Fixing Things

The other morning, I cried in my car. Which happens sometimes when I’m listening, when I’m watching the world. And the other morning was such a time, as I sped along the Taconic, the sky as polished as a shiny new crystal, the leaves on the trees flushed red and gold, and haloed by a dizzying sun. Beyond my windshield was a Count Basie landscape, with saxophones and trombones blaring--fall such a heroic season--and so the tears came, pooling around my kohl lined eyes. I sang along with the radio on that warm October morning, and cried, my heart full of the promise of things. Full of the goodness and beauty of life.

And he says that this is sadness…

He likes to tell me that I need fixing. That I am too thin, too worried, too busy, too caring, too sad. This last one is the latest one. And he tells me this, he says, because he hears sadness in the stories I tell. A sadness he feels that blocks the sun, that will eclipse any chance of happiness for me. And when he says this, I feel the corners of my lips turn up, feel the laugh lines collected around my eyes reveal themselves. Ah, but this man does not understand women. Does not understand me. I am not too thin, too worried, too busy, too caring. Nor am I too sad. I am me—Rachel—going about life in my own flat footed way, moving around in my own banged-up body. Just like him... And perhaps there are days that I am too much of any one thing, too much “too.” Yet there are also many days that I am not. And the women collected like vintage pottery—crackled and patina’ed—on a Friday night at Ruthanne’s table understand this. We sip wine; eat things we shouldn’t; let our kids pull cushions from the couch in the family room and gorge themselves on Doritos and juice so that we can sit at the table, unmolested, under a cobalt blue Star of David hung above the open window. Jew and Gentile women—the unrepentant—all in need of fixing. Instead, we laugh at our younger, more insecure selves…

Tonight he pulls me to him across the expanse of a tremendous bed, and wraps long, sinewy arms around my body; he says nothing for a long time. Later he will tell me that he saw sadness in my eyes this raucous fall night. But while we lie there in the dark, there is only the sound of our chafed and bitter breathing, and the occasional wail of a train passing along the tracks somewhere in the distance. He has hurt me this night--having done what I did not want him to do... You are a sad woman, he whispers at last in the dark. And I hope you will seek out what you need to address that. Which, given the circumstances, means I should get up from this warm bed and our whetted desires, and drive down a dark and quiet road in search of the highway. But I will not do such a thing on a night like this. I will breathe through my sadness and awaken in the morning, knowing that there is another chance for love. Another chance for living. We are, after all, still strangers--colliding in the new world that we have bumped into. We pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, looking around for the way. And so tonight I curl into my sadness and await the dawn. Which comes, of course, like a promise, or a whisper, creeping quietly along the edge of the window above the bed where the two of us sleep.
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