A Decent World E-Book

Ellen Hawley

• Herausgeber: Swift Press
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 328

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Beschreibung

'Quietly magical ... a book that draws you in and then refuses to let you go' - Stephen May, author of Sell Us the Rope Summer Dawidowitz has spent the past year caring for her grandmother, Josie — a lifelong Communist, a dedicated teacher, and the founder of an organization that tutors schoolchildren. When Josie dies, everything that seemed solid in Summer's life comes into question. What sort of relationship will she have with the mother who abandoned her? Will she meet with the brother Josie exiled from the family? Does she really want to go back to the non-monogamous household she was part of before she moved in to take care of Josie? Finally, does she still believe a small, committed group of citizens can change the world, and if so - how? Reader Reviews 'A compassionate and well-observed exploration of troubled families and relationships … perceptive and quietly moving' 'An intriguing family saga' 'Excellent, deep and very funny'

Leseprobe

For Ida

Easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism.

Origin uncertain. Quoted by Frederic Jameson

All that is solid melts into air.

Karl Marx

Toward the end of the first real conversation we ever had, David Freund asked if I still thought I could change the world.

“Still,” he said, as if we’d been arguing about this for years, although before Josie – my grandmother, his sister – died we’d never seen each other. She’d been the stopper in the family bottle, keeping him neatly contained and out of our lives, and now that she was gone, he was pouring into my life. Already he thought he knew what was inside my head. Which pissed me off, particularly since he was right.

I’d seen him twice since Josie’s death and we hadn’t managed much in the way of conversation either time. Here I was, though, sitting stiffly on his brocade sofa, trying not to spill the coffee he’d given me.

I quoted Margaret Meade at him: “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”

It felt odd saying “indeed” out loud, but the quote demanded that kind of formality. Besides, it matched his furniture.

He blew a stream of air through his lips as if it was exactly the sort of answer he’d expected. I told myself I was a stand-in for the version of Josie he carried in his memory, and the whole scene seemed as natural as it did ridiculous.

I’d borrowed my quotation from a battered poster still taped to Josie’s basement door, so in a sense it was her answer. As a kid, I read the words so often that I’d stored them on the mental shelf where our most fundamental beliefs share space with our platitudes: Safety is fragile; if we drop things, they fall; a small, committed group of people can build a just society.

Long after I left David’s house, our answer, Josie’s and mine, bounced around in my head.

Did I still agree with it?

Mostly.

Partly.

Entirely. I couldn’t face a life where I didn’t. But it was easier to believe if we were talking about the small things. I’d started to wonder about the big ones.

Josie never did. The Soviet version of socialism had shaped her life, but even after the Soviet Union collapsed, she held steady. A small group of committed citizens, et cetera.

I don’t remember the collapse. My entire experience of Josie – not to mention of the world – dates from the post-Soviet era, with capitalism triumphant and crumbling and our lovely, spoiled planet floating like a lobster in a pot of warming water while we, the complicated little parasites who live on its back, tell each other we’re still okay.

Believing we can change the world has never been easy, and it’s at least as hard to think we can’t. But to the extent that I did still believe it, was it because I’d weighed the evidence or because Josie had raised me to? Was it because giving up that belief would mean living without hope? Did I believe it the way other people believe in god and guardian angels and a higher purpose in the universe?

I could answer yes and no, passionately, to every one of those questions.

Summer Dawidowitz

January 2012

1

I woke up to lights, and two nurses straightening Josie’s body out of the fetal curl I’d last seen her in. I said, “Oh,” and they turned. A breath of understanding passed between us. It was all any of us said. One of them touched my shoulder as she headed for the door, and they left me alone in the fluorescent hospital buzz to smooth back Josie’s hair, although they’d already smoothed it, and to stand beside the bed searching for one last thing I could do for her. But the face wasn’t Josie’s anymore. Josie had been extinguished while I was asleep and nothing I could do was ever going to reach her again.

