Deb

MARCH 20, 1987

Deb goes to Ginny’s farm to borrow her TV and VCR. It’s been three months since Stephen died and she wants to show Danny there is a world larger and more capacious than the one they are living in. She wants to show him how art—poetry, film, visuals—can make meaning out of suffering, carve a pathway through one’s grief.

It’s been a long time since she’s been back to Farther Heaven. Ginny’s the only one of the originals left there—she pays the mortgage with a slim inheritance; paints the walls with birds and vines and stingrays and bees.

Ginny greets her at the door, leans toward Deb with a long hug, which Deb accepts. “Oh baby,” Ginny says. “I’m so sorry.” Old friends.

They drink coffee in Ginny’s rambling kitchen and joke about Randy and his banjo. About that cold winter. About Deb fucking Bird in the attic at the top of the stairs.

Ginny spits wine as she laughs. “Jesus. We’re growing old, Deb.”

“Eccentric.”

“Wild,” Ginny shouts out, cooing. “And broken,” she adds, her voice quieter.

Burnt sienna, Deb thinks, perusing the artwork in Ginny’s studio. A horse’s body and a woman’s head. A woman’s body and a horse’s head. Oil on pine boards. Grays and blues and blacks—the color of smoke, the color of November.

“I love these,” Deb says, brushing her finger along the dried ridges of the paint.

So nonpolitical, these muted landscapes of white birches and rust-colored leaves. These conversations between darkness and light, color and space. Or maybe just quietly political. A way of saying: here.

No matter, she loves them, gets lost in them—the texture of far-off ferns, the graceful necks of birches. The way light moves, radiates, reflects, dances. Cadmium yellow, alizarin crimson, sinopia, rose. A way to be less lonely amid the trees. A way of talking back to them. Beauty: she grows fonder of it every day. Keats: Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know. How wrong she thought he was when she was twenty-two! How right she now thinks he might be.

Ginny shrugs. “They’re something. A reflection of light.”

Deb nods. What is she doing to make her way through the days? Danny. She has given her life to Danny, her child, and to the house where they live. She splits kindling to get the stove going every morning, pores over seed catalogs, feeds and tends to her birds, works at the library. In the late afternoon she starts making dinner, does laundry, washes the dishes. She recalls reading Simone de Beauvoir in her college dorm room, a cigarette perched between her lips, furiously underlining: Few tasks are more like the torture of Sisyphus than housework, with its endless repetition.

Is her life now radical in any way? Widowhood. Mothering and housewifery. No different from Hazel’s life down the hill. Not all that different from her mother’s, after all. She’d like to ask Helen Nearing: But what about feminism? How do you reckon with that, amid all your loaves of bread?

Standing in Ginny’s studio she thinks maybe she should have stayed here, in the commune on the hill, and grown old with Ginny—artists in their refuge—yoga in the mornings and wine in the early afternoon. A diffused feminism. Art a way to at least feel engaged with the conversations of the world.

But Danny. Her son. No way to regret the life that brought him to her: green eyes, long limbs, his blood and hers. And Stephen, too—the way when he walked in the door she wanted to go to him, every time, draw his body, in a thin T-shirt or thick wool, toward her. Put her nose in the crook of his neck and breathe in.

ON HER WAY BACK FROM GINNY’S SHE GOES TO THE VIDEO store and scours the racks for something decent. Some Fellini, Godard, Bergman, or Tarkovsky; the directors she loved in college. A part of her that’s been shut down for too long. At last, in a far corner, she finds Fellini’s 8¹/2.

She sets the TV and VCR up in the living room of the cabin. She makes popcorn, opens a bottle of red wine she’s picked up at the store, pops the movie in.

Blue light projecting onto those dark pine walls. It will be the first movie Danny sees, and she can’t remember if it’s at all appropriate. She saw it in college sometime and has had Anouk Aimée’s face etched in her mind ever since, accompanied by Nino Rota’s buoyant and emotive score.

The images light up the screen: Guido the tortured artist in dark-framed glasses, a cigarette drooping from his lips. Deb smiles at the pleasure of a good image. Drinks her wine, pours herself more.

They watch Sandra Milo fling off her towel: “Guido, do you love me?”

The sex scene turns to dream: his dead mother in the room. A steady stream of flashbacks and dreams interwoven with present time. “Is that you, Mama?” Guido the boy-child asks.

“So many tears, my son,” she answers.

Deb glances at Danny. He’s staring, transfixed. She puts her hand on his arm.

The Italian actresses are glamorous and elegantly coy—coiffed hair and dark eyeliner.

Look at me now, Deb thinks, nearly laughing out loud, glancing down at her legs and feet. Stephen’s old blue jeans and the plaid shirt—also once his—full of holes. Her hair, shoulder-length, which she cuts herself in front of the cracked mirror in the upstairs hallway. A form of feminism, yes. But does it bring her joy? Does one need to be desired in order to feel beautiful? Deb wonders, watching Anouk walk though a crowd of admiring men. De Beauvoir: One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.

So many sex scenes! She should have known. Danny sits beside her not moving, not looking at Deb.

“Don’t worry, kiddo, it’s just the movies,” Deb says quietly, and it is, just the movies. Nothing like real life. All of the unknowns that live between the sheets no matter how well you know each other.

Sometimes when she was having sex with Stephen she would close her eyes and think of Bird. Not because she didn’t love Stephen’s body but because she was desperate, occasionally, for something other. For another life lived. To live out all the possibilities she has shut out in the night, in the dark, with his body beside her.

Of course she never told him that.

And who did he imagine while he was making love to her? She’ll never know that, either. That’s the thing about marriage, she thinks—all those dark places, untouched and unknown. How you share the laundry, and your dinners, and the bed you sleep in, and the child you make, and yet there can still be so many facts or secrets, shameful or mundane, left in shadow.

Nino Rota plays on—spikes of humor, constant motion.

The credits roll, and Danny rises, smiles at Deb briefly, climbs up the ladder to his room.

“Night, love!” she calls out, overly cheerful, a half-drunk creature, and he nods and closes the door behind him.

Deb sits in the dark and finishes her bottle of wine for a good hour or more. Her head is buzzing with images of Rome. Of bordellos and leather and quick one-night stands. Of the woman she might have been if she was elsewhere, if she had not married the man she married. A bear. The woman who married a bear. If she were to make a film about her life, that would be the title.

Deb laughs. The woman who married a bear who watched Fellini films during the winter, got perversely drunk on red wine in the dark alone.

What a film that would be! Choking on her wine. What a sad film that would be.

That night, like many others, she wakes at three in the morning, cold, and finds herself reaching across the bed for Stephen’s warm body. After a while she becomes sure that 3 A.M. is the hour he froze to death, that her waking is some kind of spirit vigilance. Maybe even that his spirit is hovering. Her dead unhappy king of the woods. She hasn’t ever believed in spirits before, no matter what Hazel thinks of her. She wasn’t and isn’t that kind of hippie. But when she wakes in the night she feels closer to Stephen than she does any other time. Sometimes she cries, and sometimes she whispers things to him. Our son  . . . , she says, quietly, toward the rafters and the window above their bed. Or, my life without you  . . . And sometimes, and this she would never tell a soul, he answers back. He places his callused, warm hand on the small of her back. He rubs it, gently, says quietly: Hello in there. Hello.