The Scale of Things
When I opened the door, Pam winced. She saw my red-veined eyes and assumed the tears were for her. “I’m so sorry to be putting you through this,” she said, pulling me into a hug. I was too embarrassed to correct her.
I did grieve for Pam—I’m not a monster—but I hadn’t been crying about it.
“Come in,” I said. “You look good.”
She sat at my kitchen table and let out a single startling ha. The diagnosis hadn’t changed Pam’s appearance yet, but it had changed her laugh, whittling it down to an abrupt pointed thing that pierced through her without warning or reason.
“Breakfast?” I said. “We could do eggs, toast.”
“Just toast. And coffee.”
Pam picked up a purple and teal polka-dotted apple from the centerpiece bowl of painted wood fruit, studying it as if she’d never noticed it before. Years ago, when our friendship was at its peak—before Pam had a husband and children—she’d drop by my house at least once a week for a quick chat or an after-work glass of wine. Now, I couldn’t remember the last time she had been in my kitchen.
“It’s so hard,” Pam said.
I figured it was life, mortality. But she might have meant the wooden apple.
I spooned small hills of coffee grounds into the percolator and tried to ignore how closely they resembled ashes. My dog Claude’s remains—that’s the word the veterinarian had used: remains—would be returned to me in five to seven business days.
What was I supposed to fucking do with them? Scatter the ashes in my backyard under the pecan tree? Buy a decorative canine urn, engraved with paw prints, to display on my mantle?
“When does the chemo start?”
“Two weeks,” Pam said. “I’m dreading it.”
“Well, you’ve got a lot of folks praying for you.”
This was probably true, though I wasn’t one of them. I still attended church most Sundays—I enjoyed the ritual, the predictable routine—and sometimes I turned my wordless thoughts to God in a helpless, desperate way that sort of resembled prayer. But I had stopped saying the types of prayers that requested anything specific or expected any results.
“I’m trying to trust,” Pam said. “No more than I can handle—I do believe that. The doctors are optimistic. But I can’t bear what this is doing to Tom and the kids.”
“They’ll be okay. You all will.”
What a ridiculous thing to say. Flippant. But I was exhausted. The house was too quiet. I missed the sound of Claude’s tail thumping against the floor, missed the annoying slurp and splash of him lapping water from his bowl.
Pam said, “I almost wish—this sounds horrible—but I was thinking how this would probably be easier if I was single. If I didn’t have a family to worry about, too. Isn’t that awful?”
My throat welled with hot tears. “No, that makes sense.” I stuck my face in the refrigerator, taking more time than I needed to retrieve the jar of jelly—a homemade party favor, resembling clotted blood, from my niece’s pretentious barnyard wedding last spring. What the hell did Pam know about being alone?
“Claude died,” I said, surprising myself. “Yesterday.”
It sounded strange, the harshness of the word died, especially in front of Pam. I hadn’t expected her to notice Claude’s absence, and certainly hadn’t planned to bring it up. It didn’t feel appropriate—not with her legitimately worse situation, her more suitable misery.
“I mean, I had to put him down.”
“Oh, Janelle.” Pam looked genuinely sympathetic. “I’m so sorry.”
“It was time.”
The look in Claude’s eyes as the vet administered the needle—a knowing but disappointed look, as if he understood the decision and forgave me for it, or maybe forgave me for waiting so long.
“That doesn’t make it easier.”
“Yes, well.”
I worked at spreading a hard square of butter over my toast, a scratchy sound like claws on carpet. It was sweet of her to insist on this empathy. She was a kind person, really. A decent friend. I rarely gave her the chance anymore to prove it.
Pam said, “I know how much you loved that dog, Janelle.”
But we both knew the scales were off-balance. Loved, yes. But not in the same way that Pam loved her husband, and certainly not in the same way that she loved her eight-year-old twins. Not even close. A parent’s bond with a child—that highest and heaviest of emotions—probably deserved an entirely different word.
Zoë and Zachary, Pam’s twins, were in my art class at school, and they were also technically my godchildren, though I had failed to play any spiritual role in their lives. Sometimes in class, while they were water-coloring sunsets or sculpting clay giraffes, I tried to pretend they were mine. Even in my imagination, I couldn’t muster that type of love that parents are so eager to describe, the crushing, all-consuming weight of an affection that feels more like terror. The closest I’d ever come to that feeling was for Claude. And I knew, obviously, that it wasn’t the same.
“The house feels so empty,” I said.
“Of course it does,” Pam said. Then she began to sob, loudly, grotesquely.
How selfish I was, wallowing in my own silly grief. I grabbed a roll of paper towels from the counter, since I was out of tissues, and handed them to Pam. Mascara was creeping down her cheekbones like fingers in a horror movie.
