Chapter Thirty #3
I was swallowed up instead. By the ones who wanted the pupacorn’s life over mine. By the ones who wanted me to be a face, a metaphor, a cause, a warning. By the ones who wanted my blood and its secrets. By the ones who wanted my story, but not really my story: their story of my story.
Mind, an old woman need not get pregnant for that to happen.
You lightly rear-end one priest and lose your license and your home and your autonomy.
You have to go live with the man you chose not to live with twenty-five years earlier.
You can only go where the Vista View van goes or places you can walk—and only as long as you can walk.
You have to eat the sweet-and-sour chicken—at no later than 5:45 p.m.—and obey all the rules.
You have to go to the nursing wing, but you might not be able to die there, so you have to go to the hospice center.
And die there. All of this is life, yes, but it is not choosing life.
It is life without choosing, life without choice.
Because there’s the rub, right? We choose life, but not all life, not life no matter what.
In fact, we choose life within pretty narrow parameters.
Sometimes we say, “I choose to live better. I will risk my life for a better life.” Or we say, “I choose to go down fighting. I choose life so hard I am willing to give it up.” Or maybe we say, “I choose to live but only well and strong, not a burden, not a shell, not without dignity. Not without choices.” Across state lines, around this aching fractal of a country, all over the world, in every society, in every culture, through all of history and all of time, this, this one thing, this is what everyone wants: To live well, on our own terms, and then, after a whole lot of that, to die gently and bravely and only when the time is right, to choose and to choose and to choose.
And to never stop choosing, right to the end.
None of which would Lola understand, I fervently hoped, for at least the next six decades or so. And it wasn’t what she was worrying about anyway.
“You could get in so much trouble for helping me,” she said, like it directly followed, and maybe it did.
I barked a laugh. “Oh, sure, that. That’s an easy one. That one I will choose every time.”
“But that doesn’t make sense. Why would it be okay if I got you in trouble but not if you got Aunt Alice in trouble?”
I shrugged. I didn’t know how to explain it to her. “You’ll do things for your granddaughter you’d never do for yourself. You’ll do things for her you’d never do for anyone else in the world.”
“I will?”
“Oh yes.” I nodded. “Just you wait.”
Moth cleared his throat in the front seat. “Sorry to interrupt, loves, but have a look.” He nodded out the windshield at an unassuming sign:
NEW MEXICO WELCOMES YOU
We didn’t need welcoming. “New Mexico Tolerates You” would have been just fine. “New Mexico Grudgingly Serves You.” “New Mexico: Picking Up the Slack for Our Farshtunken Neighbors.”
When I’d told my father we were leaving Brooklyn and moving to Austin because Roger had gotten a job at the university, what he said was “Why is the wind easterly in New Mexico?”
I’d looked at him blankly.
“Because Texas sucks.”
“That didn’t take as long as I thought it would,” said Moth.
“That took eighty million years,” said Lola.
“Thirteen and a half hours, nine gas stations, four lay-bys, sixteen ice lollies, eighty-seven gummy bears, and Bob’s your uncle, here we are,” Moth said cheerfully.
Lola squinted at him. “You counted the gummy bears?”
“I’m a scientist.”
“Bob’s my uncle?”
“Quite so.”
“Why don’t the English speak English?” she said.
“No one knows,” Moth answered.
With only an hour yet to go, we moved on to the urgent business of naming hamsters.
“Oliver and Pierre,” Lola said. “After my cousins.”
“Jews don’t name babies after living loved ones,” I said.
“They’re not babies. They’re hamsters. Salt and Pepper?”
I looked at her. “What did I just say about living loved ones?”
“I didn’t mean you,” Lola said. “I was thinking of famous pairs.”
“Na and Cl,” Moth suggested, then explained, off her annoyed mystification, “Salt, as you said. Sodium chloride, chemically bonded. A very famous pair.”
“But terrible hamster names,” Lola said. Witheringly.
“Romeo and Juliet,” I said.
“Too tragic. I don’t want my hamsters to die at the end.”
“Everyone dies at the end,” Moth said.
“Wait!” she said. “I’ve got it. Hamling and—”
“Hamling?” I interrupted.
“Like a hamster but smaller. A ham-ling. And a ham-let.”
Sometimes your fate cries out. So Hamling and Hamlet it was.
We switched drivers one last time.
Then Lola said, “Someday I’ll have kids. Probably. Not just hamsters.” Half statement, half question.
I nodded but did not take my eyes off the road. “Probably.”
“I just can’t have this kid.”
“This kid is not a kid. It’s not a baby. It’s barely a fetus.”
“I just can’t right now.”
“You don’t have to justify this decision, Lols. Not to me. Not to anyone.”
Lola nodded. Then she said, “What happens after this?”
“Same thing that happens after everything.”
“What?”
I glanced at her, then back at the road. “The rest of your beautiful life.”