Right and wrong

I don’t feel like talking, I don’t even want to think. I feel numbed to the five senses, sight, hearing, touch, smell, taste – nothing, all numb.

I can’t enjoy the purple and white crossbars of the lilac petals outside my window. The soprano chirping of the whippoorwills outside my window, those birds nesting in the 150-year-old oak tree outside my fourth-floor window, it goes in one ear and right out the other. I don’t hear the “Mama, Mama!” tones of their chirping. When I rub my hands across the muscular contours of my decades-long worked-out torso (the muscles fading behind the sun-blotched skin) … I feel no sense of arousal, I remember nothing of the men who’d massaged my torso, their appreciative remarks, how it excited them. And the bakery downstairs at the corner of 78th and Lexington, who cares how good the pastries smell at 5:30 in the morning? At last I think of food, how much savored the basil-infused beef tenderloin, the roasted carrots melting in my mouth, the lumpy mashed potatoes prepared for our ritual Sunday dinners by my mother with a curvy pucker on her mouth for the six of us, her eyes always softening as we ran into the dining room, taking the same seats we’d sat in for years, feeling the security of our willow-thin mother and our burly father.

I could sense those things, at least until that Monday that my father kissed my ,other on the way out the door, replaced in a heartbeat by a slit-mouthed policeman knocking on the door, muttering quietly about the accident – and my mother’s curvy pucker, soft eyes, and willowy thinness receded behind the dining table’s candles. And since the day when my husband walked out our own door that last time – this time, instead of heading toward a car crash, heading toward the arms of a younger woman with firmer breasts and suppler hips – I’ve sensed no things at all.