Part 7 (1/2)

When he got to the front of the line I went up to him.

I touched his shoulder.

I can see, I said. What a stupid thing to say. My eyes are crummy, but I can see.

What are you doing here? he wrote with his hands.

I felt suddenly shy. I was not used to shy. I was used to shame. Shyness is when you turn your head away from something you want. Shame is when you turn your head away from something you do not want.

I know you are leaving, I said.

You have to go home, he wrote. You should be in bed.

OK, I said. I did not know how to say what I needed to say.

Let me take you home.

No. I do not want to go home.

He wrote, You're being crazy. You're going to catch a cold.

I already have a cold.

You are going to catch a colder.

I could not believe he was making a joke. And I could not believe I laughed.

The laughter sent my thoughts to our kitchen table, where we would laugh and laugh. That table was where we were close to each other. It was instead of our bed. Everything in our apartment got confused. We would eat on the coffee table in the living room instead of at the dining room table. We wanted to be near the window. We filled the body of the grandfather clock with his empty daybooks, as if they were time itself. We put his filled daybooks in the bathtub of the second bathroom, because we never used it. I sleepwalk when I sleep at all. Once I turned on the shower. Some of the books floated, and some stayed where they were. When I awoke the next morning I saw what I had done. The water was gray with all of his days.

I am not being crazy, I told him.

You have to go home.

I got tired, I told him. Not worn out, but worn through. Like one of those wives who wakes up one morning and says I can't bake any more bread.

You never baked bread, he wrote, and we were still joking.

Then it's like I woke up and baked bread, I said, and we were joking even then. I wondered will there come a time when we won't be joking? And what would that look like? And how would that feel?

When I was a girl, my life was music that was always getting louder. Everything moved me. A dog following a stranger. That made me feel so much. A calendar that showed the wrong month. I could have cried over it. I did. Where the smoke from a chimney ended. How an overturned bottle rested at the edge of a table.

I spent my life learning to feel less.

Every day I felt less.

Is that growing old? Or is it something worse?

You cannot protect yourself from sadness without protecting yourself from happiness.

He hid his face in the covers of his daybook, as if the covers were his hands. He cried. For whom was he crying?

For Anna?

For his parents?

For me?

For himself?

I pulled the book from him. It was wet with tears running down the pages, as if the book itself were crying. He hid his face in his hands. Let me see you cry, I told him.

I do not want to hurt you, he said by shaking his head left to right.

It hurts me when you do not want to hurt me, I told him. Let me see you cry.

He lowered his hands. On one cheek it said YES backward. On one cheek it said NO backward. He was still looking down. Now the tears did not run down his cheeks, but fell from his eyes to the ground. Let me see you cry, I said. I did not feel that he owed it to me. And I did not feel that I owed it to him. We owed it to each other, which is something different.

He raised his head and looked at me.

I am not angry with you, I told him.

You must be.

I am the one who broke the rule.

But I am the one who made the rule you couldn't live with.

My thoughts are wandering, Oskar. They are going to Dresden, to my mother's pearls, damp with the sweat of her neck. My thoughts are going up the sleeve of my father's overcoat. His arm was so thick and strong. I was sure it would protect me for as long as I lived. And it did. Even after I lost him. The memory of his arm wraps around me as his arm used to. Each day has been chained to the previous one. But the weeks have had wings. Anyone who believes that a second is faster than a decade did not live my life.

Why are you leaving me?

He wrote, I do not know how to live.

I do not know either, but I am trying.

I do not know how to try.

There were things I wanted to tell him. But I knew they would hurt him. So I buried them, and let them hurt me.

I put my hand on him. Touching him was always so important to me. It was something I lived for. I never could explain why. Little, nothing touches. My fingers against his shoulder. The outsides of our thighs touching as we squeezed together on the bus. I couldn't explain it, but I needed it. Sometimes I imagined st.i.tching all of our little touches together. How many hundreds of thousands of fingers brus.h.i.+ng against each other does it take to make love? Why does anyone ever make love?

My thoughts are going to my childhood, Oskar. To when I was a girl. I am sitting here thinking about fistfuls of pebbles, and the first time I noticed hairs under my arms.

My thoughts are around my mother's neck. Her pearls.

When I first liked the smell of perfume, and how Anna and I would lie in the darkness of our bedroom, in the warmth of our bed.

I told her one night what I had seen behind the shed behind our house. She made me promise never to speak a word about it. I promised her.

Can I watch you kiss?