http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/02/09/lottery-tickets?mbid=rss
February 9, 2015 Issue
Lottery Tickets
Grieving for a husband.
By Elizabeth Alexander
“Self-Portrait as a Young Man,” by Ficre Ghebreyesus.
The story begins on a beautiful April morning when a man wakes
exhausted and returns to sleep in his thirteen-year-old son’s trundle
bed, declaring, “This is the most comfortable bed I have ever slept
in!” Or it begins when the wife says goodbye to the man a few hours
later, walking in front of his car switching her hips a bit, a kiss
blown as she heads to her office and he continues on to his painting
studio.
Or it begins as he packs a tote bag with the usual slim thermos of
strong coffee made in an Italian stovetop moka pot, a larger thermos
of cold water, two tangerines, a package of Nat Sherman MCD
cigarettes, and a plastic sack of raw almonds. The tote is astral blue
and printed with Giotto angels. Off to his studio for a day of
painting. Then the two children will walk down Edgehill Road from the
bus stop like burros under their knapsacks, and his wife will prepare
dinner while listening to Thelonious Monk and sipping from a glass of
white wine that he’s poured for her. The thirteen-year-old does his
homework and the twelve-year-old practices his drumming.
I am the wife. I am the wife of fifteen years. I am the plumpish wife,
the pretty wife, the loving wife, the smart wife, the American wife. I
am eternally his wife.
Perhaps the story begins with the fistful of lottery tickets he bought
two days before he died, which I discovered weeks later, when they
fluttered out of the pages of one of the many books he was reading.
Or it begins when I meet him, sixteen years before. That was always a
good story: an actual coup de foudre, a bolt of lightning, love at
first sight. I felt a visceral torque, I would tell people, a literal
churn of my organs: not butterflies, not arousal; rather, a not
unpleasant rotation of my innards, as never before. Lightning struck
and did not curdle the cream but instead turned it to sweet, silken
butter. Lightning turned sand into glass.
Maybe, though, the story began in the winter of 1961, when two women
were pregnant, one in Asmara, Eritrea, and the other in Harlem,
U.S.A.; one with her sixth child, one with her first. The East African
son would arrive on March 21, 1962, on the most hallowed day of the
zodiac. It is the beginning and the end of the astrological calendar,
and so it is said that children born on March 21st are ancient souls
who possess the wonder and innocence of newborns. The American child,
a girl, would come on May 30th, into the chatter and buzz of Gemini,
in Gotham.
When I met Ficre Ghebreyesus, in New Haven, in the late spring of
1996, the first thing he wanted to do was show me his art. He was
living in an unfinished loft where he slept and painted when he was
not cooking at the Eritrean restaurant that he owned and ran with two
of his brothers. The restaurant was named Caffè Adulis, in homage to
the ancient port city on the Red Sea that is now an archeological
site, one of Africa’s great “lost cities.” Pliny the Elder wrote of
Adulis, which he said was founded by “Egyptian slaves fleeing their
masters.” Ficre always said it meant “city of free men.”
As Ficre showed me his work, he talked about his family. His late
father, Gebreyesus Tessema, was a judge who was exiled hundreds of
miles away from home when he refused to tamper with his judicial
decisions to suit the wishes of the dictator. His mother, Zememesh
Berhe, came from a family of many sisters and two brothers, tough
Coptic Christian highlanders. Together, they had seven children: one,
the eldest son, lost to the long independence war with Ethiopia, Ficre
at the No. 6 position. Their language was Tigrinya, an Afro-Asiatic
tongue closely related to the ancient South Semitic Ge’ez and spoken
in Eritrea and its diaspora, as well as in northern Ethiopia. His full
name, Ficremariam Ghebreyesus, means “lover of Mary” and “servant of
Jesus.” The abbreviated Ficre means “love.”
On a Thursday night at the end of March, 2011, I bring an unexpected
guest home to stay with us, my artist friend Lorna, who’s spoken at
Yale, where I teach, that afternoon. When Lorna and I arrive home, the
house is lighted and glowing, and tea is brewing in the black Japanese
cast-iron pot. Ficre has put raw almonds in a small celadon bowl. It
is late; our sons, Solomon and Simon, are sleeping. We are so pleased
to live like this, organized and open and welcoming when friends pass
through Hamden, the hamlet where we recently moved to live in a tan
stucco Arts and Crafts house surrounded by a garden. Ficre fell in
love with the property, which reminded him of the African “compound”
where he grew up amid flowers, inside walls his mother painted
apricot, spring-sky blue, rose violet, and butter yellow.
