Imperative

Imperative: “A grammatical mood that forms commands or requests, including the giving of prohibition or permission.”
—The Logical Language Group

Remember when you realize that you have fallen in love. It is not supposed to happen to you, a woman trying to become a nun. Renunciation. Not so much of the world in general but of particular entanglements, their messy excesses, the requests that turn into demands that turn into emptiness as you recoil from their insistence. Look back on the moment, realize that falling in love is not as sudden or as shocking as you once thought. You begin to notice her everywhere at the convent where you live, where she volunteers. You discern her footsteps before anyone else’s, breathe in her clean-soap smell, no perfume. You find yourself in the same spaces she occupies. Although you do not approach, neither do you (as a good nun should) steer yourself away.

Remember your first kiss. A day off from the convent. A quiet room. The way she places her lips softly but firmly on yours. The faint taste of sweat mixes with the spices of the meal you have just shared. You gasp, pull apart with a comic “Aaaah!”—then kiss again. This time longer, slower, sweeter. After that, every time she is near, your cells pick themselves up and tumble in her direction, completely of their own volition, ignoring your every command.

Oh, God.

You don’t lose your faith, though you do lose your conviction that you have to pursue it in a community of nuns. But first: She leaves her volunteer work there. You try to prepare for the next step of commitment. You don’t want to fail—who wants “Flunked out of nun school” on her resume?—but you also can’t imagine living there, in the community, without her. She says she will give you the time and space you need to choose. Whatever decision you make will make her happy, as long as you decide from your heart.

Sit in your cell at the convent. Hold the letters in your hand. She will not come to visit, but she will write as she waits for you. She praises you for honoring your commitment to the religious community. She tells you about her days—work, the tomatoes in her garden, how she watches the bats swoop and swirl at dusk as they eat mosquitoes. The waiting is not easy. She loves you. Her handwriting leaps across the page, barely contained by the margins, a tempest of longing and promise. Feel your heart ache from the strain of two deep desires. The community wants you to stay. You are “leadership material,” they say. You aren’t prone to drama. You can live a good life here, a deep one with commitment to the highest power there is. You want that.

You remember a quip—you can’t recall who said it—that God and prayer are very nice, but most people need someone with some skin on them. Remember her kiss. Her smell. Her warmth. You want that more.

Say to your superior: “It’s time for me to go.”

Call your love, say: “Come get me.”

Move in together. Tell your family and friends your new address. Settle in. Once, she has to be away for a week. On your writing desk, a few hours after she leaves, you find a stack of envelopes, one for each day that she will be away. Inside each envelope is a letter, telling you where she will be on her trip, what she might be doing. The first letter directs you to a drawer in her bureau. Find a bar of dark chocolate and a teaspoon. The note says, “Fatten up while I am gone. When I get back, I plan to eat you up.”

Not very long before, you would have found all this silly, sentimental. But now: Open one letter at a time and inhale the perfume of ink. Marvel at the time and effort the stack of envelopes took, and cry in sheer frustration because she is at once absolutely close and utterly, unreachably far away.

Eat the chocolate.

Picture yourself as she sees you, neck deep in warm tropical ocean. She comes from northern Vermont; for her, water is solid for a good part of the year. She does not swim and hums with a cell-level panic when she sees something deeper than a bathtub. You, on the other hand, are a Floridian, a water baby. You always find a way to submerge into any available liquid—fresh, salt, hot tub, cold spring. She averts her eyes, since the sight of you makes her almost as nervous as being there herself. But on this trip she braves the boat, watches you. You hear her shout, but before you can reply, you get knocked off your feet by a five-foot-wide stingray.

Right yourself, swim up next to the boat, grasp the side. She says, “I tried to tell you it was coming. I was afraid.” She shakes her head. “When you came up, you were smiling so wide I could see your teeth around your snorkel.” You swim back out among the stingrays; touch them. One flutters up to you and licks squid out of your fist, its tongue as rough and supple as a cat’s.

Back in your soft bed that evening she says, “What did it feel like? The stingray?” You tell her about the tongue, and how the wide swimming wings are smooth and muscular. Like a vagina, but cool.

