Juggling by Barbara Sosman- written version
Barbara Sosman has an MFA in fiction
and nonfiction from Vermont College, as well as a BA in English from the
University of Connecticut. Her short story "Juggling" won FIRST PRIZE in the
2004 Raymond Carver Short Story Contest sponsored by Humboldt State University
and is being published in the spring 2005 issue of Toyon. Her short story
"Ashes" was published in the spring 2003 Louisville Review, and another
short story, "Me and Grace," was a prizewinner in the 2003 Fiction Competition
sponsored by The Ledge, and published in The Ledge #27.
Juggling
In the distance, beyond the grimy window thick with winter’s icy crust, a single Roman candle rises in a bright arc, then disappears. It’s nine o’clock on New Year’s Eve, with cherry bombs exploding in the courtyard six stories below, each burst embraced with the hesitant pop-pop-pop of firecrackers. But the noise doesn’t register in Hardy’s brain. His nervous system is wired into the sound of a small brass bell his wife rings whenever she needs his help, and now as he hears its call, his inner self falls out of alignment, all angles and twitches, until he reassembles it and hurries to her side. A good patient, she has promised not to ring unless it's really important, but she has rung twice in the last hour. This time she asks him to lift her into a sitting position where she can breathe more easily. She often sleeps upright all night long. Her face is now so thin that her large blue eyes seem suspended in their bruised sockets, but Hardy still sees her as she was a few weeks ago before this downward spiral began, sees her smiling at him across the Thanksgiving turkey, wearing her favorite red dress, her cheeks aglow in the candlelight, and the faint drooping of one, tired eyelid almost indiscernible.
Hardy puffs up the pillows behind her, smoothes her hair and gives her a kiss on the forehead. Her pale skin is taut and cool. "I'm so tired today," she says. "It's hard to believe I was juggling a few days ago."
"Almost juggling," he corrects her, then regrets reminding her of limitations and forces himself to offer a smile.
"Almost," she agrees, looking away. “Do I hear fireworks? Already?” She raises her shoulders as if feeling a chill, so Hardy pulls the quilt up to her neck for warmth although he’s already raised the thermostat up to 75º at her request. "I'm going to watch TV, okay?” he says. “Ring if you need me." Her eyes are already closed, but her strong, blue-veined hand reaches out to the bell and wraps around it. Outdoors, revelers celebrate with raucous horns and stuttering firecrackers. Hardy knows that if she drifts off, she will probably sleep through the noise; she will sleep herself into the new year just as she will soon sleep herself into a new consciousness. Before spring, her doctor has warned. Hardy stands at the foot of her bed and stares at her, aware of the body’s insistent habit of breath, the rhythms of the day.
“No more,” Grace had said after the last chemo that had failed in its hoped-for effect. “No more!” she had snapped at Hardy when he had tried to argue against her will.
He tiptoes out of the bedroom and into the living room, where he turns on the television and settles down on the couch, the remote in his hand. His mind can't concentrate on the program, so he switches absently from channel to channel, the way he careens from thought to thought, never holding any thought long enough for it to affect him. Even on the History Channel, or the Weather Channel, everyone seems to be at a party. He flicks off the TV and dims the Christmas tree lights, leaving only a warm glow in the room. Through the window he sees the jeweled Manhattan cityscape stretching across the horizon.
They wouldn't have put up a tree this year if their grandson hadn't insisted. Josh is 17, a senior at Bronx Science. "You’ve gotta have a tree on Grandma's last Christmas," Josh had said privately to Hardy. He'd been brave enough to say "last Christmas" out loud, even though everyone else had been thinking it and Grace herself had never been afraid to admit it. When Josh and Hardy carried in the tree, she'd smiled in delight. "The best ever," she'd said, "the best and the last." Their daughter Christine had stammered in argument, "Don't talk that way, Mom;" but after dinner the two women had sat quietly for an hour or more, Christine nodding and taking an occasional swipe at her eyes. Hardy had heard Grace say, "What can possibly be lost, when we have already given and received everything of importance?" He believed, but wouldn’t have said so, that Christine would not forgive him for letting her mother die, that there would be tantrums and accusations. He believed this but saw his daughter and grandson as if they were his only tethers to the future, and forgave them for everything that was out of their control.
Later, when Grace had fallen asleep, Christine had looked around the cluttered apartment with agitation and said, “Dad, you have to clean up this mess.” Then she’d packed up their presents and taken Josh to visit his father in Yonkers.
