Holy
There was a sense that God was watching.
I went out the front door at 6:30 p.m. It was early September. In the flower beds bordering the front porch, the pink vincas were losing their luster. So too were the several kinds of mint in a small plot to the left of the driveway. I stood on our walkway, waiting for my husband, changing from his huaraches into sneakers. The sky, dense with clouds, was coming down on my head like a lid on a frying pan. I shifted from one leg to the other, felt the usual aches and wished it were forty-five minutes later and our daily walk, a big circle around our neighborhood, over and done with.
My husband, forever young and sporty with a boy body, came out the front door at 6:32, dressed in a beige polo, tan shorts, white socks and a blue cap with “Italia” printed in white letters, the lid turned to the back. I was shapeless in baggy grey sweatpants, a grey zip-up hoodie, and a grey sweatshirt with “Yale” across the front in blue letters.
“Look at the sky,” I admonished as he moved towards me. My eyes went to the tiny hole near the bottom of his polo. It must be twenty years old, that shirt. He should get a new one.
“It has the feel not of winter but fall, don’t you think?” I said.
He wouldn’t see it that way, I knew. He finds something good no matter what. The freshness of cooler temperatures, in this case. The summer had been hotter than it had been in at least a hundred years, according to the news. I could have been happy for the relief, too, but clamping down on that happiness was my deliberate preoccupation with how a damp, cold, sullen winter would be here soon enough.
My head was lowered, my eyes were on the ground when my husband, annoyingly, said, “Oh! Look!” How was it he could sound so far away, only a few inches from me like that. “What is it?” I replied gruffly. I toyed with refusing to lift my head.
But I did, and saw the five deer in the front yard of the house two doors up from ours. One was practically at the door of the house. Deer, whose parents, grandparents, siblings and children had lived for years amongst us in our suburban sprawl yet still managed to surprise us every time with their presence.
It had never happened before, encountering a group of deer in someone’s front yard in broad daylight, during our hundreds of walks since the beginning of the pandemic two and half years ago, and the sight of them, in combination with the strangeness, the compelling look of the sky, was enough to make all the numb, dead parts of myself lurch back to life. Just a day ago, I had been thinking about suicide, noting as I contemplated it that just because I wouldn’t be succumbing to it right then and there, lying in my bed at three in the afternoon, it didn’t mean I would be so level-headed the next time, or the time after that, when such thoughts might occur to me again.
My husband stopped and stood stiff and still, regarding the deer. They regarded him back, equally stiff and still except for the one doe, who bent its indifferent head down again and picked up where it had left off, eating the front lawn of our neighbor’s house.
I stopped, too, several feet behind my husband. For a few seconds we were all mirrors of one another, he and I, those wild animals and us, his Italy hat and my Yale sweatshirt. Under an uneasy sky, there was a sense that God was watching.
I usually timed our walks, beginning with the moment we started moving until the second we stopped. I raged against stopping, for any reason, during any part of the walk, for fear of losing count of the minutes that only involved walking; for fear of losing control of something – control of something crucial I couldn’t put a name to. The need to draw a circle, to complete a circle, to put it behind me instead of it being in front of me.
“Let’s go,” I said to my husband with a commanding voice. The volume was low but I knew how to make it pierce.
It was hard to know if the deer were afraid of us. They could get away swiftly on their miraculous ballerina legs if they really felt the need, but it seemed they didn’t. Yet they continued to stare, suspiciously I thought, and I was so tired of it, so tired of their eyes. “Let’s go,” I repeated.
One of the deer had antlers, though he was much smaller and lighter in color than the weathered bucks we were used to seeing in the backyard of our house. They all had the same faces and shape, though. I was a little bored underneath everything else I was feeling.
We couldn’t start our walk, though: it was us or the deer – one or the other would have to break the staring match. This “rule,” as I saw it, was emanating from my husband and penetrating my psychic space without us having to talk about it and I was so sick of knowing all about how that imbalance happens between two married people and how the least little thing can make you feel it and make you feel like you’re in a prison.
