Grief

GRIEF / Marilyn Hacker for Iva I You turned twenty, and your best friend died a week after your birthday, in a car on a bright icy morning. Now you are flying home. I called; you called back. You howled; you cried like the child you probably ceased to be the moment that I told you she was dead— your anchor, homegirl, unsolicited sister. Now you are standing in front of me, tall and in tears and I have nothing to say. You're too big for me to hold in my skinny arms, but I do, windbreaker, backpack and all, stroke snow-splotched hair you probably chewed in a storm of tears in the cab. Your garment bag leans on the wall, a black dress in it. Now I am watching you growing away from me, towards hours in a car you and two friends drive through the same treacherous snow, to empty her dorm room, to sit with the injured boy, wired and re-formed in plaster, weeping because he was still alive; toward where you never would have expected to come and see your friend, or what briefly remained of your friend thin and naked under a sheet, the wound at her temple inconsequential-looking (a slight line of dried blood from her ear), stopped still on a white marble slab in a crematorium. II Your great-aunts, centenarian-and-some, give interviews. Stroke-silenced, your grandmother 44 · The Missouri Review Marilyn Hacker turned eighty in a Brooklyn nursing home, looking as if she might stand up, recover her thoughts, her coat, and walk off toward the L train—though she won't. Chemo has let me live so far. Some fluke, prudence, or miracle has kept your father seronegative. The January day they called you out of computer lab so you could phone home, I'm sure you mentally ran down your list of possible mortalities, guessing that it was death it was about, assuming that it would be one of these. Ill Your "black dress" was the velvet skirt you wear for choir recitals. K.J., who stood behind you at the door, her coat still on, her hands empty and open, met you at the airport , since I was sick. Your grief came indoors like another illness, one which we could hardly palliate with soup and tea, which didn't stop me from making tea again when I could let you go. But you had gone farther away, to where she was a light receding as you watched, to where she was teasing you on the train, to Argeles to where she left you at the bus stop ten days past, to where she glaringly was not. IV I booked you three at the Hotel Malher —sixth floor, no bath, a hundred-fifty francs. You crowded on my couch, made phone calls, drank tea, took turns showering and washing hair. You'd had breakfast. You'd gone to the bank. You all were seventeen. A girl in Tours, her pen pal, had invited you to come down for the weekend. You would take the train. And then you'd take the train to Perpignan. Was there a train from Tours to Perpignan? Her mother's (gay) friend had a summer home Marilyn Hacker The Missouri Review · 45 in Argeles, had offered the spare room. (I think I had to route you through Bordeaux.) You were blasé, from years I'd ferried you over, "Unaccompanied," to France. She'd spent six exchange months in Budapest, could be acute about the difference, but mostly loved the light, the river, under the influence. The boy seemed youngest, and anything she liked, except museums, he was willing to attest was wonderful too. Like colts, like April trees, your threesome bristled with innocence and confidence. A sprained ankle, lost camera, missed train were the mishaps that you thought to fear. I sent you out into the summer rain between your junior and your senior year. A crowd, standing-room-only, turned out for her funeral. Masses of wasted flowers embraced a photo album you'd spent hours assembling, through the night and dawn, with her shell-shocked kid sister. Then...