Now, as Hardy stares at the scrawny tree in the corner, he’s aware that the chaos has worsened day by day. In the disorder under the tree, Hardy spots the juggling set with an instruction book that Josh gave his grandmother for Christmas. Josh had seen a TV show where a doctor who treated cancer patients had been advising them to meditate. "But if you can't concentrate," the doctor had said, "try juggling instead. Juggling forces you to quiet your mind. Think of the balls as your thoughts flying past you. Make sure they stay on the same flat plane, so one of them doesn't go flying off into space. But don't watch them -- to juggle properly, you have to look through the balls."
When she opened the gift Grace had said, "You've got to be kidding!"
"Look," said Josh, "the book says even a klutz can juggle." He had picked up the three balls, which were more like cube-shaped beanbags, and tossed them easily in smooth arcs, first one ball, then two, then all three. "See Grandma?" he said.
"You’ve done that before," Grace teased him, and threw a wadded-up ball of wrapping paper in his direction. He caught it in mid air as the three balls were completing another perfect cycle, and for a moment kept all four objects in motion, until one of the beanbags plopped to the floor. "Hey, not fair!" he'd laughed.
On Christmas Day, and for the two days after, Grace had tried to juggle those balls. She'd studied the book as if it could give her an advanced degree, and practiced over and over, first with one ball, tossed in an arc from right to left and back again, over and over. She started out sitting down, but after a while complained that she couldn't get the rhythm unless she put her whole body into it. Standing, a little wobbly at first, she'd mastered a smooth arc with one ball, and added the second. Hardy watched her concentration, her gaze intent on the action of her hands. He saw the light in her eyes, the intensity of her desire; and for a moment he hated her for the clarity of her vision. But she dropped the balls again and again, and complained, "I'll never get three."
"Don't look at them," Hardy advised. "Just look straight ahead. You can still sense what you're doing. Don't focus up close, focus beyond yourself." He felt a rise of anger, knowing he was telling her what he himself could not hear.
She dropped them again, and laughed with childlike breathlessness. Her hair, just beginning to grow back, was damp with her effort.
On the twenty-eighth she had told him how much stronger she felt. "It's almost like a miracle, I feel so good. It must be the exercise." She had been standing more than usual, practicing, but her face was flushed with incipient fever. "I love the way they make my hands feel," Grace said, "as if my palms are little trampolines they're jumping up and down on. First they're heavy, then off they go."
Once that day she had succeeded in keeping two balls going for about ten seconds. She cried out for Hardy to come see, but after that she couldn't repeat the performance. After a while she tired of bending over to pick up the ones she had dropped. "Oh, but it was such a perfect feeling that time I really did it," she said. "I'm almost ready to try three." Later she fell asleep on the couch and Hardy carried her to bed. She was no heavier than a child, and as Hardy laid her down and pulled the quilt over her, he wished briefly for a miracle, then caught himself short for believing in magic.
The next day she had slept later than usual, and wasn't hungry for breakfast. "This morning, for just a moment, I couldn’t see,” she told him flatly. “Nothing but blackness.”
“Did you stand up too fast?” he asked. “Did your blood pressure drop?”
“The air tastes like chalk," she’d said.
“Should I call the doctor?” he asked, a riff in his heart, but she shook her head impatiently and waved away his concern. “It’s really nothing, don’t worry.”
How she pretended, ignoring un-subtle reality, and how he longed to slap some sense into her, slap her back into her life! Just as he’d tried to do once before, long ago, after which she’d stared at him, her hand on her reddened cheek, and said, “Never again,” her voice darker than he’d ever heard it, or had heard it since. The slap had been no more than a surge of testosterone, not so distant from the urge to grab her and take her sex by force, subdue her. But now he saw what had happened after all. He was the one. He was the one subdued.
"I'll be puttering around," Hardy had told her. "Just ring if you need me." As he reached out to touch her hand in comfort, he noticed a new lesion on her forearm, a bump like a shiny coin. Around it, her freckled skin had faded from cream to blue.
Hardy's vacation will be up after the new year, when he’ll have to return to his classroom of unruly freshmen who care so little about language that he wonders how they ever learned to talk. Only one, a petite Latino girl who writes poetry that sings of loss and illusion, makes him feel it’s worthwhile to stand in front of the class and talk about rhyme. Her face, its eyes dark and serious, floats into his consciousness and quickly dissolves to Grace’s ghostly face. Now he suspects he'll have to find somebody to come in and help out pretty soon. He's becoming aware that she probably shouldn't be left alone at all. He’s thought about getting her one of those electronic devices to wear around her neck, something she could use to call for help in an emergency. She could call a neighbor, or even 911, if she had to.
But she wasn't that weak yet, was she? If she could juggle two balls at once, wasn't she getting stronger?