So I began to walk, slowly, defiantly, but still staring, curious against my will to see what the deer would do with that combination of walking and staring. I walked past my husband and he finally began to move, too, following me now, and we were like silent polyphonic music, Bach perhaps, and for a moment God was watching. We were walking backwards, waiting until the deer would turn around, lower their heads and move towards the privacy, shrubbery and fences of the neighborhood backyards. We waited for them to saunter, recede and disappear from our view. Rather, my husband waited and I counted the seconds it was taking.
We turned our attention to the sky. My husband said it looked like something out of the movie, “Independence Day.” At any moment a spaceship the size of Manhattan would part the clouds, and the two of us would be vaporized by aliens. Is that what you mean? I asked, without actually speaking it. We were turned forward, walking finally at a normal pace.
We paused at the top of our street, wondering whether to continue, studying the movement of the wind in the trees. Would it be a downpour, with lightning? Should we not do a full circle? Turn around now and go home?
I wanted my husband to decide and it seems he was waiting for me to do the same. We walked on, expounding on the clouds in silence. They were different from summer thunderstorm clouds. They were lower and disturbingly opaque. It was as though something were inside them or hiding behind them. Their color was complex, infused with pale yellow, coffee-stain brown, mauve verging towards red, and many more gradations of grey than normal, from nearly black to nearly white.
Then of course I had to say it out loud. I said, “It’s Bach, with all his chromaticism and tonal changes squeezed together into short spaces of time, the density impenetrable, something that can’t be pulled apart and separated. On a massive scale.”
There was a sense that God was watching.
My husband quietly took in my speech. There was no need to acknowledge me. I was full of it, in my own massive way.
Three quarters of the way through the walk, we saw a leggy young girl of around fifteen in cut off shorts and bare feet with her dog on a leash. The dog was straining to come to us, frustrated by being held back. It made guttural, throaty noises that weren’t real barks. We couldn’t tell if we were being judged as potential friends or potential enemies.
“He’s five months old,” the girl said, in response to my husband’s friendly inquiry. This was supposed to explain it.
I recalled the deer and how you can’t tell if someone’s afraid.
A fight or flight anxiety, a low-grade panic, a feeling that a butcher’s knife hung from the heavens above my head, hidden behind some clouds, accompanied me on this walk. But I’d learned it would behave itself with reasonable politeness if I just kept moving. “Let’s go,” I said.
I had hit a buck during rutting season shortly before the pandemic while driving in the slow lane of a freeway. He came across the entire six-lanes so fast I never saw him coming.
My rental car had gotten crunched up like an accordion on impact, but it hadn’t quite killed him. Badly maimed, he nevertheless leapt forward and disappeared into the woods. A pair of police officers went into the woods to find him. I heard four or five gunshots. It took that many bullets to put him down, they said when they emerged onto the side of the highway, thoroughly shaken, as though God were watching.
He was a magnificent creature. His body covered the entire windshield as he tried to clear it. The car’s front hood came open and glowed bright orange. The doors were crushed and I barely squeezed myself out of one. The rental company said it was a miracle I was alive. I’d been driving to the airport to fly home after playing a piano recital out of state. The recital hall was in the basement of an old church with a flood-stained linoleum floor and I had only a faint sensation that God was watching while performing. For the most part, the only thing watching was the crowd, a motionless multitude, their eyes on me, and the pressure to be somebody, well, it was what it always was.
There was a sense ever since that the buck kept coming back to life. It was suddenly beside me or in front of me, hovering and quivering and staring. It happened especially when I was lying in bed. It was like a precursor of something, something not good.
At my synagogue, a Rabbi once built a sermon around the word “Gam,” Hebrew for “though, even though, although, yet, also, indeed and but.” The Rabbi said there were three “gam” states of mind in the course of everyday life:
1) Things are not going well, but out of the bad something good will come.
2) Things are not going well, but this too shall pass.
3) Things are neither going or not going well. Things just are. What is, at this moment, is, and that’s all.
Good, solid, practical stuff, encircling in the pressure cooker of the mind, this information, and yet…
Where was I? Oh yes, walking…some of the clouds looked to me like the beginning of tornado clouds, but up ahead the sky was light and cloud-free. The promise of this light kept us walking towards it and it was on the way home, towards the very end of the walk, and it felt like God was watching, and it was like the beginning of the final movement of Beethoven’s life-affirming “Waldstein” Sonata in C Major, Opus 53. I said as much to my husband.
