Breathing Vanished Air      

by Nina Rubinstein Alonso


My mother-in-law, Joan, places pine-green napkins by each plate ignoring eight-year-old Lissie who’s crawling under the table looking for the ring she dropped. Bill’s stuffing tobacco in his pipe when Joan says, “take that smoky thing outside.” Reluctantly obeying his mother, he gets up, his face a dignified mask, puffs his briar on the porch glider.

“Drinks too much, hides it well,” says his wife, a petite brunette who hasn’t given up on him yet, but will. They’ll divorce, live separately, he’ll remarry, and, years later, suffer a heart attack. At the hospital purple blotches are up and down his arms, neck, face, but I need to avoid sensitive topics as he can be acidly sarcastic. Before I can say anything, he snaps, “Don’t start lecturing me to stop eating meat just because I had a heart attack!!” He knows I’m vegetarian and is slamming me with all the force he can muster. I say, “Hope you’re better soon” and leave.

Eventually another heart attack takes him, though he outlives my husband Fernando, his youngest brother.
                                  
But that Christmas evening Joan sets platters of filet of sole and risotto on the table then says, “terrible things always happen on holidays.” Her four grown sons are there with wives and kids, though we all know that her husband Amado died at fifty-five. After dessert Fernando’s not in the living room with his brothers Juan, Bill and Ramon. He’s in the study looking at photos of his father, the same dark hair and facial planes, though Amado’s eyes are brown, Fernando’s hazel. He's never forgiven God for taking his dad when he was eleven.

A few years later Fernando’s sick, misdiagnosed for months, then three years of chemo for ‘atypical lung cancer,’ died July 18, only forty-five. At the memorial service well-meaning people tell me to consider my time with him a gift, true, but I’m bruised and broken, my cosmic emptiness like breathing vanished air. No one understands until it happens, sometimes not even then.

November, lonely, I call Joan asking about Christmas plans and she replies, “You’ll want to be with your own people.” She’s lost her youngest son, I’ve lost my husband, but we’ve shared this holiday for years, and she knows my family’s Jewish. I tell mom, steady and loving, who says, “These are the conditions that prevail,” and helps me gather Fernando’s shoes and clothes to donate.

My mother-in-law’s response felt cutting, unkind, as if I’d be nothing but another ‘terrible thing’ happening over the holidays, and she’s suffered too much already. Yes, it would hurt to see me without him, but shoving me away only increased pain.

Months later she called me, but it was too late, trust broken, I didn’t want to see her, made excuses. I stayed close to others in the family, but never saw her again, the taste too bitter.
                      

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Nina Rubinstein Alonso’s work appeared in The New Yorker, U. Mass. Review, Ploughshares, Taj Mahal Review, Ibbetson Street, Broadkill Review, Nixes Mate, Peacock Journal, Writing in a Woman’s Voice, etc. Recent books include This Body (David Godine Press), her chapbook Riot Wake (Cervena Barva Press), a story collection Distractions En Route: A Dancer’s Notebook and other stories (Ibbetson Street Press, and a poetry collection and novel are in the works.