Yet now it is New Year’s Eve, and he knows she hasn't gotten stronger. He doesn't blame the cancer, or the holidays, or the effort of juggling. A kind of peace has settled over her; but as for himself, Hardy finds it almost impossible to be still. He paces and mutters, and his thoughts fly around like gnats, in an incoherent swarm. He pulls a jug of Chianti out of a kitchen cupboard and pours a glassful, then drinks it down like grape juice. He pours another, and carries the glass and the bottle back to the living room where he stands in front of the Christmas tree, which provides the room’s only light, other than the ambient city light that always brightens the night. Then he picks up the little beanbag-like balls and holds all three in his large hand. He recalls how one of his hands can wrap completely around one of hers, rendering it invisible. He tries to imagine his life with all of Grace invisible, and can't.
He stands dumbly in the middle of a room that resonates with her presence. On the wall, a portrait she had painted in acrylics, of Christine as a baby, glowing in pinks and oranges and reflecting the blurred colors of the lights on the tree. Christine puzzled and perturbed, a difficult birth, an anxious child. And books everywhere, piled in corners, on shelves, on tables, catching dust, untouched for weeks. Magazines unread, mail unopened, a piano out of tune. On the bookshelf, photos: Christine with her husband and their newborn son; Grace holding the infant Christine; both their own parents — hers at the opera, his at a submarine launching, his father in uniform. And he and Grace, both of them burnt by the sun and laughing as they pushed a sailfish through the gentle surf of a small, Tortola bay.
On the coffee table, a basket of dried flowers she’d gathered five years ago on Nantucket, her hair wild in the wind, a cranberry-colored skirt whipped around her long legs. He notices that the flowers are faded and the basket has collected dust. Life was never subtle, although she had pretended it was, ignored the bumps and spikes of the everyday, the realities that had frenzied him — a lost job, parents dead, a headstrong child. And now to live in a city that was a shell of itself, fearful and agonized and in denial. He was afraid and angry, but she — her spirit like a clean whistle across a serene harbor — she refused to acknowledge fear or anger, simply accepted it, let it pass over or through her. From that first day they’d met, when she’d accepted him.
The insignificance of New Year’s Eve — its false promises — what will he do? He recalls that Grace always likes to enter a new year by doing or learning something new, that one year she had made an ice sculpture, and another she’d learned an Italian aria, her voice silky and pure. He remembers a midnight in the Caribbean when she’d dived into the water and brought forth its glittering phosphorescence like fireworks. But not tonight, he realizes; at midnight when the night sky is shattered by a thousand explosions, she will be in a drugged asleep.
He puts down two of the juggling balls, and picks up his wine, sips it and places the glass on the floor. Then he tosses the one ball from hand to hand. The book had instructed the novice juggler on how to create a consistent motion, step by step; now Hardy finds comfort in this smooth motion of left to right. "Piece of cake," he thinks. He adds a second ball, tossing it from his left hand moments after the toss from the right hand has begun. The two balls collide in front of his nose. On his second try, he sees the two balls pass each other in mid air and feels them land in his palms. Over and over, he repeats the same routine in the silence of his living room, as an occasional cherry bomb bursts in the courtyard below. He’s aware of his reflection in the living room window, a scarecrow flailing its arms in the faint light from the Christmas tree.
After a while he pauses, pours another glass of wine, and squints in the dimness to study the diagrams in the book. "I bet I can learn this by midnight," he says to the balls. With one in his left hand, he hefts the other two in his right, then tosses one of them up toward the left, following it momentarily by a toss from his opposite hand. He knows that the trick is to keep the balls in the same plane, and throw the second ball as the first reaches the apex of its arc. Two balls must be in the air at all times.
The first time he tries, the second ball flies over his shoulder and the third knocks over his glass of wine, dumping the wine on the floor and narrowly missing the rug.
After he cleans up and refills his glass, he tries again. While juggling two balls has seemed easy, adding a third creates chaos. He keeps pitching the balls forward, and chasing them across the room, but he can't manage to catch the third ball. It occurs to him that it's sort of like trying to learn to pat your head and rub your stomach at the same time. He tries to remember how long that had taken him as a child, but can't. He knows that he has to master each individual step, the toss, the trajectory, the catch, the timing. He has to concentrate on each hand separately, and both together, then he has to stop concentrating. If only he could stop thinking! What was the advice Josh had given to his grandmother -- to look through the balls? Hadn't Hardy himself advised her to focus outward? "Damn," he thinks in frustration, and pours another glass of wine. He doesn't drink much any more, so the combination of wine and juggling makes him feel overheated and a little light-headed. He thinks, "A loaf of bread, a juggling of wine, and thou," and chuckles to himself.
