Otter and Flotsam. Glove, Gill, and Goose Feather. Tonic and Air.
One should for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise. —F. Scott Fitzgerald
by Abby Frucht
As my three deaths go, I prefer my death by ice to my demise by cancer and heart attack. It’s way more fun, costs far less money, and happens outdoors amid the vastness of a solitude belonging not to me but to a wintery flux of matter and things immaterial exceeding all boundaries. Not to fault those luscious dreams about the monsters on the bus by which my cancer tries to warn me of some wayward havoc boarding me that doesn’t belong, but dreams have nothing on my tussle with the frozen lake nor on the scars the dog rakes into my biker jacket as he tries to climb over me out of the water. Although I like my oncologist well enough and often flaunt, via lowcut blouses and tanks, the clumsy scarring left behind by the mortified surgeon, they have nothing on the otter parading past my resting place in other, later winters, the quiffed head periscoping, the slender webbed foot aiming for a margin of ice by which to merge alongside me into the deep.
If I had put on my Fryes the day Ike went through the ice, I’d be in there still. My puppet arms closing then fluttering wide, my fingers thawing, suppurating, bubbles no longer rising from the seams in my sleeves but what’s left of my hair mussed up like always, the curls springing west then north again not via the usual pinning and clipping but via tide, current, updrift, downdraft, and then a deer swimming over my head one noon, its hooves combing my hair, my skull itself parting. Human skin has no receptors for wetness, some scientists claim, the sensation of wetness being instead a perceptual illusion, a trick played on the mind by thermal and mechanical sensory cues. I haven’t learned this yet, the day I plunge into the lake, and I will never be so reckless as to ever try to rescue the dog again, though since it’s hard to scold while drowning I might appear to be warbling, yodeling froth, my mouth stoppered and numb, wrong notes effervescing.
We were parked at the middle school at the end of the school day, Jess not yet in sight on the sidewalk, waiting. “Not now, Ike,” I warned, but up Ike jumped onto the passenger seat scrambling to pee, so I edged the car out of the parking space, paused at the crosswalk to let the crosswalker pass with a passel of kids, and pulled ahead into the parking lot fronting the bay, where some leftover rainbow puddles of oil stained the ground near racks of dinghies wrapped like corpses at sea. Beyond the seagull nesting island the winter was reaching its melting point, ice pooling in places, upheaving in others and churning apart, the plowed roads that crisscrossed it shut by edict for the season and all ice-fishing shanties hauled to shore. Still the bay appeared solid, the hard, milky, flat surface aswirl in old snow. Geese gathered out there. Ike must have peed while running after them, so fleetly did he leap through the open car door and set off across the ice, which yawned wide open too quick to be seen before clamping shut on top of him as he crashed through it, geese flapping aloft, the sky clapping and honking. The dog struggled back up, perplexed to be upright, caught off guard by good fortune if that’s what you call getting spat back up again choked and besotted thirty yards out. Instead of the usual boots, I wore clogs, wood soles clack clacking as I kicked them off my feet then goose-stepped in socks, those thick, marled woolens whose toes roll under. Racing over the bay I could hear it cogitating, the way Chuck and I hear it from bed some mornings, the parts worrying the whole, slabs clattering to shore then skidding to rest just shy of the house. March ice. Miller Bay. Lake Winnebago. The day the ice breaks beneath me I haven’t yet googled Lake Winnebago. Why is Lake Winnebago green? What is the deepest part of Lake Winnebago? Is Lake Winnebago a Great Lake? Is Lake Winnebago a good lake? How many people have died in Lake Winnebago? What were the names of those two young duck hunters, boys Jess’s age, lost to Lake Winnebago? Where do the fish bite? Do people go swimming? How big are the sturgeon? If Lake Winnebago is thirty miles long, ten miles wide and fifteen feet deep, how long might it take before a drowned breast cancer and heart attack casualty might be recovered from the waters of Lake Winnebago?
