Once More We Saw Stars

by Jayson Greene

  “Oh my god, your towel smelled so bad.” Stacy laughed. “I still remember how gross your shower was. Oh god.”

  “It’s like we’ve gone backward in time,” I said softly. I glanced down at her freckled and pale right shoulder, at her new tattoo: a delicate sparrow, beak parted and open, as if singing.

  We had agreed in the wake of the accident that we would each get tattoos commemorating her, but Stacy sprang into action while I vaguely entertained the idea. A sparrow, she decided.

  She spent the summer researching and perusing artist portfolios for hours, settling on a woman named Sajra, on the Lower East Side. Her work was largely black and white and full of symbols: third-eye chakras, half-moons, coyote heads. She did exquisite birds. The day of her tattoo appointment, Stacy—who had successfully returned couches two months after purchasing them, mattresses for being an eighth of an inch too saggy, shoes for having a “weird” strap—woke up in the morning, smiled at me, said, “I’ll see you in a few hours,” and left serenely for a permanent body alteration.

  I went to meet her a few hours later, when the tattoo was nearly finished. Sajra was still detailing. I held Stacy’s hand and watched her face as the needle dug: “It feels more annoying than painful,” she reported.

  The three of us were the only ones there. The lights were off, and late-morning sunlight flooded the parlor. There was soft, gentle music playing—Hope Sandoval’s voice, deep and dark and still. Sajra, who also did body work, handed Stacy a few healing crystals to hold on to during the inking. “Keep them,” she said at the end.

  The healing process began the next day, and with it came the delayed panic. “It’s supposed to get all scabby like that, right?” Stacy asked me in the morning, poking at it hesitantly. The bird’s delicate pinhole eye, made with white ink, had swollen into an ominous mole; the wings had grown craggy. “He looks more like a raven than a sparrow now.”

  Following instructions she pulled up on her phone for tattoo care, she washed it and dabbed it as lightly as she could with a paper towel. The paper towel stuck, and she pulled first gingerly, then in a panic. “It’s sticking!” Her eyes popped as she held the towel out in front of me. “Look,” she cried. “The whole tattoo is on there!”

  I looked at the towel, which had the faint imprint of the bird, like a bas-relief, on its Bounty squares. “If it were that easy to ruin a tattoo, Stacy, everyone’s tattoo would be ruined,” I said, for probably the tenth time that afternoon. This would pass, I told myself.

  For the next several days, Stacy fretted obsessively about the bird and its puffed-up eye. “Goddamn it,” she said. “I never should have put that towel on it. I should have just left it alone.”

  The days mounted, as did Stacy’s apologetic follow-up emails to Sajra. As her mania continued, friends fondly rolled their eyes at me in solidarity—Stacy and her obsessions. But the sparrow’s eye was a portal, I knew. You could never begin to answer the questions swarming around us—what did it mean to honor Greta? how could we carry forth her spirit?—but you could thread them through a tattooed sparrow’s eye. That was a problem you could pick at, literally and metaphorically.

  As her skin slowly settled, so did she. In ten days, the bird grew more delicate and less haggard looking, and its delicate white pupil reemerged from the melanoma-like eye bump. Stacy pulled up her shirt sleeve proudly about two weeks later at dinner. “I have regrets about everything, and I don’t have any regrets about this,” she joked.

  The sparrow had multiple meanings. “They’re city birds,” Stacy told me. “They kind of make do with what they have, like us.” Sparrows, besides pigeons, were the only birds Greta ever saw. “Lookit the birdies,” Greta would call to me, pointing as they hopped across the sidewalk and fluttered up into the tiny saplings lining the broken-up sidewalk to her daycare.

  It also came from the last book we bought and read to Greta, called The Lion and the Bird. In it, a gentle lion farmer scoops up a wounded bird that falls into his field. He mends its wing and brings it to his house, where he keeps it warm through the winter. Several pictures show them braving the cold, the bird nestled in his mane; the two of them enjoying a crackling fire together; and the two of them asleep, the bird lying in the lion’s sandal, next to his bed. It is a book about the inevitable: the bird’s wing heals, the thaw passes, and the bird flies away. “Yes, I know,” the lion says to the bird; it is the only line of dialogue in the book. The next page, a double-page spread of white with just the lion gazing skyward, always left me in tears.