The next morning, I organize the children for school and send them off
and Ficre makes coffee when Lorna rises shortly after. We three drink
our cappuccinos under the gazebo. Hanging inside is a mobile that
Ficre fashioned from some slender, twisty branches that blew down in
the yard after a storm. The mobile turns gently in the breeze. The
morning is gray, and the yard smells of the fresh, damp earth of early
spring.
As we walk toward the house, something makes us look back into the
yard over our shoulders. There is a giant hawk sitting on the branch
of our hundred-year-old oak tree, eviscerating and devouring a
squirrel.
We freeze to watch. The raptor is utterly focussed on its task. I
watch Ficre and Lorna scrutinizing, their artist’s eyes recording what
they see. The hawk attends to its business undisturbed. It is
rapacious; it takes what it wants. The bloody ribbons of the
squirrel’s entrails hang off the branch as the hawk eats the entire
remains of the hapless rodent in about five minutes.
Ficre tells us he has seen the bird the day before, with the children,
and shows us a short video he took on his phone of the creature on the
same branch, eating another squirrel. I have seen a hawk a few times
but never one so intent on its survival, never seen predation up close
and in action. It is pure and elemental, necessarily violent,
riveting, nature itself. We watch for as long as we can before we have
to go off to the duties of our days.
Some weeks later, on his bureau, I find an acrostic that Ficre made,
which exhausted variations on the word “hawk.” He’d assigned numbers
to the letters and then assigned those numbers to lottery tickets,
which he had bought by the dozens and secreted in the pages of the
books he was reading.
Saturday: the surprise fiftieth-birthday party that Solomon and Simon
have planned for their father is upon us. We try to go about our
business as usual while surreptitious e-mails and calls come in with
last-minute details and snafus. My brother stopped at the bakery in
Bridgeport to pick up the cake and found the bakery closed. A friend
from New York is waiting at a café downtown until the coast is clear.
It is supposed to storm, and a friend from Boston is not sure that she
can make it on the road. Finally, Ficre and the boys leave the house
and he takes them to see “The Hunger Games.”
I scurry around tidying up. In a few hours, friends begin to arrive,
decked out and giddy. Solo and Simon and I have secured a New Haven
party treat, the Big Green Truck: a truck with a wood-burning oven for
making pizzas with a cavalcade of toppings, plus salad, and gelato,
and espresso. The pizza makers are in on the secret and park the truck
out of sight by the side of the house.
Solo texts from the road: We are leaving downtown. We pulled out of
the parking lot. We’re on Whitney Avenue. Everyone gathers in the
library, rustling and giggling, until we hear Ficre’s key in the door.
Surprise! His face wide open with joy as he goes to each one of us,
You, and You, and You! We laugh, we talk, we eat, and we dance.
That night, he goes to sleep literally with a smile on his face. I
gently poke him, thinking he is awake and playing sleep to entertain
me, or still falling asleep, reviewing the evening in his mind. But he
is in what the poet Léopold Sédar Senghor called “a deep Negro sleep.”
The next evening, something urgent and sharp comes over Ficre: he has
to leave the house, right away, he tells me. He has to buy a lottery
ticket; he has a number, and a feeling. He is agitated, so certain is
he that his number is going to win, and win big. I tell him gently he
is being a little silly and let’s just have dinner, but he jumps in
the car, drives off, and comes back with what I later find out is a
hundred lottery tickets. “I have to win it for you,” he says. “I have
to win the lottery for you.”
On Tuesday, I come home late from the university. The boys are asleep
and Ficre is on the couch watching television, waiting for me, drowsy.
He has promised Solo a sleepover. He goes to Solo’s trundle bed and I
go to our bed, and we call out good night to each other down the hall.
How beautiful, the way that children sleep so peacefully that their
parents’ voices do not wake them.
The next morning Ficre wakes exhausted, but happy. “This is the most
comfortable bed I have ever slept in!” he says.
Then sleep some more, I whisper, and delay leaving home, puttering, so
we can be together.
He feels better when he wakes again. We drink our coffee and chat, as
on a million mornings. He drives me to work. I’ve just heard about a
poetry reading on campus from a book of new translations of the sacred
poetry of the Kabbalah, but it is scheduled at the same time I’m
supposed to pick up the children from school to take them to the
orthodontist.
“You have to hear the sacred poetry of the Kabbalah!” Ficre says to
me. “You are an artist, and you need it—I will take the children to
the orthodontist!”
