4
Dark Green Leaves
The last time Gloria had spoken to Leonard was in the fall, before her diagnosis.
After some thought, one night in June, she placed a call to him. The phone rang and was answered. She heard him say her name.
“I’m the woman you met when I was young and dumb. You put a baby in me. It’s the same old Gloria, and I’m terminally ill. I thought you should know. Laugh. And how are you?”
Later, she would be unable to remember his reply. He must have expressed concern, a quiet request for further information. Whatever he said, it was something smoothly forgettable. At least he had picked up and was listening. It was all she had wanted. The floor was hers. She caught him up.
“I spent all winter going to these stupid doctors hearing I had a pinched nerve. And then it’s this dreadful thing. If I could have the time back, I wouldn’t even have gone to them. There’s nothing they can do about it anyway. Just when you think you know everything, here comes this thing. And I spent all that time wondering if I should write a book. I don’t want to talk about it. I don’t. Corey’s fine. He took it like this little champ. We did something right. I know you’ve never bonded—I’m just being honest. Because I care about you, Leonard. Yes, I care about everyone now. That’s what it’s teaching me. And I want you to love him.
“How could this happen to me?” she asked. “What did I do wrong?”
After their call ended, she put her head against the pillow and shut her eyes. At one in the morning after she had drifted off, her cell phone rang and woke her up. It was Leonard again.
“There can be many causes,” he said into her ear. He had already done a great deal of research. “It can be sporadic, or it can be familial. Familial would mean that someone you share genes with has it too. I’m assuming no one in your family has it. You would have told me. Your father died of heart disease, I think, so he’s absolved. I’m not sure about your mother. Sporadic means it just pops up. There’s a higher rate among smokers and Gulf War veterans, neither of which would be you. So that means there’s something in there that we’re not seeing, probably a tiny molecule that goes bad. Something in the environment sets it off. The thing that’s fascinating is that, mathematically, there has to be a single domino that starts it all. One domino goes down, and it sets off a pyramid effect that takes out everything.”
The turtleneck-wearing social worker had given Gloria a folder with her appointments in it and told her she needed to mark them on a calendar. She had to follow up with the neurologist and her primary care doctor in August. She was going to meet with a physical therapist beforehand. She had a note to contact the patient services department to ask an important question, but she couldn’t remember what the question was and had to find where she had written it down; she had a Post-it somewhere. Also the social worker had strongly advised her to contact her insurance company to learn about her coverage. Did she need a letter from her primary care doctor? Did she need referrals? Did her insurance cover DME, which meant durable medical equipment?
It struck Gloria that the story of her death was beginning as a homework assignment.
At school, she’d dropped out in stages. She’d seen the end of her schooling coming; she’d watched it happening. All throughout this progressive breakdown, she’d taken the position that the school was an unreasonable authority and that she was trying to do something that mattered more than her assignments. Wasn’t it possible, she liked to think, that her bad grades and run-ins with teachers and administrators were part of a larger story, the formation of a rebellious and independent mind? When a college counselor warned her that she was headed for trouble, Gloria sat through her lecture and promptly headed outside to smoke a cigarette, aware of herself as a misunderstood and embattled figure in the story of her own life. If a fellow student asked why she’d failed a paper, Gloria would say, “I had to work. I had fucking rent. I’m sorry if Mister Ivory Tower Professor doesn’t get that.”
But she would live to repent her choices. Sometime after dropping out of school, she’d painted a picture of a woman: face, arms, shoulders, ribs. Under a shower. Mouth open. Arms held up under the chin in a cringing, self-protecting posture. Forearms flattening the breasts. Hair dripping blue paint. The oil paint applied to the canvas with a knife. Clumps and streaks of dark oils—black, gray, purple—thick pigments visibly laced with threads of crimson. A woman emerging from the swirl through hints of contour, nakedness, falling water. The eyes blotted out by the shower falling on her head.
The painting was a self-portrait. Naturally, the woman in the shower, made of oil and canvas, couldn’t speak. The point of her seemed to be to express through her physical bearing a suffering that rendered her mute. But if she could have spoken, she might have told you that all she could think about was dying as a way of escaping sadness.
