Free The Moonlight Sonata at the Mayo Clinic by Nora Gallagher Page B

our possessions, finally, into the house in the Berkeley Hills with views of the Bay Bridge and the Golden Gate (well beyond our means) and, exhausted, had a huge fight. Furious, I took a look at this man, the guy I had thrown my lot in with, and realized it was all a big mistake and I should leave him right then (I was twenty-nine). But before I did, I called an old friend.She said, “Go out on the deck and stand there and say together, ‘It’s not what it was cracked up to be.’ ”
    Over twenty-five years later, we looked at each other in the dining room and silently walked to the car and got in. Floating over our heads was all that was not and could not be resolved: Vincent’s surprise and resentment and exhaustion and guilt; my surprise and fear and paranoia and exhaustion and guilt and isolation. The anxiety over the upcoming family visit. Christmas itself.
    Vincent said, “I didn’t mean to hurt you.”
    “I get that,” I said. “I was hurt, be that as it may,”
    Our particular Christmas tree lot is on a fairground run by a family that seems only once removed from the drug trade, and this year they had decided to include karaoke with the buying of a tree. When we drove up, a young black man was singing “White Christmas.” The owners, husband and wife, were sitting in lawn chairs smoking and looking as if they’d rather be driving back to Oregon, while their teenage son rummaged in their trailer, soon to emerge with a chain saw.
    I got out of the car feeling suddenly cheerful. We walked around, as was our habit, to different parts of the lot finding trees we liked and calling out to each other their better attributes. This one is very healthy, I said, and then pondered my choice of words. We usually emerged from the forest with our leading candidates and then negotiated. Or argued until one of us gave in. The wandering through the trees in their stands was immediately soothing to me. We might last through buying the tree. We had a
routine
.
    I found a round (healthy) tree, my candidate.
    Vincent found a very tall thin tree, a spruce, on sale. I did not like the tree. I thought it would look like a largetoothpick in the dining room. I wasn’t even sure it would fit. But I looked at him, and some part of me, so absorbed in life on my side of the wall, so consumed by my own fear and dread and illness, found a way out and said that I thought the tree might really work. He looked pleased. The teenage boy, happily wielding the saw, cut the base to fit our stand and helped load it into the car, and we drove home.
    We hauled it out of the car and managed to carry it up the driveway. Vincent opened the French doors of the dining room/living room wide, and we got it in. I felt fit and hearty, a woman who could carry half a tall tree. I crossed the fingers of my heart, and we stood it up.
    It was, of course, the most beautiful tree we had ever had. It suited the dining room perfectly; its height reached into the pitch of the ceiling. Vincent looked like a man who had conquered K2; I managed to congratulate him without sounding peevish. The present, I figured, did not have to be discussed or made holier than it was. It was here, in all its hereness, tree lots, karaoke, a chain saw, a tired man and a sick woman bound by vows written down in 1549 by a new archbishop who loved a woman and was alive to words, a man who understood what is lovely and simple and safe to say, as a feeling from the heart becomes a wild dare when spoken as a promise. We had said “in sickness and in health” then, and now the dare had presented itself.

Chapter 9
    B OOKS WERE TO MY FAMILY ’ S HOUSE like beds and stoves, the most basic items, necessary for survival. When I sat with my father that last Christmas, behind him on the shelves were the titles I had read all my life, lined up like old friends: Emma Goldman’s
Living My Life
, A. E. Housman’s poems, Winston Churchill’s
The War Years
.
    My parents read to me nearly every night