Beneficiary

A few years later, we found a bunch of old fingernail clippings inside his fancy clipper. The clipper was like a pencil sharpener that kept all the shavings inside a case so the person clipping wouldn’t have to put a newspaper under his hands or feet. The nail bits curled like cheap yellow noodles, like bits of Ramen that fall to the bottom of the plastic package they come in. They smelled like a mixture of hospital death and belly button lint. It seemed wrong to throw them in the trash, but I could tell you were embarrassed by them, so that’s what we did, tossed them right next to the coffee grounds. But later I dug them out and burned them---I can’t say why, there was something beating in my primitive gut. I picked them out and put them in the sink, then threw in a match, so no witch could use the clippings against him, I guess.

I felt the same way about the opened box of Cheerios, the razor, the bottle of Bayer Aspirin. I couldn’t throw them away, and I couldn’t bring myself to pour a bowl of his leftover cereal and eat. My niece, only two, started to shake when we went to clean out the apartment. We didn’t think she understood, but she did. She sat quietly in the corner and asked for her jacket because she was cold.

I bought three muffins for the Amtrak trip from New York to Rhode Island where he lived. No one needs three muffins in four hours, I know, unless one’s inconsolable. I kept waiting for certain passengers to get off the train so I could eat the next muffin--blueberry, pumpkin, and corn. I wanted each passenger who got on to think that the second and third muffins were my first. My stomach began to clang and snarl. It was easier to obsess about what was in my Zaro’s bag than to cry in public. I unbuttoned the top button of my jeans. I would need a very big black dress.

I almost got to be a pallbearer since many of the men in my family have bad backs. But one uncle was set against it, and I thought I should leave well enough alone. Funerals are a bad time for fighting.

Right after his death, I filled out an organ donation card. I wanted, as a dead woman, to give my cravings to someone else, to make a woman’s straight hair curl. I wanted her to replicate the dreams I held in my heart, my liver, my eyes, whatever the doctors could use to save her. I wanted the live woman to dream one more of my dreams, or let my dreams collage with hers, our union a benevolent Frankenstein.

I used his VCR with alarming detachment, though sometimes at night I was afraid of the blinking lights. I wore his sweater, and then I got married. Later my husband wore his sweater.

I didn’t want him to end, not his last shrinking bar of soap. I didn’t want it to become gradually smaller then one day float down the drain. I couldn’t throw away the shampoo or Aqua Velva. I puzzled at the rubber flowers he’d put in his tub so he wouldn’t slip. I tried to peel one off before my sister gave his key back to the landlord. I wished I had recorded his voice.

I went to therapy where I cried for an hour straight. I caught the therapist starting to drift off, so I forced a wail to wake her up, to be my witness. The sleeping looked too much like the dead.

The old boyfriend called, the obligatory call, and that only made it worse. His having left, another kind of death. Soon after we talked, I dreamt that I died and that the doctors gave my old boyfriend my spleen. I was watching the operation from the ceiling, but in the middle of the procedure he woke up and said, “Wait a minute, I don’t need a spleen to live.” He walked out of the hospital, and the doctors threw my spleen into the trash.

Then I found out you could also donate your skeleton so I made arrangements to do that. Anything to help me live on, I guess. Anything to be useful. I was sure I hadn’t done enough in this life. And sure I never would.

I sometimes fantasize about the skeleton I’ll be--jangling on wheels on my way to anatomy class, dance class, figure drawing class. Some of the students, I imagine, will be spooked out, but most will look at me and sober up. Maybe I’ll be the source of mini-epiphanies at last.

But then someday even the beneficiary of my transplant will be gone. The school where I donated my skeleton will no longer exist--the building, the teachers, the students. My skeleton will be gone and the dust my skeleton makes, and all the human dancers and all the animal dancers will be gone. The paintings will be gone, and all the minerals that made such luscious pigments. Science will no longer exist--the goggles, the Petri dishes, the computers, all dead. Trees will be gone and paper and ink and books. The films will be gone, the music, and the math. I will be gone, but I will miss you if I’m still able to miss anything, that is, if some particle of me remains and some particle of you.

And I tell my husband: if I die first, I’ll try to come back and tell you what it’s like. I’ll try to translate death into English or at least kiss the back of your neck while you sleep. It is the real promise of all true lovers, the promise that has never been kept. And then all the great earth itself will be gone, and maybe even our moon and stars, all the other planets. All our fingernails.

But that will not be the end of it.

It’s true. The earth is no longer there, but something there are no words for yet, something like a tiny blue swivel chair, will be spinning wildly in its place.

From Two and Two (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005)