O's Little Book of Love & Friendship by O The Oprah Magazine

Author:O, The Oprah Magazine
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781250070111
Publisher: Flatiron Books

The Family You Choose

It’s the ones you can call up at four A.M. that matter.

—MARLENE DIETRICH

There Were No Words

Elizabeth Strout

The place had wooden tables, their thick tops shiny from years of use, and the floors were wooden, too, and shone like honey. There must have been sun coming through the high windows, because I remember light falling on the table that held our cups of coffee and maybe our food. It was lunchtime. I must have ordered food, but I can’t remember what it was. My friend Kathy sat across from me, waiting. We both taught at the college nearby, and earlier I had told her that something awful was happening that I needed to talk to her about.

What was happening was so painful that I had written down the words. I couldn’t speak them out loud. I, who was such a talkative person that I had sometimes been teased about falling asleep talking, waking up talking, talking even as I floated face down with a snorkel in my mouth on some Caribbean blue sea, pointing out a fish to my daughter—I, who had been known to “say anything,” literally could not give voice to what was happening, my terror was that deep, and so I had written down the words. Kathy’s hands I can still see, spread patiently on the table, and the silver rings she wore.

I was thirty-six, what they call a lifetime ago.

These days I often find myself thinking of the Edna St. Vincent Millay poem “Childhood Is the Kingdom Where Nobody Dies.” I think how it means that childhood is the kingdom where there is someplace still safe, and how up until that day when I sat across from Kathy, I was still in the kingdom where marriages were safe and where, in spite of private disappointments and difficult accommodations sometimes made, loyalty reigned, where treachery might peer in a window but not come in.

Later—oh, months and months, years later—I would actually feel glad to have gone through this, to understand more fully the complications of love and accountability and sadness and healing; I would be glad later for all I had a chance to learn, but that day as I sat across from Kathy, the sunlight hitting the honey-wood table, and as I pushed toward her the small piece of paper on which I had written words that made my heart crack, I was dimly aware that I was stepping into a river on whose banks I might never stand again.

And here is what I remember most: Kathy finished reading my words, and wordlessly tears fell from her eyes. That is the gift my friend handed me that day. Kathy’s wordless tears of empathy, a friend so generous that she wept for me. Childhood is the kingdom where nobody dies. Where marriages are safe. I left the banks of childhood then, and Kathy’s tears were like hands reaching for me as I, stunned, afraid of drowning in the river of grown-up land, struggled to the other side.

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