Decision to Postpone

Rebecca Grace Cyr

I’ve been on hold with the pharmacy for forty minutes. During the forty-fifth minute, I pull a book off the shelf and flip through it with one hand. I don’t know what I’m looking for, but I find it soon enough, on page seventy-two, narrated by a character who survived a car crash. I read the sentence to myself, then I yell it over the line’s waterlogged reprise of The Four Seasons.

“I BELIEVE THAT NINETY-NINE PERCENT OF WHAT ANYONE DOES CAN BE EFFECTIVELY POSTPONED!”

Feeling better, I hang up, close the book, and think about what else I can put off—mailing that package, for example, or paying that bill. The dishes, in addition, can be done another day, and I don’t even notice the smell of those trash bags anymore. As far as groceries go, I’ve got enough soup cans to survive a food shortage, and the half a pot of coffee will hold me till the AM.

In the meantime, the socks and sheets will stay unwashed, the floors unswept, the texts unanswered, and the flowers wilting. Tomorrow, I can buy new ones. I can buy a bouquet of lavender, call back the pharmacy, and mend the hole in my denim dress. I can finish that movie I started, or start that book I’ve been meaning to finish. I might even get a good night’s sleep. But for now, all of that can be effectively postponed.

What can’t be postponed is the sealed jar of fabric squares, steeped in Grandma’s perfume, or the memories that follow after I remove it from my desk drawer, stick my nose under the lid, and inhale. Then it’s air-conditioned rooms in Dallas. Radio static on hot, wide highways. Looping blue cursive and long voicemails. Giant and Jeopardy! and celery sticks with pimento spread. The bad grapefruits she’d call “woody.” The good grapefruits she’d eat with salt. The trick she taught me to get rid of hiccups (infallible!). The dark plaid pattern on her favorite chair, which we’d dig out of the garage every time she visited, which still smells like her perfume, though she hasn’t sat in it for years.

— For Gram