JOY

Guest Post

Written by Leah Moore

He was not my boyfriend, despite my insistence and my Aunt Judy’s careful redecoration of my dorm room. When I moved to New York for graduate school in 2003, my Aunt had put two red pillows in my relationship corner because Feng Shui said it would help me stir up some romance in my life.

When I first saw Zac, I was desperately hoping she was right. I was drawn to him immediately. In his tee-shirt from Amy’s Ice Cream in Austin, his warm smile and head of curls were both handsome and approachable. This was long before a sculptor in Rome stopped Zac in the street, and after asking to use his face as a template for a statue, produced paper and scissors, to cut out his silhouette. That sculptor made a good choice, Zac was striking.  

He was also interesting. I had first heard Zac raving about a play he had just seen, “The True History of the Tragic Life and Triumphant Death of Julia Pastrana, the Ugliest Woman in the World.” I had never met someone speak about theater with such passion. It didn’t matter if he wasn’t speaking to me, and I might have overheard his thoughts from the soda machine around the corner, I was convinced. About the play and the boy. All I knew about him was he had just moved from Texas, shortened the spelling of Zachary at age eight, and worked in the office of our Graduate Program. Plus, he liked this play. It was enough of an opening to start a conversation. Nonetheless, off I went to Times Square to watch the infamous show. I had misunderstood my father’s instructions and somehow thought that you could go to any subway stop to travel on any subway. Luckily, I wasn’t studying logic at NYU. I managed to find my way to the theater to subsequently sit at a theater for two hours in total darkness - there wasn’t one light in this production. I spent the first ten minutes deciding whether it was better to sit with my eyes open in complete darkness or close them like I was going to bed. It wasn’t exactly my type of show, not enough musical numbers.   

I just wanted to have something to say to him- it worked.

My ability to know his whereabouts was less about stalking and more about being strategic. I mean everyone needed to stop studying to get a cup of coffee at 11:45 on Tuesdays; he didn’t need to know that I didn’t even drink coffee. We would just happen to be in the same Starbucks on Washington Square Park at the same time - every week. Our meeting may have been a bit constructed, but our connection was effortless.              

It was a year of friendship. According to my journal, the first time he grabbed my hand to protect me from an oncoming cab, I saw a shooting star, so I knew there would be something more (I had also watched too many romantic comedies as a child). We were inseparable. His mother always said, “love is friendship on fire.” Somewhere sharing a cannoli in Veniero’s Bakery in the east Village, snowball fights in Central Park, and late-night study sessions in a shoebox apartment, we found our flame.

Love starts in imagination. We spent our first summer apart in 2005, daydreaming about our future together. Turns out, daydreaming about the life you would have was quite expensive when your phone was roaming. He would sit on his father’s porch in Dallas, while I clutched my 1990s hamburger phone in my New Jersey bedroom. This imaginative phase of love cost me $1,214.63 in phone bills. 

We spoke of a life of art. It would be the backbone of our classrooms, our travels, and the plays we wished to see. We spoke of having children, with an overabundance of curly hair like their parents, and taking them with us to see the world, before we retired in Vermont. Naturally, we would spend our twilight years working in our own theater, converted from a local barn. I knew my heart was safe in his empathetic hands. Three years of dating and seven variations of how to organize the closet in our Manhattan shoebox later, we were married.

Three years of newlywed bliss after our wedding, the doctor called to confirm our pregnancy. I opened the door to a bouncing, yellow smiley face, made of mylar. It danced aside to reveal my husband’s own beaming face. 

“Let’s call our parents first.” I snuggled into our sectional couch in the family room. This one room of our new house was larger than our entire New York City apartment. We had been living in Westchester county for about a year, despite the fact our belongings still only filled one closet. When we signed the paperwork at the closing for the house, the seller said, “I hope you can also raise your family here.” We were on our way.

I called my parents to share the good news as my husband called his family in Texas. He first called his dad and stepmom, Phil and Debby, to let them know they would be grandparents again. Our conversation was identical and overlapping.

“The due date is February 28, 2011/ It’s a girl. / We are so excited.”

While I was on the phone with my sister and brother in law, he called his mom to tell her the incredible news. I shouted from the couch, “Tell Jacquie I love her. I am so excited!”

The next morning, I strategically chose a dress that revealed the bump and had my first stranger share their seat on the subway. My first period class of Freshman whispered “I knew it” when I revealed my news. I floated through the day. Never had spending six hours with fourteen-year old students seemed so tranquil and carefree.

I met the proud father to be in midtown for a celebratory dinner with my cousin. I found Zac’s face in the crowd on 34th Street. I recalled my mother describing the butterflies she felt in her stomach when she saw my father waiting outside of a movie theater in 1989 and how lucky she was that she still felt that way.

“I told everyone the news! My students are so excited for us!” I shouted as I ran into his arms.

His phone rang. His sister.

“Perfect, we haven’t gotten to talk to her yet. We just left a message.”

He answered. His face changed. It was not the face of an expectant father. He exhaled and collapsed as I screamed his name.

“My mom...” he said, hunched on the ground in the middle of a sea of people outside of Madison Square Garden.

Jacquie.

 Zac sat on the sidewalk with his head against my stomach, rocking in grief until I could find a friend to come drive us home.

She couldn't be dead. This was not possible. He had just spoken to her less than fifteen hours ago. This woman was invincible. This was a single mother who raised two children, one with special needs. This is the same woman who worked as a correctional officer on Death Row and survived an attack by one of the offenders. This is the same woman who, after defending her own life and receiving over one hundred stitches, was discharged two hours later, and was found assisting an elderly woman outside of the trauma center, rather than resting inside. This was the woman who would come home, change into her vibrant turquoise sweatshirt, and make a gourmet dinner with Kenny Rogers serenading her. Her heart was far too strong and brave to give out so early in her life. This was not real.

I held my husband. I would hold him onto the plane, into the funeral home, and for every day to come. I sat in the first row, swollen feet, swollen eyes, and swollen heart.  Clutching my sister’s hand, I listened to him celebrate a life of passion, love, and humor. I heard him promise to uphold his mother’s legacy for our unborn child. A legacy that would include perseverance, humor, kindness, and an obscene number of pink sequins.

My hands moved to my stomach. I willed the joy I felt for the life I was growing to make room for the unimaginable grief that had just moved in.

As an English teacher, you are trained to look for motifs when analyzing literature. In one’s own life they are impossible to see in the moment. If I could have reached that grieving couple, sitting on the couch, in front of a droning television, eating soggy take-out leftovers night after night, for months, I would tell them finding the balance between joy and sorrow would become their life’s plight. It would require work to continue to rise when it was easier to succumb to sadness. 

Joy can sneak in through the windows, but grief lands like an unwanted welcome mat.  Ignoring the pain only made it stronger. It began as the deafening silence that filled your head, drowning out all other voices, leaving behind only the pounding of your own sorrow. It battered your sleep, suffocated you while you were awake, and when you momentarily stifled it, it re-emerged as guilt. Fear. Loneliness. It would follow us for the next eight years. 

But joy flourishes. It will not be defeated. It appears with evening giggles, and unexpected milestones.  It appears in the face of a grandchild that looks like the grandmother she never met. Joy is stubborn and with enough fight, will endure. Pull back the curtains to give it some room.

To read more of Leah’s work, go to: www.lovingyoubig.com

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