Had They Seen It in Our Faces All Along?
The first summer of the pandemic, my parents sold the house in the Poconos. The place was beloved – I loved it for the natural world that surrounded it, for the century old trails and primeval trees and glacial creeks and bogs, while my mom loved the nearby outlets, low sales tax, and cheap gas – but it was turning burdensome. My parents were aging. A few years earlier, during a routine scan for routine stomach complaints, my mom’s doctor had discovered some shadows on her pancreas. A biopsy found cancer. It was unusual to detect pancreatic cancer so early, but in this case it was just dumb luck. The prognosis was uncharacteristically optimistic. My mom underwent a surgical technique called the Whipple, which involved pulling out a lot of her organs through a hole in her belly then putting most of them back in, with the exception of her pancreas, spleen and a portion of her stomach. Afterwards, my dad and I went to see her in a busy recovery room outside the OR. She was unconscious, her mouth open and slack, her skin yellowed, hair a mess. Tubes protruded from her abdomen. It was shocking. She looked so small and fragile, so mortal. My dad reached out very gently to stroke her hand. Although she was still under the effects of anesthesia, she released a little moan, in response, I think.
Despite having eliminated the disease from her body, a rarity for sufferers of pancreatic cancer, she was never really the same after her procedure. Her energy and balance were off. She was always a little sick to her stomach. She’d cheated death but she came home to a different life. Certain things would be left behind. The Poconos house with all its demands was one of them. The pandemic jump started the process as people everywhere were looking for a place to go outside the city.
“I don’t know what I’ll do without Walmart,” she worried, confronting the prospect of putting the house on the market. As we spoke on the phone, I pictured my mom in the comfortable chair in my parents’ surprisingly spartan, bright yellow bedroom, the special heart-shaped pillow the hospital had given her after her surgery, pressed against her stomach. Now she watched Mass on TV while my dad made her a light lunch that he brought upstairs on a tray, and that she ate half of, maybe cheese on Saltines, maybe some soup.
“Walmart is the last place you should go,” I said. Visions of my mom’s weakened immune system mingling with crowded, virus infected aisles and dirty shopping carts ran through my head. “Any store, really.”
“Oh, Matthew,” she said, scandalized by that idea. “There’s a limit. Besides I have to go to the Dollar Store for my Rosh Hashanah cards now or it will be too late.”
My mom’s legendary correspondence, greeting cards of every ilk, arrived to hundreds of recipients all year long. Friends of my parents complained that she knew their wedding anniversaries and grandchildren’s birthdays better than they did. I thought it unlikely to find a greeting card for the Jewish New Year in a discount store in the Poconos, but my mom, a devout Catholic who until her illness went to church every morning, assured me they would indeed be found at the Dollar General in Mount Pocono next to the shuttered K-Mart, as they had been in years past.
“Your father and I have nowhere to go, nothing to do,” she told me after they’d made the decision to sell. “We’d just do the same thing out there. Watching the television, though…the things some people believe. This president. It makes you want to scream, and I’m not a screamer.”
“No, you’re not,” I said.
“Oy gevalt,” she lamented. “All we can do is pray.”
On one of the last weekends that we had the house, I headed out for a walk in the woods. When I was a few hundred yards along, I veered off the marked trail that started not far from the house and crested two small hills to where I knew the creek split around a small island upstream, a gnarled, muddy spit of land thick with tangled bushes and fallen birch trees, with rot and algae and skeeters and half-hidden frogs on the rocky streambed. The Poconos weren’t formed through tectonic collisions like the Alps or Rockies. Instead, the great glaciers of the Ice Age retreated from most of North America, digging out the landscape, scarring it, and leaving behind gulches and ponds and bogs, smelly pockets of life wherever you turned. Like everyone else, I’d been living for the last few months in a world in large part virtual, remote, removed. This twisted mound of soil and water, lavish and ugly, seething with hunger and stinking to high heaven, was the realest thing I’d seen in a long time.
I was naked before I even knew what I was doing. My clothes were all the accumulated days trapped in the apartment, they were the handwashing, the anxiety, the social distancing. They were the boredom and the insecurity. They were the daily echo of grief and frustration. The pandemic had shown me some of the angriest and most frightened parts of myself. I needed clothes in that world, but not here. Everything had to go. As I stepped forward, the icy swirl of the creek around my ankles offered a final warning, a reminder of the inexhaustible supply of peril. I knew how dangerous it was to swim alone off the trail. I could slip on a rock and twist an ankle, get knocked unconscious and drown. I’ve never really imagined my own death, even as Covid hit, even as AIDS swirled around our family decades earlier, even after losing Bryan to overdose and Emily to suicide and Perelman to liver cancer and Bill, my boss at Housing Works, to a brain tumor, even as I watched my mom battle cancer. Death had been a regular visitor, but it never called for me. I took the plunge and dropped, fully submerged, into a pool just a few feet from dry land.
When I emerged, the clearing buzzed with sweet dusty sunlight. I wasn’t sure if I was any different. A cloud moved across the sun and the afternoon shed some of its warmth. I dunked myself under a second time for good measure because it felt so nice, and then climbed out.