The juggling is becoming easier, and although he still can keep only two balls going at once, there are times when the third ball grazes his fingers as it flies just beyond his reach. He chases it, picks it up, and tries again. "Concentrate," he reminds himself, "and then let go."
All at once he recalls learning to play ragtime. He'd started with Scott Joplin's "Solace," and practiced each hand separately for weeks until he'd mastered the timing, burning the different rhythms of each hand into the opposite sides of his brain. When he patiently put them together, integrating the two rhythms into one, he had felt the melodic, cadenced march traveling down his spine. Once it was in his spine, he didn't have to think about it any more, it was forever, like patting his head and rubbing his stomach. Now he knows that juggling works the same way, and he's almost got it, he feels the flow, sees the balls curve, arc, fall, and curve again. Three balls, two always in the air, in harmony like solace, like the breath of time. "I've got it!" he exults, just before throwing one of the balls into the Christmas tree, knocking off a rubbery angel that bounces under a chair. But he's on a roll. He laughs out loud now that he's got the feel of it, although he's still tossing them outward and having to chase them across the room. He feels like a circus act on the high wire — he hears the fireworks — he craves an audience.
"This is silly," he thinks, suddenly feeling like a kid, unstoppable in his desire to show off for someone, anyone. He peeks in at Grace, whose eyes are closed. Then he grabs his keys, takes a gulp of wine, picks up the balls and heads out the door. In the hallway, where he pushes the button for the elevator, he can hear that his neighbors are having a party. As the elevator descends toward the lobby, he has a fleeting sense of losing his balance and realizes that the wine has given him a buzz, but he thinks, "What the hell, it's New Year's Eve!"
"Do you mind," he says solemnly to the doorman, who is dozing at his post; "Do you mind stirring yourself to see what I have just learned to do?"
The doorman, Mike, has replaced his uniform hat with a cap that reads, 'I hate pigeons.' He smiles amicably and says, "Help yourself."
Then Hardy starts his routine. He tosses one, two, three. For a moment he's afraid he'll have to start chasing them across the lobby as one ball slips out of the plane; then suddenly all three balls move synchronously. Mike says, "Right on!" and Hardy suddenly hears himself humming "Solace" in rhythm with his juggling hands. A small crowd comes through the door on its way between parties, and whistles and applauds in passing. He stops and bows with a flourish. "Good job, sir, and a happy new year," says Mike. Fireworks begin to explode in profusion around the building. "Is it midnight? Is it New Year's already?" asks Hardy.
“Any minute, sir.” Mike plops his doorman’s hat back on as if to signal the formality of the celebration.
Hardy practically dances all the way back to his apartment, but as soon as he enters he hears the bell, even over the din of fireworks and whistles and cherry bombs. Its ring is plaintive.
He rushes to Grace's room. "What's wrong?" he says in guilty distress.
Her mouth is open in consternation, and her eyes are wide and deep. She had once had a smile like Audrey Hepburn’s, a smile that would light up a room; now when she smiles her teeth seem too large for her face. "Where were you? I rang and rang. Is it because it's so noisy outside? Didn't you hear me?"
He sits beside her. "You're all right then? Nothing's wrong? Why did you ring?"
"I'm fine! But where were you? I just rang because I wanted to ring in the new year for us."
Hardy sighs in relief. "Look," he says happily, "I've got something to show you. I have a present for you."
He begins simply with a lone ball, then adds the second. He looks past the two balls, still aware of their perfect, syncopated motion, and tries to measure his wife’s reaction. A smile softens the shadows on her face, as she begins to move her own hands in imitation of his, holding and hefting imaginary balls in balance, left, right; and in this small turning and twisting, it seems as if they are mirrors of each other.
Then Hardy adds the third ball, but he feels fuzzy, no longer alert. One ball lands immediately on the floor and as he desperately extends his arm to reach for another, it plops onto the bed. He grabs the three balls to start over, an apology choking his throat, but almost against his will the first flies into the air and the second leaves his hand like a bullet, straight past her head and into the wall behind her with the sound of a muffled groan. But she doesn’t flinch, as if she’s known all along he would lose control, and can’t help him. She continues to toss her own phantom balls in invisible arcs, her face lit with expectation, but not for him. She’s focused beyond him, and as he turns around to see if there’s something behind him, something he can’t see, she says so softly that he almost can’t hear her, “There’s nothing to it, nothing at all.”
