On Thursdays this is what I do: I turn the oven on to preheat to 425 degrees. I go around the house picking up errant shoes and books. I straighten the pillows. If it’s still before six o’clock after that, I run the vacuum over the carpet. I love the crackling sound of dirt and very small rocks entering the vacuum. I wash my hands and slip my apron over my head and tie the belt of the apron in front of me. I put headphones in or turn the speaker on and play music. I take meatballs from the freezer and arrange them on a baking sheet. I put them in the oven. I cut onions and garlic and make them sizzle in the big enamel pot. I love the cool feel of them in my hands when I scoop them up. I love to hear them hit the bottom of the pot. I make the tomato sauce. I boil water and cook pasta. Sometime around then, Joey walks through the door. I step away from the stove and let him put his arms around me. I think, I am so lucky. I hold his face in both my hands and feel so much tenderness toward him that my chest hurts. He goes to the sink and fills a pitcher with water. I cut up a lemon and make salad dressing. I dice the apple. I make the salad. He lays the dishes on the table. Joey tells me about his patients and I tell him about my meetings.
A little after seven, our door opens. We all make sounds of greeting and delight. We make plates and crowd onto the couch, the chairs, the living room floor. More people come while we are all eating and I call from the living room: Helloooo! I love to ask about that thing you did this week. I love to hear about it. I love to say, Tell me more! I love hearing a snatch of music. I love telling a joke. I love when they laugh.
When it’s nine o’clock, Joey tells everyone to go home. We do the commotion by the door. Piling up the plates on our small kitchen table. Everyone puts their shoes on and lingers and then leaves. Joey starts washing the plates and I dry. I stack them in our cupboard. Sometimes I turn on Shania Twain. Sometimes I take my shirt off to dance around and make him laugh. Sometimes the hot water steams up the kitchen and makes my underarms prickle with sweat. Usually one of us says, I love Meatball Monday. Maybe we say it two or three times. And I feel so good. Just sated.
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When I go into someone’s home for work (I really love sitting in people’s living rooms for work), I say, Are you a shoes-off household? I ask, Where would you like me to sit?
When someone calls me, upset and disturbed, I answer in a calm voice. Okay, I say. Tell me more, I say, and I don’t raise my voice. I often say, Keep me posted. I love being kept posted. I love to get the text later.
I keep a big spreadsheet on my computer: Case tasks. There’s a whole color-coding system. Every so often the entries are so piled up I can’t tell what’s really important. I like to take out a clean sheet of paper and group the cases together in these bubbles and circles. I connect them with arrows and write down the themes. One group: RETURN HOME. One group: YOUTH. An arrow: ↑connection, ↑quality time. An arrow: ↑resources follow-through. It’s my way of seeing a little more clearly how I might manage this or that project, how I might get a handle on an important relationship.
When I go to court for one of my cases, I sometimes run into an attorney who I share some different case with. We pass in the hallway and I say, Oh, can I snag you for a minute on our other case? That’s pretty fun, actually.
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I don’t do the same thing all the time at work. The day before I opened a document on my computer to write this down, here’s what I did: I drove to the apartment of this nineteen-year-old I know. She was getting kicked out. That morning, after I hadn’t heard from her in a week and a half of trying to text and call her, she texted me, So when are you coming to get me and my stuff??? I walked to her door. I knocked on the door and she answered, Just a minute! I stood in the hallway for five minutes and smelled a burning smell and knocked again and called her name, and she yelled FUCK!
I said, Here’s what I can do. I agreed to load bags and boxes of her stuff into my car, then take her to the pawn shop, then drive her to the hotel I had reserved for her. I stood with her in her room. She said, If you had just told me before if you could take me to the fucking pawn shop, I’d already be ready by now, but you had to be a fucking bitch! She threw a duffel bag across the room and it rattled her window. I stepped into the hallway and said in a relaxed voice, I’m here when you’re ready. We took the bags to my car. We drove to the pawn shop. She asked me to wait outside and I told her I would wait for twenty minutes, then come in. I went in after twenty minutes and she was piling stuff back into her purse. She said, No, they didn’t take anything.
We drove to the hotel. She picked at the skin around her fingernails in the front seat. We talked all through the twenty-minute drive. That’s my favorite part of this job, the talking. It’s like surfing, I imagine, although I’ve never actually been surfing before. Just staying present, alert. Being in flow. Listening to the other person, and adapting myself to them. I’ve been pretty worried about you, I said. Can I tell you some of the things I’ve noticed? A couple weeks ago, when we had that phone meeting, it was really hard to understand what you were saying, like you were slurring your words. You didn’t sound like yourself. And then I haven’t heard from you in a couple weeks, even though I’ve been trying to get in touch with you. I guess it’s making me worry that you might be using.
