Perfect Liz

I've lost 20 pounds. While I was in Ohio with my mother and Jay, I was laying on my side in bed and I could see my stomach pooling next to my torso.  I grabbed my doughy little folds and could hold them in both fists.  When I sat on the toilet, my panus (fairly small yet), would hang down slightly, and my thighs were rubbing each other when I walked.  Is this me?  I thought. 
So I've been doing keto, and 20 pounds later, here I am. It was hard. It's hard every day. I have dreams about eating croissants.  I have detailed dreams about pizza.  It's funny--I don't have detailed dreams about sweets.

My stomach is flat--flatter than it ever has been, actually, because the Pilates actually works, although it is really horrible. Don't let anyone tell you anything different. It hurts. Every minute.  None of the affirming mind body love of Yoga.  None of that.  You're perfect as you are.  No you're not!  Our teachers are professional dancers, and they are tough.  The women in the Pilates class are all middle-aged, upper middle class, professional for the most part.  I'm the most marginal denizen in the studio.  Perfect Liz goes on Saturdays.

Who is Perfect Liz.

Who is Perfect Liz.

How do I start with all the ways Perfect Liz and are braided together.

Perfect Liz is the daughter of a local judge, one of the first female judges in Crocket County. Her mother, Joann, went to law school with my mother.  They were in a class of 10 women, and were the second class to which women were admitted.  Every woman in that class ended up divorcing her husband, except my mother.  The men just couldn't handle the change.  Joann married the Dean of the Law School, who became Perfect Liz' stepfather.  My mother flunked out.

She was in the Queen's court, not homecoming queen, but in the room.  She dated the son of my English Teacher.  Marjorie, my emotional mother in adolescence. The reason I am mostly sane.

This son was a terrible person. We all knew it.  But he was popular and really good looking.  He was mean, too.  And smart.  Something was fascinatingly really wrong with him, and in the way of teens, we were too impressed with his self-assurance to call him on it.  He was a monster.  Perfect Liz was his girlfriend through high school, but he had a secret sexual relationship with a very unpopular, fat, miserable girl, the daughter of the City Manager of Paloma all through high school.  He refused to acknowledge her and would only have sex with her.  One time, he took her for a weekend to a cabin "with the boys", his friends from the baseball team, and shared her with them.  She was weirdly proud of her role at the time--and we reviled her for it, after all, she was consenting, right?  Now I am older and I understand how profoundly ill she was, and how debased and abused.  She has never recovered. Of course not.

All through this, Perfect Liz was his girlfriend. 

His reign of terror ended when he attacked a girl from out of town in the girls bathroom at a debate tournament.  He had been accepted at Swarthmore, but my best friend, another oddball like me, took it upon herself to write the admissions board at Swarthmore--and his offer was rescinded.

Perfect Liz went to Princeton.

I went off to Dartmouth. Where I fell apart for awhile.

So did P.L., only she had the sense to get pregnant by one of the scions of the richest families in America.

I simply didn't go to class and hung out in the diner.

So now we're in Pilates together. She's had a lot of botox, now, but she's nice. She's approximately real. She's perfect Liz.  She has a low voice and a way of making everyone feel at ease, in the club, and at the same time honored by her notice.  She's still the popular girl.  And in our Pilates class--when we can't get the teaser, or don't understand the rhythm of squats and lat arches, the teacher will say,  "Ok, everyone look at Liz--Liz...that's perfect."

Our high school reunion was this summer.  I've never asked her about high school.  In my own way, I was very close to the events that happened--I was close to Marjorie.  We weren't close, she and I.  Never had lunch together.

After class, about a week before, she asked me in the parking lot as we were leaving.  "You going to the reunion this weekend?"

"Are you?"

She looked at me.  She has really blue eyes, and an angular, intelligent face.  It's always the surprise--how intelligent her face looks--and then superimposed, the prom queen features--like it's two faces in one.

"I'll go if you go."

"I don't need to do that to myself." I told her. But I think I meant, You don't need to do that to yourself. Who was I?  I was audience.  She was the star of the high school show.  All I did was fool around with the math teacher.  "I have no nostalgia for that period of my life."

She nodded.

Neither of us went, although we probably should have gone out for drinks instead.  Scotch has no carbs.

Nanda Devi

These men have always known about Nanda Devi.

