FROM Enormous Changes at the Last Minute
Two weeks before Christmas, Ellen called me and said, “Faith, I’m dying.” That week I was dying too.
After we talked, I felt worse. I left the kids alone and ran down to the corner for a quick sip among living creatures. But Julie’s and all the other bars were full of men and women gulping a hot whiskey before hustling off to make love.
People require strengthening before the acts of life.
I drank a little California Mountain Red at home and thought—why not—wherever you turn someone is shouting give me liberty or I give you death. Perfectly sensible, thing-owning, Church-fearing neighbors flop their hands over their ears at the sound of a siren to keep fallout from taking hold of their internal organs. You have to be cockeyed to love, and blind in order to look out the window at your own ice-cold street.
I really was dying. I was bleeding. The doctor said, “You can’t bleed forever. Either you run out of blood or you stop. No one bleeds forever.”
It seemed I was going to bleed forever. When Ellen called to say she was dying, I said this clear sentence: “Please! I’m dying too, Ellen.”
Then she said, “Oh, oh, Faithy. I didn’t know.” She said, “Faith, what’ll we do? About the kids. Who’ll take care of them? I’m too scared to think.”
I was frightened too, but I only wanted the kids to stay out of the bathroom. I didn’t worry about them. I worried about me. They were noisy. They came home from school too early. They made a racket.
“I may have another couple of months,” Ellen said. “The doctor said he never saw anyone with so little will to live. I don’t want to live, he thinks. But Faithy, I do, I do. It’s just I’m scared.”
I could hardly take my mind off this blood. Its hurry to leave me was draining the red out from under my eyelids and the sunburn off my cheeks. It was all rising from my cold toes to find the quickest way out.
“Life isn’t that great Ellen,” I said. “We’ve had nothing but crummy days and crummy guys and no money and broke all the time and cockroaches and nothing to do on Sunday but take the kids to Central Park and row on that lousy lake. What’s so great, Ellen? What’s the big loss? Live a couple more years. See the kids and the whole cruddy thing, every cheese hole in the world go up in heat blast firewaves…”
“I want to see it all,” Ellen said.
I felt a great gob making its dizzy exit.
“Can’t talk,” I said. “I think I’m fainting.”
Around the holly season, I began to dry up. My sister took the kids for a while so I could stay home quietly making hemoglobin, red corpuscles, etc., with no interruption. I was in such first-class shape by New Year’s, I nearly got knocked up again. My little boys came home. They were tall and handsome.
Three weeks after Christmas, Ellen died. At her funeral at that very neat church on the Bowery, her son took a minute out of crying to tell me, “Don’t worry Faith, my mother made sure of everything. She took care of me from her job. That man came and said so.”
“Oh. Shall I adopt you anyway?” I asked, wondering, if he said yes, where the money, the room, another ten minutes of good nights, where they would all come from. He was a little older than my kids. He would soon need a good encyclopedia, a chemistry set. “Listen Billy, tell me the truth. Shall I adopt you?”
He stopped all his tears. “Why thanks. Oh no. I have an uncle in Springfield. I’m going to him. I’ll have it O.K. It’s in the country. I have cousins there.”
“Well,” I said, relieved. “I just love you Billy. You’re the most wonderful boy. Ellen must be so proud of you.”
He stepped away and said, “She’s not anything of anything, Faith.” Then he went to Springfield. I don’t think I’ll see him again.
But I often long to talk to Ellen, with whom, after all, I have done a million things in these scary, private years. We drove the kids up every damn rock in Central Park. On Easter Sunday, we pasted white doves on blue posters and prayed on Eighth Street for peace. Then we were tired and screamed at the kids. The boys were babies. For a joke we stapled their snowsuits to our skirts and in a rage of slavery every Saturday for weeks we marched across the bridges that connect Manhattan to the world. We shared apartments, jobs, and stuck-up studs. And then, two weeks before last Christmas, we were dying.