A few moments of quiet. Yeah, you make a good point, I guess I can see why you might be worried about that. But I’ve just been tired.
She was wearing very elaborate eye makeup and her hands were dirty. The makeup thing gets me every time. It reminds me of other sad girls I know. Really, all the sad girls remind me of one girl. I’d like to write, That’s another story, but that one might secretly be the only story, the story I might not ever write down.
We brought her bags to her room. I took her through the Burger King drive-through next to the hotel. I scheduled a visit with her for the next day. I said, You have my number, okay?
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I read The Sabbath a few years ago. Rabbi Heschel says that the sabbath is a cathedral in time. All my cherished rituals are like that, like built places to me: structured, spacious.
I am always looking for somewhere that is big enough to put all of my love. It’s just that I want so much nearness. I want everyone to be in my house. I want to tell everyone how much I love them. In Pisgah last September even the goodbye embraces were like a sacrament to me. How much love is it acceptable to have for one’s most-beloved friends? When I look at McKenzie and Henry, I have exactly that amount, plus one tablespoon more.
Even when I get what I want, I want more. I want the party to last not only all night but also forever. We went to Atlanta in the spring and stayed up until four o’clock in the morning drinking and talking, and all I want is more. I want the ceremony, the games, the singing. I want the hand on the back of the neck and the kisses on the cheek. I want everyone to say I love you and mean it.
Sometimes when I tell someone what I do for work, they might say in response, That sounds hard. I usually hum noncommittally. Or I say, Sometimes! But I really love it. I don’t often find it hard, actually. I often find it demanding, which I like. There is so much inside of me. Fervor and energy charging through me. I want to have things demanded of me. I want to find myself obligated to other people, to see there is a task in front of me and to find myself equal to the task. I need to be needed, like we all do, and I need to make places where I can give what I have. Now I’m thinking of that lyric from The Sound of Music: A dream that will need/all the love you can give. That’s what I want.
I think if I talked about how I really feel all the time, it might come off a little intense. After all, we don’t have very many outlets for expressing galloping transcendent feelings of love for neighbors, friends, strangers, all of humanity, even family. So I tell our friends to come visit any time and stay in our second bedroom, and whenever I leave a client’s home, I say, You have my number — text or call or whatever! Subtext: I am madly, wildly in love with you, and so glad we get to be together in this brief moment in time on this miraculous planet.
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Remember Maurice Sendak, remember Where the Wild Things Are? The wild things say, I’ll eat you up, I love you so. That’s what I want. I want all the kids to be mine. I want to eat all the babies in the world. I want everything to be fine for everyone.
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We went to Rome at the start of the summer and walked through all the old places. I thought so much about history and tragedy and how violent we are and how small and tender our lives are. I thought about my work in the world, my place in the world, my ability or inability to make things the way I think they should be. I looked at Joey, crying a little, and said, How do you find yourself in all of this? Already, I don’t even remember what he said exactly. But I remember the feeling of expecting him to know the answer, expecting that he would be able to comfort me and offer his calm wisdom, like he always does.
One night we lay in bed chatting. Joey said, You just reminded me of something, here — and he turned on a Walter Martin song. And Walter Martin sang all about his wife’s grandfather and his long life and all the joy and the sadness, and we both surprised ourselves by crying in bed next to each other, totally overcome.
I’m always looking for a place to put all of my love. I wonder, Can I put it into work, or making meatballs every week? Can I put it into all of human history? Can I put it into the outdoor world, the entire earth, the mountain ranges echoing with triumphant sunshine? Can I put it into the biggest ideas I can think of, about gender and political consciousness and, you know, society?
But I lay in bed with my husband in a little apartment in Rome, and Walter Martin sang
Last summer at my 96th birthday in August/I looked at my children holding their children,/and their children’s children/I sipped a cold beer/and ate peanuts on the porch with my brother-in-law/We talked about old friends and gardening and the wives we’d both lost/and my old heart was overcome with both joy and sadness –
and I thought that maybe this life, my life, the one I am still making so carefully out of my job and my Thursdays at home with friends and my morning walks and my singing in the car and my dinners with my mom and my Saturdays with Joey, is the right-sized place for all of this love after all.
