“What will I do when something happens?” asks June. “Something happens” always means death. It is a strange euphemism. It means, “What will I ever do when Maria, the love of my life, is no longer here with me.”
I said something similar to my therapist when everything was going well. Teeny was still alive, if confused and moving slowly, and my dog Annie was still alive, if having seizures and wearing a diaper. “I’m afraid something is going to happen,” I said in the dimly-lit therapist’s office. And what did she do? She laughed. She said, “Well, I can guarantee you that something is going to happen.” I wasn’t paying her to tell me that. But that was a long time ago, or so it seems now. Now I am with Lauren and, once again, life is good. But not for June. She is in that state of fear that something is going to happen.
We first learn about Maria’s cancer when Lauren sees the two of them together at the doctor’s office. She comes home and says to me, “Maria is yellow. As yellow as my shirt.” Later Betsy and Julia, June and Maria’s best friends, come by to tell us the news. “Pancreatic,” they say in hushed voices, nodding slowly, looking down. “The death sentence cancer,” they say. “This is the worst possible news.”
After they leave our house, they are going to make the rounds to the houses of other family couples, to tell them the news. That’s the way we identify ourselves; we will be there for each other: we are family. If we see a couple we don’t know, not part of our group, at a concert or at the grocery store, we can just tell. One of us will punch the other and whisper, “Look, family.” On my phone I have set the ring tones to play “We are Family” if any of our friends call.
Being gay is the one thread that runs through us and holds us together. We may not have anything else in common, but we have that—it makes us “other.” It puts us on the outside looking in; all of us know that feeling. Lauren and I don’t like to watch sports on TV the way the others do. And we don’t know how to fix things or use power tools. We also never played softball. We joke that they may not let us join the club. But they do; they are our chosen family, and Maria has the death sentence cancer. Something is sure to happen.
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June is on her way home from Kroger when she sees the shoe lying beside the road. As she drives, in her mind she is going over how it might be when she gets home. Maria’s parents are there from Puerto Rico, and Maria is making Flan. June is supposed to get the Carnation brand evaporated milk, but she hasn’t been able to find it and has bought the Kroger brand instead. She pictures how Maria’s mother might take the can out of the bag, her brown arm reaching in, the mother with the short gray hair and dumpy body like a pillow with a belt, her skin caramel-colored from the Puerto Rican sun. If the milk is wrong, she will wave her hands in the air and talk in Spanish to Maria about the milk and about June, something that will sound like, “Why can’t she ever get anything right? She’s like a man, un hombre.”
When she sees the shoe, June has just driven across the bridge beside the power plant, its tall towers shooting into the sky. She doesn’t know why she stops, but when she sees the shoe, she puts her foot on the brake, slows down, and pulls into the grass beside the road. Cars continue to whiz past her. The shoe lies there in the tall grass like a dead rabbit and about that long. It is a black-and-white golf shoe, probably the largest size made for a man. It is old and beat up. It looks as if it has been run over by a big truck. She doesn’t know what compels her to pick up the shoe and toss it into the back of her truck. She just does.
When she gets home, she is not in trouble about the milk, and for several hours she forgets about the shoe. She doesn’t remember it until later, after dinner, when everybody is sitting in the living room watching “Dancing with the Stars.”
The next day when she is out watering the flowers in the yard, Maria looks in the back of the truck and sees the shoe. June is down at the end of the driveway getting the mail out of the box when Maria yells after her, “June, what is this shoe in the back of the truck?” June walks down the driveway and when she gets close to Maria, she shrugs and says, “I don’t know. I just saw it by the road and picked it up.”
“Well, get rid if it,” Maria says, walking back into the house.
“I’m going to take the garbage to the dump,” June says, swinging three large black garbage bags from beside the garage into the truck. She sees the white toe of the shoe sticking out from between two of the bags.
When she gets to the dump and disposes of the bags, the shoe is left in the truck bed. Not knowing why she does it, June picks it up and puts it on the seat beside her. Then she drives to Jill and Susan’s house and sticks the shoe into their newspaper box. The game has begun.