But this was long before Gloria knew that she would die of ALS.
Rather, it was after meeting Leonard. She had met him on a crisp fall day in 1993 when she had been supposed to write a paper. Fleeing from her assignment, she had ventured onto the MIT campus by accident, partly abetted by a wish to trespass on the elite university, marched into the student union, put her Doc Martens on a chair and tried to read The Female Eunuch. Seconds later, a man had told her, “I find you very attractive,” and her life had changed forever.
His fascination for her consisted in all he knew. A security officer with the keys to all the rooms, he let her into things she’d never thought of, like approaching the humanities from the standpoint of mathematics. What if there was a formula for feminism—or for her self—and, through him, she could figure it out?
They broke up very soon; they didn’t even last six weeks. He simply dropped her, as if she were defective, which she knew could not be completely true. Then she spent the whole next year thinking about him, which meant that there was something to him even if he’d broken her heart. She dreamed about having him and the formula, if it existed.
The baby, the fetus, she didn’t want and had that taken care of. And doing so, alone, at the women’s health center, made her angrier at her mother and father, who were traditional and religious, than at him.
In 1995, she ran into him again while working at a coffeehouse in Central Square, where everyone from MIT came for coffee, which she had known when she got the job.
They fell back together immediately without courtship, waiting or flowers. She didn’t believe in those things. She believed in the truth of her feelings, which were as real and valid as anything in the Bible.
They began their second affair in the winter. Sometime that spring, before the end of the semester, she dropped out of Lesley, where she had been hanging on so long now by her fingernails, for good, thinking this was the ultimate rebellion.
That fall, after some psychological trouble, she had Corey, alone, at Mass General.
She lost school, love, family, pride, trust in human beings, her apartment in Mission Hill. Her man from Malden had misused her and ditched her yet again! The portrait of depression dated from this time.
But if she thought she’d gotten rid of Leonard, she had another think coming: Now that she was a single mom, he came around to see her. They didn’t live together—she lived in Mission Hill, Cleveland Circle, Dorchester, JP, and other places, including her hatchback—but he was part of the city and kept coming, at times of his own strange choosing, to sit in her chair and discuss the origin of the universe while she breast-fed her son in front of a changing cast of roommates, one of whom was Joan.
Finally, she had moved to Quincy in oh-seven, had been here since.
It had gone like this with him all throughout the time that Corey had been alive, fifteen years now, and Leonard was ingrained in her.
Corey resigned from Star Market and, the next day, hiked up the hill away from the water with his hammer and met Darragh at a house on Albatross Lane. There was a thirty-yard dumpster out front where the roofers were throwing out shingling and a one-ton stack of pine two-by-fours in the yard.
It was seven a.m. and Darragh was hauling tools out of his truck. When he saw Corey, he said good morning and took him to the stack and explained: He was going to pull each two-by-four, measure half its length to find its balance point, mark it with a pencil, hook a rope around it, and let the roofers pull it up. Two boards were already leaning up against the house as skids to protect the siding.
Darragh gave him a tape measure and a carpenter’s square-tipped pencil. Corey tried tucking the pencil behind his ear. It fell out right away and he put it in his pocket. He laid his hammer on the grass.
The house looked like a pretty house with blue siding and white trim. The walnut front door had a shiny knocker. Through the living room window, he saw a ship’s lantern and other nautical motifs. Only the roof had been taken apart, giving the effect of a human face with the skull open for brain surgery.
Carrying the boards exhausted him. They were very long and heavy. In his fatigue and inexperience, while turning away from the pile, he struck the house with the end of a board and came within an inch of breaking a window. He looked up at the roof and saw Darragh staring down at him.
“If you can’t do it, just say so. I’ll get someone who can.”
“I can do it.”
When they took their break, Corey trudged up to the DB Mart alone. He was standing in the parking lot eating a ham sandwich, his arms and shirt filthy from wrestling the boards, when Tom drove up in his Ford and hailed him.
“How ya making out?”
