back, smiling at him smiling at me. The sky is so blue today. I’ll stumble, looking up as much as I do. A lifetime ago, I imagined living in the sky. Angels played on golden swings and stars hung like night lights. I close my eyes, but can’t see that child’s paradise. Heaven. A fantasy concocted from church and family stories. I made it my story. So satisfying. Then I grew. By age seven, I realized heaven wasn’t for me. You had to die to get in. And you had to be good. 

I climb a hill. Below, the creek glistens. At its banks, a couple holds hands. I look for the Great Blue Heron. It’s not here, not yet, but memory fills in: the long-legged bird snatching and gulping fish from the river, bulges descending its outstretched neck. 

I stop. It’s my chest. Not pain this time, but what? A quickening. 

It swells, thrums through my veins. It gets too big, yet I want it to stay. Stay. It’s a swirl of memory and longing, and it’s feeling all alone and not alone. 

I’ve felt this way before, and I will again. I will recall these moments, and they’re only moments, each one stumbled upon and none a full-fledged story. Finally, I see. For six decades, a lifetime, I’ve yearned for a story to replace the one I lost in childhood. The truth of it startles me. I want a new story. I want a story that redeems meaning. One that makes sense of things. Not fantasy. I want a story that pulls me, and the multitudes, into its all-consuming embrace, and still lets me be me. I’ve tried to make that story, but can’t find it in me.  

Now birds are calling. I cannot see them. Water is rushing. I feel a breeze. Everything is growing. I walk deeper into the woods. 

*

She told me how her arm bled on the cushioned table as the surgeon’s assistant ran for bandages and gauze. It was the second attempt to get all the melanoma. The blame, doctors guessed, lay with N’s childhood summers weeding soybean fields (in Iowa they called it “walking beans”) under a blistering sun. Some things can’t be undone. I wasn’t with N for her surgery. Across town, a hospital scanner was roaming my left chest, where I once had a breast. I held my body flat to the table—padded, legs of steel, more machine than bed, with no foot rail to press a toe against, no wood to reassure me. The scanner hovered at my sternum. Old images had shown “phantom lesions” there, every half-year, then every year. They always looked much the same: a few shadowy specks. Nothing to worry about, doctors decided. Until now. Thirteen years after my mastectomy and without warning, my entire left chest has become a minefield of pain. A single move can set off searing jolts, rippling flares, and deep jabs. Sometimes a cord wrenches tight below my ribs, mid-chest to my armpit where twenty-two lymph nodes had been cut out. The cord is a phantom, too, arising from distorted neural memories. But the pain is real. Nerves had been damaged during surgery, yet after the first year, they rarely flared. Why now? The first step was to rule out metastasis. On the table, I did what people do. I prayed. Silently. For N and me. To what or whom? Those questions I pushed aside. It didn’t matter if I was making believe or making belief. Something was coursing through me and it needed more than release; it needed form. Words. I made a prayer: “please, let us live.” 

I also made promises. To be kinder, more generous. Of course. To love better. It stuns me how petty and judgmental I can be, and underneath it all, how utterly afraid. I promised to change, but also to stop trying so hard, always trying. Now I wonder if some promises don’t need to be made, but simply seen and claimed where they already are—embedded in daily life, even in routines, in moments that rarely surprise but could. Like the force that pushes buds into spring. Or raises the sun each morning; fulfilling the promise of a new day. Is that force in me? I imagine so, but what comes of it? Life’s promise is death, death of the body, maybe death of everything I think is me. What would it mean to claim that promise? 

Not all of my promises were big. I vowed to remember the blueberries on my spoon at breakfast. They were blue, as I’ve forever known, but, looking close, I saw purple, too, a bluish-black, shimmers of silver-gray, and, where the stem attaches, blushes of deep red. My tongue lingered, curious, in blueberry-ness—sweet but also tart, a little sharp, maybe a bit sour. 

I promised to remember the night when N and I lay not curled together, but on our backs to protect her arm’s surgical wound and the minefield of my chest. Like weary snow angels, we held our closest hands and touched our closest toes, all warmth concentrating there beneath our sheets. Her breaths slowed toward sleep. I tried to follow her lead but could not drift away. I closed my eyes and saw a world in my mind. It had two of me: me as I am today and me as a very old woman. Although I was the maker of this dream, the old me arrived fully formed: tall, lean and muscular, sun-tanned but not weathered, with white hair, gloriously thick and long, and a shawl as blue as the brilliant sky—nothing like me, except for her blue-green eyes. At some ocean’s edge, she took my hand and tugged me forward, playfully, always an arm’s length ahead but half-facing me, smiling, her eyes on mine. Indifferent waves lapped at our toes. She laughed. The air was salty and clean, bracing in a breeze. We seemed to be heading east, a little north. I stopped wondering about our destination; she wasn’t saying. I wasn’t afraid, nor was I eager. I knew, though, I’d lost control of the dream I thought I was making.  

