Volcano

(2008)

Our feet are warm. Our faces shine. The room is getting dark, the night coming a little sooner these days. Should I turn on a lamp? Then the prospect of dinner changes our placement toward that dark. The chicken stew on the trivet. The moist leaves in the hard black bowl. The macaroni and cheese still bubbling, although it’s long been out of the oven. For a moment, we’re no longer eight years into the new century, in Philadelphia, in a loft apartment that’s too big for us, but inside a cave, a tight, sweet space. We give our joints and muscles over to the heat of it, the spell, the hearth at the center of things. Our gestures say, we’re here for you, time. We’re all right with you. We’re not straining against your grasp. No concerns about the side effects of the latest round of chemo earlier in the day. No cheering on the small miracle of the meal, the first meal she’s cooked since July’s diagnosis. No anxieties about the election, the results of which will crackle across the country, throughout the world. No steroids, no PET scans, no CAT scans, no ports, no hoods, no wigs, no hair coming out in wads—none of it. We are the four points of the clock: her mother at three, her sister at six, me at nine, Denise at midnight. See how we hold that clock in place? Nothing but us now, one breath, one body in the room. This table, this bread, these forks lifting again and again to our mouths.

But in the world of Denise, stillness is death. If illness weren’t ragging her brain, she’d be driving to Chester County later tonight, to the apartment of the lunatic golfer with whom she’s had the best sex. Or she’d be steaming through Fairmount Park on in-line skates, or laughing with a friend, or arguing with that same friend—any opportunity to slam up against the unexpected. Abruptness, collision, anything to wrench her awake. As if she needs to be wrenched awake. For God’s sake, she has more electricity in her than the train yard on the other side of the river. The freight cars bang, startling us, with all the suddenness of thunder. Or is that really thunder, a storm coming toward us from the west side of the city?

She gets up from the table. She walks to the kitchen, brings back a second loaf of bread, sits down. She looks happy tonight. She props up her chin, looks at us with a satisfied gaze with melancholy in it. Still, it cannot be so easy to see the two sides in her—the writing side, the family side—embodied in the group of people she loves, sitting across the table in peace. Complete peace. They’re not supposed to live in peace! How would she get any writing done if all she had were peace? No mother to say, can’t you write another story? I don’t know about this one: Where is the happiness? Must everything end that way? Of course all Denise wants is peace, because she never gets any. There’s always someone to call on her, need her, in the middle of the night. Think: animals scrabbling the bark of a tree. Does she ever get to sleep?

The flames shudder on the candlesticks. The TV harangues from the living room. We’re talking about the election again, our terror, the disaster of the last eight years. The relief is that we’re all on the same side. We couldn’t have sat together if we weren’t on the same side—at least on this night. Imagine the strained politeness of the conversation, the frozen hole at the center of our talk.

Somewhere, I imagine, maybe in Bucks County, maybe just two floors above our heads, a white man sits in front of a TV. He twists the bath towel in his hands...