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Roseann Lloyd
What It Was Like Today: November 13, 2005
—after Deborah Keenan

Usually when I wake up, Jim's left the bed, already in our study working. Today I burrow into his chest, sleep with my head on his heart for another hour.

*

Last Tuesday night I turned the car left too soon. I mistook the sidewalk for the driveway. Not to worry, the doctor said. It's not glaucoma, not mood disorder, just heavy lids.

*

A November Sunday morning, the first gray day, still warm: Jim brings espresso with chocolate and chili pepper biscotti. Lovely south window brings clouds.

*

Heavy lids: sleepiness, Peter Lorre, all the noir movies, cigarettes, lizards, Marlene Dietrich, cartoons of lizards, fedoras, the Raymond Chandler collection my brother gave me the day before he left, last June.

*

We don't talk in the morning until Jim comes with the tray, opens the shades. Today he tells me the Italian story of Pinocchio, noting the parts Disney left out: the constant presence of the woman with hair blue as a blackbird's.

*

Elegant: the word my brother's friends use to describe him, climbing a cliff face.

*

Today over espresso, I ask Jim if he's in the mood for roast chicken for dinner. Sweet potatoes or squash? We'll practice Thanksgiving without my brother, who always started doing the dishes without saying a word.

*

Instead of surgery, I could get a vertical eyebrow piercing at St. Sabrina's Parlor in Purgatory but the skin would drape like a velvet theater curtain over my eye.

*

My brother's not in the Hudson Bay, not in Yosemite, not at T.G.I.F. / Fridays, not at home not answering my calls. Sometimes, I sense him behind my left shoulder, murmuring, I know I let you down. I'm here for you now.

*

Later today, when I'm up on the roof deck practicing my Greek dance, leading with the left, I will leave no shadow. Gray November, you have arrived late this year but I remember you oh yes I remember.

*

Ok, so I've ranted and raved for years against cosmetic surgery, and this is the very thing I need? Say it: an eye tuck.

*

Last week, one of my students read out loud her childhood memoir about catching roly-poly bugs. Of the shrimp family, curling in moist dirt and grass. I saw my brother's small hands, fiddling, in the early summer grass.

*

I call Christine, tell her about the heavy eyelids, ask if she can teach my class when I have surgery. She sighs, dear heart, you've seen too much of the world.

*

Jim cringes when I joke about piercings. He loves light pajamas, styled like The Thin Man's, even in winter.

*

Last spring, at a family party, my brother joked, What if one of us writes an autobiography someday? Startled, I wanted to shake him, state the obvious—but I've already written my autobiography. In the poems: layered and coppery agates of my life.

*

Reading saves me. Fat fiction into the night. A bright light on my left side, for my noir eyes, for the November dark that already blankets us at 4:30.

*

I was angry—no, out of my mind—when my brother's daughter had to clean out his van. Had to pour out the vodka he left, by the half gallon. We must not torment ourselves with happy endings we can't make happen.

*

I pretend that the reason my left eye droops worse than my right is that it's closer to my heart.

*

Our grief-stricken mother finds comfort in her doctor's story of hypothermia: He probably closed his eyes and curled up in a fetal position under a tree. He felt no pain. No pain at all.

*

Jim walks around the house, practicing his Italian. I don't understand a word he says but I always answer: I love it when you speak Italian, baby.

*

Sunday naptime, I embody the roly-poly bug: round, safe, silent, blind.

*

Now that my eyelids cast all my life in shadow, the shadows live alongside my tender pleasures, in the center. Jim's chest. Cardinals on the balcony. Norwegian goat cheese on toast. Anger, guilt, betrayal, sadness—they show up there. That is, here.

*

I'm here for you, my brother reassures me. It's ok, I say, I know, I know. I notice I'm repeating myself.

*

The gray cloak of sisterhood slips from my shoulders: Tell me, what shape will my heart take, next shift?

*

Jim's long legs tangle the bed clothes every night. Before we lie down to sleep again, he carefully tucks in my side of the bed.

*

My brother's missing body, somewhere in the North woods, makes Whitman literal: I bequeathe myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love / If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles.

*

After surgery, sometime in the spring, I'll walk clear-eyed along the river. Light-footed in my men's shoes. As in my former. Life. Here.

In memory:
Lloyd Harold Skelton, my brother, who disappeared in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area, June 4, 2005. Search and Rescue found his clothes but not his body.