*

With so much going on, I forgot about the Mark Rothko exhibit at the National Gallery of Art. I can’t go now. N’s birthday is soon and I promised myself that I’d make something for her—a story. It isn’t coming along. I’ve fumbled other stories. When someone asks about our earliest days together, I usually deflect or keep it short, omitting that I was with someone else then. And, as N says, I omit our joy. We were always so much more than the story I’ve told.    

I do hate to miss the Rothkos, one hundred paintings on paper, not his more familiar canvases. I console myself by remembering I can walk any time to the Phillips Collection in Dupont Circle and enter its Rothko Room. There, in a space as solemn as a chapel, I’ll often sit on a wooden bench, perfectly centered. It’s low, long as a table, an altar, and I sometimes remember sitting in a church pew with my parents and sisters, watching priests strip the altar of gold, brass, all coverings, and everything after Maundy Thursday Mass, leaving it bare for the coming suffering, then the glory and the promise they said it would bring. On each of the room’s four walls, a massive rectangular painting hangs. Throbbing, afflicting, radiating. I can’t explain it. Sitting there, I’ll turn from one to the next, letting time slip away. Something wells inside me, and I know I could be undone and remade in a moment. 

I turn to my writing desk and time passes. I look out my windows. In my garden, daffodils nod to the glittering day. Two houses down, a magnolia blooms above winter’s debris. It isn’t paradise. It happens every spring. Still, such beauty takes me by surprise. It tugs and I surrender, grabbing my wallet and house keys. I don’t head to the garden or nearby woods. I hop a Metro to the National Gallery. 

The gallery chatters—last evening’s reveries, complaints of arthritic knees, analyses of form and line. I ascend stairs and turn a corner. Stop. Orange-yellow-red pulses on a far wall. “Stay,” it commands. I do. Thoughts flee. Oceans rise. A sun blazes twenty feet ahead, burns time away. “Stay,” it whispers. Gallery voices fall as if to graves. Silence then. Emptiness then. Only the sun, swelling like morning. 

For a moment, nothing comes between me and that painting. Feelings swirl. Hope, grief, fear, joy? They disappear before I can say for certain. I feel myself exhale. A gap opens, some kind of reprieve. The chatter returns, the slap of soles on marble floors. I turn right, to a new wall where five dark rectangles hang. All are variations of blues, blacks, and purples—blueberries. One is dissected by a blood-red line. Another is infused with the green of a late-summer forest overcome by night. Memories–not mine alone—that’s what I see.

"A painting,” Rothko said, “is not about an experience. It is an experience." 

He wanted to make paintings with “the poignancy of music and poetry.” He listened to Mozart, brush in hand. Simple forms, patterns, layers upon layers, darkness and light. There is no blueprint for making something that can slip past thoughts and overwhelm from inside, something that, for a moment, stops time.  

*

The National Gallery of Art has more Rothkos than anywhere else. Before we moved to Washington, D.C., I’d go to the Gallery whenever traveling to the city for work. One time, probably twenty-four years ago, I bought a paper copy of Rothko’s “Orange, Brown, 1963” and had it framed. A gift for N. We were only friends then, though something more in my imagination. She hung it on her apartment wall. One day, like many in that tumultuous year, she and I cried and argued. She gave the painting back. I nearly destroyed it, but instead, for some reason, hid it away. Now it hangs in a corner of our bedroom. Honestly, for years, I’ve barely noticed it there. But recently, with the Rothko exhibit and everything else, it’s become my routine to pause and look at it. That might not last, I know. It’s okay. I made the habit for the making, not for the lasting.

In all of my life, I’ve made one real painting, maybe five years ago. N had been teasing me about the four-by-six-foot stretched, already gessoed, blank canvas in our basement—her birthday gift to me from a decade earlier. When she left town one Friday night for a long weekend, I pulled it out. Stores were closed, but we had a big stash of one-quart paint samples from when we bought the house and wanted fresh walls. To choose colors, we had painted a row of five or six little rectangles on a wall in each room, all slightly different shades. Yellows for the kitchen. Bluish-grays for the sunroom. Sages for our bedroom. Blues for the guestroom and my study. We studied those rectangles for days, trying to imagine how each would look covering an entire room. We hoped for inspiration. Only after the walls had dried and furniture arrived could we see where we’d made mistakes. Those mistakes came to mind when I spread drop cloths on the basement floor and set up my birthday-gift canvas on old chairs. This would be different. I had no expectations, no plans, no skills to test, and no standards to meet. I couldn’t make a mistake. I’d just see what happened. I painted through that night and the next two days, napping for a few hours on and off. A confluence of fire, fields, frothing river, an ocean (or maybe sky) emerged. That’s what I saw, and still do. It hangs over our bed, wide as the headboard, not because it's good, though I like it and N does, too. It’s there to remind me how it felt to make something unburdened by a need to do it well, to be led only by desire to give form to emotions and drives—exhilarating. My energy swelled and fell, high tides and low, and my mind homed in on patterns and forms, colors and light, without trying, like I knew without thinking. It was a force, and now I wonder: was it always there in me, a promise ready to be claimed?