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These are the members of our family. When Lauren and I go to the Brick on Tuesday for “Wings,” they are sitting around a long table. “Going to Wings” doesn’t mean anything figurative or literary, nothing like freedom or spreading our wings and floating over the sidewalk without shame, nothing about being open about who we are, nothing about the wind beneath our wings. It just means that the chicken wings are cheap on Tuesdays. Lauren and I park our car as usual in the lot behind the Tourism and Trade office next to the Exchange Bank. In the fall the three ginkgo trees beside that lot are solid yellow. As we lock the car I tell Lauren about the short story I wrote in college called “The Ginkgo Tree” about the nursing home where my mother used to work as head nurse and about the symbolism I created between old age and death and the way the ginkgo tree suddenly drops its yellow leaves almost overnight. That’s what will happen to these trees, I tell her. One day the tree will be covered with the yellow leaves, and the next day the limbs will be a bare black skeleton against the blue sky.
When we walk into the Brick, our friends, our family, are circled around the table. Starting from the left are Jill and Susan. Jill has buzz-cut hair and used to clean houses before she retired. Susan, blonde and blue-eyed, works in Human Resources for the Piggly Wiggly. Pam, who plays the drums, is sitting beside Susan. Her partner, Linda, lives in Atlanta and works for a computer company. She comes to Milledgeville for the potlucks but not every week for Wings.
Next to Pam are Betsy and Julia who used to work at CDC in Atlanta; when they retired, they moved to Milledgeville to buy a home at Lake Sinclair. June is sitting next to Julia, and Maria is not there because she is having a bad day and is staying at home with her parents. Maria’s illness is the reason her parents are visiting from Puerto Rico.
When Lauren and I sit down, Jill is telling everybody about finding the shoe in their mailbox. Julia tells us that Maria’s pancreatic tumor is inoperable and that Maria will start chemo soon. Julia takes out a plastic bag from her purse and passes it around the table, giving each of us a purple rubber bracelet that says, “No one fights alone.” Everyone but Lauren and me orders wings. Some want mild and all flats; others order medium and all drums; some add celery and bleu cheese dressing. Lauren and I order salads because we don’t eat meat.
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Maria was a nurse before she retired. She is blond and beautiful with a colorful Hispanic personality that draws people to her. People who refer to June and Maria called Maria “the pretty one.” Then they follow with, “not that June’s not pretty, but you know what I mean.” June is tall with short red hair and is the one who cuts the grass and trims the shrubbery but cannot cook and doesn’t clean the house. Maria is fanatical about cleaning, washing the towels every day and mopping the floor with wood soap that makes it shine like a mirror. With Maria’s parents there, June can’t set a half-full coffee cup down without one of them picking it up and washing it. And they all speak Spanish to one another, leaving June out. Maria’s mother is constantly patting Maria’s cheek and crying, blubbering in Spanish. Maria’s father is a handsome silver-haired man with dimples, a dignified Hispanic man who looks wistfully at his daughter and sings “Chiquitita” to her. “Chiquitita tell me what’s wrong.”
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June and Maria met in a gay bar in Atlanta. June was on the prowl. She had a reputation for choosing a different woman every month. Maria was supposed to be Miss January. June saw her from a distance dancing a salsa dance to a pop eighties song, shaking her bootie and stomping her foot, throwing her blonde hair back and laughing, her white teeth and red lipstick flashing in the strobe lights. June went up behind her and put her arms around her. Maria told everyone later that she thought, “What’s this old woman doing talking to me?” But Maria became the lasting one. They had a commitment ceremony in Florida at a church, Maria dressed in a sapphire blue dress with high heels and her hair pulled back with a sparkling barrette. She looked like a Spanish princess. June wore a black tuxedo with a white ruffled shirt. They told us later that June couldn’t dance and, during their wedding dance, June was thinking, “Is this song ever going to end?” while Maria was thinking, “Are we ever going to move off of this tile?”
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Maria is our family nurse. She was a nurse and a nun in a Puerto Rican order. When she realized that the religious life wasn’t her calling, she became a nurse who cared for AIDS patients. When the other nurses refused to go into the room, Maria went in and cared for them. This was her calling. When any of us had to go to the hospital for anything, Maria went too. When Lauren had to have a heart catheterization last year, Maria got up at four in the morning to come with us to the hospital.
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June and Maria’s relationship with Maria’s parents is better now than it used to be. When they first visited them in Puerto Rico, Maria’s mother told them that they couldn’t sleep in the same room, that it was against their Catholic faith. She called June “that woman.” Maria told her that “that woman” had a name, her name was June, and if they couldn’t have a room together, then they would stay in a hotel and not at their home. The mother then changed her mind. Now, during Maria’s illness, they have gained a new respect for June. She is a good caregiver for Maria.