She has been adjunct professor of English at Western Connecticut State University and is Contributing Editor to the literary journal Hunger Mountain. She has been a teacher, journalist, and writer and editor for numerous textbook programs for Harcourt, Harper & Row, MacMillan, Scott Foresman and others; she also was Senior Editor in language arts for Noble and Noble, the textbook publishing arm of Dell Publishing. She lives in Bangor, Maine and teaches English at Eastern Maine Community College where she is working on a memoir.
Juggling
In the distance, beyond the grimy window thick with winter’s icy crust, a single Roman candle rises in a bright arc, then disappears. It’s nine o’clock on New Year’s Eve, with cherry bombs exploding in the courtyard six stories below, each burst embraced with the hesitant pop-pop-pop of firecrackers. But the noise doesn’t register in Hardy’s brain. His nervous system is wired into the sound of a small brass bell his wife rings whenever she needs his help, and now as he hears its call, his inner self falls out of alignment, all angles and twitches, until he reassembles it and hurries to her side. A good patient, she has promised not to ring unless it's really important, but she has rung twice in the last hour. This time she asks him to lift her into a sitting position where she can breathe more easily. She often sleeps upright all night long. Her face is now so thin that her large blue eyes seem suspended in their bruised sockets, but Hardy still sees her as she was a few weeks ago before this downward spiral began, sees her smiling at him across the Thanksgiving turkey, wearing her favorite red dress, her cheeks aglow in the candlelight, and the faint drooping of one, tired eyelid almost indiscernible.
Hardy puffs up the pillows behind her, smoothes her hair and gives her a kiss on the forehead. Her pale skin is taut and cool. "I'm so tired today," she says. "It's hard to believe I was juggling a few days ago."
"Almost juggling," he corrects her, then regrets reminding her of limitations and forces himself to offer a smile.
"Almost," she agrees, looking away. “Do I hear fireworks? Already?” She raises her shoulders as if feeling a chill, so Hardy pulls the quilt up to her neck for warmth although he’s already raised the thermostat up to 75º at her request. "I'm going to watch TV, okay?” he says. “Ring if you need me." Her eyes are already closed, but her strong, blue-veined hand reaches out to the bell and wraps around it. Outdoors, revelers celebrate with raucous horns and stuttering firecrackers. Hardy knows that if she drifts off, she will probably sleep through the noise; she will sleep herself into the new year just as she will soon sleep herself into a new consciousness. Before spring, her doctor has warned. Hardy stands at the foot of her bed and stares at her, aware of the body’s insistent habit of breath, the rhythms of the day.
“No more,” Grace had said after the last chemo that had failed in its hoped-for effect. “No more!” she had snapped at Hardy when he had tried to argue against her will.
He tiptoes out of the bedroom and into the living room, where he turns on the television and settles down on the couch, the remote in his hand. His mind can't concentrate on the program, so he switches absently from channel to channel, the way he careens from thought to thought, never holding any thought long enough for it to affect him. Even on the History Channel, or the Weather Channel, everyone seems to be at a party. He flicks off the TV and dims the Christmas tree lights, leaving only a warm glow in the room. Through the window he sees the jeweled Manhattan cityscape stretching across the horizon.
They wouldn't have put up a tree this year if their grandson hadn't insisted. Josh is 17, a senior at Bronx Science. "You’ve gotta have a tree on Grandma's last Christmas," Josh had said privately to Hardy. He'd been brave enough to say "last Christmas" out loud, even though everyone else had been thinking it and Grace herself had never been afraid to admit it. When Josh and Hardy carried in the tree, she'd smiled in delight. "The best ever," she'd said, "the best and the last." Their daughter Christine had stammered in argument, "Don't talk that way, Mom;" but after dinner the two women had sat quietly for an hour or more, Christine nodding and taking an occasional swipe at her eyes. Hardy had heard Grace say, "What can possibly be lost, when we have already given and received everything of importance?" He believed, but wouldn’t have said so, that Christine would not forgive him for letting her mother die, that there would be tantrums and accusations. He believed this but saw his daughter and grandson as if they were his only tethers to the future, and forgave them for everything that was out of their control.
Later, when Grace had fallen asleep, Christine had looked around the cluttered apartment with agitation and said, “Dad, you have to clean up this mess.” Then she’d packed up their presents and taken Josh to visit his father in Yonkers.
Now, as Hardy stares at the scrawny tree in the corner, he’s aware that the chaos has worsened day by day. In the disorder under the tree, Hardy spots the juggling set with an instruction book that Josh gave his grandmother for Christmas. Josh had seen a TV show where a doctor who treated cancer patients had been advising them to meditate. "But if you can't concentrate," the doctor had said, "try juggling instead. Juggling forces you to quiet your mind. Think of the balls as your thoughts flying past you. Make sure they stay on the same flat plane, so one of them doesn't go flying off into space. But don't watch them -- to juggle properly, you have to look through the balls."
