Heart-Shaped Box - The Forge

We went to Wal-Mart, Rag Shop, Target, Phar-Mor.

On school nights, Saturday mornings, Sunday afternoons as the sun dipped toward dinnertime, we drove down U.S. 1 toward the beach where the mall and the world began. We listened to FM radio. Jon Secada cry-singing. Taylor Dayne, too.

We went to Wal-Mart, Rag Shop, Target, Phar-Mor.

Our tantrum limbs, slouching and sluggish and silently screaming. And in the burnt-blue parking lot dusk, we pummeled our car doors, slapping them shut before dragging ourselves, and her wheelchair, through the automatic doors.

We went to Wal-Mart, Rag Shop, Target, Phar-Mor.

Our mother, our love, the crafting fanatic, waving her list of needed materials, purple ink clamoring across the page. If she could not be beautiful, she would make beautiful things. If she could not walk or work, she’d gift trinkets—homemade surrogates imbued with the last vestiges of her corporeal energies. Everyone deserved evidence that she still breathed and moved, that her heart was boundless even if she was not. Everyone but us.

We went to Wal-Mart, Rag Shop, Target, Phar-Mor.

We were not her surrogates. We were her shoppers, her servants, her scavengers. We were her eyes scouring metal shelves for shaker boxes of various sizes, discerning the difference between cyan and cerulean. We were her legs sprinting from clearance bin to clearance bin to discover that one item that would help her realize her vision: iridescent fabric, Modge Podge, an angel made of straw. We were her hands, sifting through foam and plastic, clutching the starry spangle of sequins, heaping the homespun dazzle of buttons, grabbing greeting cards from their slots so she could cut off their painterly covers, the sentimental heart of them tossed in the trash. We complied and appeased until it was Attention, Wal-Mart, Rag Shop, Target, Phar-Mor shoppers, the time is now ___, please bring your items to the register as your children are hungry and haunted by homework and your husband is a googly-eyed stencil of a man.

We went to Wal-Mart, Rag Shop, Target, Phar-Mor.

Who is all this for?, we sighed, flinging her bounty onto the conveyor belt, checking her lap for stray items. And between oxygen tank spurts, she’d answer in her breathless litany: For my friends and for your friends. For classmates and teachers, the aides and the principals. For your co-workers at the power plant and the neighbor with the new baby. For the ICU nurses, the hospice nurses, the nurses where I get my MRIs. And the doctor, don’t forget the doctors. All the doctors. So many doctors.

But we knew this was mostly for her.

We wanted our love, our around-the-clock caretaking, to be enough. But we’d betrayed her with every tendon in our capable hands, every functioning nerve, every resilient bone. We rendered her a burden with each puff of air we birthed and abandoned, each kiss to her steroid-ballooned cheeks, an anvil of a lie that she hadn’t changed, that nothing had changed.

But we knew she was a new woman now.

A new woman smelling of paint and iodine, magic marker and heating pad. A new woman cutting and shellacking and adorning until her TV dissolved into a rainbow bright drone, until dawn’s light matched the bruises stippling her arms. A new woman warrior cloaked in comforter, grayed from overuse and underwashing, armed with a hot glue gun as self-defense, burning holes into her sheets, stamping blisters on shaky fingers. A new woman, high on morphine and other assorted opiate beads rattling in amber bottles. A new woman we didn’t recognize, sometimes feared, and reticently loved.

We went to Wal-Mart, Rag Shop, Target, Phar-Mor.

We slumped against this new woman’s chair, our bodies heaving with annoyance as we rolled her through the same four stupid aisles of whatever superstore to find just the right shade of teal acrylic when there was so much more to desire: hard rock cassette tapes and hoop earrings and action figures and big screen TVs. We had better places to be, to go, to live out our young and healthy lives. And here we were instead: sick from the smell of apple-cinnamon sachet, plagued by fluorescents spreading their cadaver glare through every strip mall haunt. We wondered where other families were, what they did together. Did they assist in the stockpiling of art supplies to allay their mother’s mortal fears? Did they defer to their wife’s manic whims out of pity and exhaustion?