When Brother Pius decided to create an outward bound experience for troubled youth, he decided to call it Darrow Hall. After Clarence Darrow. Jay doesn't know exactly why.  Maybe to implicitly express his rebellion against  Catholic doctrine?  But he wanted to do it right, so he hired Willi Unsoeld to create the ropes course.  Jay tells me it was a wonderful ropes course, one of the best he's ever seen, which is unsurprising, given the fact that Willi Unsoeld is one of the greatest mountaineers who ever lived.

Willi was present at the start of Darrow Hall, as were my husband and his friends, all boys graduating from St. Louis' court of Catholic schools.
His best friend was Hondo.  The friends called themselves the Betts brothers.  There was Billy, Hondo, Rasputin...when I married Jay, I, too, was given a Betts name.

Willi had a daughter, and he loved her so much, that he named her after the mountain he loved the most, Nanda Devi.
Nanda loved the mountains, too.  And when she was a young woman, she and her dad attempted her namesake.  But she died.  Not because of the mountain, but because of an illness.

So Jay and Hondo have always known and loved, and sorrowed over, Nanda Devi.

We heard the trickle of news at first...just a whisper...Jay said.."you know, I think Hondo might be there..." when we heard about the climbers who missed their check point. Over the next few days, it has become more and more apparent, that Hondo isn't coming back.

I know a lot of wonderful stories about Hondo. He and Jay traveled all over South America together, and all over the Southwest.  He lived a few hours away, but always found the time to come to our gatherings, sit by the pond, drink beer.

They haven't confirmed his death, and I find myself thinking, if any one of them had a chance of making it, it would be Hondo.  Because he's got this sort of sheen to him...hard to put into words.   This solid, pleasant, implacable tenacity.

Jay grieves. Doesn't want to be alone, which is how he shows it. The house is peculiarly clean.   Don't know how to close this...

Hot Cocoa

Freezing rain is coming down. The pebbles on the path are slick and treacherous. I don't drive in this weather, not with my history, so I've been stuck inside all day. I woke up early, sat zazen, had the best intentions of being productive, but Jay had other ideas, so back to bed I went! Age is a massacre, paraphrasing Philip Roth, and erections have been a bit of an issue this year. I finally convinced Jay to go to the doctor. Our primary care physician is very beautiful.

"If someone had ever told me I would pay to have a beautiful woman stick her finger up my ass, this was NOT how I imagined it would go down." He told me that night.

She prescribed Cialis, and advised a statin, which he eschewed, opting for diet changes. So we have been vegetarian all year, and, lo and behold, things are...working again.  Not they were ever NOT working for me. One of the things about being middle-aged is that you abandon your fantasies and rituals about sex and just get down to getting off.  If I love you and you smell reasonable, I can manage to have reasonably satisfying sex with you, and you will probably get something out of it, too, almost no matter what.  His erection is a nice bonus, but not essential.

Of course, one of the contributing factors may be the death of my father, if I'm being honest, because Jay did a good portion of his care.  This involved cleaning and turning and changing him, and staying up all night. Coming face-to-face with mortality either really increases your libido or saps it. Axel Munthe writes about this, when he and the nurse make love at the deathbed of the mother superior, who has just died from cholera. Seido told me that the night his mother died, he had sex with the nurse who cared for her in the hospital parking lot.

I've never really felt that. I'm pretty steady. I'm usually up for it, but not actively seeking. Upsetting patients usually take me out of the sack for awhile. Flesh becomes distasteful.  But then, I guess, the tide comes in.

Sounds tepid? Maybe. It is what it is, I guess. Perhaps that ship has sailed. I have mostly been the object of others' passions.

We went for a walk this afternoon, through the frozen yellow winter grass.  Afterwards, I made hot cocoa.  Good stuff. With cream and dark chocolate.
That's my 1/2 hour.

It's gotten cold. Grief is weird. I'm ok, and then I'm not ok. And when I'm not ok, I'm really not ok. I'm sobbing, these wheezing, keening, gulping squalls. Then they pass. Sometimes, I think, every day is taking me away from him, like a sailboat moving from the shore. Each day takes me farther away from the days when I had a father. What a father. Funny and quirky and handsome. My friends thought he was my brother. "You never told me you had a brother..." they would say. He grew up in Coconut Grove, in a house on Poinciana, built in the 1800's, with dark cypress floors, and deep shadowy galleries, and ceiling fans. He got kicked out of Coral Gables High, and so, after a substantial donation from my grandparents, was accepted to Ransom Everglades (except then, it was just Ransom. Everglades was the girl's school.) He met his best friend then, Fernando, a boarder from Cuba. Blonde. Rich. They would go to Havanna on the weekends. He would be killed in the Bay of Pigs. His family was one of many herded by Fidel into a stadium and slaughtered. There's a photo of my father, dancing on a porch with a smiling, dark-eyed, blonde girl. Fernando's sister? My father wouldn't talk about those pictures or the people in them. That's my half-hour.