When she opened the gift Grace had said, "You've got to be kidding!"
"Look," said Josh, "the book says even a klutz can juggle." He had picked up the three balls, which were more like cube-shaped beanbags, and tossed them easily in smooth arcs, first one ball, then two, then all three. "See Grandma?" he said.
"You’ve done that before," Grace teased him, and threw a wadded-up ball of wrapping paper in his direction. He caught it in mid air as the three balls were completing another perfect cycle, and for a moment kept all four objects in motion, until one of the beanbags plopped to the floor. "Hey, not fair!" he'd laughed.
On Christmas Day, and for the two days after, Grace had tried to juggle those balls. She'd studied the book as if it could give her an advanced degree, and practiced over and over, first with one ball, tossed in an arc from right to left and back again, over and over. She started out sitting down, but after a while complained that she couldn't get the rhythm unless she put her whole body into it. Standing, a little wobbly at first, she'd mastered a smooth arc with one ball, and added the second. Hardy watched her concentration, her gaze intent on the action of her hands. He saw the light in her eyes, the intensity of her desire; and for a moment he hated her for the clarity of her vision. But she dropped the balls again and again, and complained, "I'll never get three."
"Don't look at them," Hardy advised. "Just look straight ahead. You can still sense what you're doing. Don't focus up close, focus beyond yourself." He felt a rise of anger, knowing he was telling her what he himself could not hear.
She dropped them again, and laughed with childlike breathlessness. Her hair, just beginning to grow back, was damp with her effort.
On the twenty-eighth she had told him how much stronger she felt. "It's almost like a miracle, I feel so good. It must be the exercise." She had been standing more than usual, practicing, but her face was flushed with incipient fever. "I love the way they make my hands feel," Grace said, "as if my palms are little trampolines they're jumping up and down on. First they're heavy, then off they go."
Once that day she had succeeded in keeping two balls going for about ten seconds. She cried out for Hardy to come see, but after that she couldn't repeat the performance. After a while she tired of bending over to pick up the ones she had dropped. "Oh, but it was such a perfect feeling that time I really did it," she said. "I'm almost ready to try three." Later she fell asleep on the couch and Hardy carried her to bed. She was no heavier than a child, and as Hardy laid her down and pulled the quilt over her, he wished briefly for a miracle, then caught himself short for believing in magic.
The next day she had slept later than usual, and wasn't hungry for breakfast. "This morning, for just a moment, I couldn’t see,” she told him flatly. “Nothing but blackness.”
“Did you stand up too fast?” he asked. “Did your blood pressure drop?”
“The air tastes like chalk," she’d said.
“Should I call the doctor?” he asked, a riff in his heart, but she shook her head impatiently and waved away his concern. “It’s really nothing, don’t worry.”
How she pretended, ignoring un-subtle reality, and how he longed to slap some sense into her, slap her back into her life! Just as he’d tried to do once before, long ago, after which she’d stared at him, her hand on her reddened cheek, and said, “Never again,” her voice darker than he’d ever heard it, or had heard it since. The slap had been no more than a surge of testosterone, not so distant from the urge to grab her and take her sex by force, subdue her. But now he saw what had happened after all. He was the one. He was the one subdued.
"I'll be puttering around," Hardy had told her. "Just ring if you need me." As he reached out to touch her hand in comfort, he noticed a new lesion on her forearm, a bump like a shiny coin. Around it, her freckled skin had faded from cream to blue.
Hardy's vacation will be up after the new year, when he’ll have to return to his classroom of unruly freshmen who care so little about language that he wonders how they ever learned to talk. Only one, a petite Latino girl who writes poetry that sings of loss and illusion, makes him feel it’s worthwhile to stand in front of the class and talk about rhyme. Her face, its eyes dark and serious, floats into his consciousness and quickly dissolves to Grace’s ghostly face. Now he suspects he'll have to find somebody to come in and help out pretty soon. He's becoming aware that she probably shouldn't be left alone at all. He’s thought about getting her one of those electronic devices to wear around her neck, something she could use to call for help in an emergency. She could call a neighbor, or even 911, if she had to.
But she wasn't that weak yet, was she? If she could juggle two balls at once, wasn't she getting stronger?