“Great!” Corey hurried over and shook the hand that Tom extended.
“What’s he got you doing?”
“I take these two-by-fours and tie a rope to them and they pull them up on the roof.”
“You been up on the roof yet?”
“No.”
“I wonder how fast he’s going. He tells me he doesn’t have the best crew.”
“I hear them. They sound like they’re having a good time. I’m down in the yard by myself.”
“He says they’re slow. Ya never know. It could be him. He’s a touchy guy. How is he—Darragh? You getting along with him?”
“Oh yeah!”
“He’s got a way of losing his cool sometimes.”
“Really?”
“It doesn’t mean anything. He comes around eventually. I always used to think it was funny to see him lose it when me and him worked together. One time, I seen him take a guy’s snap line and throw it across a fence.”
“His snap line?”
“The string they use to snap a line.”
“Oh yeah. Right. Why’d he throw it?”
“Because it was the wrong color. It’s supposed to be orange. It’s a carpenter thing. Whatever. Ha!”
“Why does it have to be orange?”
“So they can see it better. They make them other colors, but you’re only supposed to have orange. The guy had green or something. Darragh’s like”—Tom grabbed an invisible object from Corey and tossed it—“ ‘Fetch!’ We were laughing. He’s all right, though. I never seen him miss a day of work.”
That was commendable, Corey agreed.
“Thanks for getting me the job.”
“I’d rather see you work than some kid who doesn’t appreciate it.”
Tom went into the minimart and came out a minute later with a shopping bag of wet, cold Gatorades and Dasani waters from the cooler. He mounted his truck and plunked them in the footwell.
“For your guys?”
“Yeah. We’re in the rafters today. It’s a sheet metal shed, so it’s hot as balls.” He cranked the ignition. “Going back to work?”
It was his way of saying goodbye. Corey promptly nodded yes and went back down the hill.
Back home after work, Corey was taking a shower, the white sunlight coming through the small window, half-open to a wilderness of backyard marsh grass like the hairs in a giant lion’s mane. His arms showed up very tan in the bathroom, contrasted against the tub, the white vinyl tile. The tile was peeling, the porcelain discolored, the faucet encrusted with salt, soap scum, mildew. The green shower curtain with frogs on it was attached by cheap plastic rings to the bar, some of the rings tearing through the plastic. The water ran coolly over him, and he felt very alive and cool after working in the hot sun.
He heard someone arrive when he was in the shower. He turned the water off and listened through the wall. It was Leonard—visiting their house for the first time in quite some time. He was having a long talk with Gloria about her disease.
Corey walked out in a towel to get his jeans. Leonard had his back to him, and Corey saw his sallow face in profile.
“You’re all alone out here in Quincy, aren’t you?” Leonard said. He looked out Gloria’s window at the distance to the Boston skyline up the coast. He glanced around her sun-filled house and listened to the tranquil silence of the marsh.
He left around four o’clock, saying he had a shift. He wasn’t in uniform, though he could have been planning to change at MIT. He was wearing a pair of charcoal slacks, a fedora like a detective, and a white undershirt. Corey followed him outside. The daylight was coming from the west but still beamed hot and bright on the shore. Leonard’s polarized sunglasses responded by darkening, making his eyes impossible to read. The glasses were expensive. Corey would see them on sale at a LensCrafters in the Braintree mall for $350. His father’s car was waiting on the roadside. He drove a Mercury Sable, a shadow widening under the wheels on the graded asphalt. The kind of gym bag a lot of cops carry sat in the front seat.
He asked his father what he would be doing when he got to work.
“I’m doing a plainclothes investigation. There’s been a string of campus burglaries.”
Corey noticed that he was carrying a set of police-issue handcuffs.
It was the time of year when the days are long and you can’t see the evening coming. When you did, it was just a brief pretty postcard as people went off to the bars before an aggressive summer night began.
Leonard got in his car.
Her car was a red hatchback from the 1980s. The red had faded out. She called it “Scarlatta” as in Scarlet. The day after Leonard’s visit, she took it north along the shore, across the bridge into Mattapan, a ghost town. She passed a Baptist church and saw huge dark trees behind the sunlit wooden buildings and not a soul in sight. The road became the Arborway. She reached Jamaica Plain.
