{"id":513,"date":"2010-09-27T00:52:20","date_gmt":"2010-09-27T04:52:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.jerseydevilpress.com\/?page_id=513"},"modified":"2010-09-27T00:52:20","modified_gmt":"2010-09-27T04:52:20","slug":"to-do-list","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"http:\/\/www.jerseydevilpress.com\/?page_id=513","title":{"rendered":"To Do List"},"content":{"rendered":"

by Morowa Yejid\u00e9
\n
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\nI\u2019ve got to drive up to Ypsilanti this weekend, and it\u2019s got to be this Saturday because the Fourth of July weekend is when they run the specials on the grave plots.\u00a0 I want to get a good one.\u00a0 I want one with a tree, a maple.\u00a0 No, an oak.\u00a0 Rodman has the nerve to tell me this morning, after thirty-three years of marriage, that he doesn\u2019t approve<\/em> of me going\u2014which is 100% insane because I don\u2019t need his approval to pick out my own burial plot.\u00a0 He\u2019ll be standing there, arguing with the funeral home director about what\u2019s best for his wife, cramming his feelings into long, condescending discussions with the notary public and the attorney.\u00a0 I know him.\u00a0 He\u2019ll be stretching his fury and fears into taut, pronounce-each-syllable words to the insurance representative and the social security benefits clerk.\u00a0 And he\u2019ll do it all without looking me in the eye.<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t want to see all of that.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ll rent a car myself, and I\u2019ll drive up to Michigan tomorrow morning and I\u2019ll buy my spot at the Ypsilanti Groves of Peace.\u00a0 Done.\u00a0 Then I\u2019m going to dump these damned horse choking pills in the toilet because for one thing, they\u2019re placebos anyway.\u00a0 They didn\u2019t work six months ago, they don\u2019t work now, and they won\u2019t work tomorrow.\u00a0 So I\u2019m going to flush them and tell that ridiculous nurse that she can stop tattling on me to the oncologist about his nuclear-research-waste-away medications.\u00a0 If I\u2019ve got to throw up, let it be from an Atlantic City frankfurter drowning in mustard and sauerkraut, or too much Ben & Jerry\u2019s, or motion sickness on the boat Rodman and I used to sail on late Sunday afternoons.<\/p>\n

We used to float together on the lake when the water was crystal in the dimming light, when the sun was melting like a great candle.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve got to get stamps and send my sister Karen a card.\u00a0 I\u2019ll write a little note of apology on it too.\u00a0 Because I\u2019m sure I hurt her feelings when she said that I should stop smoking, now that I\u2019ve been diagnosed, and I said: \u201cWhat the fuck does it matter now?\u201d\u00a0 That was a low blow, because for one thing Karen likes to hunt and gather all those natural things like mammals used to do in Jurassic times, except she goes to the organic store instead of the Amazon Rain Forest.\u00a0 She\u2019s big on the tofu and nuts and berries, and who am I to judge?\u00a0 That\u2019s just her bag, and she\u2019s never said an unkind thing to me.\u00a0 Not since we were girls, when I wanted to go out with her and her friends, and she would tell me no.\u00a0 And I blew up at her for commenting about the Virginia Slims and offering me a chewable Vitamin C.\u00a0 I lost my cool.\u00a0 But it wasn\u2019t as if I didn\u2019t know what was happening to me.<\/p>\n

