Small Coke
This time the nail is piercing the front of my right eye, pushing itself like an ice pick down behind my nose and kind of choking me. What I mean is, the pain is everywhere.
The whole world has a migraine. Nothing helps but Coca-Cola, the sticky, sweet poison that can clean the rust off a car. As the headache comes at me, threatening to nail me to the sofa through my eye, I get up. And by “I get up” I mean that I push myself up the way that, in movies, the hero, beaten to a pulp, gets up. In slow motion. Harnessing all of his forces, he pulls himself to his feet and stands, facing the enemy one more time.
I put on my sunglasses and get in the car. I pull my organic life up to the drive-through window at McDonald’s. “Supersize me,” I tell the little clown box. Not really. What I say is, “A small Coke, please.”
“Anything else?” the little box asks.
“No,” I say, squinting. The static of the intercom system. The bright yellow and red of Ronald McDonald’s clown suit. It’s all too loud, too much.
Coke is the only thing that works. I sit in the parking lot, sipping sweet fizz, waiting for it to erase the pain. It helps but also, it doesn’t.
—
Back on the sofa, I switch the TV on. Oprah is reading aloud from Eckhart Tolle’s A New Earth. “Since human life and human consciousness are intrinsically one with the life of the planet, as the old consciousness dissolves, there are bound to be synchronistic geographic and climatic natural upheavals in many parts of the planet, some of which we are witnessing now.”
That’s not the part she read, but it’s the part I turned to when I pulled the book from my shelf.
Oh, why do we think we can invade every corner of the planet? Why don’t we see her, Mother Earth, lying there, trusting us with her quiet places? It’s one world. It’s all connected. Are you listening to me?
I fall back against the pillows. LaughCrying. Seriously? Now I’m going to start worrying about climate change?
In a couple of hours, Max’s girlfriend is coming over. Roast chicken, wild rice, grilled asparagus. That’s what I’d make for them — if I could get up. I’d serve it on white china, with folded linen dishcloths and a silver bowl of roses at the center of the table. (If I had those things, I mean.) Will they arrive and find me here — huddled under this comforter — unable to speak?
“My mother had terrible headaches,” my children will tell their therapists. “Often, I’d come home and find her on the sofa, watching inane television with an icepack on the back of her head.”
—
I get up. We have to keep living. While fathers are sliding down their slippery slopes and sons are going to college, we have to keep buying groceries and making dinner and getting our column in on time.
I lie back down. There should be some way that people who are overwhelmed, who are living in service of other people... I don’t know, wear a sign or get a permit, one of those laminated key cards we could wear around our necks on a black cord, that would excuse us from doing the laundry.
I used to pride myself on my ability to maintain calm in crisis. When Max was five, and he fell off a stool at the dining room counter and the stool landed on his face, the metal leg cutting a perfect half-moon into the flesh under his eye, I did not panic.
Even with the blood, the crying, the calling of the pediatrician and the wrangling of the little sister into her car seat; even with the calming down of the husband who was repeating over and over, “You’re okay, you’re okay,” while cradling our son’s body in his arms; even then, I did not panic.
I handled it: holding down our son while 16 stitches were made in his face. Driving to the emergency room for x-rays of the orbital bone. I handled the preposterous call to the HMO for permission — “My son is bleeding, what the fuck do I need your permission for?” The interminable wait on the hard plastic chair, my child dozing and crying, dozing and crying in my arms.
I handled everything. Until the X-ray technician ordered me out of the room for my own safety and I was forced to abandon my boy in the huge, sterile, cold room full of scary medical equipment with a stranger. Then, I fell apart. I sobbed, I paced, I banged on the door. I was not okay.
This is a symptom. This coolness. This ability to compartmentalize. To push feeling so far down that later, when the crisis has passed, I cannot find it.
—
This is a scene from The End of Men, a memoir I started years ago. The previous chapter is Slippery Slope, here. If you're new to the project, read the first chapter here: Keys. The full list of scenes, in order, is here. Want to support the work? Leave a comment. Share a chapter with a friend. To receive the chapters by email, subscribe here. To support the writer (me) and the project, become a paid subscriber. Paid subscribers also get the workshops.