  The next few pages show the lion, crestfallen, going about his life. The same fields, the same fire, the same bed—no bird. “Sometimes life is like that,” the book advises. The winds blow colder, and the lion catches himself looking up: “Well?” he wonders. There are a few pages of agonizing delay, a false start, a falling leaf. And then the bird swoops down, lands on a branch, regards the lion. They will tough out another winter in each other’s company.

  After Greta’s death, the book became intolerable to me; we were living the life of that lion, with no promise of the bird’s return. Every day, we got up, made breakfast, showered, dressed, and walked into the world, without our sparrow.

  In bed at Asaf’s Kingdom, I reached down and traced the lines of its beak tenderly. The bird was fragile and full of light, as if I could reach out and cup its warmth in my palm. One claw was visible, perched atop a crescent moon. The open beak was inclined to Stacy’s right ear. “Is she singing to you?” I asked Stacy. A few tears sprang to the almond corners of her eyes and leaked down onto the bedspread.

  “Yeah, sometimes she is,” she whispered.

  * * *

  Finally, we walked into an open house and knew: this was the place. It was a second-story brick condo near the water, and we loved it the second we entered. We brushed past the other nervous open-house attendees, trying to fight the instinctive panic of possessiveness—It’s ours! We deserve it more than all of you!—that rose up in us. We squeezed past a midthirties woman who had brought her mother and stood alone in the second bedroom. Bunk beds. The family had raised two children, a boy and a girl, to middle school in this second-floor Brooklyn apartment, one of the agents informed us. Stacy and I, awaiting the results of our latest ovulation-test experiment, glanced at each other meaningfully.

  Driving back from the viewing, we jabbered endlessly to each other. “I could really see us there for ten years, at least,” Stacy kept saying. “It’s a good school district, and there are gardens everywhere! It feels like life would actually be easier there. Don’t you think?”

  I did. But I was unable to do much except nod. As always, Stacy’s indomitable sense of forward motion continued to tug us into the future even when I was listless and drifting. I stole a look at her eyes as she drove; they were blazing and clear. We would have to find a sublet, she reasoned. If they accepted our offer, maybe we could try to close by mid-December? I strained to keep up. She dictated an email to our realtor as she turned onto the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, which I dutifully tapped into her phone, holding up a hand occasionally to plead wait, wait.

  We submitted our offer the following day; that night, we made love again on Asaf’s scratchy IKEA comforter. The excitement we felt was both invigorating and awful, like breathing freezing air. My nerves were shattered, and yet optimism coursed through them anyway. I was hardwired, I realized. If you were built for optimism, you just had to figure out a way to stay that way. We couldn’t keep not caring, even if we wanted to; we just weren’t made for it. I felt an unexpected throb of empathy for pessimists: You can’t help it, either.

  * * *

  It is December. Our bid has been accepted, but the closing date has once again been pushed back. Now, we are sitting in the last Airbnb of our long, enervating period of homelessness. We have been living out of the same bag for two months. There is no Wi-Fi in this apartment. There is an AT&T card you buy from
a corner bodega and refill. There is one knife in the kitchen, and it is barely fit for carving pumpkins. Nonetheless, we have been cooking almost every night, having nearly snapped from night after night of takeout and restaurants.

  Tonight we are eating dried-out beans and underdone rice out of tiny chipped plastic bowls. We are drinking bad wine out of coffee mugs.

  Frustrated, depressed, I decide to go out to buy some chocolate for dessert. I end up pacing the street. It is horribly cold, everything is closed, and I lose it; somehow the lack of chocolate breaks me, overwhelming me with desolation. Stacy keeps texting me: “Are you almost home? Come back.” I text her a string of expletives. She texts, “I have something that will make you feel better.” In my black cloud, I feel certain I know what she is talking about. She is about to show me the latest sketch of the built-in shelving unit she is planning. I have been looking at various iterations of this sketch for days and have run out of helpful-sounding noises to make.