Somewhere down the hall, a woman bellowed that she wanted to go home, she wanted to go home.A man said something low and soothing that I couldn’t make out and the woman shouted again, louder, wilder. I thought I should go to her – if Josie had taught me anything it was to not turn away from other people’s pain – but I didn’t move. The woman sounded crazy and I never did know what to do with crazy. Or maybe she wasn’t crazy, maybe it was just that her life was complicated. Her problems were complicated. If I walked in and asked what was wrong, she’d pour every one of them into my lap, problems cascading down, and then they’d be mine, and what the hell would I do with them? Or I’d become her new problem, the one she could solve by bellowing at me.

I can’t do it, I told Josie’s memory, and in the face of her silence I told myself she’d have understood. She was strategic about the problems she took on. Load the whole world’s pain onto your back and it’ll break you.

The woman stopped shouting. I’d dithered long enough to be excused.

I left Josie’s body by itself and walked the empty hallways to the family room so I wouldn’t be sitting next to her when I called the family to say she’d died. It wasn’t that I thought her spirit would be hovering nearby, but I didn’t want to stand next to her empty body and talk about her as if she wasn’t there.

Even though she wasn’t.

The TV that had spent all day grinding out news and celebs and revving car engines to soothe worried relatives was silent now and the only light came over the three-quarter wall from the corridor. Choosing the darkest corner, I knelt, lowered my head to a chair and bit its plasticky upholstered edge. In some small part of my brain, a string of cells lit up, telling me this was an odd thing to do, but it was a dim light, claiming only the tiniest fraction of my attention. To an outsider, I might have looked like I was praying, and that thought lit up a few brain cells as well. The people I come from don’t pray, though. We may bite, but we do not pray.

Then I let go of the chair, dug out my phone and surrendered Josie’s death to the family and all of its teeth.

When Zanne came through the door, I was back beside Josie’s bed, worrying that the single blanket covering her might not have been enough and wanting retroactively to keep her warm. Zanne filled the room, though, driving out any thought that wasn’t about her. She was impressive where any other woman in her body would’ve just been overweight, and she was dressed in black with a flash of silver at the neck.

“I’ll wait outside,” I said.

“Could we call a truce, please? Just for tonight?”

For the scantest measure of time, I weighed this. It was a physical process that bypassed thought, but nothing inside me softened, so no, apparently we couldn’t. Not tonight. Not tomorrow. Not with her and not in my lifetime.

I left her there and walked the hallway until I came to the elevators, where I stopped to watch the numbers light up and go dark, and that tiny set of changes was enough to fill my mind. They lit up and went dark for some measureless length of time, then the doors opened on Jack and Raymond – my uncle and his partner.

“Summer,” Raymond said, and he folded me into a hug. My head rested on the muscle below his shoulder and as I hugged him back my hand brushed his dreads. I had an impulse to braid and knot them the way I had as a kid, at first fascinated by how different they were from my own hair and, once I got past that, by all the possibilities their length offered. For a breath of time I was young enough to plaster myself to him until the empty space inside me filled. Raymond: the relative I wasn’t related to; the one I could give myself over to most easily.

Behind me, Jack squeezed a shoulder. “You okay, kiddo?”

I pulled away to open a space for him and gathered enough of myself to say, “Zanne’s in there with her.”

He said, “Waiting for an audience,” and then, as if the thought was connected, “I should’ve stayed the night. I didn’t think it would happen so soon.”

“I didn’t think she’d be so dead.”

I giggled – whatever I’d expected myself to say, it hadn’t been that – then I cried and brushed my eyes almost dry.

“With Sol, I never got to see him. Josie asked if I wanted to and I wouldn’t go in.”

Jack squeezed my shoulder again. He was as gently rumpled as Zanne was dramatic. “Sol was pretty dead himself.”

It was an oddly comforting thing to hear. In the history of the world, other people had looked at death and felt this same surprise. I stared at nothing, then the elevator doors came into focus, the metal scratched with names and hatch marks, the cock and balls boys draw on every public surface.

“Listen,” Raymond said to me.

