Put it Down

The first day of April and it snows.

I’ve turned bitter. I hate that about myself. Even playing with the red-haired baby at the end of the hall doesn’t shake it.

Megan brought me flowers two days ago and told me in the same voice she uses before she anesthetizes a cat, ‘Honey, all you do is work. It isn’t healthy. Why don’t you come out with me this weekend.’

‘I don’t want to meet anybody new!’

‘You don’t have to meet anybody new. You haven’t gone out in nine months. We’ll go to a bar.’

I frowned.

‘A coffee shop, then, Emily,’ she said.

‘I don’t drink coffee, you know that.’

‘Well, see what the symphony is playing, and you can teach me about music.’

Quickly, before she retracted the offer, I said, ‘I already know what they’re playing. It’s Stravinsky. I’ll get tickets tonight.’

Megan smiled. ‘Good, good.’

The same voice she uses when she gives a dog a shot, after she scratches behind its ears.

*

To get myself in the spirit of disaster—she’s going to hate Stravinsky and I can’t wait to watch her reaction—I bought myself a new dress.

Going to the symphony is getting a concussion and waking up after surgery saying, like everybody else, to the recovery nurse, ‘Where am I? What happened?’

*

She meets me in the lobby of our building. She lives on the tenth floor; we became friends one afternoon while doing laundry because I made a joke about washing machines. Now I don’t remember the joke, just how she laughed as she folded red underpants, embarrassed. I told her it was important to have pretty underthings, and she laughed some more.

We take a cab. On the way she compliments my dress. I tell her I got it on sale, which is a lie. Then I tell her, ‘That was a lie. I spent too much money so I’m glad you like it.’

‘Why lie about spending money. You haven’t bought a new dress since…’ The last time I bought a new dress was when Asa took me to the symphony. ‘Sorry,’ she says.

‘It’s all right,’ I say. ‘It’s been a long time since I had a new dress. I guess it was okay to splurge.’

When I say words like ‘splurge,’ I worry that that’s a Mother word, and I’m too young to turn into my mother.

Megan stares as we cross the river and exclaims, every time we see them, ‘Look at the skyscrapers!’ I love this about her; it’s something I feel too, one of those things I stopped saying to seem more sophisticated.

On one hand, I enjoy being my age, because I can pull off sophistication that I couldn’t five years ago. On the other hand, I say things like ‘splurge’ and realize, ‘I am my age,’ and it scares me.

‘I know, aren’t they gorgeous,’ I say.

On the bridge, one couple stops to kiss. How many days until he never kisses her again? Then think, ‘Maybe he’s really going to stay with her forever.’ Which is worse?

Thank God we’re going to the symphony.

Megan wants to check her coat. It’s snowing, we track in snow with our spring shoes. I appreciate this.

We take our seats. I open my program book. I got it wrong. It isn’t Stravinsky. It’s Rachmaninov’s Piano Concerto #2. And Barber’s Adagio for Strings.

‘Megan,’ I say. ‘Are you sure you want to stay?’
‘Of course. It’s a learning experience. Don’t you want to laugh?’

I start to cry. I hate that I cry in public.

‘Why are you crying? Honey, what’s wrong?’

There’s that cat voice. ‘I thought they were playing something different.’

A lady smashes my knees trying to get to her seat, her opera coat smacks my face. Megan calls, ‘Excuse me,’ to her.

‘Maybe it was important for you to hear these two pieces they’re playing tonight. I think that’s probably why you got mixed up—it was supposed to happen this way, in your stars.’ Usually Megan tones it down, but sometimes, out slips something about your chakra, or karma, or goodgod, something like, ‘Honey what’s wrong, your aura looks wilted.’

‘I don’t have any Kleenex,’ I tell her.

She hands me a pack.

I point to what they’re playing.

‘You told me you love Rachmaninov!’

I was thirteen when I first heard this. Every day for two years I listened lying in bed staring out the window at the neighbor’s chimney. In winter smoke rose in chords to sky. In summer, a grackle built a nest. I wished the concerto were a person. If I listened enough, he’d bring me flowers or chocolates, take me to walk in sunken gardens, feed me foods I’d read the names of but never tasted. For years I listened faithfully. Then I met a girl named Lisa McDonald, and the relationship cooled. She was a terrible substitute.

When I was younger I heard only thick, idealized Romance when I listened. Now I hear how knots and kinks lend tenderness depth.

Those people on the bridge.

How I will make it through this performance without thinking of Asa:
Count blue coats, count red coats, count black coats, count number of coughs, count occurrences of cough drops being unwrapped, cover ears, don’t listen.

How I will think about Asa while not thinking about Asa during the performance:

She wore a blue coat with big toggles she pulled when we walked to look at Christmas lights people put up. When the coat came it was too big for her. She didn’t want to admit that she needed a smaller size. She washed it in hot water, dried it on high heat. The wool knotted, she used a razor to try to smooth it down and she cut her fingernail off in one jagged line. It grew back crooked.

I wore a red coat on New Year’s Day. The coat fell on the floor when we decided not to go out that night after all.

She bought me a black coat when her dog peed on my red one that night.

Her coughs were like a child trying to play a tuba.

She used natural cough drops that came in a pink tin.

She covered her ears when I said, ‘You’re beautiful.’

She didn’t listen when I said ‘Come back.’

They’re playing the second movement now. I’m ready to think about Asa.

The time I shadowed Megan at the veterinary office? I saw her ‘put down’ a cat. I didn’t call it ‘put down’ before, but she did, so I started to say it too.

The cat was a small old tabby whose eyes couldn’t open all the way. ‘Megan, what’s wrong with it?’

‘She’s got advanced Feline Leukemia, and is in too much pain—it’s inhumane to let her live this way.’

She couldn’t stand up. ‘Megan,’ I said, ‘Where are the owners?’

‘They didn’t want to be here. It’s an old couple, they’d had the cat for seventeen years. Said it was like their child.’

I thought, ‘If someone was going to kill my child, I’d have to be there.’ If I didn’t go, I’d worry my cat would think, ‘She doesn’t love me. She’s letting this happen and she isn’t even here.’ At least let her hear my voice.

When Megan readied the needle, I touched the cat’s throat, felt her heartbeat.

I wanted to say, ‘Megan, please, this can’t be it, give the cat another chance, maybe it’ll get better.’ I thought of the owners, at home, knowing their cat was dying. I made myself look, I wanted to acknowledge what we were doing—I was a part of it. The cat was a soft crescent cooling on the operating table. Sunlight reflecting from a billboard outside lit the cat’s eyelashes individually. I stroked her back. I couldn’t tell she was dead.

Megan was already starting to clean things up.

‘That was an easy one,’ she said. 'Poor thing.’

At intermission, Megan buys us each a glass of champagne.

‘Cheers,’ she says, ‘to you.’

‘To me?’

‘You made it through that piece without crying, like you said you were going to.’

‘Oh,’ I said.

‘Did you like it?’ I ask.

‘It made me cry,’ she says.

‘I don’t think I can handle the Barber tonight Megan. Do you care if we leave?’

‘But I haven’t heard it before.’

‘Yes you have—remember, when we were in the bookstore and that piece came on, and you said, ‘What is this shit, funeral music?’’

‘That’s the one?’

‘Yes. Can we go?’

In the corner of the ballroom—that’s where I always go during intermission—a little boy yells to his mother, ‘Put it down! I want some!’ His mother gives him a piece of chocolate.