What I wanted was to crawl back into bed—to rub my palm over the cold cotton space next to me where Claude always slept. Instead, I poured Pam another cup of coffee and told her that I’d sit with her as long as she liked.
*
My first class on Monday was the third graders, with Pam’s twins. I almost called in sick, but if Zoë and Zachary could handle being at school, I certainly could. Maybe being with my students would be comforting—watching them sketch sunflowers onto black paper with crumbling pastel chalk, guiding their tiny hands as they shaped slimy clay into molds of elephants, skyscrapers, crucifixes. The Latino students especially loved making crucifixes. I didn’t discourage them, even though their twig-skinny Christ figures—hanging so precariously from the lumpy clay beams—inevitably ripped in half under the kiln’s heat.
The class shuffled into my art room single-file behind their peppy homeroom teacher. I tried to avoid eye-contact with Zoë and Zachary. Like their mom, the twins naturally attracted attention, stood out in a crowd. They had inherited Pam’s magnetism, her blinding white-blonde hair—Zachary’s a shimmering buzz-cut, while Zoë had naturally crimped curls, just like their dad used to have when he was young. I’d never been particularly fond of Pam’s twins, to be honest.
“Today we are making collages,” I announced. It was an easy project, requiring little supervision. Just give them safely blunted scissors and child-friendly magazines, and they could all keep themselves occupied.
I used to pity women like me—artists who gave up their professional ambitions to supervise the creativity of children. I’d won a scholarship to art school, had starved in Brooklyn for a few wonderful years, but at twenty-nine, when I moved back to Texas to care for my mother during her slow death, I took a job teaching art at my old elementary school, and here I’d been since. Almost two decades now. Good Lord.
A plump girl with pink blotchy skin whose name I continued to forget, even though we were already three weeks into the school year, raised her hand. “But what are we supposed to make, exactly?” she said. “Like, what kind of collage?”
Her face was twitching with the anxiety of too many choices. I smiled. She had no idea that too many choices was a good thing—that eventually all her many options would dissolve into precious few.
“You could make a neighborhood full of houses. Or, I don’t know, a flower? You could choose images from a magazine, or you could make something completely abstract. Whatever makes you happy.”
She nodded purposefully, grimly, as if this assignment would determine the success of her academic future.
The kids dispersed to grab crusty glue bottles from the cabinet. They began slashing at construction paper with scissors, rainbow-thin slivers of red and green and blue landing on the linoleum floor. I sank into my faded-pink armchair—a relic from my mother’s house, one of the few items of hers I’d saved. In the front row, Pam’s twins sat next to each other. Usually Zoë and Zachary sat in gender-specific friend groups, but today here they were, side by side, sharing supplies, silent and serious. Their solidarity was heartbreaking. Zachary was tracing his sister’s left hand with an orange marker: presumably the feathers of a turkey.
The first time I ever saw them, asleep in a double-bassinet in Pam and Tom’s living room—two tiny, wrinkly replicas of humans, wrapped tight in blue and pink blankets like sausages—I thought, how unfair. Twins? Two of them! How gratuitous, the hand-picked generosity of God.
Covet. That was a word my mother used to toss around. It seemed to have slipped out of style, rarely mentioned now even in church. It was always my sin of choice. I stopped even bothering to repent of it, assuming God had grown bored with my tediousness, my lack of anything more surprising to report.
Eight years ago, it must have been, that Pam told me she was pregnant, while we were having one of our date nights at my house. It didn’t feel like so much time had passed, but there in the front row of my third-grade class was the proof. Her little miracles.
We had started the date night tradition—wine and cheese and inside jokes—back in the early days of our friendship, when we clung to each other in our shared and satisfied singleness. Even after she married Tom, we still got together often, just the two of us, a celebration of the idea of female friendship, even as we began to have less and less in common. Not being mothers, though—that we’d still shared. It was one of the things I had valued most about Pam. Around my friends who were parents, I’d always felt a manic compulsion to prove my life had meaning, to illustrate that childless joy was possible. With Pam I could be more relaxed.
“To barren wombs!” she’d once declared, tipsily raising her wine glass. “To early retirement!”
Pam was forty when she got pregnant.
“I’m in shock,” she said. “Tom and I had just had the conversation about how we were going to stop trying. We’d finally accepted it, you know?”
I nodded, confused. It was the first time I’d heard anything about them trying. She’d never mentioned wanting kids, not to me.
“We thought about adopting,” she said. “But then we decided, no, we’ll just try to be content. And literally, Janelle, I swear, it was within a week.”