It was Sunday and everyone was holding hands in Jamaica Plain. A rainbow flag hung outside this church. Couples in sunglasses and straw fedoras were licking ice-cream cones together in the sun. Mop-headed children in hand-me-down dresses ran through the crowd and drew chalk spirals on the sidewalk.
Gloria parked and joined the throng. She had a burlap shopping bag with a heart on it. She went into an organic grocery.
Yesterday, Leonard had told her to consume antioxidants. “That was my instinct all along! The yoga diet! And now to hear it from a science perspective!” she had marveled. He said she could beat this disease; it depended on her willingness to follow the correct solution, even if it hadn’t yet been ratified by conventional science, which was corrupt.
She went to the vegetable bin and weighed a sweet potato in her hand. Her eye fell on lush wet greens brimming from a cooler. Did they have dinosaur kale? She went to check. On the way, she found powdered wheatgrass. They had lucuma powder too, a natural sweetener with a caramel taste that reinforces the immune system. The lucuma fruit has green skin, yellow meat, a large pit like a mango, and grows in Peru.
“I miss your store!” she told the checkout girl, a woman wearing a kerchief in migrant-worker style.
After paying for brown rice pasta and a dry pint of raspberries, Gloria took another turn through the market to see if there was anything she had missed. Past the vitamin aisle, there were books on alternative medicine: She read the titles on the spines.
A bulletin board at the back of the store issued calls to action: protest the war; protest Harvard University’s expansion into Allston; protest Whole Foods, which was displacing minorities; protest the police, the city council, gentrification; join the Socialist Workers Party, create a fair and decent world, one that would not be ruined by our animal natures.
The market had a back door. It led her into a high-ceilinged, blue-walled space. A wide staircase with an ornate balustrade led up. She climbed the stairs, carrying her burlap bag. A wood-carved golden lotus hung above the landing—a picture frame, which, instead of a painting, held a mirror in the center, like a third eye. A cold spicy, incense-y smell filled the air. On the next floor, past saffron curtains and a cubby full of shoes, she found a yoga studio with hardwood floors—a whispering place.
She saw an advertisement for a spiritual retreat run by a guru—a Caucasian with a shaved head who had given himself a Hindu name. His flyer said he was a Harvard-educated doctor. You could spend a week with him in Telluride, Colorado, meditating and praying, hearing him lecture—full immersion, $3,500 for ten days.
The girl behind the counter at the yoga studio looked like a twelve-year-old boy. Gloria went to her, smiling, and whispered, “This looks so fantastic!”
The girl whispered, “It is!” and gave her a brochure.
“Can I take this home and look at it?”
“You should!”
She drove home, both hands on the wheel, centering herself, filling herself with serene breaths at the stoplights, the small engine running under her.
Gloria’s summer went on—it wasn’t over yet. The date passed when Leonard had said he’d check back without any word from him. Corey kept going to his job at the house that needed a roof and coming home, suntanned and scraped-up, dirty and hungry and sleeping in his room across the wall from her. At his job, he heard the carpenter’s crew clowning on the roof. Day after day, she applied her makeup and drove up 93—to help people who had checked out of America with their drug problems check back in—now knowing what she had always claimed to believe, that there really was something far bigger than workaday life: death or life itself.
A week into August, she went to her clinic day at Longwood. The neurologist held Gloria’s hands as if he wanted to dance with her and compared her limbs with his eyes. He slid his hands up her bare arms to the shoulders. She was wearing a gown. She thought she smelled his breath. He noted a pathological hardness in the thinning muscles of the left forearm beneath the soft bag of her skin. Spasticity, a classic sign. She looked away from what he wrote on his chart.