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Jill and Susan bring the shoe over to mine and Lauren’s house when we have the next potluck. They hide it on top of the refrigerator, far back, where it doesn’t show. Maria is feeling too bad to come, but June comes and brings Flan, made by Maria and her mother. We don’t discover the shoe until I climb up on a step stool to put away the casserole dish I used for my Vidalia onion casserole. Lauren and I talk about creative and funny ways that we can shoe the next couple. We decide to mail it to Pam’s partner, Linda, in Atlanta. So we do. For a long time we don’t hear anything about the shoe.
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After Maria’s parents go back to Puerto Rico, June and Maria take a trip to visit them there. They think it will probably be their last visit. In Puerto Rico, thirty or forty of Maria’s relatives gather in the house and pray the rosary. A Spanish priest comes over and says Mass. Maria goes with her father to the church where she was baptized. Her father has promised God that if Maria is able to visit Puerto Rico again, he will walk on his knees to the altar. June e-mails pictures to us of the thin skeletal Maria walking beside her kneeling silver-haired father all the way to the altar.
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One morning when Betsy and Julia go down to the lake to have their morning coffee, they see something floating beside the dock, a little raft tied to one of the wooden posts by a rope. They walk closer, and there it is, the black-and-white shoe strapped to the dock by a rope, floating and bobbing. “We’ve been shoed!” they say.
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When they return to Florida from Puerto Rico, Maria goes to the Mayo Clinic in Jacksonville for a round of chemotherapy. While she is there, Jill and Susan have the potluck at their house. They set up a videocamera and we all make a video for Maria. The introductory music is “Ain’t no sunshine when she’s gone,” and the closing is “Lean on Me.” Sandwiched between the music are couples, sitting on the sofa in front of the camera, talking to Maria, telling her how much we miss her and that our prayers are with her. Lauren and I sing a duet to her, the Irish Blessing, “May the Road Rise to Meet You.”
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One morning when I am walking in the backyard with the dogs, I see the shoe tied to a tree by the shoestring. I untie it and pull it down, then go into the back door telling Lauren, “Betsy and Julia have shoed us!”
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We hear that Maria is beginning to feel the effects of the chemo. She is sleeping a lot and has dark circles under her eyes. It is a race between her body and the cancer…who will die first.
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Tonight I call June and Maria. June tells me that Maria has had a bad day today. She gets chemo again on Monday and then has shooting pains in her stomach on Wednesday. I am thinking of the two of them out there, and they seem so alone to me, dealing with this sickness together. It must be taking everything they have, just to make it from one day to the next. It has been a long time since they have been together with all of us.
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June sends an e-mail to everybody, telling us that Maria doesn’t have good news. The chemo has not shrunk the viability or the size of the tumor.
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I pick up Maria and take her to her chemo. Her hair has thinned and is cut short. The blonde has grown out, and her hair is now silver like her mother’s. Her eyes look big and brown in her thin face. She tells me that she and June have been talking about which is worse, what Maria is going through or what June is going through. She tells me that, if it were up to her, she would ask the Lord to take her now, but she keeps holding on for June and her family. She says she prays for June every day. She is trying to teach June how to cook and how to wash and stack the towels, that she should put the fresh towels on the bottom of the stack and take the new ones off the top. I don’t tell her that Lauren and I repeatedly wash the same ones and hang them back up. She has her way of doing things, and she wants June to learn. She weighs 85 pounds now, but she wears clothes that fit her and dresses up in makeup and earrings. She does not want to look sick, and, despite the way her body is ravaged, she is still a beautiful woman.
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We’ve all been talking about death a lot lately. Lauren and I have been writing our own obituaries. We have gone down to my family’s cemetery plot in Memory Hill Cemetery to see if there will be room for us to be buried there.
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All my life I have seen symbols. When I was in college at Georgia Southern, each morning when I went to class, I passed a small dogwood tree. For several days the tree held two blooms, side by side. I had been reading Wuthering Heights in my English class. One morning as I passed, one of the blooms was gone, leaving a single bloom. I stopped a moment, and, remembering the deceased Catherine tapping on the window of Heathcliff’s room in an attempt to be re-united with her love in that space between the living and the dead, I pulled off the single bloom that was left alone on the tree.