I was standing apart from him and it made him taller than when I’d leaned against him. A tree in this family of shrubs.

“About Zanne. I’d never ask you to feel anything other than what you feel, but the family has to pull together right now, and she is family. You don’t have to like her and you don’t have to forgive her, but you do have to be in the same room with her. You have to be in the same conversations.”

He hadn’t said, “She’s your mother,” only, “She’s family,” and I could accept that, but even so all I said was, “I hear you.”

He raised an eyebrow to mark the difference between I hear you and yes.

Jack’s hand was still on my shoulder, offering support, sympathy, maybe a warning. I couldn’t tell which, but it was a connection and I was grateful for it.

Zanne stood looking into the dark outside Josie’s window and she turned when she heard us, displaying her tearstained face. She’d never kept an emotion to herself and she’d never displayed one at its original size. She hugged Jack, pulled Raymond in, hanging on as if they were just in time to haul her from the deep.

When she released them, she asked, “What about Caro?”

Caro. Zanne and Jack’s sister. My aunt. Raymond’s not-quite sister-in-law. The odd one out in the family and the person I’d had in mind when I thought of the family’s teeth, although our mouths were all full of them and we all knew how to use them.

“She wants us to go to her house. They’re making breakfast.”

We turned to Josie as if we needed to ask: was it okay if we abandoned her to this place while we fed ourselves? Jack touched her hand, a small, charged motion that made him, for some fraction of a second, beautiful, as if he’d distilled everything he knew into it, and everything he felt. I envied him that moment, as if the perfect gesture would make life bearable.

Then he moved away and he was no more than some smallish man your eye would skip over to fall in love with either Zanne or Raymond.

Raymond stepped into the same spot, touched his palm to Josie’s head and whispered that she’d been a mother to him too. Silently, some seaborne giant inside me broke the surface and wept.

When Raymond moved aside, I stepped in. Why we were taking turns like this I couldn’t have said. No one was on the other side of the bed and it wasn’t as if she could only focus on one of us at a time. Still, it’s what we did. I kissed her forehead one last time. She was a mother to me as well, but I didn’t need to say so. We were closer than that.

I waited in the hallway while Zanne made her grand final gesture, and when they all filed out I followed them until at the elevators I said I’d meet them at Caro’s and turned back before they had a chance to ask why.

Josie was where we’d left her – where had I thought she’d go? – and her emptiness was new enough that I narrated it to myself: She’s still here. I lifted her hand and pressed it to my cheek, then on an impulse worked the wedding band over her knuckle, wrestling it left and right, reminding myself that I couldn’t hurt her, although it felt violent all the same.

The ring came loose and I pressed her hand back to my cheek, then lowered it to the bed.

I thought the words I’ll keep this safe for you, as if in the privacy of my head she could still hear me. This was the ring Sol had given her. She’d want it to be – what? With one of us? I didn’t know and she was beyond wanting, but it felt like something I could still do for her.

My fingers closed around the ring, keeping it safe until I tucked it in my pocket, and after that there was nothing left to do but follow my family through the city’s still-dark streets and across the bridge to St. Paul, with each block leaving Josie’s tiny, empty body further behind.

2

Jack pushed the wreckage of his breakfast toward the center of Caro and Steve’s table – a smear of egg, a film of grease, the plate as oversized as if they were running a high-end restaurant.

“Here’s the question: Can I say she was a Communist?”

He was talking about the memorial, which we hadn’t set a date for, but whenever we had it he wanted to be the one who’d tell her life story.

Caro groaned, although the emotion didn’t go deep enough to penetrate her makeup.

“Okay, that’s one vote. Anyone else?”

“It’s who she was,” Zanne said. “You can’t tell her story without it.”

Zanne, that famous advocate of unadorned fact. It gave me a floaty sense of being outside myself, just far enough away to see how surreal we all were.

“She didn’t publicize it,” Caro said. “Why should we have to?”

“It’s not the McCarthy period anymore.” Raymond’s tone was gentle, as if he was offering a compromise, although he wasn’t.