The room where the reading is held is packed. The words resonate and
sound to me oracular and true, though their meaning is mysterious:
Windows of worship
Windows of beckoning
Windows of weeping
Windows of joy…
Windows of bearing
Windows of birth
and he saw—
windows without number and end.
The program runs long, so I tiptoe out to get home as promised.
>From his bedroom-window lookout spot, Simon sees me approach and comes
running downstairs to the door. News from the family in diaspora: an
older cousin in Montpellier, France, will not join us for the holiday
as planned, because his three-year-old daughter is contagious. I go
inside and call to my husband: “Fiiii-kiii!”
“I’ll get him!” Simon sings.
And then Simon is screaming. I run downstairs and see Ficre slumped on
the floor, the treadmill still running. There is a raw slash where
skin has come off his head. I think, The treadmill was set too fast;
he fell and hit his head. Which he had. I think, He will have a
horrible concussion. There is a small amount of yellow fluid pooled
next to him. Strangely, I see no blood. Some months later, Solo comes
home from school and says, I know what the yellow liquid was. It was
plasma. Blood separates into red and yellow, plasma and protein.
I tell Simon, Leave, get the phone, get your brother, call 911, bring
me the phone, and I am alone with Ficre. His eyes face mine directly.
He is so warm; he is the right temperature. Half of his face seems
slack to me, so I then think, He has had a stroke and that is worse
than a concussion, but he will recover.
I tell the children, Go upstairs, wait for the ambulance, bring them
down quickly when they come.
I am alone again with Ficre. It is just the two of us. I speak to him,
low and urgent and gentle. I hold him carefully and try to wake him
with my words and touch. I breathe into his warm mouth. I don’t try to
lift him, lest his spine be injured. I am certain he can hear me.
At the hospital, the medics rush him into the emergency room, and the
doctors usher me into the roomette where they work. I keep my hand on
his calf the whole time. He is still warm. They cut off his clothes.
As his body is exposed, a doctor in a turban closes the curtains.
They pump him and jump him. They keep doing it. “Anyone have any other
ideas?” the doctor shouts, after they have tried and tried. And then
he looks straight and deep into my eyes and says the words they say in
the movies that are nonetheless the only words: We did everything we
could do for him. Which I saw. Later on, I will learn it was 6:54
p.m., Wednesday, April 4, 2012.
“Then we carefully diguise the bribes as legal fees by changing the
word ‘bribes’ to ‘legal fees.’ ”Buy the print »
The penis, which is mine alone, lies sleeping on his thigh, nestled in
its hair, and that is what I remember of his body, after the
emergency-room doctor met my eyes and made his pronouncement. Him,
still him, still Ficre, still a him, the last trace of him. The penis
with which he made the human beings who are our children is sign and
symbol and substance of what I have lost.
I lie atop him and cover his body with my body. After a time that
cannot be measured, someone I do not know comes and puts her arms
around my shoulders and gently, gently leads me off and away from
Ficre.
And then the children arrive, and I am waiting for them at the
entrance, and I tell them that Daddy is dead.
Where is Daddy? We go to a room to see his body—not to see him, to see
his body, for when we go in it is his body but not him, in a hospital
gown, under covers. We touch and hug and weep over the body that no
longer houses him. It is somehow not frightening to see this body. In
these moments it still belongs to us. The body is no longer warm. Our
wails are one wail. We know when we want to leave the room.
When he was sixteen years old, he walked across his country through
killing fields to escape. He walked into the dust of Khartoum. He was
a refugee in Sudan, in Italy, in Germany, and in the United States,
where he ended up living in New Haven for far longer than he had ever
lived anywhere else. He became an African-American man, but he was not
the descendant of slaves. He washed dishes in Italy, attended school
before he knew a word of the language in a Germany so racially hostile
it almost broke him. He went years without seeing his parents. His
parents and his community built him to survive. But it was not without
price.
His big heart burst. The autopsy later tells us his arteries were
blocked nearly completely, despite the fact that he was slim and
energetic and ate yogurt and blueberries and flaxseed, despite the
fact that he passed stress tests with flying colors. I learn that
severe heart disease is first discovered in many sufferers only when
they drop dead. He could never quit smoking, though he tried and
tried, over and over and over. Heart disease is the leading cause of
death in the United States.
He was probably dead before he hit the ground, the emergency-room
doctor and the coroner and a cardiologist I later speak with tell me.
That may be why there was no blood on the floor, despite his head
wound and the scalp’s vascularity. He might have felt strange, the
doctors told me, before what they call “the cardiac event,” but not
for more than a flash. One tells me he is certain Ficre saw my face as
he died. We are meant to take comfort in this knowledge, if knowledge
it is.