In Gloria’s mind, she had a bad hand and a good hand. The disease was in the bad hand, the left one. It was now visibly, abnormally thin—and weak. She could barely generate any pressure with her thumb, her weakest digit, which severely limited what she could do. Her fingers were a little better, but not by much. She placed things in her bad hand instead of picking them up directly. Paying for groceries, she dropped her bank card on the conveyor belt and was unable to pick it up. She told the impassive checkout girl, “I’m sorry, I have a bad hand.” At home, unpacking vegetables, she ran cold water over her hand at the kitchen sink.
“Will that help at all? Icing it?” she asked the neurologist.
“It might not hurt.” He held her atrophied hand in both of his and studied the dent that had formed in the adductor pollicis, the triangular muscle between her index finger and her thumb.
She had fasciculations in her bad hand, and the tremors were climbing up her forearm. But, so far, just the forearm, the muscles connected to the fingers—the flexor sublimis digitorum, had she known the name. The internal sensation which had first crept over her—that manic feeling in the flesh—the electric energy—she was waiting to feel where it would happen next.
She bought The Book of Ayurvedic Healing at Whole Foods. She bought a book on essential oils and aromatherapy. She bought a book by the Maharishi. She bought a set of metal spheres, so-called Kung-fu Exercise Balls, in a red velvet box; they were to be rotated in the hand to build dexterity and health. They contained little chimes, which warned the user if she wasn’t manipulating them smoothly. They cost her $45 in Chinatown. They were too heavy for her bad hand, so she never used them. But of the chimes, which Corey said were girly, she said, “Don’t you understand? I need them so much.” And he was so sorry for laughing then. She racked up five hundred dollars on her credit card buying healing books published by Singing Dragon Press and the Higher Balance Institute.
A twenty-one-year-old associate at the market, who considered herself “a passionate expert in healing,” told Gloria she “absolutely had to had to” get clary sage oil.
Labor Day was almost upon them now.
Gloria returned to the yoga studio in JP and bought a month’s worth of classes. They were expensive. The instructor wore green-and-orange tights, which made her think of tropical fruit—and the rain forest, where chemical compounds with extraordinary properties have developed over the millennia. The instructor put Florence and the Machine on the sound system, arched her ripe flexible body and lifted herself into a handstand, her legs projecting sideways like a break-dancer above the polished maple floor.
“We’re not here to show off,” she said. “Try it if it serves you. This is the Eight Angle Pose.”
“I’m out of practice,” Gloria said.
“There’s no such thing.”
At home, Gloria faced her son in the kitchen. “My yoga instructor said I’m the most focused student she’s seen in a long time. I try everything, even things that are too hard for me. I tried a really hard one today and fell on my face: the Astavakrasana. Your mom’s no quitter.”
She had stopped at the Purple Cactus. She took a wet bunch of Paleolithic kale out of her reusable shopping bag and put it in the refrigerator. She unrolled her mat on the kitchen floor and kneeled and bowed in a posture of obeisance to something greater.
The next day she was too tired to execute a Cobra. She couldn’t rotate her biceps forward, lock her arms, point her toes and lift her heart. By the third week, she didn’t want to go to class. She moved her mat to the back of the studio and limited herself to Downward-Facing Dog until she could get her strength back. She caught the instructor eyeing her; she wasn’t her favorite anymore. But even Down Dog got too exhausting. She spent the rest of the hour in the half lotus, whispering ong namo guru dev namo, telling herself that golden streams of prana were flowing through her hands.
The instructor suggested that maybe Gloria should try something less intense than Vinyasa Flow.
A few days later, she dropped a fork. She and Corey looked at each other across the table. She had been holding it with her good hand. “Oh no,” she said.
The dormer got built, Darragh didn’t need him anymore, and the summer ended.
The first week of school, the principal met with Corey’s class. The students sat in the bleachers in the indoor basketball court, looking at how each other’s bodies had changed over the summer—the shoulders, the hair, the girls leaning forward on the bleachers, the tattooed butterflies and roses that had appeared on their lower backs.
“Welcome back,” said the principal, Mr. Gregorio, who wore a yellow dress shirt and black slacks and a laminated ID card. “This is going to be a special year. We did a lot of work over the summer to make this an even more outstanding year than last year. I want to remind you of your opportunities at this school. Football, basketball, volleyball, wrestling—you literally have everything. In other districts, it’s not the same. Take Braintree. If you want to try welding, they make you go to vo-tech. Not here. We let you decide on your major as late as senior year.”
