Safe Suicide

Arias

Arias My wife is singing an aria of love, Puccini at the least, top of her soul’s lungs, all night, all morning. She is singing for our daughter, just turned twenty-two, whose birthday we celebrated at dinner out last night and who is visiting from her apartment across Boston at 1 pm today, Sunday, to exhibit her paintings for sale to friends at our home in Watertown. The proceeds will support her trip to Cuba in a few weeks, where she hopes to explore the culture, write, and look for opportunities to teach English. My wife loves Ruth with all the passion of her own life at fifty, her own joy of art and dreams of painting more than she herself has been given to; and her own sense of mortality too as a woman, and the passion of her grief in relinquishing her dreams of body and of youth. She sings, my wife, not by singing, but by cleaning, painting, rearranging our small house. Several young artists on Ruth’s street in Jamaica Plain had proclaimed a neighborhood open house several months before, and having sold a few paintings then, Ruth was inspired to stage her own show out of our house. She had invitations printed and sent them out to everyone of her and our acquaintance. Our family room, off the kitchen, entered by our backdoor, is the designated art gallery. Out goes the television, TV stand, table, and the bookcases; the futon couch moves from one wall to the other. The rattan rug is cleaned and turned. Thump busy. Sweep. Mop. Scrub. A fury of commotion. Curtains are washed. A bathroom rug is washed, throwing the washing machine off balance so it bangs all night. My son, fourteen, and his overnight friend, have retreated from 10 pm last night on with the moved television and VCR behind the closed door of my son’s room, off the kitchen in another direction, first floor. They are watching VCR movies. They will persist until 4am or later, DVD on my son’s computer, Play Station. Three movies. Four movies. They are each on Christmas/ Chanukah/ Winter Solstice/ Kwanza vacations at last—my son from his private school eighth grade; my wife from 129 130 safe suicide the private elementary school where she teaches (and where both our children have graduated); my daughter from her job teaching ESL. But I am not on vacation, yet. Thursday, at final class meetings for each of my three courses, I have collected term papers. It is a seasonal convulsion now, on the brink of vacation, to concentrate with surgical care on grading the papers and then computing final grades, which are due Monday. I think of Robert Frost’s apple picking: “there were ten thousand fruit to touch, / Cherish in hand, lift down, and not let fall.” I want silence. I want gratitude and deference as I labor in my basement study for my family, but also for the standards and profession I believe in and my responsibility to each student. I pride myself on being the polar opposite of the caricatured professor who grades by throwing unread papers haphazardly on the stairs. I am counting the hours and stamina left before my deadline Monday morning. After two days steady reading, I have finished twenty-six undergraduate essays on Shakespeare’s tragedies, averaging ten pages each, correcting sentence-bysentence , idea-by-idea and writing lengthy comments to justify the grade. I have turned now to the stack of graduate literature seminar term papers. At 1:30 am, I am still working hard, but I have to quit and head for bed. My wife says go on, it is one of those nights. The kitchen is all bric-a-brac. She is cleaning the stove. I head on to our upstairs bedroom, bone tired. Try to sleep. Washing machine bangs. TV sounds rise and fall. But mostly the energy of her bustle, the crackle of doing, muted but wild and manic, keeps me awake. I head for a couch in the basement where it is quieter and sleep in bursts with wakings all night until 9am—wake to the same bangings, clunks, stomps, rattles, clinks, scrapes. Groggy, I risk emerging for a cup of instant coffee. We say good morning. I say she is going wild. She says it is an estrogen imbalance. She has insomnia and sudden energy. She has just repainted the entire kitchen. The family room is transformed. I...