Kronos, the speaker tells us, is time, chronology. Topos is, she says, a place, any shared allotment of space. She says we should tap into this idea when helping students learn. We should take them for walks, exploit their personal investment, explain to them their impact on community. Kairos is the sacred moment, the moment in which we learn or are introduced to an idea. She talks about how irrevocably our intellects attach themselves to time, knowledge that depends on where you are and whom you’re with. She talks about reason a posteriori, in terms of the consequence after the fact.
I walk out of the large room with its stadium stairs and I replay the message standing in the hall. My socks are neon green and I curl my toes in. I want to scream into the phone. I want to yell at her to keep the fuck away. My hands shake and I do not want to reenter the auditorium. I’ve left my bag and my computer. I’ve yet to sign the sign-in sheet.
When I get back inside, the word “stasis” is in all caps on the board. Beneath it, the speaker’s written “civil war.” In biology, she says, stasis is the moving of fluids back and forth. More hopeful definition, she says, then she laughs. Second century BCE. Hermagoras. These were, according to him, the different forms arguments took inside a court of law. Pre-lawyers, she says. Oft forgotten. Poor Hermagoras. She laughs. She’s taken off her sweater. The heat inside the room is stifling, thick. She wears a dark-blue short-sleeved shirt that pulls in places that suggest it was constructed for a man. She has a small vine tattoo that loops around her wrist, then spreads in thin intricate twists all up her arm. She wears glasses and pushes them up on her nose each time she writes on the board. She has a tiny speck of chalk on the left side of her cheek.
Five steps, she says, make up the basic stasis questions. One: fact or conjecture. Everything is arguable, she says, maybe most of all the facts. Two: definition. Definitions, she says, are logotropic; definitions can trope, confine, recapitulate a whole argument. Three is quality or value—what sort of act is being argued, what it’s worth. Four: cause or consequence. Five: procedure, proposal, policy—what should we do, she says, about whatever we’re arguing? How do we find a way to move on?
* * *
I go home and get our girls and somehow end up at my younger sister’s. I do not like my younger sister. I think sometimes I would like my younger sister if we had not, our whole lives, been in a not-quite-clearly-constituted fight over who deserved to make it out intact.
She doesn’t mean it, my sister says, on the too-hard loveseat my parents bought her. She never cut up their credit cards and now talks to them daily. They purchased and paid to renovate this apartment in Murray Hill. My girls laugh and play with a box of Q-tips that sits below my sister’s vanity. They break them, then stick them in each other’s noses.
For three years, most of college, my sister stopped eating almost completely and her bones began to turn to chalk and hair grew on her face, and I could still, now, loop my thumb and index finger around her wrists and they would meet.
You know how she is, my sister says. She’s just hurt, she says.
My husband calls my sister the apologist.
She’s not good at dealing with hurt, my sister says. Tell them that you’re sorry, she says. Let them think you think you’re wrong.
Before Dante gets on the boat in the Inferno, I tell my sister, there are cries of anguish from the uncommitted—the souls who took no sides, those concerned not with good or bad but with how to take care of themselves. These people, I tell my sister, were naked and futile. They were stung relentlessly by wasps, fed on by maggots, in a sort of spiritual stagnation, I say.
My sister looks at me, then at my girls, who have stopped with the Q-tips and are helping each other climb onto my sister’s bed. She leans toward me, whispers to me—when she was little she used to threaten them, she used to tell them that if they yelled at her, if they made her practice her piano or come home at a certain time, she said, if they did that then she might turn out like me—she says: Are you sure you’re okay?
* * *
What is she threatening? asks the Chilean writer at our now weekly coffee.
I tell her that my mother wants to remind me there is evidence. She could find proof. She could make a case—more than enough documentation of all my various diagnoses, prescriptions, and probations—against my right to be a mother to my children and there would not be shit that I could do.
Would she take them? she says.
Probably not, I say.
I sip my coffee, look down, then up. I was sick a while, I say.
What kind of sick? she asks.
Depression, I say. Anxiety? So many diagnoses, I say, shaking my head and looking down.
I’m bored already by how pedestrian I find these diagnoses. How I’m just like everyone I know who thinks.
And they’d hold that against you? She looks up from her plate.
They’ll hold it over me abstractly. They want me to remember always that they could hold it against me, while maintaining sufficient plausible deniability that they’ve done anything wrong.
I think she’ll respond but she doesn’t. She catches the eye of the waiter and he comes over. She orders us two gin martinis and we wait for them and are quiet. When they come the glasses sit close together, each with a lemon-rind twist. She nods toward mine and lifts hers and we clink them, quietly, before we take a sip.
THE NEXT DAY, I’m at work and my husband texts me a photo of him holding our girls in our apartment. They’re all grinning. The two-year-old has hold of his face with both her hands. I leave early and decide to walk the twelve miles home instead of taking the train. I figure at some point I’ll get on the subway, but I don’t. I still have that feeling, leaving work now daily long before I’m supposed to, that I’m supposed to be somewhere doing something, but I also think maybe what I have to do right now is walk.