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We are all going to June and Maria’s and taking dinner. I will take my sweet potato casserole with the brown sugar and pecan topping; Maria loves it. I will also take my cranberry congealed salad with the nuts and celery and the sour cream topping. Betsy and Julia are bringing several desserts and cornbread dressing. Jill and Susan are bringing green bean casserole. It will be good for us to all be together again.
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Today when I take my walk beside the lake, I see that the white duck is alone. The geese have left for the winter. Then, waddling from under a bush, is one remaining goose. As I watch, the goose goes into the water, flaps its wings, and then comes back to the shore and waddles up to the duck. The two appear to have become a couple. Geese, I’ve heard, mate for life. This goose is saying to the duck, I stayed to be with you.
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Today I notice that my purple bracelet is not on my arm. I panic, afraid that it is a sign. Then I find it on the floor of the closet and put it back around my wrist. I am relieved.
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Maria is getting worse. She is going through a bout with constipation. The pain medicine causes that. A few hours after eating, she throws up everything. She wants to wear a pain patch so that when she throws up, she won’t lose her medicine, but the doctor says she is too light and has no areas of fat on her body to put the patch on. They are going to ask him to put it inside her thigh, where there is a little meat left.
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Death hangs over our heads, sits on our shoulders. Time goes by. It is summer. The yellow angel trumpet is blooming, the blossoms bowing their heads toward the ground as if praying. One day I come home and find a branch broken, and I think it is a sign. I try to prop the branch up, to make it live, but the next morning the leaves and the blooms have shriveled on that one fallen branch.
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June says that Maria feels as though a brick is in her stomach. She carries her little blue throw-up bucket around with her. June says, “We don’t know what else to do.” I can tell that caregiving is wearing thin on June, and I tell her to take care of herself, to let someone else take over for a few hours.
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Lauren and I come up with a clever idea for the shoe. The potluck is to be at Jill and Susan’s next time. We go down to the florist’s and take the shoe. We ask the woman to plant the shoe in the middle of a flower arrangement, completely camouflaging it with yellow, orange, and purple chrysanthemums and other flowers. Then we have her deliver it to the potluck. It arrives before Lauren and I get there, but everyone tells us that it took them a few minutes to recognize the shoe hidden in the flower. Then it seemed to jump out at them. Everyone agrees that our idea cannot be topped and that it is time for the shoe to be retired.
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Maria has begun to gain weight, all fluid build-up around her abdomen. The doctor calls the fluid ascites. The fluid increases every day and has made Maria so heavy that she can’t stand up by herself but has to be pushed around in a wheelchair. Finally the fluid seeps from her pores and runs down her legs and puddles on the floor around her feet. June tries taping together Kotex pads to lay across Maria’s stomach to collect the fluid. I set up my sewing machine and begin cutting baby diapers into long strips and sewing them together. June tells me that they work much better than the Kotex pads.
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I go out one evening in the back yard to take the dogs out and find a dead bird lying on the step. Sometimes when that happens, the bird has flown into the window and is stunned. When you pick it up, the bird wakes up and flies away. But this one is dead. It is a purple finch, the bird often described as a sparrow dipped in cranberry juice. Its head and neck are a soft red. Its eyes are closed, and it is beautiful in death. I smooth the soft feathers with my fingers. Its eyes are closed, and its stillness gives me that sad feeling of awe and silence that comes with death. Each death is new, and one never prepares you for the next. I bury the little finch in the front flowerbed underneath a small stone angel, my favorite piece of yard art.
The next morning as I make my coffee, I look out the window and see another purple finch exactly like the other one sitting on the rim of the birdbath. It is sitting still and staring, looking stunned. Its feathers are wet and ragged as if it has just bathed. It keeps tilting its head to one side. Something in me wants to go and try to wake up the dead bird that I have buried and say, “Come on! Your partner is missing you! You can’t go yet!”
Then the little finch flies into the weeping cherry tree and perches there among the leaves. Almost immediately several other finches fly into the branches, surrounding the bird.
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One day June asks me to come stay with Maria in the hospital so that she can run some errands. Maria sleeps the whole time June is gone, and I watch her. All her hair is gone, her head as round and white as an onion, and her chest is hollow. Her fingers on top of the sheet look like bones. Her mouth is open, and her breathing is labored. Her swollen stomach rises under the sheet as if she is pregnant.
When June comes back, she leans over Maria and says, “How are you, Hon?” Instead of looking at June, Maria looks at me and asks, “You’ll tell me when it’s time, won’t you? When it’s time for me to let go?”