“We have to think about TOCK,” I said. “They’re the ones who could be affected by it.”

TOCK was the organization Josie had founded more than half a lifetime ago, back when it really was the McCarthy period. I did fundraising for it, charging less than I charged my other clients and lying to them about it, although I expect they knew.

“How about if TOCK agrees?”

“I don’t suppose it matters if I agree,” Caro said.

Jack held his fork in both hands as if he was testing the handle. It was expensive, yes, but would it bend?

“It won’t hurt you in any material way,” he said. “It could hurt the organization.”

“Is that what matters? Material ways?”

“It’s who she was,” Zanne said again.

“Right. So we’ve decided then: We’re going to tell everybody everything that ever happened in the family. We’re going to drag them through every miserable bit of history we’ve got.”

“Who said it was miserable?”

Since it was Zanne asking, I said, “You might have noticed I wasn’t exactly happy.”

Zanne got as far as “That’s—” but Jack talked over her and she used it as a get-out-of-jail-free card.

“This isn’t any random bit of history. It’s not the difference between blue hair ribbons and green ones.”

“I didn’t say it was hair ribbons.”

“Just tell ’em,” Zanne said, trying to stare me down as if I’d been the one saying we shouldn’t mention it. “Fuck ’em if they don’t like it.”

Quietly, more as if he was thinking out loud than criticizing, Steve said, “Elegantly put.”

“I’ll say it in Latin if you like.”

I waited to see if he’d take her up on the offer.

“Everyone, please.” Raymond turned one palm up like someone checking for rain.

“Oh, do what you like,” Caro said. “You will anyway.”

Steve touched Caro’s arm. Silent speech in the language of the long-married. Your family’s crazy, it said. You can’t change them.

“More coffee,” Caro said, making it more of a command than a question. “Summer, what about toast? You could eat that much.”

“I can’t.”

She extended the platter anyway – something seeded and buttered, from Whole Foods if I’d had to guess. It was nutritious, overpriced and repellent. I couldn’t understand how these relatives of mine were eating while Josie lay so completely dead, but Caro and Steve had set out enough bacon, eggs, fruit and toast to feed a small village, and the leftovers were congealing on the serving platters. When we left, they’d scrape it all down the garbage disposal to feed the rats that live in the sewers. Rats in rich neighborhoods live better than the global poor. It’s trickle-down economics at work.

My hands had made themselves into a barricade.

“You’re sure?”

Steve lifted the plate from her hands and set it back on the table.

“Caro, she said no.” He took the coffee pot and left us.

“You’ll sing?” Raymond asked Zanne.

The question was as kind as it was unnecessary. We’d have had to drug her to keep her from singing, but she wanted someone to ask. Needed someone to ask.

“Just for god’s sake don’t sing ‘Beloved Comrade,’” Caro said.

Zanne leaned an elbow on the table, smiled and sang directly at her.

To you, beloved comrade,

We make this solemn vow:

The fight will go on.

The fight will still go on.

She’d started it on a low note, close to the bottom of her range, and when her voice lifted she broke the song into open grief.

Rest here in the earth,

Your work is done,

You’ll find new birth

When we have won.

When we have won.

It undid me. From as far back as I can remember, her voice always could undo me, even though her solemnest vows were nothing more than trained air. The fight – what Josie always called the struggle, although it had too many syllables to make its way into the song – vibrated in the room with Josie’s children, their partners, her one lone grandchild, who she’d raised herself because her daughter got distracted. Carried on Zanne’s voice, the struggle wasn’t either terrifying or some long, daily slog, but the state we most longed to enter. Red nirvana. Satori. Love itself.

Then the song ended and Jack gave a shudder, half theatrical, half – I think – real. “It’s overblown, I know it’s overblown, but god, it is so beautiful.”

