The Goodbye Dinner by Dorothy Barnhouse

I’m getting ready for a doctor’s appointment when Lucy pokes her head into my room and tells me that T texted and asked if she could come over for the goodbye dinner.  “What goodbye dinner?” I ask and Lucy shrugs. I write a poem in my head as I shower and by the time I towel off, it’s gone. Maybe that’s what my dream was about, the dream I woke up thinking about, of a man – a handsome actor type, no one I knew — sitting in a rocking chair on a porch, a bare red lightbulb swaying above him. In the dream I was looking at the porch and saying to myself, “Oh, this is an abortion clinic.” When I woke up, I thought, “That dream was about an abortion clinic.” Now I wonder what the difference is, the difference between ‘being’ and ‘being about.’ I think that maybe the poem I just wrote and lost in the shower is a kind of abortion and that’s what the dream was about, but of course the dream happened before the shower. Still, it’s a thought I hold onto for a minute. Then I realize that last night at dinner, when M asked how my novel was going and I told her I had decided to put it aside — it was no longer satisfying and I didn’t know what I was doing (plot and all that) – I realize that was the first time I said to anyone but myself that I was abandoning the novel, so maybe the dream was about me aborting my novel, and last night’s dinner with M was the goodbye dinner, a goodbye dinner for my novel. In other words, by the time Lucy mentioned the goodbye dinner to me as a possible future event with T, it had, in fact, already happened with M. This makes a kind of sense because last night Lucy, M and I were on the roof watching a storm come in. We were drinking a bottle of wine that M had brought. It was pink and cold and Spanish and when M took it out of her bag to give to me, she said she remembered I liked it, and even though M is technically Lucy’s friend, not my friend, I was overcome with gratitude for my children and their friends who have grown up and do things like bring wine to dinner and ask questions like, “How’s your novel going?” but as we were talking and drinking wine, a flash of lightning happened. No singular jagged bolt this, this was the whole of New Jersey, the entire western horizon lighting up like a stage. All three of us jumped and screamed at the same time and then laughed because of our simultaneity and how girlish we sounded. At least that’s why I laughed. The sky turned a color that sky usually isn’t and even though we were all there together looking at the same sky, we all felt a need to describe it. “Purple,” Lucy said. “Brown,” said M. I said, “Bruise,” and we watched it moving toward us, filling the sky. Then Jack came home and joined us on the roof and said, “Wow, the sky looks like a bruise” and I thought, “I have to find another word — ‘bruise’ is too easy.”  The lightning got closer and each time it lit up the sky, it took us by surprise, and we all jumped and screamed and then laughed at our fear. Lucy must have seen a look in my eyes because she said, “Don’t worry, Mom, it will hit that before it hits us.” She was pointing to the metal vents that poke out of the roof of the building next door. But what I was thinking at that moment was what it would feel like to be hit by lightning and whether now would be a good time to experience that. When the rain started falling — big ploppy drops that were going to soak us — we went downstairs. I turned on the stove to finish the shrimp and the corn and then I saw the salad bowl full of kale, which I’d already washed and cut, and suddenly I remembered the slivered almonds. I had laid them out in a single layer on a baking sheet and put them under the broiler to brown. “Shit!” I said and opened the oven, expecting burn and char, but the almonds were a beautiful golden brown. I turned to Jack. “Did you turn the oven off?” He said no. I looked at the clock. It was 30 minutes slow. I said, “We blew a fuse again.” This has been happening ever since we replaced our windows — the contractor somehow messed up the wiring so the air conditioner and the living room lights can’t be on at the same time. Every time we blow a fuse, Jack says “Fuck you, Alex,” Alex being the name of the window contractor. But as I looked at the golden-brown almonds, which I was going to sprinkle on top of the carefully washed and cut kale, I thought that if that fuse hadn’t blown, I would have burned down the house. Me, upstairs on the roof with my daughter and her friend and our pink wine, trying to put words onto a sky that has no need for words while one floor below, the slow lick of flames. 