Looking in people’s houses all along the walk, we saw that their lights were just starting to go on. We could see into their kitchens and find out who had a bulkhead in their kitchen, and who had remodeled their kitchen and gotten rid of the bulkhead. All the houses had the same design. We ourselves had had a bulkhead. When the kitchen was renovated, though, we didn’t eliminate it, despite the contractor’s disagreement.
“It will make your kitchen look so much bigger if you take it out,” he said, trying like hell to talk us into it.
My husband, an artist, would patiently explain and re-explain how it would break up the lines of the interior spaces in the house. The bulkhead was flush with the door entrance heights going into the other rooms. After a while the contractor started to agree. I noticed this and praised my husband’s persistence and brains, and his unerring certainty about how things should be. I praised his certainty, period.
During the walk, I didn’t bring up stage fright, or the flight or fright or flight or fight (which is it?) business though in truth that was on my mind, not the sky or the deer or bulkheads or my husband’s t-shirt or his good qualities. All I said was, “I’m suffering.”
My husband is used to statements like this from me. He knows it can mean anything, from a sore finger to our empty-nesters phase of life to a vision of death.
I have wasted a lot of time on sleepless nights googling the causes of stage fright:
*Unrealistic assessment of what is expected of you.
*Underestimation of your capabilities.
*Overestimation of the opinion of others.
*Unrealistic expectations of others’ response to anxiety.
*Overestimation of the idea of rejection.
In other words, what? And therefore, I should do what?
My husband listens to a classical music station on his old FM radio when working on a painting at his downtown studio. Sometimes they’ll play a particular piece that moves him to text me a video of the radio playing it. And underneath he’ll write, “This was made for your hands” or something like that.
This just happened in the late morning the day before the walk I’ve been describing. Artur Rubenstein was playing Chopin’s gentle prelude in F Major from his set of twenty-four preludes. It flows like a peaceful brook. I couldn’t place it at first. It seemed to come from some constellation far away in a night sky overlooking, say, Santorini, Greece, a dreamscape of someplace happy and out of reach. Then I slowly remembered. The last time I’d played it was nearly two decades ago, when I performed all twenty-four preludes in concert a few days after my father’s burial. During the final prelude, the one in D minor – intense, dark, a gates of Hell vision – tears came to my eyes. My father had risen up to greet me from his grave. The piano keys disappeared. I was looking straight through the ground into his casket. When, sobbing by then, I reached the final three notes – three D’s on the lowest part of the piano, spaced wide apart and marked by Chopin with a deafening triple forte – I was down in there with my father. To tell you the truth, I was scared to death, of death, of life, of what Chopin knew.
When I didn’t respond to my husband’s text, he sent another one: “In your hands, you would play this sublimely” or something like that. This may have been true long ago but I couldn’t see myself as capable of sublimity anymore. He is nice that way, though, so I answered, cordially: “Yes, I think so.” It sounded like I was agreeing with him.
As we neared our house, the storm clouds seemed to have moved somewhere entirely behind us. We hadn’t gotten caught in the rain, skewered by lightning, eviscerated by aliens. We went inside and didn’t talk for at least ten minutes.
“It has to do with breathing as one,” I said after a while.
“What does?” he asked.
“I don’t know. Everything. Chamber music, for instance.”
There was a buck moving through our backyard. I saw him through the dining room window. The window was open and he must have heard my voice, because he came to a standstill and stared inside at me. My husband was just coming into the room from the kitchen. I said, “Don’t stop,” when I saw that he, too, saw the buck. He was bringing me a cut up apple to share and a cup of tea and a cookie.
“Please don’t stop. Please, just whatever you do, don’t stop, for God’s sake.”
© Whitney Gordon
Whitney Gordon is a writer and classical musician. She has advanced degrees in piano performance and maintains an active teaching and performing career. She has published fiction, non-fiction, and poetry in the (former) Kentucky Review, Fine Lines, Story Shack, Flash Fiction Online, and Erozine. She received an MFA in creative writing from Lesley University in 2015.
The Loch Raven Review 