Yet now it is New Year’s Eve, and he knows she hasn't gotten stronger. He doesn't blame the cancer, or the holidays, or the effort of juggling. A kind of peace has settled over her; but as for himself, Hardy finds it almost impossible to be still. He paces and mutters, and his thoughts fly around like gnats, in an incoherent swarm. He pulls a jug of Chianti out of a kitchen cupboard and pours a glassful, then drinks it down like grape juice. He pours another, and carries the glass and the bottle back to the living room where he stands in front of the Christmas tree, which provides the room’s only light, other than the ambient city light that always brightens the night. Then he picks up the little beanbag-like balls and holds all three in his large hand. He recalls how one of his hands can wrap completely around one of hers, rendering it invisible. He tries to imagine his life with all of Grace invisible, and can't.
He stands dumbly in the middle of a room that resonates with her presence. On the wall, a portrait she had painted in acrylics, of Christine as a baby, glowing in pinks and oranges and reflecting the blurred colors of the lights on the tree. Christine puzzled and perturbed, a difficult birth, an anxious child. And books everywhere, piled in corners, on shelves, on tables, catching dust, untouched for weeks. Magazines unread, mail unopened, a piano out of tune. On the bookshelf, photos: Christine with her husband and their newborn son; Grace holding the infant Christine; both their own parents — hers at the opera, his at a submarine launching, his father in uniform. And he and Grace, both of them burnt by the sun and laughing as they pushed a sailfish through the gentle surf of a small, Tortola bay.
On the coffee table, a basket of dried flowers she’d gathered five years ago on Nantucket, her hair wild in the wind, a cranberry-colored skirt whipped around her long legs. He notices that the flowers are faded and the basket has collected dust. Life was never subtle, although she had pretended it was, ignored the bumps and spikes of the everyday, the realities that had frenzied him — a lost job, parents dead, a headstrong child. And now to live in a city that was a shell of itself, fearful and agonized and in denial. He was afraid and angry, but she — her spirit like a clean whistle across a serene harbor — she refused to acknowledge fear or anger, simply accepted it, let it pass over or through her. From that first day they’d met, when she’d accepted him.
The insignificance of New Year’s Eve — its false promises — what will he do? He recalls that Grace always likes to enter a new year by doing or learning something new, that one year she had made an ice sculpture, and another she’d learned an Italian aria, her voice silky and pure. He remembers a midnight in the Caribbean when she’d dived into the water and brought forth its glittering phosphorescence like fireworks. But not tonight, he realizes; at midnight when the night sky is shattered by a thousand explosions, she will be in a drugged asleep.
He puts down two of the juggling balls, and picks up his wine, sips it and places the glass on the floor. Then he tosses the one ball from hand to hand. The book had instructed the novice juggler on how to create a consistent motion, step by step; now Hardy finds comfort in this smooth motion of left to right. "Piece of cake," he thinks. He adds a second ball, tossing it from his left hand moments after the toss from the right hand has begun. The two balls collide in front of his nose. On his second try, he sees the two balls pass each other in mid air and feels them land in his palms. Over and over, he repeats the same routine in the silence of his living room, as an occasional cherry bomb bursts in the courtyard below. He’s aware of his reflection in the living room window, a scarecrow flailing its arms in the faint light from the Christmas tree.
After a while he pauses, pours another glass of wine, and squints in the dimness to study the diagrams in the book. "I bet I can learn this by midnight," he says to the balls. With one in his left hand, he hefts the other two in his right, then tosses one of them up toward the left, following it momentarily by a toss from his opposite hand. He knows that the trick is to keep the balls in the same plane, and throw the second ball as the first reaches the apex of its arc. Two balls must be in the air at all times.
The first time he tries, the second ball flies over his shoulder and the third knocks over his glass of wine, dumping the wine on the floor and narrowly missing the rug.
After he cleans up and refills his glass, he tries again. While juggling two balls has seemed easy, adding a third creates chaos. He keeps pitching the balls forward, and chasing them across the room, but he can't manage to catch the third ball. It occurs to him that it's sort of like trying to learn to pat your head and rub your stomach at the same time. He tries to remember how long that had taken him as a child, but can't. He knows that he has to master each individual step, the toss, the trajectory, the catch, the timing. He has to concentrate on each hand separately, and both together, then he has to stop concentrating. If only he could stop thinking! What was the advice Josh had given to his grandmother -- to look through the balls? Hadn't Hardy himself advised her to focus outward? "Damn," he thinks in frustration, and pours another glass of wine. He doesn't drink much any more, so the combination of wine and juggling makes him feel overheated and a little light-headed. He thinks, "A loaf of bread, a juggling of wine, and thou," and chuckles to himself.