  When I walk in the door, sour and despondent, Stacy tells me gently to close my eyes. I look at her. “OK,” I say. I close my eyes. I wait, impatiently. I hear her feet creak across the floorboards as she makes her way back toward me.

  “Open your eyes,” she says softly.

  I open my eyes.

  I am looking at a white plastic stick with a tiny screen.

  It says PREGNANT.

  Five

  pregnancy

  SINCE GRETA’S ACCIDENT, Stacy’s mother, Susan, has grown increasingly reclusive. She won’t answer texts for ten, fourteen days at a stretch, and when she finally does we discover she hasn’t left her apartment and has spent the entire time in bed. She’s aged thirty years, it seems: her hands tremble from psych meds for her PTSD, and she’s lost the ability to focus on tasks for more than an hour, which means she is hemorrhaging work.

  She emerges from her exile to visit us after Christmas. Through a sort of tacit agreement, we’d all skipped Christmas Day, and aside from the tree planting, this is the first time we’ve all been in the same room in months. Stacy and I had finally moved into our new place, and after a few weeks getting it in working order—built-in bookshelf installed in the living room, rugs put down, floors and surfaces scrubbed clean—it was time to bring family into it.

  Also, there was the minor matter of breaking our news.

  The mood is festive, but tentative and fragile: being in the same room sometimes feels like visiting a blast site, and we are all a little wary in one another’s company. Stacy and I confer silently at the counter while I open another bottle of champagne. Now? No, not now.

  Jack and Stacy rib Susan good-naturedly about her unconventional mothering techniques. “Remember in high school, when I slept over at Amanda’s house and got drunk without telling you? You called her house and left the world’s most insane voice message.” Stacy launches into an impersonation: “Somebody! Needs to! Reel you! The fuck! In!” Susan doubles over.

  “I used to bring my friends over just to show them that you let us swear in front of you,” Jack says from the fridge, opening his third beer. “Nobody believed me. So I’d bring them over and just start yelling, ‘Fuck! Fucking shit, Mom!’ ”

  Susan is helpless now, wiping tears from the corners of her eyes. “The research has vindicated me on that,” she cries. “It clearly shows that children who are allowed to swear grow up to be more intelligent.”

  “You see, Mom?” Stacy prods. “If you lived in Brooklyn, it could always be like this.”

  “I love my building,” Susan replies, her smile stiffening slightly and the room hardening with it.

  No one quite understands Susan’s insistence on remaining on the Upper West Side, around the corner from the bench where her granddaughter was killed. But she clings to her apartment like a life raft in a roaring ocean, tortured by continuous flashbacks but seemingly unable to contemplate upending her life once again. Inside, she feels safe enough: there is a plaque and a tree dedicated to Greta in the little garden, and the doormen check on her daily. But the moment she steps outside, the world swarms and she panics. One day, a car backfired and she collapsed, hysterical, on the sidewalk.

  Lesley tries to shift the mood. “Does anyone need more champagne? Stacy?” She leans forward to fill Stacy’s glass before she can object. I move in to smoothly intercept the glass, but everyone notices, and I catch Susan and Jack exchanging meaningful looks. So it probably isn’t a surprise by the time I turn the music down, Stacy and I sit in opposite chairs facing them all on the couch, and Stacy says, “So, we have some news.”

  Susan reacts with joy and terror: “Oh my god, I’m so excited and happy for you,” she says, welling up. Then, her voice still watery, she adds as an afterthought, “I should probably move to Scotland.”

  We all laugh: What?! But nothing seems unreasonable in these circumstances, and the tangible prospect of hope, the looming threat and promise of new life, is a crazy-making thing. The ground is heaving once more beneath us, and we behave like skittish animals sensing a storm. We hug one another, teary and smiling, and then everyone abruptly leaves. We need to be alone again.

  * * *

  I am waiting for Stacy to meet me outside a yoga studio when I spot her walking up the block. She’s at that early stage of pregnancy, not yet showing but emitting some mysterious pheromonal signal, so an unusually attuned few start to look at her differently. You can almost see the thought bubble over their heads as they walk past: Is she…? Are they…?