The song was slow to let go of us, and it echoed into a silence until Steve – wide-shouldered, quiet, unknowable – came back with the coffee and we got back to work, listing the people who had to be told, deciding who’d make which calls. Steve refilled my cup, his free hand resting on my shoulder. I’d always sensed a gentleness about the man, even though I had only the vaguest idea of who he was. He’d been in my life since I was five, like some kindly piece of furniture. Raymond had made himself a part of the family, but Steve stood aside. If lightning struck us, he’d be safe.

“Can we call you for phone numbers?” Jack asked me. “You know where she kept her phone book?”

Of course I knew. I knew every detail of her last year. I knew she’d eaten crackers in bed when she couldn’t sleep, knew that in the morning she’d vacuumed crumbs off the sheet until she couldn’t manage the vacuum anymore, at which point I took over, because crazy as it was, it was easier than brushing crumbs onto the floor and vacuuming them there.

None of the rest of them knew this, only me. Me, me, me, humming the same tune as Zanne and Caro.

How did Josie and Sol give rise to this nest of me-creatures? How had Jack managed to slip free?

“Or email,” I said. “Whatever’s easier.”

“What about the obit?” Caro asked. “You want to write it now? I could do it later.”

Before the idea of Caro writing it could gain traction, Jack started to dictate: “Josephine Freund Dawidowitz. Born, died, survived by. Include husband and partners.”

Caro made notes.

“What about David?” Zanne asked.

“He is family,” Caro said, her pen hovering.

“Not anymore he isn’t,” Jack said.

“Josie didn’t count him in,” I said.

That made it two to one, and we turned to Zanne, the wild card in our pack, to see if she’d deadlock us.

“Leave him out,” she said, not bothering to justify her vote.

“Retouching history again,” Caro said.

Raymond put a hand on Jack’s arm to stop him from arguing.

I half remembered a story from Stalin’s time about one of the old Bolsheviks who’d been airbrushed out of a photo when he fell from favor. If they had airbrushes then. Maybe they did it by hand. Maybe I was mistaking metaphor for fact.

“Founder of TOCK,” Jack said.

“Have to spell it out.”

“Spell it out, then.”

Their voices were sharp and short, threatening a spat about even this.

“Founder of Teach Our Children.”

Caro paced the words barely ahead of her pen.

When they first chose the name, Josie’d wanted to leave out the K because it didn’t stand for anything, but she lost the vote. Decades later, when it was just the two of us, she still sometimes called it “TOCK-the-K-is-silent.”

“How much do they charge for these things?” Zanne asked.

“From each according to their ability,” Jack said. “We’ll split it fairly.”

We’d had this discussion before, when Josie’s bills outran her income, and after a few squabbles about how able some of us were, we didn’t do badly.

“Want the abbreviation too?”

“That’s all some people know it as.” Another time where I got to be the expert. Me, me, me.

“Parentheses TOCK.”

“Blacklisted as a teacher during the McCarthy era for her political activity. That should come before the first mention of TOCK.”

Caro wouldn’t repeat this but she wrote, her fingers tight and angry on the pen.

“Any memorials should be made to TOCK?”

Even Caro nodded. Anything else would be heresy. I could have told her it wasn’t a politically challenging organization, but she already knew that and it didn’t bail any water out of a childhood she alone saw as leaky. Josie had put politics before Caro. She’d put TOCK before Caro.

Poor Caro. None of the rest of us thought Josie had shortchanged us.

The discussion moved on. Cremation. The memorial again. Her will, because even the purest of us accumulate things. She’d left the house to the four of us equally and trusted us to divide its contents without spilling blood. We dealt out the tasks like playing cards and there was something comforting about knowing we had jobs to do, decisions to make – the unsentimental business of living on after someone dies.

“I brought her ring,” I said.

In my imagination, fishing it out of my pocket was going to be seamless, but the reality was awkward. I had to separate it from the change I carried, then my hand caught in my pocket and I half stood to pull it out. Caro said “Keep it” while I was still struggling.

I set the ring on the table. This was what I’d brought and this was what I was going to deliver.

Jack picked it up, held it a moment, his hand forming a cushion for it to rest on, then gave it back.

“Keep it,” he said. “Someone has to.”

