I Quit

A friend of mine has quit her job many times over, in writing, verbally, and yet, every time I see her she feels the need to say it again- I quit. Today I say I quit the wedding racket- no more commercial white and sleepless nights over how the party will turn out. That’s not who I am. I am quitting my job as well, and the state of California, also being single, my computer, my DVD player, come August my cell phone, and then, I quit the country. And then there is Jane, who, after six years of fighting cancer with teeth bared, holding a cup of tea and distributing shortbread all the while, finally kicked up her heels and said I quit, too. After I quit vomiting from the stomach flu, I called to cancel our meeting, knowing that a silly little stomach flu paled in comparison to her particular bout with chemo, but that I couldn’t make it, nonetheless. “She is sleeping,” her husband said. I never saw her again. Her son, my student, will graduate from the 8th grade this year. In trying to think of something to say at this graduation, I feel so young. They are just beginning, just breaking forth into who they are, who they want to be, what they will be. How does one make sense of a life but to live it? I feel that I, too am just stepping forth, onto a different cog in this wheel, a few steps ahead of them, a few steps behind Jane. And that’s that. A few steps. So I quit, and in so doing, I begin.

Marie Louise de Bourbon

Shivering on my bed experiencing the last queesy vestiges of a violent stomach flu, I was reminded of Maria Luisa, originally Marie Louise de Bourbon, niece of Louis XIV, as described by Kathryn Harrison in her gruesome, martyred, spectral, work of historical fiction, Poison. Maria Luisa became so after her arranged marriage to the impotent, pasty skinned king of Spain, Carlos II. She failed to produce an heir, and eventually died a vomitous death brought on by poison. Harrison imagines the poison as an overdose of Spanish Fly, slipped into her addictive opiate friend laudanum, which she took daily to surive her depression in dismal inquisition era Spain. Once the vomiting began, the court's doctor saved all of it for inspection, hoping to detect the source of her illness. Gold and ceramic steaming bowls of royal puke were whisked away by handmaids to be poked and prodded. Gross. After a week or so of her vomitting, they slaughtered a goat at her feet, and covered her with the warm, bloody skin, hoping that the animal's sacrificed life would revive the other wasting spirit. But she died, and in so doing escaped the prison her royalty had offered her. Me, I survived.