Smile when she says, “Hmm. You would enjoy that.”

Smile again when your grandmother says, “Oh, she’s a keeper. Where in the world did you find such a sweetie?”

Chuckle along with your grandmother when you both answer: “The convent.”

Lie together in one narrow single bed in your grandmother’s guest room and make up marketing slogans for the convent. Your favorite: “A great place to meet nice girls.” Your lover gently taps your forehead, bestows an honorary degree from SHI, the Shameless Hussy Institute. You both solemnly commit to maintaining extensive professional development. You fall off the bed, laughing, and put a pillow over your mouth because you don’t want your grandmother to appear and ask why you two are making so much damned noise.

Get back in bed. Pursue your education.

Let your skin remember how she felt early in the morning. You are a Southerner, used to waking up in a pool of sweat in moisture-laden air. But in New England even summer mornings can be chilly. Although she sometimes complains that you steal all the covers or that you try to snuggle so close you almost push her off the bed, she doesn’t really mind. She says, “Come here, delicate Southern thing,” and wraps you in arms that are brown and ropy-strong, with pointed elbows and chiseled wrists. Sink into her sleepy warmth again and again, day after day. She says, “You used to pull away as you fell asleep. You made noises when you dreamed, like a frightened animal.”

You give thanks that you don’t pull away anymore. That you are not haunted by nightmares. That you do not wake alone but in a warm, safe nest that you both have created, twig by twig, out of your broken selves and your longing.

Begin to love the dry, cool air.

Remember the afternoon you sit together just five years after you leave the convent. Five years after you buy the cartoon dinosaur sheets for the bed you share. Four years after you find a job teaching technical writing to auto mechanics, a task she finds so comically endearing that she kisses you all over your face every time you mention it. Three years after you stop speaking to your mother because she will not be civil to the woman you love. Two years after she teaches you to fly a kite. One year after her heart takes on an electrical stutter that no treatment seems to regulate.

Sit together on your second-floor porch that looks out into the expanse of an ancient maple. You listen to the birds and to her as she tells you what she wants your life to be after she dies. Watch her shift into what you—not very kindly—call “social-worker mode.” Never mind about the dying part. She has instructions for you: Don’t work too hard. Keep writing. Find someone to share your life.

Take in what she says only much later. At the moment, even though she is saying words, you hear only sounds. Clamp your hands over your ears. Still you hear her, a giant crow saying “Die, die, die.” You become so angry at her—at her instructions, at her measured calm—that you launch your glass of iced tea high into the air, toward the maple’s thick green crown.

Apologize. Try to pick up all the broken pieces.

Observe this insane woman sitting next to you in a helicopter, hovering over the top of a New Zealand glacier. You are celebrating your tenth anniversary, the one you thought you would never have. The doctors have crafted some reins for her galloping heart, and together you have ticked off the years, making a home, growing cosmos, irises, columbines, peonies, impatiens. A sprawling butterfly bush comes alive with wings in the morning sun. The bleeding heart rises year after year from the last patches of snow. Your garden yields more lettuce, peppers, tomatoes, strawberries, and raspberries than you can eat. You laugh when she leans over the strawberry patch in her short shorts and the mosquitoes raid her skinny behind. She laughs when you leap like a gazelle out of the same patch, running from the fake snake you put there to scare the squirrels.

You cannot imagine loving anyone more than you do her—but you want to shoot her at the same time. As the helicopter swoops and pitches, she gleefully points out ice formations bigger than your neighborhood. She repeats the pilot’s estimate about the distance between you and the abyss of ice below—a ten-thousand-foot drop!—obviously having forgotten that you are as terrified of heights as she is of oceans.

Count to ten. Breathe. Count to twenty. Breathe again. Ignore the view out the window. Instead, look to your right, at your love, head like a giant egg in her flight helmet, a ridiculous, demented, grinning egg.

Consider throwing up on her.

She presses her egg to yours, says, “Thank you. We will always have this to remember, together.”

