I hate that word: shitty. The word itself makes my sister go nuts: there's a sense of a great rage, heaving breasts, rustling skirts, maybe a rolling pin. A 19th century fit coming right at you. She never actually does anything, but she leaves you feeling that she could be serious bad news.
My mother on hearing a single declared shit would leave the room hurriedly looking pale. Saying "shit" in my starchy Scot-Presbyterian-lawyerly family was...I don't know what it was like since I didn't know that many bad words. I thought "ain't" was a really bad word. And it wasn't like all this repression kept us from having foul, filthy mouths, although my sister keeps it clean. Like my ex-Navy dad, I swear 24/7.
"It's so relaxing," my husband told me one afternoon, when I apologized for unleashing a cartoon style string of awful words: &@#%$v9+##a6&^&."I never have to watch myself with you," he said happily enough, which is the relaxing kind of guy he is.
But some days, it's just shitty out there and no other word will do.
It's been drizzling rain so much the yard is squelchy and the cats are pissed at me. They think I control the weather and why wouldn't they? Me with the mighty light switch; me with the roaring faucets.
The swine flu settled in my chest and like a real dope, I loaded up on Mucinex last night and realized too late I was completely jacked on guiafenisen. I stayed up for the second night in a row, coughing up chunks of asphalt, old hubcaps, and greasy car parts. Then I put on a faceful of makeup, really tight jeans, and my black leather jacket and set out for Baylor, in a decidedly foggy state. I hadn't seen my boy in a while.
Thing about Baylor is it's a monster of a hospital that lives between some really good real estate and junkie-land. As I mumbled along north Washington, praying to that old bastard, God, I realized that the guy in front of me was incredibly drunk and tilting into the passenger side. The guys behind me...I guess they were guys...the windows were so darkly tinted and dirty I couldn't tell, but they seemed glued to my bumper and were driving a serial-killer van. The cops pry these fat ancient vans open after a good long lawless chase and scared kids with their underwear inside out topple out on the pavement.
But so be it. That's the way God had ordered the world this particular day. I went to the wrong rehab center first, and while the receptionist tried to call up Lynn's records, a tiny East Indian man on a glucose drip and a catheter came up to me. Blease, miss, he said politely, I need to bee. I tried to smile gently, but I know all about the need to bee and the ways of catheters. Lynn's had two bladder infections in as many days. I couldn't do a thing for my tiny Indian and this dawned on him as the nurse practitioners closed in like wolves and took him off to bee.
But another thing about today that made it unusually shitty, is that I cried. I hate crying, but if crying is called for, like over my dead cats nearly two years ago, then I will cry. I would still rather throw up in public than cry, so obviously I have all these Grief Issues. But it was today that I realized that Lynn could really die and that God, who has already gobbled up my parents, an ex-husband, my painting teacher and my two very dearest friends, might decide to grab Lynn while he's at it.
Later on I kept crying and wept over the phone tonight at my dear couple-friends. He could do it, I shouted, God could take Lynn and why not? And if God takes Lynn, I am going to be one angry bitch. The way I have to go about Acceptance is to imagine God doing his goddamn worst on me, at me. And that means I have to know Lynn could die, despite Baylor, despite me writing our way out of this mess, despite all my hopes and idiot plans, Lynn could still die. I have to really fucking know this, otherwise I'll have no peace. This may sound like a five-year-old's idea of church, but it's part of the way I write and practice. I try to imagine things as simple and stupid as they really are.
So Lynn could die.
I hate this, I yelled at my two very dear friends. He's lying in bed, looking like bleached catshit and no one has any idea that he's a really astonishing painter, and for thirty-one years, he's made me laugh every single day. To Baylor, he's just some old guy, who looks pretty fucked up. And I hate crying. I'm not a goddamn girl.
You're really not, the husband agreed calmly. You're not a girl at all. But you're a good fighter.
And I am. Except there's nothing to fight right now. There's just a bunch of events I'm trying to figure out, while my boy lies on his back, bored out of his skull.
I'll go tomorrow and see what medicines he's on, find out how to get this bladder thing licked and I'll tell him, Fuck rehab. I'm not impressed you can sit in a wheelchair and you shouldn't be either. The point is to get you out of that goddamn wheelchair. So you're gonna have to be smarter than any of these jokers. And I'll find him some of that good dry shampoo while I'm out.
We've been here before and it's a real pig of a rodeo. But it's the only one in town.
It was a really shitty day today. I'm sorry Marty, I'm sorry Mama, but some days you've got to call it just the way it is.
And it's shitty.
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