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SUNDAY JOURNAL

Death, stunning in its banality

By MELANIE HUBBARD
Published August 27, 2006

After years of marriage and no time to ourselves since "B.C." ("Before Child"), we're in Venice. It's incomparable, and we're having the time of our lives. We come in for a rest before going out again to dinner and find we have a message: Claire, my husband's 22-year-old daughter and our little daughter's babysitter, has phoned from Florida.

Claire is under strict orders to call us only in an emergency. What could have happened? What could have happened to our child? Frantic with anticipated grief, I can't return the call. I ask my husband to do it. He talks to Claire and recites the news: She's smashed my car, my elegant, sleek sculpture on wheels. Whew! That's all? Only a thing, only money?

My baby is safe, my real live darling girl - who gets on the phone to tell Mommy about her impending seventh birthday party. Without us. Yes, I feel guilty. But as I look out the window at the boats going by in the Giudecca Canal, I am giddy with relief. Nothing bad can happen now.

The "emergency" has occurred, and my beloved car has taken the hit. I knew it would. The minute I handed Claire the keys, I knew I'd kissed my buggy goodbye, but I figured, even then, that our second honeymoon - days and days in Italy sans child - would be worth it.

The next day I slipped down a slick flight of marble steps and hit my head, hard.

There was an audible smack. I also hit my back, my butt, my elbows and thumbs. Concerned staff at the Peggy Guggenheim Museum offered me ice, but there was no blood, no wound. I asked for water. I felt a little dizzy. A little not-quite-nauseous. I didn't seem to be going blind. I didn't faint or get suddenly sleepy. I stepped gingerly, waiting for myself to fail or fall or feel. Everything was fine, really, but it wasn't.

I thought about it as I lingered over paintings, over Motherwell and Klee, over a sheet of copper slashed, punched and incised like the gold leaf background of a High Gothic icon without the saint: My little girl could have lost her mother, just then, just there, because I had decided to wear flip-flops that day. And because the steps, worn as smooth as ice, had not had a strip of rough, sandy paper glued to their forward edges.

Because Venice is so beautiful, the deep joining of earth and water, its price, I guess, is death.

Or the consciousness of death. And so, as I made my way from sight to sight, feeling no step to be entirely safe, I recalled a childhood vacation. I must have been 10. We were on our way to grandmother's house, making a long trip in our green Dodge station wagon from Winter Haven to Carabelle in the Florida Panhandle. Dad says we used to stop at an Arby's in Chiefland for lunch, so it must have been in Chiefland, though neither Dad nor Mom remembers what I remember.

We were outside at a red plastic table. A young couple at the next table had seated their baby on one of the curving metal benches. We were all nearly finished with our sandwiches when the baby flopped and jerked back suddenly, as babies will, and landed on the back of his head with a smack on the concrete patio. It was a sickening sound, like the splitting of a melon, but there was no blood, no cry from the baby, just the rising anxious shrieks of the young mother, who picked the baby up, holding him high in front of the shaggy young man, his father, and cried, "They're turning! His eyes are turning!"

And I imagined or saw the eyes looking heavenward, back into the skull as if seeking the answer to a question - and then we got out of there. There was a pay phone. We didn't use it. We didn't - why didn't we? - stop. We didn't help, we didn't say a word, we got into the car and drove off. We were finished with our delicately layered moist brown meat in a bun - I had ordered it au jus, which Mom remarked meant "with juice" in French, so it was redundant (another vocabulary word) of Americans to say they wanted a sandwich "with au jus" - and we had a grandma to visit.

I'm sure my little brother and I bickered for the whole long trip, strapped in and bored, lunging at each other over the wide leather seat-middle, making sarcastic remarks - but my terror found no words. How could a baby just die at lunchtime in the middle of an ordinary day? Who were we, that we sped on, out and away from the oncoming wails, the mess of relationship and need and pain, the emergence of all of our dying?

Melanie Hubbard is a frequent contributor to Sunday Journal.

[Last modified August 25, 2006, 09:19:42]