EXIT ONLY by TERRY MAROTTA

The Life is the Light

I was at the beauty parlor a few months ago, and Randy was washing my hair before cutting it. As I lay back in the chair passive, inert, feeling his fingers work­ing in my scalp, a question came into my mind:

“Have you ever done a dead person’s hair?” I asked. “Sure,” he answered.

“And was it scary?”“Not really,” came his reply. “In a way it’s easy. You just do the front, of course.”

We were silent then. As he worked, I thought about my own little skull and how the day would come when it would lie all quiet beneath that Rafter of Satin and Roof of Stone that Emily Dickinson refers to in one of her poems.

“Do you believe in the resurrection of the body?” I asked.

He looked at me for a long moment. This was not, I knew, standard beauty parlor gab. But Randy is not your standard person.

“I don’t know about the body,” he said. “But the Bible says the dead are a great crowd of witnesses.”

“Where are they though?” I asked, a question I have thought about every day of my adult life.

He took a breath.

“What I think,” he said, “is that it’s like theater here, and we’re on the stage and the dead are in the audience. They can see us but we can’t see them. You know how that is on a stage? We can’t see them because of a bright light in between…”

“And they’re watching us?” I interrupted, “and think­ing, ‘such a fevered dream, this living of theirs. Such tiny strivings’? Do they look at us and think, of our actions, ‘how paltry and insignificant?’”

“Oh, not at all,” said Randy emphatically. “They’re watching us because our actions are significant. We’re the ones now. It matters very much what we do.”

I’ve thought about this conversation many times since we had it back in June.

A few people are as clear as Randy is as to our place in the grand scheme of things. Many more aren’t.

A young person said to me the other day, “You’re born and then you die. And the whole time you’re here you don’t have a clue as to what it’s all about.”

I look around myself, to see what it’s about:

A little cat hops quick as an eighth-note to the kitchen window sill, arranges herself in a pool of sun that shines on the white stone slab of counter. I see the bright China blue of a fruit bowl next to her, the dazzling large-pored orbs of orange within it, her soft pelt electric with life, as she smoothes it with a wedge of pink tongue.

A cellist rises from her chair in the symphony orches­tra and sits in front, to perform an extended solo. Seated again, she takes the instrument between her legs. As she draws the bow over its strings, and the deep rich tones of the cello roll out over the audience, her throat constricts, as if with great emotion. Her nostrils flare. She keeps her eyes closed as if against the insupportable beauty of the music. When for a brief moment in the piece she opens them, she does not see the audience.

A young man, full of life and high spirits, goes on a youth retreat the first September weekend of his Senior year. Boarding the bus to return home at week’s end, he collapses and dies within minutes of what the autopsy will later show to be a cardiac infection. Another young man, unknown to him before that week away, speaks at his memorial service. He has worked with the sick at a nursing home, he says; he knows this is no fainting spell. He holds the dying boy, in the few seconds remaining. “God loves you, Jermaine,” he tells him. “I love you too.”

If the dead are all around us; if they are watching, as Randy believes, they may say, “See how they shone, at their moment in the light: the little cat; the cellist; the boy who left life early, and the one who helped him to leave it.”

Mother Theresa cradles yet another sickly infant brought in from a dumpster on the streets of Calcutta. She presents him like a bouquet of flowers to the visiting British journalist.

“See!” she says with shining eyes, “There is Life in the child!”

The life is the light. And to all those who feel the light—in them and upon them—this world is shot through with glory.

Back in 1993 when I was a serious Nobody (as opposed to now when I’m a Nobody with damaged hair) our late national treasure of a novelist and poet John Updike sent me a postcard in response to a column I sent him about an ABC boy who died young. I guess it was also about my mom dying in front of my eyes, the beauty of oranges piled in a bowl and how a woman cellist looks when she takes that instrument between her legs, which both embarrasses and moves you at the same time and makes you realize how Sex and Music and God really ARE all connected.)

I’ve been reading Updike to cheer myself up. Others would read him to feel jealous but the thing with the guy is how generous he always was to everyone; how gracious, even to us little people: Back in ’93 he wrote a short story for The New Yorker about his mother dying. Anyone could see it was his real mom, so the column I sent him accompanied a condolence note. When he answered it he said I wrote ‘like a dream’ which is nonsense but such gallant nonsense. I’m writing for 1,000 years here and still no book offers! Still no requests for my endorsements on bras for your full-figured girls! I have never been on staff at a newspaper; haven’t earned a salary since I stopped teaching high school, topping out at the handsome figure of $12,000. But I have five books which I by-God published myself. And I make a princely ten dollars a column from the papers who still bother to pay me, who haven’t themselves gone under for the third time. And every April 15^th my husband David says “T, you couldn’t be earning LESS!” – to which I say ‘So what?’

Remember that great thing labor leader Eugene Debs said 100 years ago? “While there is a lower class I am in it; while there is a criminal element I am of it; while there is a soul in prison, I am not free”? Well where there’s a way to lose money I have found it, all unwilling, or else it has found me. At the same time I do know this, that the best fun  I ever had was on the day I took the train to New York on my own dime, went to The Ethel Walker School in Brooklyn, taught the whole day and gave away five cartons of my funniest book, the one from my children’s childhood with all the pee-pee and bum-bum jokes in it.

It’s what God wants of me I think. And to have written all your adult life is such a privilege.

These last seven days I have been writing my way out of sorrow over the death of my cat Charlotte and now here I am on the zillionth rainy day of this rainy cold summer and I feel swell. We’re on vacation with our mildewed clothes and Old Dave is doin’ the crossword ten feet away. Our remaining cat Abe is calculating the minutes ’til his next pig-out on fresh shrimp, eight strangers are coming over for drinks at 6 and God bless you guys I’m writing to you.

To read what I said about the dead boy, the oranges and the cellist give me a minute. Takin’ a quick walk for the sake of the old bones, then I’ll put her up.

Signed,

The Cheeseball as she looked last month.

(Took one look  at this pic and went straight to the beauty parlor. “I have black curly hair, dammit; Throw out the peroxide and the straighteners and let me be what I am.” Today it’s the color of charcoal ready for the steaks. And by God if the curl isn’t comin’ back at the edges too! (that’s what’s known as FAKE HAIR stuck to the back of my head in the photo. Marie Antoinette called. Cue the guillotine guys.)