It was all made possible by block scheduling, he said. He held up a schedule card.
“You all need to have one of these. We’ve spent a lot of time on these, so that you can avail yourself of the opportunities.”
His staff stood at the wings of the court. The men were dressed like him in ties and extra-large dress shirts to contain their chests and shoulders, tightly buttoned at their necks and wrists.
After Mr. G spoke, out came the guidance counselor, a straight-backed Chinese woman with a Boston accent, who told the juniors it wasn’t too soon to start thinking about college.
Corey went to his scheduled classes, shook all the same hands as last year, ate his lunch and did his bit of homework. But the semester seemed to get underway without him. He saw Molly with the girls’ volleyball team, wearing warm-up suits and white towels and running stairs. Because of their different schedules, he only saw her at a distance. He tried to wave. He heard she was busy applying to UMass. He went home to his empty house in the afternoons.
On Saturdays throughout the month of September he helped out a friend of Tom’s at a construction site in Milton—organizing a job trailer, creating order, sorting screws and nails and tubes of silicon, putting each thing where it went. It was the high point of his week, but the job ended.
Tom was under the gun with a new project and it was best not to bother him until further notice, so Corey looked for his next job on his own. He didn’t try that hard to find one.
One day after school he turned on the computer and Googled his mother’s disease. He found a website hosted by the National Institutes of Health and watched a video of a thing that looked like an X-ray image of a leg bone—a whitish transparent pipe with a bulbous end. It converged on a pink striated cable made of bundled strands, almost touching it. Golden flashes of light pulsed in the gap between the transparent bulb and the pink striated cable. With each flash, the pink cable contracted like a beating heart. The pipe was a nerve, the cable was a muscle. The pipe started changing color, shriveling and turning gray, blackening like a dying tooth. The flashes went dim, like a bulb burning out. The pink cable stopped squeezing, and then it changed color too, darkening like unrefrigerated meat.
After watching the video, he sat for what seemed like hours with his head in his hands.
When he looked up, he noticed the rigging tied to his bed, which had been there since Mother’s Day last spring. He sprang up and pulled apart the knots and threw the ropes and pulleys and all his nautical books away in his closet and closed the door on them forever as far as he was concerned.
The sky projected a gray movie down on the shore, the color of concrete, the color of the sea—and he watched it, watched it like a woman on a widow’s walk, frozen into inaction except for pacing with her eyes on the horizon waiting for her husband’s ship. The autumn winds picked up. Out on the Cape, a squall was hitting the boats that weren’t in yet. Sitting alone in his room for how long he didn’t know, he listened for Scarlatta. He stood up when she came in, the night having fallen. As she came in out of the black outdoors wrapped in her winter coat, he looked to see if she was doing badly or not, if there had been more bad news.
Sometimes she made dinner, sometimes not. She didn’t want to talk about what was happening. They didn’t hear a thing from Leonard.
As the weeks passed, the fall turned very dark. To Corey, it seemed as if an invisible hand was turning down the lights of the world. His mother went out at night, and Corey didn’t know where she was going, that she was sitting by herself at the Half Door, while a local DJ played early eighties breakbeat and the young electricians and landscapers drank around her. They wore heavy black hooded sweatshirts and plaid shirts.
One night, a guy watching Gloria at the bar signaled his friend. He had seen her wrapping both her hands around a beer bottle in order to lift it. They watched her drink. The men smiled at one another.
She would have looked so small at the bar with her short blonde hair and her spine beginning to hunch from loss of muscle.
“Want me to hold that for you?”
“I bet you could.”
A few days later, through her bedroom wall, Corey heard his mother talking on the phone, saying maybe she ought to shoot the moon and go to Thailand while there was still time. Not Lhasa—the hippie trail, China Beach. Get a boyfriend. Get her groove back.
The conversation frightened him.
“Right!” he heard his mother say. “OD on China White. I should.”