But that didn’t happen. 

Or as the teacher of the on-line yoga class said – the class I took before I took the shower when I wrote and lost the poem but after the dream I had about the movie star rocking on the porch of an abortion clinic — “Try to inhabit the space between the no longer and the not yet.” 

Which brings me to the now, which is me walking down 34th Street to the doctor. It feels like travel. Macy’s is bankrupt. Victoria’s Secret is boarded up. I pass the Empire State Building where 40 years ago I had my first real job, on the 79th floor. I pass the newsstand where I would buy a pack of Marlboros every few days from a beautiful Algerian man who one day ducked out from behind the counter, touched his hand to my elbow and asked if I wanted to go out for drinks. My hair was long and blonde back then and I said yes. At the corner of Madison, I pass the building where Jack and I saw a marriage counselor for a few months. I look up, approximate where the 11th floor is, picture us there, legs crossed, arms folded. Maybe we should have had a few more sessions. I keep walking until I see the words Cancer Center on a sign cantilevered over the sidewalk. 

I have arrived. 

I wait in line to have my temperature taken. I’m asked a questionnaire’s worth of questions about Covid exposure and possible Covid exposure. I’m handed a mask even though I’m already wearing one. “Double is better,” says the intake clerk. Finally, I’m released to the elevator bank. Inside the elevator, I press 4. When I get to the fourth floor, I stand in line at the reception area where a woman in front of me is yelling, “I will not sign away my privacy.” The receptionist is shielded by plexiglass but still the waiting room is filled with women, some of us angry but most of us tired and compliant because what choice do we have. I sign and smile even though the receptionist can’t see my mouth. When the doctor finally sees me and declares me cancer free, he doesn’t leave. He leans back in his wheeled chair and faces me. He puts his hands behind his head. He wants to talk. He has dogs, he hikes, he’s had Lyme, nine months of antibiotics, he just dropped his son off at college. I sit there in my gown, the gown the nurse had handed me — “opening in front” — and I listen. I recognize that this doctor needs a rest. Not every woman will receive the same news I have just received. There is a hall full of examining room doors that he has to open. And so I sit. I nod and smile. I’m grateful, after all. This man is kind, he apologized for running late, he delivered good news. But as he talks, it dawns on me that he is the actor-man from my dream. He is handsome and confident in an actor-y kind of way. He’s even rocking as he talks, bouncing his weight into the back of his chair. As I recognize this, I also feel myself slowly filling with contempt. I don’t like this man. He’s trapping me. I’m half naked and sweating onto the paper that covers the examining table. I don’t care about his dogs, his Lyme, his son. All I need to do is stand and say, “Goodbye.” I rehearse the word as the doctor keeps talking, but it doesn’t propel me. Instead, it conjures the goodbye dinner, the one T texted Lucy about just this morning, the one that hasn’t happened yet, that was never going to happen but maybe already happened. Maybe it was last night’s dinner, the dinner with M that didn’t burn down the house because Fuck Alex didn’t know what he was doing. I think about all the other women in the waiting room and their goodbye dinners, whether they have already happened or might happen or didn’t happen. I think about the yelling woman who is, no doubt, sitting on an examining table now, gown open in front, waiting for the doctor. I think about her goodbye dinner, if it belongs to the no longer or the not yet. Maybe she’ll be lucky and it will look like mine.

I’m finally released. I get dressed. I push through the revolving door back onto 34th Street, the belt around Manhattan, the circle around my life. I retrace my steps west, back to the train toward home, and this time it’s familiar: a prophecy, a memory, a dream. 

Dorothy Barnhouse is a writer, editor and educator based in Brooklyn, NY. Her work has been honored by grants and fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Sustainable Arts Foundation, and MacDowell. She has published in Columbia: A Magazine of Poetry and Prose, and the Lindenwood Review.  

12 May 2022