Of Fireworks and Friendship

Finding the things that last.

Is there anything more depressing than watching fireworks alone? It turns out that there is: watching them alone from my own backyard.

Putting on my shoes, getting ready to take out the trash, I hear a popping sound. A bang. Another. The neighbor kids, two doors down? No, the noise is coming from the opposite direction.

The golf course.

Only a block from my house, but on the other side of the proverbial tracks. I never get the emails. It’s June 27. July 4th is a week away. As usual, the country club is setting off fireworks early.

Some years, they do it on the 3rd. Once, it was the Thursday prior to the Sunday that was the actual holiday. I haven’t checked the calendar to see if June 27 falls forty nights after the strawberry moon, but I doubt it. Is there a rhubarb moon? That might make more sense.

The trash bag is one-third full. Because I didn’t buy enough fresh produce, I don’t have the usual package of spinach, pair of cucumbers and an eggplant to toss after four days in the fridge. Today is Friday; garbage pickup is on Monday. Ahead lies another weekend of sort-of sorting, pretending to cull. I still have three bottles of expired salad dressing in the refrigerator door. My husband liked Green Goddess, Mission Fig, and Thousand Island. I’m keeping them a little longer because I like to recite their names. Grouped together, they’re the Salad Supremes. Baby lettuce, where did your leaves go? I make my own balsamic. Boring.

At least I’ve halfway filled the recycling bin. Although no one is deceived by the widow-sized garbage container, I do my best to pretend I’m a family of four. In the corner cupboard, on the lowest shelf, are two canisters of the protein powder that made him gag. In his closet, I find a broken umbrella and yet another pair of slippers. A cache of cough drops glued to their wrappers, a trove of unmended socks I somehow missed during the first round, two years ago. Death cleaning never ends.

The thirteen-gallon bag stretches, almost to bursting, as I wrangle it shut.

Standing on the back deck, I pause. Some of the fireworks seduce through sound as well as light. Whistle; boom. Crackle, scratch, sizzle. I feel like a trespasser. Like I’ve wandered, uninvited, into a stranger’s lawn party in a Cheever story. But more than that, I’m reminded of The Great Gatsby.

Bright bursts: flappers in their tiers of fringe. Champagne corks flying everywhere. The sky above the golf course explodes, an urgent narrative nearing its inevitable conclusion. Gatsby stands in the shadows as his world flames out over a golf course in St. Paul, Minnesota, his creator’s hometown.

You’re being weird, I tell myself. Literature, fireworks: an incendiary mix. I take one last look — cool, how did they do that, they’re getting so much better — and go indoors.

Standing in front of the sink, I drink a full glass of cold water. Staying hydrated, so important. My ribs contract around the stilled molecules in my chest. I wonder if this is anything like the pain my husband felt as cancer began to spread through his lungs.

Or is it grief? Simple, complicated, squamous-cell, benign, malignant? Could be a lot of things. Insomnia. I should set reminders on my AppleWatch. Fluids. Lunesta.

I count my breaths in all of the ways I’ve learned, remembering that the release is more important than the intake. All is exhalation. Sound, then silence. In fireworks, in novels, in life. After the final boom, there may be applause on the other side of the golf course. If there is, I don’t hear it.

---

Dear F. Scott Fitzgerald,

When The Great Gatsby was published one hundred years ago, it was a flop not given the critical acclaim it so richly deserved. The book is now required to be enthusiastically read in some most all of the finest American high schools. Apologies if you’ve already heard. I mean, you moved on. And there was no Internet.

I’ve followed your footsteps down Summit Avenue and up Cathedral Hill. Had a few dinners at the elegant restaurant that was once a drugstore where you loitered over bootleg sodas with friends. Gazed with longing at the golf course, thinking of your sledding parties, flirtations, and getting dumped being cruelly spurned, sending you straight to some floozy named Zelda strengthening your resolve to go on to become the author of, arguably, the greatest American novel of the twentieth century all time.

They named a theatre after you. Bronze plaques mark the addresses where you lived. A statue of you stood in front of your old prep school, until someone took a blowtorch to it and tried to sell it for scrap recently, when it was removed for refurbishing.

I feel sad. Tired. Lost. Why ban The Great Gatsby? Why ban any book?

What? Oh, nothing.

More explosions. Rattling the windows. Is this the alternate ending, the one that ends not in darkness but —

No?