Clothes in hand, I picked my way up the rocky stream bank. I’d only taken a few steps when I spotted the silhouette of a young buck about on the edge of a small clearing about a half dozen yards away. I froze where I was, mud pressed up between my toes, a cool rush of air off the creek tickling the water on the back of my legs. Although we saw deer all the time, it was rare to be so close to one in the wild, especially when I was apparently unseen. He was motionless, perfectly proud and elegant, his antlers just beginning. He couldn’t see me. He had been wired to detect movement, and I was standing as still as he. My quick plunge in the creek hadn’t washed away my scent, either. He knew I was there, but so long as I didn’t move, I was invisible. He turned to face me, or where he thought I was, and stomped his hoof, snorting, sending a spray of angry mist into the dappled sunlight. There was no mistaking he was a wild animal, despite how gentle we wanted to remake him. I could see how rough his hide really was, how pestered he was by gnats. He snorted again and stared at my confounding shadow, the invisible enemy, the ghost. I haven’t eaten animals in decades. I considered us connected, ultimately of the same flesh, didn’t I? Maybe this deer might have lost a brother too, maybe even to a woodland virus like Screwworm, or Chronic Wasting Syndrome, just like that which afflicted many AIDS patients. But we weren’t alike at all. He didn’t have to write any book about it to know that he was real. Only we humans had to do that, illuminate ourselves to remind us we are alive. But I was glad for that. Glad for the world we had all dreamed up. Were I hunter, I would have killed him. Instead, I invoked my secret power—to disappear—because I didn’t want him to see me as I really was, a pale shivering man naked in the woods, half-assing a transfiguration a few hundred yards from a golf course. I waved my arms, revealing myself and releasing him with a benediction. He took off in a flash, joined by a few fawns that I hadn’t noticed before, hidden among the ferns and hemlock and mountain laurel. Up the hillside they bounced, disappearing into the trees as though made of bark and branches themselves. I envied their power to vanish like that. I stood there naked for a few more moments, savoring their world. It seemed beautiful and simple, but I knew their life was marked by daily risk and a struggle to survive. I could only belong in my own. Still wet, I dressed again and made my way back over the two small hills and through the woods to the jeep path and back to the house.
I took a short nap before dinner. When I woke, the house was quiet. My dad wasn’t in the yard hosing down the patio. My mom wasn’t on the screened porch reading a book. The kitchen was dark and still. My parents’ door was closed but as I approached, I could hear the low murmur of the television. I tapped on the door and stepped into their bedroom. My dad was in one of the two soft swivel chairs at the foot of the bed, his customary spot for watching television. He had turned the chair to face my mom, however, where she was sitting on the edge of the bed. In this position they were about as close they could be. They’d been married over fifty years. I’d probably seen them as a combined unit more than I’d seen them separately. For a moment neither of them could see me in the doorway. It was then that I noticed my mother was topless, her bathrobe open and around her waist.
In one of my earliest memories, I am in the shower with my mom. I am two, maybe three years old. I remember being captivated by the way the water ran down her body, how it poured off the curves of her hips and nipples and pubic hair. She was a goddess of the sea. Naturally, decades had passed since I’d seen any more of my mother’s body than her face and forearms and ankles. She’d always dressed modestly, in simple clothing, functional and decent. I’d rarely seen her in a bathing suit and even then, it was a generous, old-fashioned one piece. She was older than most of my friends’ moms, who wore bikinis and skirts with no hose, who suntanned. Grownups were lost to the world of physical beauty anyway. Their bodies were irrelevant. They were cushions for us, a place to eat or rest or weep, a place that as we grew older we had departed from and pledged never to return.
Now, topless in front of my father, my mom had an old woman’s body, exhausted after eighty-six years of life, five sons, three dead, and a battle with pancreatic cancer. Nothing like the fecund deity that had loomed above me in the tub. It wasn’t her nudity that threw me back, but the nonchalance of my dad sitting there, her breasts in full view, like, well, like any other couple would do. They had their own nature. Generative, intimate, wild. I was looking right into the heart of their mystery. They must have imagined my brothers and I in our own relationships. They must have imagined the moment of their infection. I know I did. Why was AIDS so controversial anyway? It was because you got it by getting fucked in the ass. When my parents sat together naked in a room, decades earlier, did they imagine their sons, mere children, growing up to do that? Did they know how we’d live and die, how we’d look for love, where we’d find beauty, what would terrify us and break our hearts? Did we let them know? Could I, ever? Did they stand there, still and invisible, and watch us stamp and snort? Were they surprised, or had they seen it in our faces all along?
Matthew Aquilone: My plays, essays, stories and poems have appeared in Christopher Street, The Rumpus, Open Doors, The Nervous Breakdown, The New York Daily News, Ensemble Studio Theater, Theater for the New City and elsewhere. I have been a resident at the Ucross Foundation, The Edward Albee Foundation, The Norman Mailer Foundation, Woodstock Guild/Byrdcliffe Colony and the Cummington Community of the Arts. I was also named a finalist for the Tin House Debut Forty Prize. I live in Brooklyn where I was born and raised.
