Samwiches
Three times in the past three years, friends of mine have died, and three times in the past three years, my daughters have been packed the wrong lunches.
Josh died the day of the Paris attacks. It was cancer, and though we knew it would happen soon, we didn’t think it would happen ever. While I cried on my bed, the girls, in their room, shook the Paris snow globe that Cody and I had brought them in October when we had gone for our anniversary trip. In Paris, we ate fries and drank wine under an awning at an outdoor café while the sky emptied rain all around us.
I splashed my face with water, as you do after crying, and read to my girls and tucked them in. We said the same prayer we say every night — though it is the only time I ever mention God to them–and then I sang the same song I always sing, and wished them moonbeams and ice creams, and brushed my teeth, and read two pages, and fell asleep on my side of my bed. I was fine.
But the next morning, it happened. We were in a brief phase where I cut Eva’s sandwiches with a heart-shaped cookie cutter and Ella’s in perfect little triangles. I gnawed the outside edges of whatever remained, and then, with carrots and apples in the panda lunchbox, I placed the heart, and with cucumbers and grapes in the sequin lunchbox, I placed the triangles.
When Jim died, also of cancer, Eva was into peanut butter, and Ella, turkey. I called Lorraine and flipped through the pages of a manuscript he had recently returned me, looking at his handwriting, his closed e’s, his comment, on a poem about the heart, that I was “perilously close to cliché,” his comment, on another poem, that he “needed air, a break, a glass of something, a step outside before going on.” Slicing bananas, I remember Jim in Nashville, the glasses of something, the steps outside. He had written in pencil, and I became overly concerned that the graphite would fade. His a’s, too, were closed, little fists, big fight. We were supposed to play poker that Saturday, and, as I drizzled honey and cut crusts, I made a mental note that we would not be playing poker that Saturday, then I placed some things in the Shopkins lunchbox and other things in the blue lunchbox and walked my girls to school, crossing to the sunny side so that we might be warmer.
When Holly died, it was her heart. She who had streaked the high school football field with me, who had not infrequently made me laugh until I peed, who had sung me to sleep with songs I would commit to carrying with me for the rest of my days, had always had the biggest, best heart, at least metaphorically, so suddenly, every time I saw the word heart or thought the word heart or heard the word heart or uttered heart, said, it was her heart, the world felt like it was splitting down the middle, like it itself was a heart, and it itself had broken. It was her heart, and it was October.
I think of Eva and Ella that day in the cavernous lunchroom with its sky blue walls and its cockroaches, of Ella unearthing a little cup of salami and some pita chips, and Eva unwrapping what she would discover to be cream cheese and jelly on white bread. In the din of the cafeteria, their little hands finger their unwanted food while they try to grow accustomed to the hunger they will carry for the rest of the day.