I breathed into his mouth. He was supple. The 911 operator asked if my
husband was breathing and I could not say. The air around him was warm
and vaporous. How many times that day and in the days and weeks and
months that followed did I say “my husband.” My husband died
unexpectedly. I just lost my husband. “Lost” implies we are looking,
he might be found.
I lost my husband. Where is he? I often wonder. As I set out on some
small adventure, heading for some new place, somewhere he does not
know, I think, I must call him, think, I must tell him, think, What
would he think? Think what he thinks. Know what he thinks.
When I held him in the basement, he was himself, Ficre.
When I held him in the hospital as they worked and cut off his
clothes, he was himself.
When they cleaned his body and brought his body for us to say goodbye,
he had left his body, though it still belonged to us.
His body was colder than it had been, though not ice-cold, or stiff
and hard. His spirit had clearly left as it had not left when we found
him on the basement floor and I knew that he could hear us.
Now I know for sure that the soul is an evanescent thing and the body
is its temporary container, because I saw it. I saw the body with the
soul in it, I saw the body with the soul leaving, and I saw the body
with the soul gone.
When we first became lovers, we entered a three-day, three-night
vortex. Night One I slept Senghor’s “deep Negro sleep” for what seemed
like the first time ever, lifelong insomniac no more. Night Two I
burned with high fever and dreamed of my grandmother and a cherry
tree, the only fruit she ever ate to excess. The next morning, Ficre
gave me small sips of cold blackcurrant juice and rosehip tea to make
me well. Night Three my fever broke and so did my menses, more blood
than I had ever let in my life, all over the bed, a trail across the
room, the bathroom floor, and in the tub. He cleaned it up; I did not
feel abashed. Then he had to go to Washington, where there was to be
an exhibition of photographs of Eritrea that he had taken during the
war and just after independence. The last thing he put in his bag was
my first book of poems.
He returned to New Haven five days later with a present for me: a
honey-drenched honeycomb, from a visit to Luray Caverns. Its structure
was ancient and iconic. Did you know that honey was found in King
Tutankhamen’s tomb and is still edible? he said. And that honey was
found in sealed jars in Pompeii? We marvelled at the honeycomb’s
simple construction and deceptive strength, and held it up to behold
its incomparable gold. We looked all around us through the honey’s
gold light. Then we ate it.
Why did he buy the lottery ticket with my name on it? Why was he so
angry when he lost?
The day he died, the four of us were exactly the same height, just
over five feet nine. We’d measured the boys in the pantry doorway the
week before. It seemed a perfect symmetry, a whole family the same
size but in different shapes. Now the children grow past me and past
their father. They seem to grow by the day; they sprout like
beanstalks toward the sky. Simon’s anklebones appear shiny at his
pants’ hems. He complains his feet hurt, and indeed his toes have
grown and are pushing against the tips of his shoes. His growing seems
avid, fevered. It feels like the insistent force of life itself.
Ficre and I used to walk together in Grove Street Cemetery, where he
is now buried, where I will one day join him. The Yale art historian
Sylvia Boone is buried there, too. Her great work is about Mende art,
and is called “Radiance from the Waters.” Her gravestone is a West
African wonder in rosy marble etched with a seashell and a Sowei mask
she’d written about. In her earlier book about visiting West Africa,
she wrote that travellers should always commit the “charming, hopeful,
irrational” act of buying a lottery ticket in a new country. She
called it buying “a chance.” It will make you feel lucky, as if
anything could happen, even when “you know you will not be there for
the drawing.”
You were six and your brother was four, my mother said. The whole day
passed, a lovely day, and at the end I knew something was different,
but I wasn’t quite sure what. Ah, that’s it! I said to myself. Nobody
cried today! For the first time in six years, nobody cried!
We used to laugh at that story when my boys were young and the cries
would come and go, dried up by the vanished sunlight like summer
storms, fast-finished but ever-present.
I thought of that phrase tonight. “Nobody cried today.” It is ten
months, almost one year. I did not cry today. I cried yesterday. I may
well cry tomorrow. But I did not cry today, and neither did either of
my sons, though mostly I am the one who still cries. It is not an
accomplishment, just an observation, but one that marks the passage of
time.
The next day, Simon weeps, remembering the day his father died,
remembering being the first to find him, wondering if dying hurt him,
remembering that the last thing his father said to him before he went
downstairs to the treadmill was a cheerful “Check on me.”