We went to Wal-Mart, Rag Shop, Target, Phar-Mor.

Her hobby was an outlet was a bargain was a plea was a prayer. After each close call, each new ICU stint or hospital stay, we devised an elaborate project to stave off death and temper its power. We understood it was a group effort.

We went to Wal-Mart, Rag Shop, Target, Phar-Mor.

We used to spend weekends without death in the rear view. We used to clean and cook and bring our separate lives to the dining room table, dishing them out in healthy portions for each other to enjoy, a steady diet of jokes and the precious mundane details of our days. But during the craft years, we were perpetually famished. Forever waiting in check-out lines, we hoped the McDonald’s across the street would stay open.

We went to Wal-Mart, Rag Shop, Target, Phar-Mor.

We longed to take her home, for her to convalesce as the doctors directed. We longed for solo golf outings and video game marathons and Beverly Hills, 90210. We granted one another breaks for browsing alone, retreating to those corners of commerce promising a plastic-sealed and immaculate beginning. We were seduced by the lurid hues of VHS cover art, the strong and steady pulse of state-of-the-art stereos, the flash of toys requiring batteries. And if there wasn’t a fantasy purchase in stock, we’d head outside to gaze at the ghost-moon glow of parking lot lights, to envy the highway traffic whizzing toward the mall and the ocean’s edge until: Where’s your sister? Where’s your brother? Where’s your dad? Well, go find him. We’re ready to go.

We went to Wal-Mart, Rag Shop, Target, Phar-Mor.

We wanted to tell her how much we loved her and apologize for treating her like a chore. Instead, we crossed items off her list and wrote checks we hoped wouldn’t bounce. We lugged the bags out to the car and crammed them anywhere we could. We lifted and lowered the fragile bulk of her into the hatchback, laid her portable oxygen in her lap like a sleeping child, wedged her chair beside the day’s haul. Parked at the McDonald’s drive-thru, we devoured delicious garbage in silence. Then we drove back down U.S. 1 and listened to the plastic bags sigh as their cargo escaped and pitched against the trunk’s walls. Jon Secada cry-singing. Taylor Dayne, too. We were almost home.

But we knew what awaited us there.

We unloaded and organized the fruits of our errands into giant plastic bins occupying her walk-in closet: one for paints, one for adhesives, one for textiles, one for assorted crap. We gathered her project essentials, retrieved her required medications. We kissed the quaking damp of her side effects and took to our rooms and the sofa to sleep until the next scheduled outing. In the middle of the night, we woke to pee and saw her working, head bent and grimacing, proving her will to live, transforming the contents of her heart into inferior knick-knacks that no one would ever use or wear. Her arthritic hands and bleary eyes begged, Remember me, remember me always. She didn’t believe us when we told her we could never forget.

We went to Wal-Mart, Rag Shop, Target, Phar-Mor.

Until Dad drove off and there was no more journeying down U.S.1, no more mall and the world beginning, no more cry-singing, no more scouring and scavenging, no more browsing breaks, no more McDonald’s. Until her body pasted itself to her mattress and the bins of crap remained full and quiet, until there were no new hobbies to ward off what was coming. Until there was no “we” like before. Until it was just her and me alone, at night, pain coursing like hot glue through her ribboned spine while she wheezed like a well-loved tube of paint, her heart, an oblong wooden box accidentally sealed by too much gloss, gorgeously inaccessible. I watched her mottled chest undulate in the stillness of school nights, Saturday mornings, Sunday evening as the sun dipped toward dinnertime. I’d imagine prying her box heart open, cracking its airtight lid, risking the splinters to see what was inside, and when I found that I wasn’t there, I’d repair the damage, decoupaging it anew until it was shiny and glittering and perfectly intact and hold it up for her to see in all its DIY splendor, displaying it in the bowl of her trembling hands for us both to admire.