3

By the time we broke up, the night of Josie’s death had opened into a steel-gray morning, and I took a moment to stand alone on the sidewalk, pulling cold air into my lungs, letting its sharp edges clear the family from my body, reassembling the adult I could only manage to be in their absence.

Caro and Steve lived a block and a half from Summit Avenue, as close as they could afford to the turn-of-the-century grace the robber barons had left behind and the upper middle class now nested in. It was a well-behaved neighborhood, with an underlying tension about how close it sat to – they’d whisper it so as not to risk offending anyone – the Black neighborhood along the freeway.

Not that they were prejudiced, mind you.

Their block had a bland kind of beauty, and for a second or two I was grateful for its quiet.

Then I drove home, and I’d closed Josie’s garage door and was headed for the back gate when Irene crossed the alley toward me, dressed for work, looking both tough and office-ready, a cigarette in one hand, a purse big enough to hold a kitchen chair over the opposite shoulder.

“Any news on your gramma?”

“Gone, Irene. Early this morning.”

Instead of saying she was sorry, she said, “She was a real lady, you know?”

I laughed. Because it was true. Because none of us get to escape our history. Because Josie never stopped carrying herself like she knew where the goodies were kept. She’d have trained that out of herself if she’d known a way, but she’d absorbed it too young.

Irene gave me a one-armed hug, holding the cigarette to one side, protecting my shoulder blades from the smoke. It was awkward. She’d sat with Josie when things got to the point where I didn’t feel right leaving her alone, but we’d never been on hugging terms.

She smelled of stale tobacco and winter air.

“Stop by if you want company,” she said. “Have a beer. A cup of coffee. Whatever.”

I said I would. They were the things people say – stop by; I will – one side not knowing if the invitation’s welcome, the other not knowing if it’s real, both of us wondering if we didn’t like each other best with an alley in between.

“I gotta run. I’ll miss my bus.”

She was half a garage length away before I called my thanks after her. She waved an arm to say she’d heard, but she didn’t turn.

Josie’s house was quieter than the 3 a.m. hospital corridors had been. If Irene hadn’t just left for work, I’d have run back out and asked her in. I wanted someone there to breathe the air with me. The words of a song, or as many of them as I could get hold of, echoed in my head: Old someone’s dead and gone, left me here to sing this song. Until that moment, I would have thought that was a single state, dead and gone, but it wasn’t. In the hospital, Josie had been dead. Here, though, in the house I’d shared with her, she was gone, an absence so big it swallowed the possibility of sound. It was a different thing altogether. I traced a path from the kitchen to the dining room to the living room, opening curtains, bringing in the winter light.

In each room, her absence echoed off the walls.

Old Josie’s dead and gone, left me here to sing this song.

I tried to clear the words out of my head. It was like sweeping smoke until I substituted “Beloved Comrade”. Jack was right about it being overblown, and he was also right that it was beautiful. I sang most of the first line before my voice broke and I wept. For Josie. For her long-lost comrades – that poisoned, antiquated, beloved word. It wasn’t a word she’d used, and even in my thoughts I never had. One or two of her – let’s say it – comrades actually had talked about each other as comrades, although I never heard them say “Hello, comrade”, or anything that embarrassing. It was more like “Some of the comrades were there”, and even that didn’t happen often. I doubt I’d heard it used half a dozen times. Just enough to remind me that even if it doesn’t fit comfortably on an American tongue, it had once been a living part of the language. They’d meant it. Or some of them had.

As far as I know, the Communist Party had already folded in on itself by the time I heard anyone put breath behind the word. The Soviet Union had collapsed, leaving these old warriors behind to remind each other of who they’d been and what they’d hoped for. To trade news of the small battle fires they still tended. To tell each other about their aches, their illnesses, their grandkids, their disappointments. Josie had loved them, and they drove her crazy with their complaining.

I was weeping partly for Josie and partly for all the purity that might have made the world a better place and hadn’t.

