Farewell, Michael

Amy Egbert

Word Count 960

I felt Michael again in the middle of my chest, like lead, there next to my heart. It was something like grief, like regret, like unfinished sentences. Trapped words that needed air. He died next to a younger woman he didn’t love, a woman with black stringy hair, a parsimonious woman who had claimed him, who had in effect owned him. He died in his sleep in a house on the Cape built with her money. I can’t remember her name. It was a stingy name. He was my first love, first orgasm, first husband, first alcoholic. His love cradled me, corrupted me, ignited me before I panicked. It was too crazy, too much. I ended it. I broke his heart and I never got to say sorry.

When our daughter Katherine called four years ago in August, wailing, breath left my body.

There was a Blue Jay on a maple tree branch just outside my window. A slight disturbance shook the green leaves. The smell of cocoa butter on my skin. I was about to be married to Charles. I was meeting the florist, Anna. The theme of our wedding was joy.

“Mommy, what will I do?”

I fell to my knees by my bed after we hung up. I fell to my knees, watching myself. She falls to her knees. She slid to her knees. She’s on her knees. Spasmodic gasps in place of tears.

“No, please,” I said. I looked up. The white ceiling fan spun silently.

“Great timing,” I said.

I wondered about that certain tell of his, the pulling of one eye to the side with two fingers, the shit-faced tell that gave him a look of such intense concentration, as if he couldn’t bear to miss a word. Did he take it to the next place?

He had died next to her, that odd clingy woman who wore white to our daughter’s wedding. White!

When our daughter celebrated “Me Day” in kindergarten, Michael and I went to a bar called Canterbury Ales in Oyster Bay. We drank Kamikazes and played Pac Man. Then we went to a costume shop and rented clown costumes, with outsized green shoes, spotted bow ties, frizzled multi-colored clown wigs, bulbous red noses and horns. We smeared white greasepaint on our faces, drew red greasepaint smiles, black circles around our eyes. Our idea was to entertain her class. Just recently she said a part of her knew when she heard the clown horns blaring down the kindergarten wing, the slap of the clown shoes on the wooden floor. A part of her shrank, knowing it was us.

She had wanted to show off her puppy.

Katherine was 11 years old, playing outside with the goats at the Wilson House, Bill Wilson’s birthplace, when I asked a room of recovering alcoholics how to manage a champagne toast at her wedding. Everyone laughed.

I remember all of it without a whiff of regret. Michael and I led the guests into the big white tent, arms linked. When I looked at him, I saw another tell, the sloppy, love-sick grin. What did he remember? We parted inside the tent. He went to the woman in white, and I went to a short man in a khaki suit, a demon dancer. He kicked up his heels when he spun me.

I married Charles two weeks after Michael died. Katherine gave one of the readings. Her voice quavered. Light fell on her blonde hair, her red dress. I half rose from my seat. My son started down the aisle toward her. She held up one hand like a traffic cop and continued.

 I can’t remember the words.

Ah, Katherine,

Did I ever tell you I knew when I saw him across the net in his whites? Short shorts like Agassi, tan muscled legs, white Izod shirt, white leather Adidas, a smear of red clay on his pockets. Blue eyes. That grin. He bounced a green neon ball on the flat side of his racket. He threw three in the air and juggled them. The game was a dance, the smack of the ball, the brushing of hands when switching sides, the blonde hair on his arms. The heat off his body. He called me “Miss Ame,” He was married to Jeanie. I was with Bobby. Or was Jeanie with Bobby? Or had Jeanie fucked Bobby and that’s why they were separating? In those days I was drunk with power. I wanted your dad. He sent me two dozen red roses where I worked in the fiction department at Good Housekeeping magazine.

“Good Morning, Fiction,” he sang to me on the phone. Slush piled around me in hopeful yellow envelopes. I hid behind it, and dreamed of him.

Your dad. I wonder, did I ever know him? The little towhead from Garmisch Partenkirchen, raised by his grandparents? I loved the small boy in lederhosen inside of the man, who skied to school on long wooden skis. He got coal in his high top boots at Christmas. Our mothers abandoned us. We looked for healing in each other, but alcohol was easier. I had to leave him. I was running for my life. I’m sorry.

I fell for you. I fell hard in the bars with sawdust floors and bowls of stale peanuts. Rum Southsides and rolled joints in colored paper.

The time you flung your Rolex watch from the white Cadillac convertible.

Did anybody really know what time it was?

I want the time back.

Bars of sunlight fell across your chest.

You slung your jacket across your shoulder, looked at me cum sticky on the white sheets.

I couldn’t put us back.

When our daughter called, I fell to the floor.

*

Amy is a graduate of Sarah Lawrence College, and is a journalist published in Good Housekeeping, Vermont Magazine, The Manchester Journal, and most recently, Grande Dame Literary Journal. She attended the Breadloaf Summer Writing Program, is a graduate of the Brattleboro retreat, studied with the poet Kate Grey and has taken many classes at the Westport Writers’ Workshop. A retired Trauma-Sensitive yoga teacher, she lives in Vermont with her (younger) husband and Bernedoodle. She is currently at work on a collection of short personal essays.