In my defense, today’s death is a mix of things, things self-perpetuating, bric upon brac, a woman acting the roles of plate, fork and bowl being whisked to the floor by a clumsily executed tablecloth trick. Once more Ike slides backward making no splash even as he climbs out and stands dazed and chagrined, and no sooner does he lose his footing again than I stumble in after, ice churning above. I am over my head, I must have watched Ike’s reappearance before I reappeared, myself. Ike drags himself up to wrap his forelegs round my neck, since that’s what dogs do when being rescued from drowning. I haven’t read this yet. Water sucking at my eyeballs I grope and kick, go up, come down, Ike’s tongue in my ear, his paws at my collar. Cops call the lake the drink. I haven’t heard this yet. Am I frightened? No. Down I slide, eyes open. It’s pretty in here, not what I would expect if I’d had expectations, in cross-section the ice a shelf of pipettes meant to siphon the daylight into the murk. Shards tumble and clink amid their own ringing echoes in the vast, groaning chamber beneath the filamentous aperture the sky shows through. I like it better than the hospitals, better even than the bouquets crowded with lilies visitors bring, better even than the ceilings wheeling over my head while I was lying on the gurneys. Skating past here on blades in other bright, frozen winters, I’ve spied hands beneath the ice that turned out to be gloves and in other years, gloves that turned out to be gulls, like the dead gull I spotted while out there in summer, kayaking, once.
“A stoned gull in a heap on the nesting island,” I phoned the DNR to warn.
“A stoned gull,” the guy mused.
I wondered if he knew he had a sexy voice. I’d gone hiking months before with one of his colleagues, but since we weren’t exactly feeling it, we spent the rest of that evening scrolling through ratings for conservation NGO’s on Charity Navigator.
“I mean victimized,” I explained. “Beaten up like by a troubled teen or someone. By stones, I mean,” thinking how much uglier killed gulls look than lots of other dead things, since there are so often splintery, chewed bones showing and the beak wrung open and one wing shorn in a wrong direction. I hope those two young duck hunters never turned so dismembered and sorrowful looking, their bodies finally discovered still suited in camos, a library card tucked into a wallet snug in a pocket. They haven’t vanished yet, the year I quarrel with the ice. The boys’ dog swam to shore while the boys were drowning only to be struck by a passing motorist where it waited for the boys to return to their car, its muddy paw prints on the door.
Cops lose their cool, talking about it.
I don’t like the term survivor.
Nor do I like the term battling.
There’s a game I like to play when I’m walking or swimming or lying in bed alone of an evening like on the night I am having my heart attack, some book by my side where it slid from my grasp like wax off a candle. I’ll ask myself, “Would I rather die by shark, perish by bear, or be supped on by wolves near the wreaths of rusted flowers adorning the boulders overlooking the mounds up north in Chuck’s family hunting grounds, where Chuck’s legions of well-loved dogs are buried?”
I’ll pick the dropped book up, prop it open three-fingered, read the same words I’d read a minute ago and let them drop into a cleft in the body pillow when a pain I’ve never felt before sparks into my arm, bolts of lightning from my shoulders all the way through the tip of my middle finger.
“Wow,” the nurses exclaim, once Chuck, home from golf, races me across town along the flurry of traffic circles leading to Emergency. “You’re so easy to examine. Such a slender little thing. Too many of our patients are overweight. Which by the way, you are sitting on the bench for fat patients.”
Soon they send me to the cardiology ward, where I stay three days, eat fifteen jellos, sip ginger ales out of a paper cup, and am lulled back to sleep by the whisper of the nurses’ Polyurethane soles swishing past along the hallways. The cardiologist gushes. He’s never seen a Takotsubo heart attack before.
“It goes away, you know,” he tells me. “Broken Heart Syndrome. There’s no standard for treatment. In two or three months, it’ll be gone for good.”
Taking hold of my hand, he wants to know what happened to break my heart. He still asks this sometimes, as he will ask again in May at my yearly exam.
I tell him I watch too much tv news, that Chuck ended up in bed once two decades and a half ago with one of my friends, and that it takes me a whole day to drive to my granddaughters. I’ll tell him both my tiny granddaughters need open heart surgeries, that the doctors themselves have covered the expense of a costly genetics test in hopes of finding out why, and that Jess and his wife, hoping not to assuage their fears and worries with mine, have asked me please not to plan on driving down to be there on the days and nights surrounding the surgeries. Of all of this I shed a tear most every night when I am jogging on the treadmill watching MSNBC, or on the rower in the mornings watching CNN, or simply reading the Times outdoors in the evening, beneath the tree from which a squirrel keeps losing its footing, drops spread-eagled on the awning directly over my head, then scampers up into the branches again.
