Free The Year of Pleasures by Elizabeth Berg

dangerous place for memories—John, untucking his shirt, laying his watch on the dresser, then crossing the room toward me, his sweet intention in his smile. Here, on this first night, we would have held hands in the darkness, whispering excitedly about what part of our new town we would explore first. Always, we whispered, after the lights were out. Always, upon awakening in the morning, he smiled at me. “Welcome to Tuesday, Betta,” he would say. He did that up until the end, when a pleasant routine had become grimly ironic. Welcome to Friday, Betta, and another day of hell. One kind of hell for you. Another, more breathtaking kind of hell for me. But welcome to it.
    I got out a saucepan to heat water for tea—I hadn’t found the kettle yet; I supposed it was in one of the few kitchen boxes I had yet to empty. I’d drink a mug of Sleepytime, and then, when I was sure I could no longer keep my eyes open, I’d go upstairs to lie down. In the morning, I could cross off another day. I put my hands to my lower back, stretched, allowed myself an
Oh, God.
“Healing hurts,” someone at John’s service had told me. “But hurting heals.”
             
    At 3 A.M. , my eyes opened and I was wide-awake. I felt as though I hadn’t slept at all, when in fact it had been four hours straight—not bad. I sat at the edge of the bed and looked around the room, made bright by moonlight coming in through the curtainless windows. It was a nice-sized room. Smaller than the bedroom we’d had before, but I appreciated the coziness, especially now. Tall wardrobe boxes stood like sentinels in the middle of the room, smaller cartons stacked up beside them. So much to do, in just this one room. I looked over at the dresser, thinking I didn’t want it where I told the movers to put it after all—the opposite wall would have been better. But I didn’t think I could move it by myself. Another mosquito bite of grief. I was beginning to learn that sometimes sorrow was a complex form of aggravation.
    I didn’t want to lie back down. Nor did I want to wander around what was still an unfamiliar house, no comfort stations yet established. The chenille-covered chaise longue was in the corner of the living room, but there was no glowing lamp beside it, no throw draped over it, no ticking clocks nearby or flowering orchid plants with their exotic, reaching stems. Instead, there were more boxes of things to be put away. And there was more silence, denser in the larger rooms, more alive, capable of replacing a hard-won calm with a pulsating panic.
    I lay back down on my stomach in a position I’d learned in the single yoga class I’d taken last winter. I pointed one of my heels up, lengthened my leg, then did the same with my other leg.
S-t-r-e-t-c-h.
I remembered the merriment in the instructor’s eyes when she’d asked the class, “Now! Have you all grown an inch or two?” She was an elegant-looking woman from Amsterdam with a charming accent. I’d wondered if she was like that all the time—yogacized—or if she had moments of pettiness and despair like the rest of us. Did she nearly float around her house on a cloud of enlightenment, or did she walk in with a pile of overdue bills, fling them on a table that needed dusting, and phone a friend to complain that all of her students were idiots? My inability to decide was what I turned into an excuse for dropping the class. What did
she
know? I asked myself, when what I was really asking was, Why should I wake up so
early
and go out into the
cold
?
    Now, though, I tried to breathe the way she taught us that day.
When you breathe in this fashion, remember that it has a healing effect on each and every cell of the body.
I remember rolling my eyes when she said that, and at the same time wanting very much to believe it. Now, compliant out of class in a way that I could not be in it, I took a long breath in, made it longer, then longer still.
Think of a high waterfall; pull down, down,