Today and only Today

There are 4 inches of ice on the pond. We were hoping this would happen while the kids were here, after the burial. But Lilly went back to NYC on January 2nd, after being bumped from 3 flights New Years Day, and Nick drove back down to New Orleans on Friday afternoon, after stopping by to say goodbye in the cold lobby of the hospital. It's been hard to go back into work this week, walking back into the building is so strange. What is the feeling? But this is a small town, and we can't push things away, avoid pain by maintaining a physical distance from the places saturated with our sorrows. I see the nurses who treated my father in the hall; I see the ICU attending in HyVee; the grave digger is a patient. Maybe that's a good thing. I hope so. What am I going to do? Move? My mother is living in my little house. She complains about it, but she likes it. It's a good house--filled with love and images of the Blessed Virgin. It's a little shabby, but there's always been a jewel box like feel to it. My living room there is the most comfortable, nap inducing, sanctuary I can imagine. People immediately feel it's ok to say what they want, pick up a book, rifle through the music stand--it is a good place, and I know my mother, who never managed to create that in her house, feels it. She's kept the Gypsy on, and that's good. But she wasn't there Saturday, so I spent part of the day over there. We aren't fighting. I'm angry, but I love her. I made myself some canned soup, went into Lilly's old bedroom, and finished my dictations from clinic. I'm slow. No one seems annoying. Everyone seems rumpled, vulnerable, lost. I think about the thousand and one small ways I sin against my fellows--with impatience, selfishness, lack of attention. When I got back to our farm, Jay had made a bonfire on the bank of our little pond (we've had sand carted in to make a sweet little beach), and he had a boombox down on the dock playing Christmas music. We skated out into the dusk. The ice was very clear, and the obsidian pond stretched below my skates, which needed sharpening. I felt that I was suspended between two darknesses, held by this temporary firmament, on these shaky old blades. I used to be a figure skater in my youth, and I can feel the ghost of my younger body, gliding and spinning and jumping--but my physique doesn't follow. This disconnect--I suppose the gap just continues to widen over the years. But we held hands and found our way. Sat by the fire and had malibu rum laced thick hot chocolate with heavy cream. We are in a mirror darkly seen, but then face-to-face.

No Dreams

My father died. The last night was madness. Clinical, fluorescent-light-illuminated hell. On Tuesday night, I left the hospital at 930. Before I left he looked at me, as if he wanted to devour me. I have never been looked at like that. He just looked and looked, and I tried to look back, but the gaze was too much for me, too overwhelming. It was a look that came from beyond ordinary time. Then the nurse came in to perform oral care, and the moment was broken. He just wanted to know me, and to take me in, because I'm his child, and he really, really loved me. He often looked at me like that, this year, but this was more luminous. Heading out, I ran into one of my surgeons in the lobby, who was having a meltdown, but that's another story. I'd been working during this whole thing--going to his bedside during breaks and after work. I planned to head over there after my half-day clinic the next day. At about 11 am, I felt one of the worst physical feelings I've ever known--I can't explain it--like everything good had been drained from my body, like I was about die, like the world was going to end. I thought "Shit. This is it. It's really going to hell now." So, being a good little nurse, I finished my charting--as I was doing so, the pager went off. I proofed and signed my note, then answered the page. One part of me stood aside with her arms folded, shaking her head and saying, "You are one cold bitch, Haley Patton." Dr. Tso picked up. He's one of the fellows in the MICU. Asian, bespectacled, gay, deeply kind. "Haley, I think you'd better come over. His heart rate is at 40 and he's satting 64. We were going to code him, but your mom...reconsidered." Silence after this. Up until this point, my mom had insisted on keeping him a full code--despite being 96 pounds, despite having an ejection fraction of 15%, despite the fact that he can't swallow, ambulate, or control his bowels. "You just want him to die." She told me, when I tried to get palliative care involved. On Tuesday, in addition to gazing at my dad, working a full clinic, and talking my surgeon down from the ledge, I also forced my mom to sit quietly as I described, in the most unemotional way I knew, what an actual code would involve. I said, "I'm not going to argue with you, but I want you to give your full attention to me while I outline this step by step." Then I did it. I didn't embellish. Then I left. So, I guess she listened. He was spared one thing. One final brutality, at least. Christ. That's my half-hour.