Remember everything and nothing about that day. You call her from the office, tell her you are on the way home. You talk about plans for dinner. She sends you good traffic karma, says, “See you in a few, babe.” You arrive home only twenty-five minutes later and call her name when you walk in the door, dump your pile of books and papers on the couch—she will fuss at you later, you know—say, “Honey, I’m home!” You are surprised when she doesn’t answer, but sometimes she gets absorbed in what she is doing, filters out background noise. You walk into her office, preparing to make yourself foreground. Stop. She is at her desk, slumped in her chair, face ashen.

Try to understand the jumble of words that tumble out of the ER doctor’s mouth: Brain. Ischemia. Infarct. You know what these words mean but do not understand why he is saying them about her. Hold her hand, the one that has more sensation. Tell her it will be okay, that you got to the ER in time. Look in her eyes. See the terror in yours, reflected. Stroke. As she drifts into sleep, think about the word. A caress. A golf swing. A swimming maneuver. A brain attack. Imagine the word in your hands as a ball of clay. Pinch away the pieces you don’t want to think about. Reshape the ball into a smooth orb, unblemished and whole. She sleeps, then wakes, tells you she feels “not too bad.” She says, “Remember the helicopter? On the glacier?” You say that you do. She looks out the window. “I want to fly like that again.”

Kiss her face all over. Tell her: “You will.” Completely miss her point.

You get in the car a few months later to do your Saturday morning errands: the post office, the drugstore, the library. She waits for you while you grab a few items for dinner from the grocery, pump gas for the car. And then, your reward for all that work: ice cream. She always knows ahead of time what she will have. She laughs because you always say, “I have to look at the menu,” even though you never get anything other than a kiddie cone of Swiss chocolate almond. You drive down a familiar street, the one you’ve driven down together a thousand times while talking about ice cream and family and books you’ve read and places you want to go. She looks to her left and right, then at you. “Where are you taking me? I’ve never been here before.”

Stop the car. Try to stop your racing heart.

Make lists. Label the cabinets. Post instructions on the refrigerator in big bold print. Today is Tuesday. I am at school until 3:00 p.m. Your lunch is in the fridge, top shelf. Microwave for two minutes. Turn off stove after making tea.

Get a large calendar. Add the doctors’ appointments. Your work schedule. Weekend plans (beach, theater). Go over it every morning. Cross off the old days, circle the new. As you leave, say, “I’ll be home soon.” Call between classes and meetings. Worry.

Take down the lists each day. Throw away the moldy food and the scorched teapot. Talk to family, friends, your minister. They all say, “Well, she seems okay to me.”

As you are leaving for work one morning she says, “You don’t love me.”

Ask her why she thinks such a thing. She says, “You leave me here for days.”

Give up on the lists and the microwave instructions. Make sure she has breakfast in the morning. Take her out to eat when you get home. She doesn’t want to eat “in there.” She means your dining room. At the restaurant, the one you’ve eaten at dozens of times, she cannot find the bathroom. Watch as she struggles to read the menu, to open her napkin. She asks you what she likes to eat. Listen as she tells you about one of your friends and realize she is talking to you as if this were the first time you’d met.

You listen to the doctor who says, “This is what strokes do to the brain.” You ask what else you can do. Watch the doctor lift his shoulders, almost imperceptibly. See him pat your love gently on the shoulder and tell her, “You don’t have Alzheimer’s.” Hear him say to you, “Good luck.” Don’t remember the expression on her face when you tell her that you can no longer care for her at home. That you must work and she’s not safe alone. She refuses to be held, to look you in the eye. Try to put her accusations out of your mind—that you do not love her (because you go to work). That you just want her to be dead (because you say you need help with the house, with her care). Gaze at this woman, who seems like your love. You search her face, her eyes, for the woman you fell in love with all those years ago but find a woman whose fear has morphed into rage, whose brain creates narratives of deceit and intrigue that are slowly writing over all the other memories of gardens and lovemaking, glaciers and laughter.

Stare at the stranger who stares back at you.

Don’t look again at her jumbling, tumbling Christmas letter, the last one she sent, that a friend passed on to you. It tells everyone that she got sick one month and that you abandoned her the next. You understand that this is how she must remember it. You sit down at your desk and write your own letter: The months when she barely speaks. The sleepless nights when her heart races and bucks. Trip after trip to the doctor, the ER. How you rearranged the house, made the lists, missed work. How you hired a helper whom she locked outside. How you left the house when your love threatened to call the police.