When I ran out of tears, I picked up the shoes she’d left by her chair, knobbed where her bunions had fought the leather for space, and I carried them to her closet and lined them up neatly, as if she might need them again. Then I turned the covers down on one side of her bed and curled myself into it.

Josie’s sheets were older than I was, but they were good cotton – percale, she told me once – and they’d grown softer with age until now they were as smooth as skin. She’d committed her life to the working class, but she’d kept a weakness for small luxuries. Like Irene said, she was a lady.

When I was little, she used to sing me a song about a lord’s wife who runs off with the Gypsies and says she won’t miss her husband’s goose-feather bed. She’ll sleep in a cold, open field. I used to think of it as Josie’s story, only she ended up with the best of both worlds: Sol and the cold, open world, plus two sets of damn fine sheets.

Only I didn’t know back then how good Josie’s sheets were. Which was just as well, because I was a little purist and would’ve looked down my nose at them, and at her for having them. I didn’t find out about them until I moved back in to help with those small, essential jobs like vacuuming crumbs off them.

The day she went into the hospital, I put clean sheets on the bed to welcome her home, folding them down the way she taught me to, so the piping showed above the blankets. The way the lord’s sheets are turned down: bravely-o. Even though I half knew she wasn’t coming back.

Or – admit it – I hoped she wasn’t. She’d been wanting to die ever since the strokes robbed her of the person she’d been. If humans had an off button, she’d have pushed hers. It was an act of love to want her death, and wishing for it had left me fouled.

I didn’t exactly sleep in her bed, but I lay there, my mind hazed, wanting her back as helplessly as I’d ever wanted Zanne to come back for me, and I let time pass until the phone rang and Caro asked for a couple of people’s numbers. Then Jack wanted a few, and when I hung up I made my own calls: Josie, early this morning, we wanted you to know, we’ll call about the memorial as soon as we get it figured out, although it won’t be right away. And yes, we’ll miss her. We’ll all miss her.

I spread my grief across the city until it was wide and thin and damn near bearable.

When I couldn’t think of anything else to do with myself, I called Shar and told her how much I missed her. I didn’t tell her Josie was dead. I had a half-formed sense that telling her on the phone would cheapen it and a less-than-half-formed sense that once I told her, my grief wouldn’t be my own anymore, so I held it close. This belonged to no one but me, even while she was the one person I wanted comfort from.

She asked if I could come over, meaning could someone stay with Josie, and I said I could, not telling her we were past that and had been for days.

I felt the Household’s gravity pulling at me.

The Household, capital H, meant Shar, Tee and Zac. Before Josie reached the point where she couldn’t live alone, it had meant the three of them plus me, although I was never in the inner orbit. I was a moon circling Shar. But even after a year of making my bed at Josie’s and keeping most of my stuff there, I still thought of it as the Household, as if it was the only one I knew of.

I unlocked their front door and walked into the full scream of the vacuum. Shar caught sight of me and fumbled for the power button, yelling over the noise for me to wait, reminding me of someone struggling with a dog that outweighed her. She hit the button and the scream curved downward into silence.

“Hey,” she said.

She was still holding the vacuum and couldn’t seem to free herself from it.

“Josie died,” I said. “Last night.” I stood at the edge of the rug, hands inside my jacket pockets, each one clutching a glove.

She leaned the vacuum wand against the wall and we watched it slide, neither of us making a move to catch it, flinching in unison when it clattered on the floor, as if the sound had surprised us. As if Josie’s death had. She moved toward me and I shook my head, saying no to something: No, don’t be kind to me. Don’t cry, don’t touch, don’t speak, although what had I come there for if not all of that?

“It’s what she’d been wanting. Since the first stroke.”

It felt right to say this, as if I owed Josie bluntness.

“All the same,” she said.

She told me to take off my jacket, and it seemed natural that she had to tell me this.

“Here. Sit.”

I let her park me on the couch and she sat next to me.

“I’ll miss her,” she said.

