Read Online I See You Made an Effort: Compliments, Indignities, and Survival Stories from the Edge of 50 by Annabelle Gurwitch - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Annabelle Gurwitch
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neighbor’s house. Our home was designed when families typically had only one car, and my husband has parked in our driveway, so today it’s my turn to park on the street. These neighbors purchased right at the top of the market and have transformed their home into a spacious manse with a meticulously well-maintained native-plant zero-scaping, stone fountains, and imported olive trees that had to be lowered by cranes into the front yard terracing. I catch a glimpse of their sleek, powerful new Sub-Zero stainless steel refrigerator in their newly renovated kitchen.
Mon dieu
, it’s got French doors.
On the other side of our home is Tobacco Road. The Joad family’s home is sliding into disrepair; windows have been strangely and randomly blocked by metal stacking shelves, and bedsheets hang in the window frames, never a good sign. Our kittens jump over their fence and come home with oil stains on their foreheads. What’s going on in that backyard, piled high with old furniture and car parts? They own a ten-year-old refrigerated truck, from the back of which they sell off-brand ice cream that I have strictly forbidden my son to eat. The truck is parked outside their house, where the patriarch of the family often works on it sansshirt and, neighborhood rumor has it, on occasion without pants as well. With the tangle of plants I like to call our English garden and our faded wooden shingles, I sense our house listing slowly toward Tobacco Road. When will our bedsheets go up?
I open our front door and it smells like teen spirit. I’m not sure what Kurt Cobain had in mind, but it’s come to mean sweaty socks and FroYo, with just a hint of sunscreen, at my house. No one is going to take the aroma of our home and bottle it. I have bills to pay. I’ve got both horizontal
and
vertical cracks in the foundation of my house, but my bedroom is still bigger than any apartment I had in my twenties, potable water is only a few feet away, and I can still afford my own strawberries.
I will need to keep up that gratitude list practice. I vow to keep one of my dozen or so pilfered bottles of Asprey Purple Water body lotion on my nightstand as a reminder of how quickly I can be seduced. Also, because it smells soooo damn good.
828-3886
Dear God,
Please don’t ask me to kill again.
828-3886. I recognize the number when I see it flash up on the screen. It’s one of the few phone numbers that I know by heart. We’ve been friends for twenty-two years. Hers were the last digits I learned before we all outsourced our memories to our cell phones. All the other numbers from my past have lost relevancy or don’t connect to the living: street addresses for homes we no longer own, birthdays of grandparents, channels of TV stations, prepregnancy shoe size, and of all those landlines long abandoned—hers was the last working phone number.
828-3886.
I answer the phone.
“Hey, Robin, what’s up?”
When you’ve been close friends for over two decades, you can hear the bad news in the sound of their breath.
“Oh no,” I say, bracing for the news.
“I have cancer.”
“What kind?”
“Pancreatic.”
“Pancreatic,” I repeat in a voice I don’t recognize. Or maybe it’s a finality I haven’t heard in my voice until now.
It had started as a slight pain in her abdomen earlier in the year. The initial diagnosis was gastritis. In recent years, Robin’s greatest pleasures had been her wine-tasting group, gourmand weekends in Napa Valley and an annual trip to France. She’d even considered cashing out and hightailing it to a wine cave in the Loire Valley. After she triumphed over a lifetime of struggle with body issues, wine and anything worth eating would now be denied to her. It seemed impossible that “Cut out spicy foods and wine” had progressed to “Get your affairs in order” by springtime, but it had.
In my twenties, all cancers sounded the same to me, but I’m old enough to know that pancreatic is one of those
Mon dieu
, it’s got French doors.
On the other side of our home is Tobacco Road. The Joad family’s home is sliding into disrepair; windows have been strangely and randomly blocked by metal stacking shelves, and bedsheets hang in the window frames, never a good sign. Our kittens jump over their fence and come home with oil stains on their foreheads. What’s going on in that backyard, piled high with old furniture and car parts? They own a ten-year-old refrigerated truck, from the back of which they sell off-brand ice cream that I have strictly forbidden my son to eat. The truck is parked outside their house, where the patriarch of the family often works on it sansshirt and, neighborhood rumor has it, on occasion without pants as well. With the tangle of plants I like to call our English garden and our faded wooden shingles, I sense our house listing slowly toward Tobacco Road. When will our bedsheets go up?
I open our front door and it smells like teen spirit. I’m not sure what Kurt Cobain had in mind, but it’s come to mean sweaty socks and FroYo, with just a hint of sunscreen, at my house. No one is going to take the aroma of our home and bottle it. I have bills to pay. I’ve got both horizontal
and
vertical cracks in the foundation of my house, but my bedroom is still bigger than any apartment I had in my twenties, potable water is only a few feet away, and I can still afford my own strawberries.
I will need to keep up that gratitude list practice. I vow to keep one of my dozen or so pilfered bottles of Asprey Purple Water body lotion on my nightstand as a reminder of how quickly I can be seduced. Also, because it smells soooo damn good.
828-3886
Dear God,
Please don’t ask me to kill again.
828-3886. I recognize the number when I see it flash up on the screen. It’s one of the few phone numbers that I know by heart. We’ve been friends for twenty-two years. Hers were the last digits I learned before we all outsourced our memories to our cell phones. All the other numbers from my past have lost relevancy or don’t connect to the living: street addresses for homes we no longer own, birthdays of grandparents, channels of TV stations, prepregnancy shoe size, and of all those landlines long abandoned—hers was the last working phone number.
828-3886.
I answer the phone.
“Hey, Robin, what’s up?”
When you’ve been close friends for over two decades, you can hear the bad news in the sound of their breath.
“Oh no,” I say, bracing for the news.
“I have cancer.”
“What kind?”
“Pancreatic.”
“Pancreatic,” I repeat in a voice I don’t recognize. Or maybe it’s a finality I haven’t heard in my voice until now.
It had started as a slight pain in her abdomen earlier in the year. The initial diagnosis was gastritis. In recent years, Robin’s greatest pleasures had been her wine-tasting group, gourmand weekends in Napa Valley and an annual trip to France. She’d even considered cashing out and hightailing it to a wine cave in the Loire Valley. After she triumphed over a lifetime of struggle with body issues, wine and anything worth eating would now be denied to her. It seemed impossible that “Cut out spicy foods and wine” had progressed to “Get your affairs in order” by springtime, but it had.
In my twenties, all cancers sounded the same to me, but I’m old enough to know that pancreatic is one of those
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