* * *
—
So there was that.
* * *
There have been a few times—and I mean recently—when I feel the curtain of my childhood descend around me once again. A terrible enclosure, a quiet horror: This is the feeling and it was my entire childhood, and it came back to me with a whoosh the other day. To remember so quietly, yet vividly, to have it re-presented to me in this way, the sense of doom I grew up with, knowing I could never leave that house （except to go to school, which meant the world to me, even though I had no friends there, but I was out of the house）—to have this come back to me presented a domain of dull and terrifying dreariness to me: There was no escape.
When I was young there was no escape, is what I am saying.
* * *
—
Thinking this reminded me of a time right before David got sick when I was in the Deep South giving a talk, and the woman who organized the talk said to me on the way to the airport the next morning, “You don’t seem very urban.” This woman had been raised in New York City, and I could not tell what to make of the remark; she did not say it kindly, I thought.
But the moment she said it I thought of my tiny childhood home. What came to me immediately was a sprinkling of dismalness that descended, and I have thought about this since:
How in my later years that stench comes back to me, the way people sometimes act—to my mind—as though I had a smell they did not care for. Whether the woman who drove me to the airport that morning felt that way, I do not know.
* * *
—
As I think of this now, I remember Lois Bubar speaking of how “citified” Catherine Cole was when she met her with her bare legs and the dress with the piping on it, and I think: Catherine, you did this, you managed, you crossed these lines in our world! And I think in a way she did. Her playing golf. Her trips to the Cayman Islands. How is it that some people know how to do this, and others, like me, still give off the faint smell of what we came from?
I would like to know. I will never know.
Catherine, with her own scent that she always wore.
* * *
—
My point is that there is a cultural blank spot that never ever leaves, only it is not a spot, it is a huge blank canvas and it makes life very frightening.
It is as though William ushered me into the world. I mean as much as I could be ushered. He did that for me. And Catherine did too.
* * *
Oh, I missed David so much! I thought about how for two days before he died he said nothing, not even really moved, and when he died I was not in the room, I had left to make a phone call. I have since learned that this happens frequently with people: They wait until their loved ones have left the room so they can die.
* * *
—
But the nurse told me—she said—（oh God!）—she told me that David had spoken, his eyes had still been closed, but he had spoken. His last words were “I want to go home.”
* * *
And I had thought that I had no real home with him—but I had! This was my home with him, this small apartment that looks out over the river and the city.
* * *
—
I was not sorry to be in it, even with my grief.
* * *
—
I suddenly thought of how he loved raspberries on his cereal every morning. Fresh raspberries: He would go to a farmers market that came into the city on Sundays and he would go every July and buy raspberries and we froze them so he could have them throughout the year on his cereal in the mornings, and I thought of one morning when he was to have a colonoscopy in four days, and the directions from the doctor had said no seeds for five days, and on that day, as we started having our cereal—this was one of my favorite parts of the day, sitting with my husband for our little breakfasts—he suddenly said, “Wait, I need my raspberries,” and I reminded him of the directions from the doctor, and I saw his face fall—it fell like the face of a child who is sad, and oh dear God we know how sad a child can feel—and he said, “But not even today?”
And so I got up and got him his raspberries—every night he took a little from the freezer to have with his cereal the next morning—and I said, “Okay, you still have time,” and he ate the raspberries on his cereal that day and he was happy.
I mention this because it is one of those strange memories that we have when a person we love so much dies: David had his raspberries that day and he was happy. But I remember this, and it makes my heart ache.
* * *
—
I will tell you just one more thing about David, and then no more:
* * *