---

I don’t know how to characterize this piece I’m writing. Two trains running? My brain does strange things at this unexpected time. Nothing is straightforward. It’s six a.m. and I’m going to try to get some sleep.

You’re on your own.

---

Last week, I drove north from the Twin Cities to stay with friends. Jeannie and Brian live in Texas. For twenty years, they were my next-door neighbors.

Bless their hearts, what a place. Huge bedrooms and baths, a deck perfect for morning coffee and evening charcuterie, three TVs, stone fireplace, loft, whirlpool.

For two days and two nights, we engaged in life’s higher pursuits: walleye, wine, Netflix, and watching the Lynx beat the Mystics, WNBA players in an arena filled with girls who want to be just like them. The thought occurred that they may not have that chance. We drank more wine and went to bed.

The big questions came up:

• When, on menus from diners to wagyu steakhouses, did sandwiches become “handhelds?”

• As for “sea salt”: doesn’t all salt come from the sea?

• Reading glasses. I buy mine at Costco, three to a pack, squarish and unflattering but they work. Many times a day, they disappear. After searching purses, pockets, drawers, and under sofa cushions, I discover four pairs huddled together in plain view on a table or desk. How is this herding instinct bred into them? Costco, what are you hiding?

• Cataracts. When I had my surgery, they gave me a choice: Near vision, or far vision? Easy, I said. I need to see highway signs. Nine-point font? Isn’t that what readers are for?

• Hahahahaha.

In a nearby town I bought two tops. One is teal, long-sleeved, with an asymmetrical cut. The other is printed in shades of blue, with a trapeze hem. I’m relating these details because these are the first clothes I’ve bought in five years and I’m relearning Fashion, a language I once spoke at the intermediate level.

Before leaving home, I gave myself a pedicure. Applied polish to all ten toenails. Gave myself bonus points for not missing any of them, and for not spilling acetone all over the bathroom floor.

I forgot to bring open-toed sandals. The peachy-pink, iridescent enamel is my secret, like silk underwear.

---

When I was twelve, I learned about fireworks.

At that time, they weren’t shot off after every event. Not concerts, winning games, civic celebrations, birthday parties or because some obtuse teenager wanted to make his baby sister cry. It was only on the Fourth of July that people drove to the places where trained professionals (guys missing fingers) sent rockets into the sky, usually from a boat on one of the lakes in a state that brags of having more than ten thousand of them.

We drenched ourselves in bug spray and wore light jackets. I had a cheap windbreaker, already unraveling at the seams. But in the darkness, it wouldn’t have been too noticeable.

Of course, the neighbor lady noticed. Before we climbed into our Rambler station wagon, she found the spot that would utterly deflate me, and punctured it.

“You have a shell! And it fits, even though you’re tall for your age.”

How did she do it? Tall for your age. A shell. It fits.

No it does not fit, look at my wrists sticking out, I ruined the sixth-grade class picture because I turned the wrong way and slumped, middle of the top row, tallest girl in class, trust Mary to ruin everything. It’s not a shell, it’s a windbreaker.

I got in the car with Mom, Dad, my youngest brother, his buddy, the neighbor lady and her daughter, my age, who I was forced to be friends with, who was short and wasn’t blond like me and went to a special school and did not know how to read.

What I learned about fireworks was that they weren’t exciting and half were duds and the oohs and ahhs meant nothing, the grand finale was nothing, and I was nothing.

I learned that age twelve was the dividing line: you no longer went to see fireworks in a station wagon with your family and your tormenters. You went with your friends, some who were older, some who were boyfriends or girlfriends, and you wore an actual windbreaker and sat on the roof or the hood of the car and paid no attention to the fireworks. Or you stayed home.

I stayed home.

---

Friendships are hard for me. Fraught. I pull back, afraid to be vulnerable. This does not mean I am rejecting you. It means that I’m still learning.

In the next few weeks, I have a couple of stories to tell about friendships that ended painfully after many years. These are stories of disenfranchised grief. I’ve been waiting a long time to tell them. The grief is real. You may have been through such a loss.

But if you’re lucky, you have people like Brian and Jeannie in your life. They are you true friends, the ones who won’t flame out and disappear. Treasure them.

---

Dear friends,

This is a love letter. To you, to friends, to F. Scott Fitzgerald, and to the famous final sentence of The Great Gatsby:

“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

I don’t believe it has to be that way.

~ With love,

Mary

"A Widow's Journey" cracked me wide open. Every word an arrow to my heart. Writers like you are the reason why I love language. Thank you." ~ Betsy

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