“Does this mean my heart is broken?” I’ll ask my cardiologist, who’ll give my hand a final squeeze, wish both of my granddaughters best of health all their lives, and bid me not to sneak looks at Chuck’s text messages ever again.
“I can’t stop,” I’ll shrug.
“Try,” he’ll advise.
“I’ll make an effort,” I’ll lie.
You wouldn’t say it resembles slow motion, exactly, the sight of Ike and me tumbling back into water then shooting straight up again then fumbling back through.
Too, we’re not exactly falling. Rather it’s the ice that falls past and around us—collapsing, really—as if to facilitate gravity. From shore we might resemble a windup toy, our limbs bicycling forward making no splash, the sky unmoved, unbothered, so I’m not panicking, either, or just in my body, not in my mind, my hands tearing at air, my toes upbraiding each other, “We oughts kicks our ways out,” since toes talk plural, “we oughts gloms our mouths closed, one oughts not drink the drinks, one oughts divine a paths out, kicks our ways to where the ice is robuster than here,” outmaneuvered by the ground not being where it’s meant to be. The ice doesn’t go all the way down, that is. It shimmers back into watery beads as we plummet, the way Chuck’s Grandma Stuckert’s cut-glass heirloom pitcher exploded when I lifted it the very first time, leaving only the handle complete in my hand while the rest of it hailstoned on botched linoleum.
Would I do it again?
Rescue the dog in other, later winters for another, second time?
The bay yielding underneath us, down we go like someone’s finger stirring ice in a glass.
Ike is Chuck’s dog, too, is the crux of the matter, Chuck who adoring the smell of Ike’s ears likes to burrow his nose in the waxiness of them as in other dogs’ ears in all decades past and after. I have no choice but to rescue our dog, I mean, by which I mean that the presumption of making a choice is, like wetness, not included.
“If you don’t save Ike,” Chuck inquires of my mind, “then who will curl himself up beneath the arches of your feet when you get breast cancer again? If, I mean,” recalling Ike sliding under my desk to feel my blood vessels purring inside my soles, before the rest of us knew, before I even had the dream about the monsters on the bus haranguing me to schedule a mammogram. Funny what the dog knows before the body takes stock, and what the body understands before the mind begins to reckon. So when I brandish the scars Ike raked into my jacket the way I’ll ogle my breast cancer scars years later—the gnarling and the stippling, the very lesions disfigured—it’s not to gloat at the mess but to abide once again being plunked in the matrix, ice tapping at my ears the way masts chime in summer where the sloops are moored. What a night I once had in this selfsame harbor, me and some sailor snugged up in a v-berth smoking a joint, water spanking the hull, masts climbing the sky off neighboring sailboats sprite-like in moonlight. Now I take a look out at all the colors and shapes and sounds water comes in: frenzy and slumber, racket and murmur, drowsy and din. Later I’ll read you’re advised to take stock of the options presented you by your environment during instances of danger, but that book has not been written yet. There’s a passage of cleared-out ice to the north where a thin beery foam melts into a culvert, but I am either too smoggy all of a sudden or not cold enough yet to take the trouble to get there. Still I grope at one jaggedy edge and the next, not trying to go on living, exactly, since going on living isn’t my purpose, like at the grocery store when I am shopping for supper, buying enough to eat is my purpose, not going on living. It seems a modest request for a body to make, to wring free of the water rather than begging to go on living. Plus, I’m dozy, since though I’m not a napping sort it must be naptime, I think, some wintry plasma infiltrating me. I must have flung aside Mom’s gloves, Jess’s late Grandma Carolyn’s dashing red gloves with suede tassels, they must have fanned out and sank. I oughts to lay down my head, I am one with the drink, I am soup, I am balm, I will never be arid. Plus I can’t feel my feet, unless the thing I can’t feel is them not touching bottom, not cold, exactly, though cold they must be. It might be logical for me to open my mouth, for me to sip, gulp, and swig and to quaff this brew, as in as I am out of it, as out as I am in, but instead I simply yawn the soaked dog off my shoulders and belch out a clenched breath before he climbs back on. Do I not care if I die? Am I divested of caring? Or is it simply that here, trapped in the gurge, I’m as alive as I am ever, Grandma Carolyn avowing that even after I’m gone I’ll be here, like she is, whirling around between dying and living, going, coming, and remaining? At this I inhale a mouthful of spume, and swallow it.