  As she gets closer, her face comes into focus. She is flustered and upset, walking too fast and with her hands balled at her sides. “I just had an awful conversation with my mom,” she tells me. “She just told me that she’s not ever going to move. I got emotional and had to hang up.”

  Since we announced the pregnancy, Susan and Stacy have been fighting continuously. The incidentals change, but the underlying tension does not: Susan feels forever misunderstood, while Stacy feels she understands all too well. It is an echo of the fight they’ve had their whole lives, but it’s taken on uglier dimensions in Greta’s absence. Greta was the fragile bridge Stacy and Susan walked across; now they stand on opposite sides of a gulf, each unable to hear the other.

  “Oh no. Did you ask her why? What did she say?”

  “She says it’s where all her memories are,” Stacy says, drawing out “memories” venomously. “Forget that her entire family is in Brooklyn and that we’re never going to the Upper West Side again. She knows that.” Stacy stops, takes in a shaky breath. “I just…I wish she didn’t make decisions like this.”

  As usual with Stacy’s family, the right words elude me. “I hope she changes her mind” is all I say. We enter the studio and set up.

  Twelve weeks into Stacy’s second pregnancy, we are still doing yoga together three, sometimes four times a week. It probably resembles discipline to onlookers, this compulsion, but there is a desperation lurking in our devotion that makes me flinch when I stop to notice it. We live in constant terror of reverting to our childless days before Greta, when we slumped around purposelessly for entire weekends—we would have failed her, and oblivion would have claimed her. So we commit furiously to our yoga schedule.

  We’ve found ourselves drawn to the fastidiousness of Iyengar yoga, which makes a point, nearly a fetish, of alignment. The simple poses you do in other classes become quantum physics problems, and standing is no longer a single act but dozens of them—heels spreading into the floor, thighs and knees lifting. I am grateful for this complicated instruction partly for how it disperses the weight of my existence into little shreds; life feels more manageable when I am directing all of my attention and energy toward my left big toe bone.

  Other classmates filter in, wave silently to us as we settle in.

  “Allow your eyes to soften and unfocus, letting the light in but not holding it,” says our teacher Mimi. “Allow your upp
er lids to draw over the eyeball, until your eyelids meet.”

  I try to embrace this peculiar instruction, to discover something new and strange in an eye blink. I can feel Stacy settling in next to me, her breathing starting to even. I close my eyes, and when my lids finally meet, I find Greta, like a finger pad touching the surface of an old, cool scar. I smile in recognition. Hi, sweetie, I whisper silently.

  I stretch both arms high up above my head and feel my internal organs lift, releasing a flood of memories and sensation like dishes clattering to the floor. I lean into my forward leg, my arms supplicating skyward. Greta’s fluttering fingers after she nursed at two weeks old come to me, her head tilted and her eyes closed as if she were conducting an underwater symphony. “She’s milk drunk,” Stacy would say tenderly. I am rewarded by tears releasing down my face, warm and silent as sweat. Mimi and Stacy and the rest of the class disregard me. This part, too, is routine.

  We fold at our waists over stiffened legs.

  “Look at your knees,” Mimi commands. “Can you see them lift? Lift them, and then don’t lift them. Do you see the difference?”

  Mimi is obsessed with knees, constantly exhorting us to lift them, to observe them. I stare obediently, and as my fingertips graze my toes, Greta appears before me in her purple one-piece swimsuit. Her legs protrude like stubby frankfurters, her face beet red and her little hairs matted with sweat. “I don’t wanna be outside annnnyyyymorre,” I hear her say—she had recently learned the word “anymore,” drawing it out, and she somehow knew exactly how to use it.

  I straighten, bring my feet together, inhale. I remember how her hands felt exploring the contours of my face. Tadasana, standing pose. I am instructed to imagine my pelvis as a bowl full of water I cannot spill. I remember Greta’s legs gripping my hip. I remember her sticky fingers in my hair, the look of focus on her face as she “fixed” it.