Had Pam deliberately avoided talking to me about this desire to be a mother, or if I had somehow missed it? I felt deceived, foolish. But there were plenty of things I’d kept from her, too. I felt the urge to tell her something that might surprise her, a kind of revenge, just so she would know that I also had secrets. Like how once, when we were very young, before Pam moved to town, her now-husband Tom had kissed me passionately at a party, had made me some drunken promises before disappearing to take a contract job down at the Gulf working the oil rigs. Sometimes, when they had me over for dinner—their favorite old-maid friend—I wondered if Tom’s habit of placing his hand lightly on my back as he poured wine into my glass was something more than plain hospitality.
Also, Pam didn’t know I’d had an abortion my final year of art school. Not that I was ashamed, exactly. It was probably the right decision. But I sometimes wondered if I would have still made that choice, if I’d known what I did now—that I wouldn’t get another chance.
“God’s mysterious timing, you know?” Pam was saying. “Only when we stop needing the thing, only when we allow ourselves to be okay without it, that’s when He answers our prayers.”
I’d visited Pam’s church a couple times—more full-of-the-spirit than my own congregation, which was quieter and less dependent on audience participation. I remembered hearing her young, attractive pastor talk about this idea: God blesses those who understand that Jesus’ presence is more than blessing enough. God rewards those who have learned to be content with Him alone.
For all I knew, maybe this was true.
“I’m so happy for you,” I said. “And for Tom.”
My voice cracked. I squeezed Pam’s hand and smiled. Soon—I had sensed it even then—she would prefer the company of other moms, commiserating with them about sleep schedules and daycares, sharing the frustrations and joys that those of us without children could never quite understand, not completely.
Claude, who was barely a year old then, gangly and awkward and occasionally destructive as a human teenager, wandered into the room from wherever he had been napping and placed his brown-and-white speckled snout on my lap. As if he knew how much I needed him at that moment. My consolation prize, my consolation.
*
“Ten more minutes,” I announced.
The plump, blotchy-faced girl raised her hand. “What if we’re not done?”
“That’s okay.”
She studied me, expecting more details, and then shrugged, turned back to her collage project: carefully cut cubes of construction paper, depicting a square red house in a neighborhood of other houses. I flipped through a newspaper that was laying on my desk. A few teachers were in the habit of bringing me their old newspapers from home, for catching drips and splatters of stray paint.
There was an update on a group of kidnapped Nigerian schoolgirls, now missing for over six months. One of the girls had managed to escape, but 276 remained missing, rumored to have been sold as child-brides. In the Style section, the front page announced the marriage of two movie stars, who had eloped to southern France.
“Hands to yourselves, please,” I said, as sternly as I could, to a group of boys jousting with plastic rulers.
In my first year of art school, a teacher had assigned a project based on a theme: What I’ve Lost. For inspiration, he’d read us a list-poem, a litany of losses. I assumed it had been written by someone famous, but years later I tried to find the poem—checked the library, searched online—and couldn’t track it down.
My keys. My marriage. My favorite shirt. My mind.
For the assignment, one of my fellow classmates had presented a series of coat-hangers with childhood photographs dangling from them, yellow-edged polaroids secured with clothespins. Another student had painted a blue tunnel with a blood-red triangle in the center, which represented her virginity. I couldn’t remember now what I had created in response to that prompt. At that point in my life, I hadn’t lost much—I hadn’t yet had the abortion, my mother hadn’t yet gotten sick—so it was probably something abstract: loss as a state of being. Still, I remembered so clearly my teacher’s humiliating dismissal of my piece. Shallow, he had said. Skating the surface.
“Time’s up,” I said. “Let’s see your work!”
The kids held their collages proudly over their heads. For many, the glue was still wet, and scraps of magazine cut-outs dripped down the pages in a slow gravitational drift.
“Leave them flat on your desk, please, so they can dry.” I wandered up and down the rows, commenting on their work. “That’s lovely!” I said, brightly, repeatedly.
Zachary’s did indeed depict a turkey, hand-shaped feathers sprouting out from an oval body, surrounded by clumps of autumn leaves—jagged pieces of brown and orange tissue paper. Next to him, his sister had cut out various images of women from magazines. A cheerful blonde in a business suit, serving a microwaved breakfast to her family. A paparazzi shot of Gwyneth Paltrow, grocery shopping in sweatpants and sunglasses.
“It’s people that look like my mom,” Zoë explained in a sad, theatrical whisper. She sounded like she was performing a scripted line for a movie.
I wanted to grab her tiny shoulders and shake her.
“Lovely,” I said.
Out the window, the branches of the large oak were scraping against the glass, so close that if I wanted to, I could climb onto the nearest limb and breathe in the humid air and escape.