The sky soon in full gloom, a chain link rattles in the schoolyard where Jess will be standing by now on the sidewalk, watching kids get picked up, his brow dimly lavender under the sky. He’s not frightened, either, at least there’s that. If I scream, he might hear me. But I don’t want him to hear his mom’s drowning cries, I want him to lead a sturdy life. An extra cookie in the pocket of the peacoat tempts him. In advance, he feels fat beneath the buttons of the coat, his hand in reach of the treat he was successful in sneaking from lunch that day. It’s not frosted, just sugared. His mom eats way too few cookies, eats them only when he brings her one home from school. She’ll never know, he supposes. It might be one of those days he comes home without one. Soon he takes a first bite but just in his mind, nibbling at every crumb of its roundness. Too, there’s that girl he likes on the crosswalk, dropping her sketchbooks, probably on purpose. Would it be sexist to rush forth and pick them up?
He’s unsure.
He’ll ask his mom.
He glances up and down the road, a road whose name he’ll someday give to the younger of his daughters. “Did you name her for the street?” I’ll ask one day. For his wife’s great grandma, he’ll reply, tilting baby to bottle then bottle to baby. “Drink,” Jess pleads. “Little H,” I’ll say. Did I urge food on my newborns in just this manner or did they thrive on their own, crawl in on one breast to latch onto the other as I rose to feed them? Not the song about the mouse nor the song about the spider but the one about the teapot is the song H wants, her gaze affixed to my croonings as if she craves the rhyme by instinct via the attentions paid it by her sister, knows it in the way of involuntary knowing as if for us to glance away for but a fraction of a second will mean to skip the whole rest of all meals entirely. I tap the bottle with a finger, half-remember bubbles chirping as they flit past my ears. We’ve not met them yet, H and her sister, Jess prodding at the grass with the toe of his shoe, not fretting, just brooding. His mom is never not on time. But she’s a high-strung sort, which he does not intend to be, he only hopes she’s not wearing those cowboy boots, which she has sworn not to show off at school again. A bell peals in the building. When the ice starts groaning, he is distracted by the sidewalk monitor leading him inside to where his dad or his stepmom or one of dad’s secretaries soon comes to fetch him. It’s a detail he won’t recall when he's grown, nor how Ike shows up at his dad’s that evening, paws cold as tomatoes. Is Jess wearing hat and gloves? His older brother in wherever, is he wearing hat and gloves? A couple standing on asphalt far off in the lot, their car parked suddenly next to mine, begins waving their hands, rotating their arms as if performing a kids’ song over the bay. Five Little Pumpkins? Old Hickory Dickory’s Knees and Toes? I ask not with my mind but with my jacket, my jeans, the clumsy insensible thick wool socks.
Wheels, they mean.
Roll, I see.
Save yourself, they are shouting.
There are scholars who say that like wetness on skin the self’s an illusion, a trick played on the mind by what the body’s daily trek across space and time beseeches of it, but I haven’t downloaded those arguments yet. “Let go, Ike,” I grouse, ice cartwheeling under, just like a road spins under a car. I hoist a foot into the sky, wrestle an elbow, orbit the other leg over the first, twist backwards straight in again, paddle anew. I gargle and hack, I slip and I gag, I am the first failed amphibian. Ike flops his way forward onto clean ice, drags his way flat, sprints all at once shoreward. Far ahead in the lot as I crawl slowly after, two cops drive up with an intention to interrogate me, level some fine, print my name in a blotter, though how obedient I am in staggering toward them, wailing now, the sound freed as by the turn of a nozzle inside me.