An hour in, I call my mom.
What was that supposed to be? I say.
I just worry, she says. She just worries, but she also likes me afraid.
About what? I say. If you worry, why don’t you talk to me?
I’ve been functional for years now, but I think it is a functional that is difficult for them to make sense of. I think they thought when I got better, I’d be better than they think I am.
You don’t talk to me, she says.
Okay, Mom, I say.
She starts crying then, and I know I’m supposed to ask her what I can do to help her, to tell her that I’m sorry. I’m supposed to tell her everything is fine.
She’s telling me that she just doesn’t know why it’s not ever enough for me, all her trying, all her loving. My eyes are dry and I know that I will not start crying. I feel fury at her for crying like this, fury at myself for not being willing or able anymore to care.
Mom, please, I say, trying to sound careful. Mom, I say. It’s okay. I’m sorry, I say, accidentally.
I am your mother, she says. Still crying.
I know, I say.
She stays quiet.
I’m sorry, I say. I’ve said it once and now it seems that I can’t stop.
I thought, she says. I thought when you became a mother … She says the word like it holds something that I have refused to see or understand. That I’ve got it now, it’s been given to me, and that I’ve ruined what it’s meant to mean.
I’M STILL NINETEEN; she’s still twenty. I sit alone in my attic room because she left and order chicken fingers and French fries every night and read and watch TV and try hard not to talk to anyone. I sit out on the roof and all the undergrads file out at night to go places I don’t know about, have little interest in without her. I hardly go to class, much less have other friends, and I watch them, listen to them talk to and yell at one another. I watch them walk out hopeful, underdressed, and buoyant. I watch them come home hours later, still out on the roof, just watching. They’re disheveled, touching one another, in different groups or pairs.
We are very good at desperate emails tinged with
self-destruction. Hers are more active, more interactive. We have lives that look concretely, wholly separate, lives that, if one were to track back to the causes, to the feelings and the thinking, might feel largely the same. My depression is the flattest; it’s so boring; it’s all inward—in books, at least, as well as in her emails, the characters all do things. They have too much sex; they drink; they travel and their lives at least are filled with stories that they might tell later when they’re older and they’re better, when they’re the grown-up versions of these unformed, reckless things. I envy her these stories, their shape and texture, the concreteness of her self-destruction. She is looked at, and because she’s looked at, she lives her anger and her sadness out loud and people see; I disappear and so slip down and under. I, sporadically, quite violently, try to be seen and am then further knocked down by how completely that effort fails. I ride the T, and I cry and my hands shake and I imagine that someone will notice, will say something, will take me home with them and tell me how to live, but people look afraid or look away or don’t notice to begin with. The barista at the coffee shop I used to go to with her seems so horrified by my crying and my shaking hands, even as I order the same quiche and chocolate cake and give him money, that I stop going, just to not have to see what I look like on his face as I hold my hand out for my change.
I don’t talk and no one notices that I’m not in class or at the campus center. I buy tubs of Betty Crocker icing at the 7-Eleven that is far enough off campus that I won’t accidentally run into one of the four people I know. I get the chicken fingers I subsist on delivered, when I know my roommates are in class or at a party; I try very hard to only go downstairs to pee or shower when they’re out. I do not sleep but also do not leave my bed and sometimes, just to prove my ineffectuality more surely, I walk around Boston late at night and nothing happens; I walk back to my attic, take my clothes off, get in bed.
She has three love affairs that year and starts selling weed to friends for cash. Her dealer is in love with her; sometimes they have sex, and she uses the discount to pay for her own stash. She lives off campus with two also-gorgeous girls who have tattoos on their forearms—one of them has her nose and eyebrow pierced—and they drink beer before they eat breakfast and when I go to visit her I feel young and small and far away. I hate her maybe. I want her mostly just to feel as sad as I do, to be as trapped, if only so that she doesn’t get too far ahead of me while I’m still the same.
* * *
It’s cold still. I’ve lost track of time and do not know the day or month or whether there’s some place I’m meant to be or have been meant to be this whole week. It’s cold and I’m not wearing enough clothes, running tights, a long-sleeved shirt, no gloves or hat, and I’ve run out to the Charles River in the middle of the night. I stand on the MIT Bridge, the one, in summer, we walked over every day; the water’s frozen at the edges but not in the middle. I have my cell phone with me and I call. There’s something wrong with me, I tell her. What is feeling like? I ask. She’s in love again. All she seems to want to talk about is this man she loves, who won’t love her back, who sometimes shows up at her house at night and they have sex but does not yet acknowledge she exists in the light of day. She says my name over and over. Where are you? she says. I’m on a bridge, I say. I don’t know then but I know now that we’re both children. I want her to feel scared, I know both now and then. I want her to feel more for me than any other person. I don’t care the shape it takes: fear, or love, or sadness. I want her close to me. I want her to feel like she can’t ever leave. She starts to cry and I tell her to stop it, There’s no need to worry. I don’t mean this. I’ve called because I want her to cry and I want her to be scared.