I just knew too much.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ll write a note on Karen\u2019s card and think only of when she was sixteen and I was fourteen, and she had miscarried in the bathroom.\u00a0 I had offered my shoulder for her to cry on, and she had said:\u00a0 Let\u2019s run away.\u00a0 I\u2019ll think only of us riding in the blueness of twilight on the open road, in the station wagon she had stolen from our parents.\u00a0 I had twelve dollars in my pocket and she had a driver\u2019s permit in her purse.\u00a0 We had been free of everything in existence for thirty-five minutes on the New Jersey Turnpike before the police caught up with us.\u00a0 But I\u2019ll think only of the two of us tracing those white lines, with the smoke stacks signaling our exodus, and the grey air burning our eyes and our souls.\u00a0 I\u2019ll think of the fate we thought we controlled for thirty-five minutes when I lick the envelope, when I pin it under the windshield of Karen\u2019s car without ringing the doorbell.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ll leave an informed message on the graduate student\u2019s answering machine, Rodman\u2019s mistress.\u00a0 She\u2019ll want to know that after two years of being aware of her existence, I never once feared her taking my place; that years from now, after she\u2019s finished graduate school and started her own family and sat alone with her thoughts by the window, she\u2019ll understand that there are many ways to win and there are many ways to lose.\u00a0 She\u2019ll erase my message after listening to it, but she\u2019ll file it in the archives of her mind.\u00a0 She\u2019ll reference it when the time comes and know that even if Rodman had never happened, I was right.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve got to stop at the post office to send my novel to the United States Copyright Office, with a check for the filing fee.\u00a0 I don\u2019t even care anymore that \u201cOne Day\u201d was never published because for one thing, I know that there will come a day when all that constitutional white marble will be chipped away.\u00a0 All that monument stone will just be chalky silt, and somebody will go down in that mile-deep basement and open up my yellow-paged unbound book.\u00a0 They\u2019ll open up the singular edition of \u201cOne Day,\u201d and it\u2019ll be just as good a read then as it is now.\u00a0 All about the woman, the heroine, that chose career first, that chose a man first, that chose to have pets instead of children.\u00a0 I\u2019m not going to make a copy of it.\u00a0 I\u2019ll mail the original.<\/p>\n

It\u2019ll be the only real proof that I was here.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve got to get that dress I saw at Neiman Marcus: the red one with the A-line.\u00a0 I am not going to be put down in one of those ugly-ass granny dresses with the lace trim and the darts in the front; the kind of dress that you look at and right away you think of tired, muddy women in the Mississippi Delta.\u00a0 They buried Mama in one of those wrecks and I was never able to shake the sight of it.\u00a0 Mama in that sickening paisley sack, surrounded by bouquets of flowers that should have been given to her when she was living.\u00a0 Not me.\u00a0 That\u2019s why I\u2019ve got to pick up some long stems today.\u00a0 And I\u2019m not going to the little florist by the house that I\u2019ve been going to for ten years, just because I\u2019ve known Margaret for ten years.\u00a0 I\u2019m going to the market out in the country.\u00a0 They\u2019ve got the biggest, prettiest flowers out there.\u00a0 All the way past the traffic and the downtown shops and the golf courses and the freeway, to the road that has only two lanes, where the world is small and quiet.<\/p>\n

Where I can forget about all of the things I\u2019ve been meaning to do.
\n
<\/br>
\n
<\/br>
\nMOROWA YEJID\u00c9<\/strong> is a native of Washington, D.C. Her short stories have appeared in the Istanbul Literary Review, Ascent Aspirations Magazine, The Taj Mahal Review, Underground Voices, and The Adirondack Review. Her story “Tokyo Chocolate” was one of the ten stories published in the 2009 Willesden Herald Anthology, and was nominated for the 2009 Pushcart Prize. She currently lives in Atlanta, Georgia, with her husband and three sons.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

by Morowa Yejid\u00e9 I\u2019ve got to drive up to Ypsilanti this weekend, and it\u2019s got to be this Saturday because the Fourth of July weekend is when they run the specials on the grave plots.\u00a0 I want to get a … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":318,"menu_order":3,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","template":"","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-513","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/P15duy-8h","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jerseydevilpress.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/513","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jerseydevilpress.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jerseydevilpress.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jerseydevilpress.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jerseydevilpress.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=513"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.jerseydevilpress.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/513\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":514,"href":"http:\/\/www.jerseydevilpress.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/513\/revisions\/514"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jerseydevilpress.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/318"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jerseydevilpress.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=513"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}