*

For all of our relationship, N has wanted a new dinner table. Our tables have always been second-hand. Dark and heavy. Rectangular. We’ve had the current one for nineteen years and even brought it along when we moved to D.C. despite neither of us liking it much. Replacing it was never a priority for me. Now, though, I think about N eating breakfast and dinner every day, year after year, at a table she dislikes. She wants something lighter, maybe golden oak, a familiar tree with vivid grain, the effort of its growth plain to see. I wish my dad were alive. He was a skilled woodworker, a craftsman known for his bowls, desks, and tables—coffee tables, end tables, sideboards, and dinner tables that generations gathered around for meals and games. My grandfather taught him. I wish I could ask my dad about trees, hard and soft wood, how to use a circular saw, and when to sand between layers of stain. I want to ask him if a tree, after it’s cut, grows for a moment more. I want to ask if wood, when attached to the lathe, still holds a little life. I want to know when, precisely, wood dies. 

N wants something else even more than a new table. Make me a poem, she says. Make me a story. Words are the gift she wants from me. Something to keep. Something on paper. Words on paper live a long time. In our beginning, I wrote her long letters, but they’ve mostly been lost to email accounts we no longer have. These days, I text her and send short notes, often links to someone else’s stories. We talk every day, but those words evaporate. 

My friend Mike and I corresponded for years, traded drafts of our writing and private reviews of the poetry and books we read. We wrote big emails about little things: unraveled our childhoods, recalled highlights from our careers, and told stories of the families we made and illnesses we endured. He wrote of pain that sometimes overcame him. When he died last year, I re-read all of our letters. I copied excerpts about his wife, how they danced in dive bars in their seventies and walked most days through the fields and along the lake near their New England home, how she evolved into the trusted first-reader of his essays and books, and how he was grateful for her prayers, though he didn’t believe. I sent the excerpts to Mike’s wife with my condolence note. In her reply, she said she cried to see his admiration, respect, and love in words she could read and re-read. They had lived together for fifty-some years. They talked. Their bond was deep. He was a good writer. Yet, Mike hadn’t made a gift of words for her. 

I understand. If love were enough, I would have written a story for N by now. 

My dad made bowls and tables for people he loved, but love wasn’t what drove him to the work. It was the experience of making, the hours fully absorbed, working and refining the wood. Alone, but not alone, for he was one with the wood transformed by his hands. A small bowl, made late in his life, sits on my mantel. When I take it in my hands, my chest tightens a little, then eases. It’s a fleeting sensation, but real. A quickening.  

Rothko once said his paintings expressed “basic human emotions— tragedy, ecstasy, doom and so on....” He was dramatic, but also learned and curious. He knew of human suffering, cruelty, and beauty from both experience and study. Born to a Jewish family that fled persecution in Czarist Russia, he spoke four languages, immersed himself in philosophy, and studied classical mythology. He suffered from depression, an oppressive pain. At age sixty-six, he took his life, less than two years after a nearly fatal aneurysm. In his final years, he was driven to paint. To make. 

Despite doctors’ recommendations to slow down, he produced hundreds of paintings, mostly on paper, during his last two years. Some, known as the “Browns and Grays” and “Black on Grays,” are dark and often said to represent human tragedy. But during the same time, he made a suite of large, serene paintings in soft blues, mauve, and pinks. At the National Gallery, walking amid the tragic and serene, I found myself wondering what stirred inside him in his final years, what promise he found in those hours at work. I can’t presume to know, but I’m grateful for what he made and what it awakens in me. 

*

N is in bed, already asleep. Her birthday is a day away. I’ve been trying to write, putting my mind to it for hours, day after day. It’s been hard. Typing triggers chest pains, so I’m writing on paper with my right hand. But it’s hard for other reasons. I’m losing faith in my stories. They can’t bear the weight I’ve put on them: to make sense of things, to redeem meaning, to (for god’s sake) redeem me. 

My head drops to the cup of my hands. A memory: blackbirds whirling from a tree. Those blackbirds are in me. They stay. My hand retakes its pen. Words appear, not swirling or soaring, but slow, one after another. Steady. Is promise there? 

The hour is late. Maybe this thing I’m writing could be a gift for N.

I think we’ll go for a walk on her birthday. I want to show her what I saw in the woods along Rock Creek. 

Storms had downed many trees, the old and big. A thick branch, maybe twenty-five feet long, had fallen from some great height, but not to the ground. It was caught by the outstretched arms of two smaller trees, nestled in each V. I was looking up at the blue sky and just happened to see the trees connected like that. It stopped me. I’m not saying it means anything. But in that moment, the word rescue came to me. And I felt serene. I realized the limb was already dead, probably. The rescue was temporary.