I thought the words I know you will but couldn’t say them. She’d known Josie since we were kids, and that helped anchor me to the planet. We held hands for some time before we turned toward each other. She touched her forehead to mine, laying her hand across the back of my neck, and we rested there until something inside me opened to her – an unquestionably physical feeling that didn’t match any physical event and was more intimate than any kiss I’ve ever known. I spread my hand across the back of her neck in an echo of her hand on mine and my mind stopped pumping out thoughts, just marveled at the wave of feeling that lifted us.

And then, slowly, it set us down. I folded back into myself. She folded back into hers. We kissed, light and sweet, and we separated.

“You want to go upstairs?” I asked.

I hadn’t known sex could grow out of the same ground as loss, but it did, and I followed her up the stairs to her room.

By the time we came back down, Tee was folding laundry on the living room floor. She stood, a single motion like a dancer’s, until she was upright, a sunflower blossoming between the stacked underwear and the laundry basket. Even stock-still, she had a grace about her. Then she hugged me, rocking me left and right.

“Josie died,” I said into her shoulder.

Her grip tightened.

“Oh, Summer.”

Her voice had gone teary, as if the loss was hers, although of the three Household members she’d known Josie the least. I squeezed back long enough to be polite, then extricated myself. I didn’t want to cry. I didn’t want anyone else to cry, especially Tee, whose tears were—

It wasn’t that they were easy. They wrenched her hard on their way out, but she had too many, and too many things set them flowing. If she cried now, it wouldn’t be for Josie, it would be because the world’s grief overran her sometimes. Once, before Josie’s stroke, when I still lived with the Household, I came home late and found her weeping in the dark over a woman she’d seen at first light, collecting cans from the alley before the recycling truck came, pushing them in a supermarket cart that was hung with black bags. She carried a stick with a nail at the end to scare away dogs. Or people. Tee had a couple of bucks on her and she gave it to the woman, who tucked it in her bra and moved on. Tee hadn’t, though. She was still weeping. She should’ve had more, given more, done more. Instead, she felt more.

I sat with Tee for a while that night, telling her she was a good person, but it wasn’t what she needed to hear, and it wasn’t what I wanted to say either. Because what good did her tears do the woman in the alley?

They wouldn’t do me any good either. This wasn’t her fucking pain, it was mine, and I wasn’t sharing.

“It’s okay,” I heard myself say, and to soften it I added what I’d said to Shar: “It’s what she wanted.”

It came as a kind of footnote.

I followed Shar to the kitchen, where she put a pan on the stove and poured in leftover soup, and I was prepared to believe I could eat. It wasn’t Caro’s overpriced health food. I was back in the life I’d chosen, and I watched her stir the soup. She was a small woman with yarn-wrapped, white-girl dreads. They were different in texture, in width, in message from Raymond’s. He didn’t approve of white people wearing dreads but he’d been generous enough to stop saying so when she sprouted hers, although that didn’t keep me from remembering it.

She set bowls on the table and called Tee. I stirred mine: carrots, beans, whole wheat macaroni. There’d be miso in there somewhere – there was always miso – and it was crammed with protein and fiber and alternatives to capitalism. I stared into it as if I could read our entire philosophical mix inside my chipped, flowery bowl, but I didn’t spoon it into my body. Instead I told them about the hospital, the nurses, everything I now knew about pneumonia. I stirred the soup, making the acquaintance of a new bean, a different slice of carrot. “Beloved Comrade” came back to me. Josie wouldn’t have counted miso as a weapon in the struggle, and I had to admit she had a point. It wasn’t the magic enzyme that would break down capitalism.

“Zanne showed up,” I said.

“How’d it go?” Shar asked.

“It’s been worse. Mostly she let me ignore her.”

She sang, the voice inside me said, but I didn’t want to talk about the layers of meaning – or if not meaning, at least feeling – involved in that. I didn’t understand them anyway. Instead, I said, “I’ve been thinking all morning about how sure Josie and Sol were that history led to the revolution and that life would be better afterwards.”

Shar hummed an acknowledgment.

I said, “I envy them that.”

Even if they were wrong? the voice inside me asked.

Fuck yes. Even then.