“You’ll know when it’s time,” I say, “and you’ll tell June, and she’ll tell you it’s okay.”
But in truth, it isn’t okay with June. It won’t ever be okay. June is in denial, is praying for a miracle, which she is sure will come. “You can’t go tomorrow,” says June. “You’re scheduled for an appointment with your doctor.”
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At their next doctor’s appointment, the doctor tells Maria and June that there is nothing else to be done, that she can have no more chemo. He recommends Hospice. “But she’ll die if we go with Hospice,” says June.
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We take up a collection to pay for the shoe to be put in a shadow box. Betsy and Julia leave it at Maria and June’s front door, and it is there when they get home from the hospital. They hang it in the basement, and the shoe is officially retired.
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Serenity Hospice comes and signs Maria into their program. They bring a hospital bed and a bedside potty chair and many pads to collect the seeping fluids. They give June instructions for Maria’s around-the-clock pain medicine. Maria’s parents come back from Puerto Rico to stay the duration. Her father is quiet, and her mother cries non-stop and won’t leave Maria’s side. June never has any time alone with Maria.
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Lauren wakes me up at 3:00 a.m. She has dreamed that I am cold and dead beside her. We have been talking about death too much. I comfort her and convince her that I am alive.
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June asks us all to come to their house for Wings. Someone goes to the Brick and brings a big basket of wings, flats and drums and celery with containers of bleu cheese. When we get there, Maria is lying in the hospital bed and is only partially aware that we are there. We are in the kitchen laughing and talking, and the door is open to Maria’s room. We take turns going in and out, standing beside her bed, quiet, still, in awe. We lean over and kiss Maria’s forehead and whisper that we love her. Her lips move as she tries to whisper back. Someone tells her that the shoe is hanging in the basement in the shadow box.
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A few days later June calls and tells us that it won’t be long. She wants us to come out. We stand around Maria’s bed and sing songs, “Amazing Grace,” “How Great Thou Art,” and a Spanish song that Maria’s parents know, something that translates into someone walking beside the seashore and leaving all their belongings in the boat. Remembering that Maria used to tell her dying AIDS patients to follow the light, June turns on the lamp on the dresser. Maria opens her eyes and looks up at all of us standing around her. “I’m ready to go!” she says, her voice momentarily strong, “and you are all holding me back!” When we leave, June is crying. “I knew this would happen if we went with hospice,” she says. No one tries to reason with her.
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That night at four a.m. our phone rings beside the bed. I answer, and June’s voice says, “Maria has gone to be with Jesus.” She wants us to come out.
I have never driven to Maria’s and June’s house at night before, and I go past their driveway and have to turn around. When we get there Maria’s body is lying there, covered in the sheet up to her chin. Her mother is sitting beside her bed with her hand on Maria’s forehead, still warm. June paces back and forth between the kitchen and the death room. The funeral home people are on their way. June has made them promise that they won’t put Maria in a black plastic bag. “We don’t do that,” the man assures her.
While we wait, June and Maria’s mother bathe Maria’s body. The door is closed, and when they invite us back in, Maria is lying on the bed wearing a red-flowered dress. Powder and lipstick are on her face, and she looks pretty, as if she is about to jump up and put on her dancing shoes.
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The memorial service is held at Sacred Heart Catholic Church. The priest says that Maria has taught him a lot about what it means to be a Christian and a good person. He looks out at the mourners in the church, most of them gay women, and he says, “Don’t let anyone keep you from your faith.”
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One night several days later I dream that Maria has come back. We are all sitting outside around a barbeque, and she comes and sits beside me. I am so happy to see her, and I ask, “What’s it like?”
“Heaven is dark,” she says, “and there are a lot of old people there.”
I think in my dream that maybe each person’s Heaven is personal, and that maybe Maria’s Heaven seems dark to her because we aren’t there with her.
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One day a couple of months after Maria’s death, I am driving along the road beside the lake when I see a long black-and-white golf shoe on the side of the road. I can’t believe it, and I slam on brakes and pull to the side of the road. I walk back to where the shoe is lying in the grass. I consider surprising someone by starting the game again. Instead, I walk to the edge of the lake and throw the shoe as hard as I can out into the water. I don’t know whether it will sink or float, but I like to imagine June, sitting one day on her dock looking out at the lake, when the mate to the traveling shoe washes up on the shore.