Make weekly trips to the heavy, somber-faced couples counselor, ask her how to communicate better, how to cope. You sit in that small room and pour out your heart to your love. You list the gifts of life with her, the safety, growth, trust, and you remind her how, living with her, you learned to relax into your body, to sleep sweetly through the night, to laugh at yourself, even—you take her hand in yours—to drive in the snow and say “ayuh” like a Yankee.

You can’t help but remember this: The counselor asks your love to name the gifts she has received from your years together. She frowns for a moment, then looks at you blankly. “Can’t think of any,” she says.

Leave the office. Go to your desk. Take the Christmas letter and tear it into tiny pieces. Watch them fall on the floor, like snow.

Tell her you will always love her. Tell her that she needs others to care for her now, that you can’t care for her at home. Tell her that she will be safer in the new place. That you will both be happier. Tell yourself you believe this.

Make a new schedule: Get up. Cry. Go to work. Leave the office, say you are going to lunch. Park your car at the rose gardens nearby, cry. Drive home. Cry as soon as you click the door closed. And again, as you crawl into the bed that you share with yourself. Pile up pillows. Sometimes, deep in the night, just for a moment, you think they are warm, breathing. Reach out, say her name. No answer.

You tell yourself there must be a limit to how much grief one person can feel. Even so, you lie flat without moving for hours. You scold yourself to move around, to get groceries. You stand in front of the organic produce, advising yourself that you really should eat. You ponder what might be a good answer to the question “Why?”

Tell everyone that you are fine, because it terrifies you to think how much you are not.

When the nursing facility calls to say that she has fallen, drive to the hospital as fast as you can. Explain to the ER nurse who you are: a partner, not a partner, half of a couple in limbo. The nurse leads you to the treatment room where the love of your life sits, spattered with blood. The love of your life says, “Why are you here?” You try to think of an answer: Because you love her. Because she is hurt. Because they called you. Because you don’t know what else to do. Together, you wait for the results of the X-rays and CT scans, though she is not sure what either of you is waiting for. Try to talk. Get her something to eat when she is hungry. She says, “Thank you.”

You are surprised: “What?”

She replies, “I hate you.”

Stand very still for a very long time, until the nurse says, “You need to go home now.”

Continue the new schedule: Get up. Go to work. Do your errands. Try to eat and sleep. Try to remember what your life used to be. Observe yourself as more than twenty years of life with your love shrinks and hardens into a small ball of pain. Wrap yourself in solitude; speak to people only when you must. Imagine yourself a small single-celled organism floating alone in a vast impersonal, forgetful ocean.

Don’t think about what you know: that this limbo could go on for a long time. Every morning, tell yourself that you will learn to live this life. Every evening, admit to yourself that you probably can learn, but you don’t want to.

Your friends help you find a place with room for just one. Carry your solitary belongings, box by box, up a set of winding, narrow stairs. Your mother, who has finally, warily accepted your “lifestyle,” needs surgery. Your sister, who has been taking care of your mother, has cancer. You help manage the rehab, the radiation and chemo, the endless paperwork. As often as you are able, visit your love, who may or may not know that you are her love. For a long while, you don’t visit. There is so much to take care of.

Remember the last time you see her. It is a cold spring day, and you are both heavy with winter clothes and grief. She struggles to put words together. You wait with more patience than you know you have. You ask about a friend you both know. She says, “Who?” You tell her your sister has died.

She says, “I love her,” then points at the Blue Ridge plate your sister gave her, nearly fifteen years ago. Take the plate to her. Her hand

trembles and the plate drops onto her lap. She looks you in the eye for the first time in a long while. She says, “Yours. Now.” You hold each other’s hands. You cry.

Settle your heart when she says, “Want to. Talk. About dying.” You listen to her. It takes a long time, but she asks for your permission, your blessing, to go. Give it. Give it with all the love you contain. Tell her “Thank you.”

Watch her fall asleep.

Say, “See you later.” Not “Goodbye.”

Cradle the plate close to your heart.

Read more from Issue 17.1.