You did check, I tell him. And then I came, and then Brother. And we
were there with him when his soul left the room. He was in his own
home, and he was with us.
The tears subside, and melt into a few strong shudders. When I look at
the video Ficre made of the children watching the rapacious hawk, I
hear the light tinkling bells in Simon’s voice and think, He was so
young that April.
A bit later, in the shower, Simon calls out to me, I was a ten in
sadness when I was crying, Mommy, but now I am a six.
Whoops, he says, it just went down to five.
He comes out of the shower and puts on his pajamas.
Now it’s just a three.
He brushes his teeth.
Now it’s all gone, he says. We were with Daddy when he died.
A year later, it is time to make decisions in the studio. It has been
photographed exactly as he left it, each table surface a still-life,
each palette a painting unto itself. The paintings have been sorted
according to size, dusted, and labelled, all eight hundred and
eighty-two of them, plus the sketches, and the photographs, and the
small metal sculptures.
The idea of throwing away his paintbrushes makes me queasy. They are
somehow biological, his DNA in the brush fibres. I find a box of the
very best paintbrushes, which are made of sable. I have long been
fascinated with the story of the frozen woolly mammoth, how scientists
used a blow dryer to thaw it and extract DNA from its flesh and fur.
Now I read they have found liquid blood inside a ten-thousand-year-old
woolly mammoth. They will extract the DNA and eventually fertilize and
plant an egg inside an elephant. Ficre’s DNA is everywhere in the
studio, and in the paintbrushes he held for so many hours.
After the studio, I clean deeper in the never-ending house, facing it
bit by bit. I clean my pantry cabinets and find Ficre’s baking
supplies: two brands of yeast and powdered-milk solids, wheat and
white and rye and spelt bread flours, rice flour to experiment with
gluten-free bread. I throw away all the expired flours. They smell
ever so slightly rancid, but not unpleasantly so. They smell
biological. I am reminded that grain is alive, a host for bacteria.
Things grow and live in it.
Soon after that, we walk forward into a new story, each of us carrying
the old ones across our shoulders in bandanas tied to sticks. My sons
and I move to New York City. Today, we look out our window at the
Hudson River and wait for another hurricane as the sky turns lavender
and orange, Ficre colors. When the rain is most dramatic, we feel him
close. The boys grow taller than everyone around them and become young
men.
Something is fading: not the memory of him but the press of memory,
the closeness of him. He is somewhere in the atmosphere, but also not.
He is fifty and I am fifty-one. He is a photograph in the living room;
he is, for the moment, still.
On the streets of New York, I see people who remind me of him in
glances: Ficre elderly, in a favorite overcoat and a gentleman’s hat.
Ficre an African man walking the city. I see a lovely bald brown head,
or a slightly springing stride. He moved lightly and valued
light-footedness, as he valued sotto voce. How he despised needlessly
loud voices. There are flashes of him in this complex metropolis, but
he is not here.
Death sits in the comfortable chair in the corner of my new bedroom,
smoking a cigarette. It is a he, sinuous and sleek, wearing a
felt-brimmed hat. He is there when I wake in the middle of the night,
sitting quietly, his smoke a visible curl in the New York lights that
come in between the venetian-blind slats.
At first, I am startled to see him. He sits so near, is so at home.
But he doesn’t move toward me, he simply cohabits. And so, eventually,
I return to sleep. He isn’t going anywhere, but he isn’t going to take
me, either. In the morning, the chair is empty.
I dream we are moving, my family of four: Lizzy, Ficre, Solomon, and
Simon. It is light and easy. We laugh with the boys as we sort through
and throw things away. Ficre carries and moves large bags and
objects—“your African ox,” as he used to call himself, sturdy and
purposeful. The boys move like oxen as well. We are glad to be going
wherever we are going.
Now it is just the two of us walking a long, gently curved road,
holding hands. At a fork in the road, Ficre lets my hand go and waves
me on. You have to keep walking, Lizzy, he says. I know it is the only
truth, so I walk.
I look back. I look back. I can still see him, smiling and waving me on.
It was the two of us walking the road and now he has let my hand go.
I walk. I can always see him. His size does not change as I move
forward: he is five feet nine and a half, exactly right. I can still
feel the feel of my hand in his hand as I walk.
I wake and the room is flooded with pale-yellow light. ♦
Elizabeth Alexander is the Frederick Iseman Professor of Poetry at
Yale, and the author of six books of poems, two books of essays, and
several edited collections. Her memoir, “The Light of the World,” will
be published in April.
Received on Tue Feb 03 2015 - 09:23:04 EST