I need you to go home, she tells me. I need you to turn toward your apartment and I’ll get in the car and meet you there. She’s hours from me. She says my name again. Her voice, I later learn, is thick with weed as well as all her worry, all her sad and sorry. Then, I think she has so much power, but later I will see all the ways she feels almost completely at the mercy of the wants and needs of other people just like me. I’m so happy that night, though, to have finally found a way to make her come to me.
She talks and cries and I hear her muffled voice and then another person. I hear her start her car, but I stand still. In my memory, she comes to the bridge, but I’m not sure this is what happens. In my memory, she saves me that night; that night I think maybe everything will be okay. It’s only the next morning that I see them, out front of our house while she sleeps in my bed and I sit on the roof: my parents, harried, exhausted, rushing out of a cab and coming up our front-porch steps.
Bitch, I say, beneath my breath, as I watch them ring the bell, as I hear her rustle, as I climb in through my window, knowing then that I am absolutely by myself.
* * *
Why the fuck, my mother will say later; they will walk me, both of them, to the university offices and tell them I am a danger to myself and must be monitored more closely. The university will balk and want to kick me out, but my parents will not agree to this and my mom will threaten various things, citing statutes that might be made up, and then the university will decree I see a therapist three days a week instead. I will be on probation and they will try sometimes, my parents, they will call and tell me to take care of myself and ask me about class. They will feel both wholly overwhelmed and scared. It will have been years, by then, of me being more than they can handle. They will have tried therapists and so many different medications. They will have tried yelling at me, begging; none of it will work. Sometimes, when my mother is too tired and she gets a bill from the therapist, she will call and yell at me and ask me why I can’t just suck it up and be better. What did we ever do? she’ll ask me. Why the fuck, she’ll say, do I have to pay someone to talk to you?
I’ll drive one day in the car with my father, going somewhere, the second time they come up to see me after she has called them, and he will look so revolted by the fact that I am crying. I think now: he must have been so scared. Stop it, he’ll say, over and over, but I won’t stop it. He’ll reach his hand up to my face as if he might stop the tears from coming and he will breathe in once, too tired to have hold any longer of whatever patience he might have had before this. He will slap me, once and hard, across the face.
And then Sasha in the background. They’ve always been nice to her. We’re young and she was scared. When she thinks “parent” she thinks a different thing than what they are. She writes me email after email and for a while, I like the feel of not responding. I like her asking, begging, saying that she’s sorry, until I can’t stand it any longer, not having her to talk to, until she’s desperate, until the man she’s been courting all semester has fucked one of her roommates and she’s begun to disassemble, until we’re galvanized, alone again together against every other thing.
4
I SLEEP PAST my first alarm and then my second. At 5:40, my husband reaches for me and asks if I’m going to go run. This annoys me, though I can’t say why it annoys me. He tries to pull me to him but I roll closer to the wall, my back toward him, and he climbs out of bed. The coffee grinder whirs and I close my eyes again. At 6:40, which is ten minutes before I am supposed to leave for work, he calls to me from the kitchen. He’s making breakfast and packing the children’s lunches.
You getting up? he says.
I skip my shower, skip my breakfast.
He pours me coffee in the mug I bring on the subway each day and I hug and kiss both children as they unfurl themselves from their small beds. When I’m halfway down the stairs the two-year-old comes running out of the apartment.
Mommy, she says.
I give her one more hug.
Don’t leave.
Josslyn comes out of her apartment and she picks her up.
* * *
On the train, I check Sasha’s Facebook for an announcement about her baby. I check every other day, mostly knowing it won’t change. I’m not friends with her husband
on Facebook. We’ve never met, and when I go to his page it’s only his picture and some posts from years ago. It’s possible his settings make it so there are all sorts of pictures to which I simply don’t have access. The ultrasound or maybe of the baby, newly welcomed, the bump, her perfect cheeks fleshed out.
* * *
In a meeting about SAT preparation, I think about setting up a profile just to see whatever I don’t have access to. He looks trusting. I could pretend to be from wherever he says he’s from. I try to remember what she looked like pregnant the first time. Both my girls were over nine pounds. When I was pregnant, I was so large people pointed at me on the street.
* * *
With the four-year-old, the ultrasound tech told me thirty-three weeks in that I did not have enough amniotic fluid. Our OB was out of town, so—on my phone, on the sidewalk on Fifty-ninth Street and Eighth Avenue—I googled what the cause and consequence of this might be.
Could be the baby has no brain or an esophageal malfunction, said the internet. Could be everything is fine. I tried to call my husband but he was working. I scrolled through my phone trying to think who else I might call. Not my mother, not my New York friends, who were still new and had never been pregnant, who all still thought I was sane then. Not Sasha.
Instead, I sat on Eighth Avenue somewhere below Fifty-ninth Street, leaning up against a fire hydrant, massive belly bulging, and I cried. I held the base of my stomach with both my hands and people stared at me and I stared back at them until it started to get dark and I walked home.
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