(Note: After a long hiatus during which I pondered trying to get my writing published, and thus, hoarded it, (since posting it here would make it largely unpublishable in conventional outlets), I gave up. I might as well have what people are interested in my writing just read it. So, welcome back, whoever you are, or just welcome. -SC)
Ten days before Christmas, six before our 15thanniversary, my husband had a colonoscopy. Family history had brought him there, more than a decade before the average person needs to undergo the procedure, and we were, by a long shot, the youngest people in the outpatient waiting room. I had read the preparatory documentation decreeing that, if there were no responsible person to wheel him out and drive him home, groggy and half drugged, his procedure would be canceled. I would need to declare myself at the outset and be there at the end to receive him. He was property to be released to me. There was no provision for unclaimed baggage.
In the week or so leading up to the day, as the phases of his preparation progressed (beige bland diet, clear liquids) I thought about carting him out in a wheelchair. They said that would probably be necessary and I did not like it. In my whole life, I’ve only ever been hospitalized for childbirth, and he never at all since I’ve known him. His doctor says that, since he is a male who survived his twenties without dying of stupidity or risk-taking, he really doesn’t even need checkups until his heart attack risk climbs when he hits his 50s. Our bodies are healthy, fit, do what we ask them to without complaint. I know this will not be so forever, but I only know it intellectually. I don’t really know it in ligament and muscle. We take our physical abilities for granted, and our intellectual ones, the skills by which we make our livings, broaden with time and maturity. The thought that they may also decline and be lost one day fills me with black dread when I think of it. Most of the time though, I coast along in a disbelieving state of gratitude for the life I have, the two people I made, the one I married. Once in a while, I wonder if this coasting is the same one the coyote felt every time he careened off the cliff, but didn’t realize it right away. The note about the wheelchair was a glimpse down at the thin air below us.
When we got married, the shortest day of the year, the longest night, I had put little thought into what I would wear, and much into what would be read at the wedding. We chose Robert Frost’s The Master Speedand have its final stanza framed in our bedroom with drawings I did of two wrens, two oak leaves, two hiking boots. Every morning I look at it, and sometimes its cadence bounds through my head too, for no particular reason. It accompanies me all the time.
Two such as you with such a master speed
Cannot be parted nor be swept away
From one another once you are agreed
That life is only life forevermore
Together wing to wing and oar to oar.
One night, in a rare moment of being fully still, I lay in bed looking at a picture hanging on my wall. It’s Japanese, I think, and I know next to nothing about art, so I don’t know what medium it is—some kind of paint, or some kind of woodblock print. It’s of two ducks in flight against a blue sky—a winter type sky like now, when the sun comes up only high enough to scrape the sides of the bowl of the day and then go down again. The perspective of the picture flattens the ducks, so the wing of the one in the foreground seems to lay across the neck of the one flying behind. They look like they are interfering with each other. Not like “wing to wing” I thought. And then, “oar to oar,” I thought, and I realized I had, all these years, missed the point. When I chose that poem, when I was twenty one, straight off a Bachelor’s degree in English, pleased with my literariness, I was smitten by its being addressed to us. “Two such as you,” it said, and I answered, “Yes, tell us more about us. Tell us how we’re joining together, tell us about two making one, tell us about union, tell us how there’s no space between us at all, we’re so well matched.” The poem flattered my idea of love, and marriage, it told of defying the laws of thermodynamics even, of climbing, like metaphysical salmon, “back up a stream of radiance to the sky/ and back through history up the stream of time.” I heard, “two such as you,” and “together” and I preened and strutted and listened not very well to the last bit that defined it all. Lying in bed, “oar to oar,” I thought, and the obviousness of the image now slapped me broadside. I had, I realized, retained only a vague idea of what that phrase meant. Blame my years of prep school and my awe of the tall, lanky sorts who rowed crew for my image of the oars in series, one behind the next, each person pulling in synchrony with the rest of the eight, or however many those sleek, expensive boats carry. How had I failed to notice that that wasn’t right at all? I was too taken with the idea of marriage as a fusion, of a joining, of two-become-one that I had not noticed that the poem actually set us away from each other, that we were, quite literally, not in the same boat. And if we each row our own boats, then there has to be more than two oars-lengths between us even, there has to be space between the oar tips too, to allow each of us free movement, to keep the eddying turbulence from pulling each others’ blades underwater, to stay the course.
I thought about the impending procedure, and the wheelchair, and the space opening up between us. However transiently, he was going into the country of the sick, the sedated, the passive, the patient. I was to remain in the waiting room in the land of the able bodied, alert, free-moving, and would receive him when the ferryman anesthesiologist brought him back from his dim, Versed dream. It was not the idea of the wheelchair that bothered me. It was the oars. If we were to keep rowing up the stream with our master speed, we’d need both sets of hands on our own oars. We’d need to not interfere with each other’s progress, and we could neither of us carry the other one. I remembered that from years before, when I’d been in labor with each of our children. He and I were in the room together, he was beside me, doing anything I asked, tiring himself out pressing on the sides of my hips for hours, when I told him I felt like my pelvis was coming apart. But after twenty, thirty hours of it all, he would be falling asleep in the chair by the window while I labored and rode contraction after contraction. I wondered how he could drift off to sleep in those conditions. But those conditions were entirely my own. My own internal geography, altering landscape, changeable weather, and tectonic shift. He could not know what it felt like in my body. We were not in the same boat.
Now, eight years after our second son’s birth, in a different hospital, in a different city, I waited in a pre-procedure room with him until it was time for them to take him away. He’d had an IV dose of Benadryl and was mostly sleeping, and rousing periodically to tell me it was fine if I left. He was just sleeping, after all. A nurse documented any jewelry he was wearing: only his wedding ring. Then they came for him and wheeled his stretcher away and I went the other way to go wait. As I walked down the hallway, I looked left to see a set of doors open to a parallel hallway. A patient was being pushed along, supine, sleepy, toward the procedure room, and after a moment, I startled and saw it was him. They were going the same speed I was, down the parallel hallway, the nurses, also able-bodied, striding, my gait matching theirs. But they were bearing him away and they disappeared past the doorway as I went to read and watch people waiting.
Why were we married on the solstice? People ask me that, or, if we were looking for celestial or solar significance, why not the summer solstice, the longest day? Or an equinox, the balance points of the year? The truth is, it was an accident that it fell on a solstice day. We just wanted a winter wedding, we liked December for it, and the church would already be decorated for Christmas, saving us money on flowers. But now that I think about it, it suits. The pagans all knew about this time of the year, the long descent into darkness, the hold-your-breath-and-hope-the-sun-comes-back rituals, the stop, and the turning point when the pendulum starts its swing back. The unmoving sun shining the same whether we turn our faces toward it or away, and we are finished turning away. Though the winter will get colder, it will get no darker.
When his exam was all over, and he’d been given a mostly clean bill of health but for a follow up in six months just to be sure, they summoned me, calling out for “The Courchesne Family” and I went to claim him. It turned out he didn’t need a wheelchair after all. He was fairly steady, though slower than usual, with a little tendency to drift left as he walked. I walked alongside him, watchful, bracing a little, gauging the right distance to keep, the right balance, the right speed. And then I brought us home.
thestagecoachroad 