The juggling is becoming easier, and although he still can keep only two balls going at once, there are times when the third ball grazes his fingers as it flies just beyond his reach. He chases it, picks it up, and tries again. "Concentrate," he reminds himself, "and then let go."
All at once he recalls learning to play ragtime. He'd started with Scott Joplin's "Solace," and practiced each hand separately for weeks until he'd mastered the timing, burning the different rhythms of each hand into the opposite sides of his brain. When he patiently put them together, integrating the two rhythms into one, he had felt the melodic, cadenced march traveling down his spine. Once it was in his spine, he didn't have to think about it any more, it was forever, like patting his head and rubbing his stomach. Now he knows that juggling works the same way, and he's almost got it, he feels the flow, sees the balls curve, arc, fall, and curve again. Three balls, two always in the air, in harmony like solace, like the breath of time. "I've got it!" he exults, just before throwing one of the balls into the Christmas tree, knocking off a rubbery angel that bounces under a chair. But he's on a roll. He laughs out loud now that he's got the feel of it, although he's still tossing them outward and having to chase them across the room. He feels like a circus act on the high wire — he hears the fireworks — he craves an audience.
"This is silly," he thinks, suddenly feeling like a kid, unstoppable in his desire to show off for someone, anyone. He peeks in at Grace, whose eyes are closed. Then he grabs his keys, takes a gulp of wine, picks up the balls and heads out the door. In the hallway, where he pushes the button for the elevator, he can hear that his neighbors are having a party. As the elevator descends toward the lobby, he has a fleeting sense of losing his balance and realizes that the wine has given him a buzz, but he thinks, "What the hell, it's New Year's Eve!"
"Do you mind," he says solemnly to the doorman, who is dozing at his post; "Do you mind stirring yourself to see what I have just learned to do?"
The doorman, Mike, has replaced his uniform hat with a cap that reads, 'I hate pigeons.' He smiles amicably and says, "Help yourself."
Then Hardy starts his routine. He tosses one, two, three. For a moment he's afraid he'll have to start chasing them across the lobby as one ball slips out of the plane; then suddenly all three balls move synchronously. Mike says, "Right on!" and Hardy suddenly hears himself humming "Solace" in rhythm with his juggling hands. A small crowd comes through the door on its way between parties, and whistles and applauds in passing. He stops and bows with a flourish. "Good job, sir, and a happy new year," says Mike. Fireworks begin to explode in profusion around the building. "Is it midnight? Is it New Year's already?" asks Hardy.
“Any minute, sir.” Mike plops his doorman’s hat back on as if to signal the formality of the celebration.
Hardy practically dances all the way back to his apartment, but as soon as he enters he hears the bell, even over the din of fireworks and whistles and cherry bombs. Its ring is plaintive.
He rushes to Grace's room. "What's wrong?" he says in guilty distress.
Her mouth is open in consternation, and her eyes are wide and deep. She had once had a smile like Audrey Hepburn’s, a smile that would light up a room; now when she smiles her teeth seem too large for her face. "Where were you? I rang and rang. Is it because it's so noisy outside? Didn't you hear me?"
He sits beside her. "You're all right then? Nothing's wrong? Why did you ring?"
"I'm fine! But where were you? I just rang because I wanted to ring in the new year for us."
Hardy sighs in relief. "Look," he says happily, "I've got something to show you. I have a present for you."
He begins simply with a lone ball, then adds the second. He looks past the two balls, still aware of their perfect, syncopated motion, and tries to measure his wife’s reaction. A smile softens the shadows on her face, as she begins to move her own hands in imitation of his, holding and hefting imaginary balls in balance, left, right; and in this small turning and twisting, it seems as if they are mirrors of each other.
Then Hardy adds the third ball, but he feels fuzzy, no longer alert. One ball lands immediately on the floor and as he desperately extends his arm to reach for another, it plops onto the bed. He grabs the three balls to start over, an apology choking his throat, but almost against his will the first flies into the air and the second leaves his hand like a bullet, straight past her head and into the wall behind her with the sound of a muffled groan. But she doesn’t flinch, as if she’s known all along he would lose control, and can’t help him. She continues to toss her own phantom balls in invisible arcs, her face lit with expectation, but not for him. She’s focused beyond him, and as he turns around to see if there’s something behind him, something he can’t see, she says so softly that he almost can’t hear her, “There’s nothing to it, nothing at all.”
I liked this story very much as both a juggler and a Bronx Science student. However, I noticed that your analysis of juggling is incorrect. You say "Three balls, two always in the air", when actually there is only one always in the air in a normal cascade, which is the regular pattern of juggling. Once again, very nice story!
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