“Aaaahhhhhh,” I cry. “Yaaarrrrrrrr. Eeeeeehhhh.”
I flap a sleeve at a cop, who swats me with a clipboard in lieu of shoving me away. She doesn’t like me, I can tell, my giddy, operatic wailing, my sodden jacket sluicing ice water onto her shoes. She’s like a doctor who can’t stand blood, this cop. She won’t help with my hair, won’t pull the drenched lock of it out of my throat or unsnarl the weeds from their loops round my ankle. Chastised, embarrassed, one bra strap missing, the other knotted to my elbow, I’m soon blanketed up and whisked to Emergency. Chuck is called, my insurance is called, but it’s Norb, Chuck’s dad, codger in wingtips, who tiptoes past the drawn curtain to where I’m strapped to an air-bed riding billows of heat. “One should never be so comfy,” I tell the old man, since how hygienic I feel, thawed, rinsed, fresh and salubrious, recalling a kid who got my name wrong in college and remarked as I untangled us to fasten my bra, “I like you, Libby. You’re a very clean girl.” Norb hands me a book the way you’d fluff up a pillow. I don’t remember which book, nor when Chuck drives me home to find my car in the driveway where it belongs, supper warming on the stovetop, telephone ringing, pet guinea pig cooing. My sister phones from New York just to hear my live voice, my other sister from New Mexico, my older son from far away in wherever he is, and then Jess from their dad’s house just across town. He’s held off on that cookie, I can tell. It’s not round all around but flat to one side where it baked too near to the edge of the pan. It proposes no path, tenders no solace, whatever sustenance it offers being wasted on a plate, meeting no need and slaking no hunger.
Static energy, Jess sees.
Like for homework, he thinks.
Tonight’s homework: To observe things that can’t be perceived. A contradiction, Jess objects, since how can you observe things that can’t be perceived?
Such as his mom, he supposes, who in her post-drowned torpor when he calls her on the phone not far away on Main Street can only barely be heard.
Certain low-pitched sounds, he writes, certain high-pitched sounds, launching into his list on a sheet of notebook paper torn prematurely out of the spiral and sequestered in his backpack he doesn’t know when, a date that can’t be perceived, the paper crumbled but worthy enough of homework. Also ultraviolet light, the presence of the earth’s magnetic shield, and the fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth, ninth, and tenth dimensions. Certain aspects of the future, certain strings in string theory, rays of light striking nothing. Also other human being’s unspoken hopes, dreams, thrills, mischiefs, dreads, anxieties, trepidations and heartaches.
Should he scold his mom, he wonders, for speaking more softly even than usual when he finally gets through to her, not to mention for saving the dog from drowning instead of picking up Jess when she was expected, the red Impreza fitting crooked in the parking space, the windows down but thank god no music blaring?
No, he decides, only maybe when he’s forty will he ask what on earth she believed she was thinking, her mind emptied like a cup, like someone picked her up and spilled her. Was she practicing meditation, perhaps, and in some yoga-fied state of supposed awareness regarding her mortality while declining to evaluate it? He hasn’t learned this yet. For now he tells her he loves her, hangs up the phone, and sneaks off to eat the cookie while off on Main Street his mom is trundled to bed, beginning to feel not herself again, exactly, but rather some self restored to some body in which it used to reside. Next winter a skater will skid to a halt on spying one of Grandma Carolyn’s lost suede gloves, gnawed hand with red fingers waving its mix of hellos and demurrals, its scarlet but decorous exhortations. One oughts, one must, one should, for example, rescue the dogs, always, forever. One must wage a sense of humor, one must not be too amenable, one must ever be brave and sad and delighted, one must eat one’s own hearing aide the way Dad ate his the year he turned down meals. He supposed it was a pill, he plucked the hearing aide off the nightstand beside him and with a swig of Boost, drank it. One must clamber out from under, sing to the granddaughters, cradle the phone on the day of the surgeries, toast all brume and snake and swill, guzzle, snort, plead if one wishes, pray if one can, slurp and be sated, hold one’s breath in one’s hand and be now and forever, if not frightened, terrified.