Joan Is Okay(15)

Twenty minutes later I said he could take me to the station.



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THERE IS NO REAL fight against death because death will always win. But death can be handled well or poorly.

The first death I saw happened when I was a child. My mother, who had been holding my hand, stopped holding my hand to scoop me up and to turn me away. But I had seen it. A hit-and-run. The man’s body facedown on the side of the street, with blood pooling at the elbows and knees; the skin ballooned outward, blue and thin, like plastic bags about to burst. A death handled poorly.

My father’s death had been handled well. In China, I had reviewed all his charts, alongside a translator, from routine checkups in his last decade to the adverse event itself, and deemed the stroke properly managed, with the right meds given and the right algorithms performed. Disease can have no reasoning to it, coming down to either bad genes or bad luck or a combination of both. Every death was sad, but in a hospital at least there was a process around it, a box, and once that process was clear, death, while always the victor, could be contained.



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ONE LARGE PIECE OF mail that did not fit inside my box was left on the floor beneath.

A thick silken envelope, color burnt orange, or rust, or autumn maple, with my name written in cursive and green foil lettering. The envelope came attached to a wicker basket.

I was cordially invited, at the end of the month, to Fang and Tami’s annual Harvest Bash. Activities would include an on-site horse-drawn hayride, a petting zoo (goats, peacocks, and mini horses), face painting (back by popular demand), and make your own cornucopias. Come taste our handcrafted seasonally spiced cocktails, the invite said. RSVP required two weeks in advance.

Last year’s Harvest Bash didn’t have a petting zoo.

I imagined someone with a peppermill cracking fresh flakes into every drink.

The basket came with one pound of Royal Riviera pears, two pounds of seasonal apples, six ounces of gouda cheese, four ounces of cheddar cheese, a cranberry orange loaf cake, a pumpkin spice loaf cake, trays of assorted nuts (pecans, roasted almonds, honey roasted cashews), one pound of cranberry pear chutney, one pound of caramel sauce.

Goats had rectangular pupils, I knew, and sometimes screamed like humans. But did they care for cranberry pear chutney? Or caramel sauce?

I didn’t know what to do with the sauces. The Royal Riviera pears I gave to my doorman, cheeses and nuts to Mark. Loaf cakes I could eat and in two nights they would be gone.

The day it arrived, Fang texted to ask if I’d received a basket.

I texted back that the basket was safe and mostly consumed.

Good, he wrote. Then he asked for my RSVP to the bash.

Right now? I wrote back.

Cool, he replied. I’ll put you down for two. Bring a friend. Anyone you like.



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I HAD NO WALL decor in my living room except for a giant wall calendar about half my height, with just the grid of the dates, all lines and numbers, no pictures. When the month was over, I ripped the half-body sheet clean off and, more than the breeze from my handouts, the calendar produced a gust.

Overheard in the elevator, between a young couple going up to the ninth floor with me. Same weight and height, this couple, woman and man both 143 pounds, five six and a half, and I wondered if this commonality had brought them together.

Books, the man was saying to the woman, 9B consults on books and culture. He tells you what you could write about and how you should think about yourself in this cultural moment.

What cultural moment? I asked, and the couple turned around. I said I lived in 9A but had nothing to do with 9B, I was just eavesdropping, just curious.

Curiosity killed the cat, said the woman.

Actually, it was cancer, I said, thinking of the former cat of 9B.

The man looked at the woman and vice versa. They both turned from me and we got out on the same floor, but diverged.

He did recommend a lot of titles to me. One evening, he dropped off a stack of books that he had multiple copies of but couldn’t bear to just donate. Books that he’d read in school that had been helpful and enriching at the time. Not necessarily his favorites, but classics that everyone should read. The bag was bulky, and he went through each title with me at my doorway, starting with Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath.

I turned the book over and read the description: a naturalistic epic, captivity narrative, road novel, transcendental gospel about the Great Depression.

Whose grapes again? I asked.

No, the author’s name is Steinbeck. John Steinbeck.

When I stared blankly back at him, he ran a hand frantically through his hair.

Dozens of books in the bag, some thick, some thin. I tried to pretend that I knew most of them. Oh yes, that one, I would say, pointing, when the last humanities class I took in college was the last time I had to read a book that did not contain only facts.

A page a day, Mark suggested. But well worth it. That was how he finally made it through Proust, he said.

And I said, Me too.

Besides books, he had many thoughts about the city and the kind of person who chose to live here. New York was a true melting pot, but what made a true New Yorker was this or that, a unified belief system of tolerance, of live and let live, that couldn’t be replicated anywhere else. New Yorkers weren’t rude, they were brusque, witty, sharp; they told you exactly what they meant, no bullshit or fake pleasantries. From here, somehow, we wound our way to the Yankees. Every New Yorker has an opinion about them, so what was mine?