Letters to Eternity

The two sat at the dinner table, which had been a fiftieth-anniversary gift from June’s sister. Made of dark cherry wood, it matched the cabinets in the kitchen and complimented the deep green upholstery on the couch in the den. The silence of the fields and the forest was beyond their walls.

Arthur and June sat side by side, very close, their chairs turned slightly towards each other. They had cooked dinner tonight as they always had: together, with some soft singer crooning at them from the turntable in the corner, with soup bubbling on the stovetop and bread rising on top of the fireplace and potatoes roasting in the oven. Arthur liked to make precise calculations and measurements when he cooked, following recipes exactly and using his kitchen scale that weighed everything in grams. June preferred spontaneity, piling ingredients into the pot and stirring haphazardly, and using unprecedented amounts of salt and pepper.

“June, stop!”

“What?”

“June, you can’t put that in yet, I haven’t measured it-- June!”

“It was the right amount, honey, I promise--”

“Well, at the very least, will you please measure the salt out into a teaspoon?”
“Don’t you trust that my hands are clean?”

Arthur covers his eyes with an oven mitt. “Oh my god, I can’t watch.”

June kisses him, grinning, then turns and steals a slice of carrot from a pile that waits patiently on the tray of the kitchen scale.

They dance together to the music as they cook.

The kitchen was clean. They had only made enough food for the two of them, for one night. That was all they needed, for the mornings, which had been coming for them every day of their sixty-four years together, would forget them altogether tomorrow.

A mortar and pestle, bought by Arthur (“Arthur, when will we ever use a mortar and pestle?” “Well, I don’t know, but we may want it at some point. And it’s such a lovely color!” “Good lord.”) at a craft fair in Vermont in the ‘90s, was the only thing that remained on the countertop. The orange bottle had been thrown in the trash after it’s contents had been crushed and added to the soup.

June and Arthur talked. They’d forgotten much, over the years, and their bodies were crumpled under time’s weight, but they remembered their first meeting and they remembered their wedding and, most of all, they remembered their love.

June exits out the stage door, bag over her shoulder and makeup still shining on her face under layers of dried sweat. A man approaches shyly as she walks away, but he speeds up his steps, almost hopping down the alley, to call out to her.

“Excuse me? Miss Soto?”

She turns, surprised.

“Hi, I’m sorry to bother you, I just wanted to tell you that you were the best up there. I mean, I don’t really know anything about ballet, but I think you were the best. The most emotion. You looked like you were feeling instead of just dancing. It was beautiful.”

She stares, surprised. “Um, thank you.”

He looks at her, nervous and awkward, and then suddenly starts and pulls his backpack from his shoulders. “I have these for you too. I forgot.”

A bouquet of daisies.

“I came to see the ballet last week and I saw you and I. . . Well, I only got the nerve to talk to you tonight, and I brought you these because, well, it’s what you do for performers and I also wanted to know if you’d go out to dinner with me?”

They are in bed.

She presses her fingertips to the tissue paper skin above his cheekbones, next to his eyes. There are webs of wrinkles now, and she lightly traces a trail through these cracks with her fingernail.

When she smiles, he taps her teeth with his own fingernail. She has small teeth, which he frequently calls pearls.

She sneaks her hand into his armpit and tickles him until he shrieks and they fall into each other laughing.

“What is your favorite smell from your childhood?”

“My favorite smell?”

“Yeah.”

“My mother’s pointe shoes, when they were new and stiff and shiny. She would sit on her bed and sew the ribbons on, and she let me hit them with books to break them in for her. And they smelled like pointe shoe, I don’t know how to describe it. Satin and glue and cardboard, put together to make something painful and beautiful.”

“June?”

“Mm?”

“You know how much I love you, don’t you?”
“Of course I do, you fool, I married you!”

Some time passes.

“You know, I love you too.”

June squeezed Arthur’s knee under the table. Her hands shook from age, not from fear.

“Are you ready?”

“If I’m not ready now, I’ll never be ready for the next stroke.”

“Fair enough.”

“And we’ll have a few hours.”

“Probably until nine tonight.”

“And we can just fall asleep.”

“Together.”

“All right. I’m ready.”

They started to eat.

They sit at the counter, not looking at each other. The sound of the city roars beyond their walls, but there is silence in the apartment. Words have been exhausted, expressions have been set in stone.

Minutes or hours later, June leans into Arthur’s shoulder and starts to cry. He holds her and cries too.

“I’m sorry.”

“I am too.”

A hospital pillow cushions Arthur’s head. Blankets and a robe shroud his bent frame; an IV tube is buried in the skin of his arm. June holds his hand to her lips, her own hands clasped around his in prayer.

She later learns that he will have no lasting brain damage, and she cries of relief for hours. She never lets go of his hand.

He has another stroke four years later, and another the year after that. He slowly begins to show signs of deterioration.

Both of June’s knees and one of her hips are replaced while she is in her seventies -- ballet had treated her roughly.

They finished the meal. They had decided beforehand to be joyful and grateful on this night, so they laughed and talked and kissed with mouths full of asparagus and soup. They held the last sixty-four years between them like the moon is held between the earth and the sun.

Before they retired to their room, they pulled a shoebox from the top of one of their bookshelves and brought it with them into bed. Inside were the letters that they had written back and forth, when June went on a two-year tour across the country with her company. The envelopes were yellowed, some with hearts drawn in the corners or a note scrawled along the edge of the flap. Each letter itself was nearly torn where it had been folded for so long, but the ink was dark and legible, and Arthur and June pulled them out and read pieces aloud to each other, smiling at poignancy or laughing at dramaticism.

When had read two years worth of their lives, they replaced the letters in the box and took pen and paper from the drawer of the nightstand. June wrote, for Arthur’s hands shook more than hers, and they left the letter for their loved ones to find.

They made love, drowsy and lightheaded, with no concern for orgasm or heat. They simply sought to be as close to the other as possible, and held each other in any way that their tired bodies would allow.

When they had finished, they remained close, naked in the center of the bed with the bedclothes retired underneath their sagging and shelled frames. Judith’s cheek was pressed to Arthur’s chest; she listened to his feeble heart as she had a million years ago, and she felt no regret or doubt. Arthur kissed the top of her head. She wriggled up to him so that they were facing one another, lying on their sides.

She kissed him.

“Here’s to hoping that eternity exists, my love.”

“It does for us, Junie. I believe that it does for us.”

And they fell asleep, foreheads pressed together, final breaths mingling in the space between their lips.