A small boy named Andrés who sat in the back row was still working, attentively arranging bits of paper onto his collage with a glue-stick. He hardly ever spoke, and he always looked tired, like a world-weary old man.
“This collage is interesting, Andrés.” I had no idea what it was supposed to be. “Can you tell me about it?”
“It’s my cat,” he said.
I squinted at the jumbled mess of colors and shapes.
“Well, it’s my cousin’s cat, but I wish he was my cat.”
“I see.”
“You said whatever makes us happy.”
He was glaring at me, his eyes sharp and defensive.
“Yes.” My eyes were stinging. I felt myself losing control. Andrés loved this cat, unabashedly and without shame. I adored him for it. “You did a great job.” What I wanted was to shout this praise loudly—to proclaim that Andrés’ collage, this tribute to his cousin’s cat, which looked absolutely nothing like a cat, was my favorite.
Of course, I couldn’t say that in front of the other kids. But what was so wrong, really, with playing favorites? From many, we choose who we will marry, and who we won’t. We choose a few people we want to keep as friends, tiptoeing away from all others. Even Jesus named a favorite apostle. Some are blessed more in this life, and others will supposedly be blessed more, as compensation, in the life to come.
The tears I had been stifling all day were now rolling down my face. I didn’t even try to hide it. Who cared if the students saw me cry? Seriously, who the fuck cared?
Andrés was staring. I could feel his growing panic and remembered this particular brand of embarrassment from childhood—the shock of seeing an adult cry, like witnessing an obscene act.
The bell rang and Andrés sprang up from his seat, grateful to be rid of me. The kids all rushed around the room, throwing glue bottles and half-shredded magazines back into the cubbies. “Everyone, leave your collages here to dry,” I yelled. “Place them flat on the drying rack. You can pick them up next class.”
Zoë approached me, holding with outstretched arms her creepy collage of blonde women, like she was holding a birthday cake.
“Ms. Janelle, can I pick mine up later today, after school?” She and Zachary sometimes slipped and called me by my first name, since that was how they had learned to address me before I was their teacher. “I want to give it to my mom tonight.”
“Sure,” I said, curtly. “Fine.”
She glanced at my face, then averted her eyes to the floor. “Are you okay?”
“Yes, Zoë. I’m just sad.” My voice was much sharper than I intended. “Aren’t I allowed to be sad?”
A dead dog wasn’t much—not on the scale of things one could love and lose—but it was what I had. It was all I fucking had.
Zoë looked away from me. She placed her collage on the drying rack. In the doorway, their homeroom teacher appeared and began clapping her hands, trying to organize the students into a line. The kids jostled one another, re-arranging themselves in endless configurations; they all wanted to ensure they could stand next to their friends, could not handle being separated for even the thirty-second walk down the hallway to the lunchroom.
Only the plump overachiever was lagging behind. She was slowly returning the art supplies, picking up the glue bottles and scissors that other kids had dropped on the floor. Then, as she turned around, the sleeve of her shirt caught on the corner of the drying rack, knocking several collages to the ground.
“Don’t worry,” I said, when I saw the horror on her face. “I’ll take care of it. Go catch up with the rest of the class.”
I crouched to retrieve the fallen art projects. Most were fine, but one was still wet and had landed face-down. Why did kids insist on using so much glue? I lifted the soggy paper and saw that it was Zoë’s. Several of the blonde women were now on the floor. A few were wrinkled, speckled with dirt.
I knew what I should do was try to repair her collage. My next class wouldn’t arrive for another hour. I could preserve as many of Zoë’s cut-outs as possible and then flip through the magazines for additional pretty women resembling Pam, to replace those that were unsalvageable. I could glue them all to a new crisp sheet of construction paper, so Zoë could present it to her mother tonight.
I kneeled and picked the paper bodies off the ground. But I didn’t try to do it carefully. They ripped into mushy shreds—satisfying, like slimy wet clay in my hands. Then I started in on the collage itself, where several of the images were still intact.
One by one, I peeled away the blonde figures that clung to the gluey paper. I crumpled Alicia Silverstone’s body in the palm of my hand. With my fingernail I picked at the image of the woman in the business suit, until it had dissolved into slivers. I tore Gwyneth Paltrow’s body in half. I did it with glee. I didn’t even feel guilty.
Allison Grace Myers is a writer of fiction and nonfiction whose work has appeared in ELECTRIC LITERATURE, CRAZYHORSE, IMAGE, GULF COAST, and WITNESS. She is the winner of the John Steinbeck Award for Fiction and has been honored with notable mention in BEST AMERICAN ESSAYS. She received her MFA from Texas State University, where she held the Rose Fellowship. She lives in Texas and is at work on her first novel.
