by Julia Fine
I could admit that I’d lied on the questionnaires. That would be good. That would be vulnerable. Was it still vulnerable if it was so calculated? “Be more vulnerable,” said Annie’s therapist, but she didn’t specify how, didn’t specify when, not even for Annie.
But maybe I needed to be less vulnerable. After all, it was the vulnerability of childbirth that had left me, and consequently Clara, open to what I could only call a poltergeist. From the German poltern, a disturbance. Geist—a ghost. Which begged the question of what ghosts there were among us that didn’t cause a disturbance—certainly not Margaret, with her construction projects and her growling dog. Did we breathe these ghosts while sleeping in the way that we supposedly ate spiders? Perhaps this was why Clara, why so many babies, fought sleep. They were close enough to the void that they knew what else was out there, and they didn’t want to swallow anything unsavory.
HERE WAS THE problem. Amended: here was part of the problem.
At six weeks old, Clara was turning into more and more of an actual person. When she opened her eyes, it truly felt like she was seeing things, processing and heading toward an understanding. When I put her in the headband from my mother, she looked like an actual baby. She could smile. She was amused by Solly’s tail flicking across the waxy floors, Ben’s scrunched monster faces, my sneezes. She could push up onto her forearms, and for a brief moment could lift up her head. After she’d eaten, her belly bulged out like an old man’s beer gut. Her hair was still downy, but lightening. She was losing her cradle cap, thanks in part to Vaseline and our meticulous combing. In short, she was becoming less of a thing that had happened to me and more of a person who was in the process of happening to herself.
This should have been excellent, as it implied we were, to a certain extent, separating. She was learning how to exist in a body, and while it would be years before we cut the metaphysical umbilical cord, she was well on her way to becoming. We could now go, with any luck, up to six hours at night without nursing. During the day she could be by herself on her mat and not need me for upwards of ten minutes at a time.
This meant I had to reevaluate myself; I could no longer avoid my daily life with the excuse of being necessary. In those ten minutes I had to clean the kitchen, or respond to my emails, or, god forbid, open up my dissertation. The anonymous message-board chorus was still prompting me to write, reminding me I had to keep writing, reminding me I’d pinned all hope of a career, of a self-sustaining life, on this project I’d largely abandoned. Reminding me that writing was most likely the solution to Michael. I didn’t appreciate the pressure. The twelve weeks I’d promised myself as maternity leave were not yet up, though the point at which they would be was inching ever closer.
Anon1324: Get back to work. Keep writing.
Anon1325: Clara’s asleep, why aren’t you writing?
It no longer bothered me that the message board knew me, knew Clara. They could have found us out so many ways: we posted photos of her to our social media accounts, Ben not bothering to make his profiles private. We’d filed her birth certificate and insurance claims and had even put ourselves on the waitlists for day cares, just in case. Of course they knew Clara. What hung me up was that they also knew Michael.
Anon1326: She wants you to write.
It wasn’t clear to me how she’d gotten to them, how she’d persuaded them, who they even were. But it was clear Michael was using the message-board app as a door I’d unintentionally left open.
One of many doors left open. Now that Clara was closer to emerging from the hazy brume of fourth trimester, she was casting off a part of her protection. She was susceptible to influence, as we all became susceptible as soon as we could use our minds to learn. She was susceptible especially because she didn’t yet have language to help anchor herself in a concrete reality. She didn’t even know what reality was.
Michael could get Clara by jingling her dangly play gym animals in a particular order, or by playing a particular song. She could turn the crank of the jack-in-the-box and surprise her. She could break the windows and leave the glass in a crystalline pentagram across the living room floor, and while this didn’t seem her style, I couldn’t know for certain that she wouldn’t evolve with Clara’s own evolution. A rabbit can outrun the hounds nine times, but on the tenth the dog will learn, the dog will catch it. I found myself checking and double-checking and triple-checking for sharp objects hidden in the short shag of the carpet, for dead animals Solly might have dragged in from outside while I wasn’t looking, for the beads of an old necklace scattered across the floor, for tapered table edges, open outlets, dangling cords.
“She isn’t crawling yet,” said Ben when he came home from work the Monday following Thanksgiving to find me on my hands and knees, one arm fanned under the couch, looking for stray pieces of popcorn. I could hear the ghost of the even, the extra syllables of judgment. Ben said, “You can relax.”
I’d been meaning to tell him. I was going to tell him. I just didn’t know what to tell him. The overhead lights flickered.
“I’ll take a look at the breaker later,” said Ben. This was the opportune moment, and I slithered up from under the couch, readjusting my sweatpants, breathing deeply. Dust bunnies gathered on my sleeve, made mostly of dog hair: prey formed from predator, ironic. Clara cooed in her bouncer, and I gave her my finger to hold. I thought in doing so she’d lend me some immunity.
“We need to talk,” Ben said, before I could begin. “Annie called me.”
I had lost the opportunity, the messaging. I hadn’t been able to get out in front of it. Ben sighed and came over and sat on the floor next to me, so that we both looked down on Clara, our backs against the bottom of the couch.
“I was going to tell you,” I said. I was being honest, yet all the while strategizing how I would discover what Annie had already told him, how much I would have to admit to, how much I’d keep myself from giving away.
“She’s worried about you,” said Ben.
“Hmm.” I scrunched my mouth to the side, and decided to start simply. “Did she tell you I was locked out on the balcony?” Warmth was gathering in the corners of my eyes.
“She didn’t.”
I turned to look at him, to look right in his eyes so he would know I was telling my version of the truth. “I was locked out on the balcony,” I said. “I was getting some air. I’d left Clara inside.” I was fully crying now, but not for the reason I knew he would think I was crying. Not because I’d lied to him, or because I’d endangered our daughter. No, I was crying because I was still so calculating, because my brain was still counting the beads on some imaginary abacus, weighing and balancing and planning. Annie’s therapist—were we ever to meet—would not be pleased. This was a poor man’s vulnerability, a lying man’s truth, and I was ashamed of how easily I fell into these clichés, how I took the most undesirable man’s descriptors and combined them with that age-old archetype, the faithless woman.
From my research, I’d discovered Michael always behaved as if she had no reason to mislead you. The way she felt was not a feeling but an objective fact that you already innately understood, only needed to be guided toward, firmly and gently. I tried to channel her confidence, though I didn’t know how much of that confidence was a facade.
Ben was the opposite of Michael in all ways: substantial where she was transubstantiated, tactful where she was blunt, kind where she was funny.
I was still holding my daughter’s hand, and I was crying because I knew that this was the closest I would ever be to my husband, and it wasn’t close enough.
“It’s okay,” he was saying, “it happened and it’s over and I understand why you didn’t want to tell me.” His willingness to give felt like a concession. He would hide the hardest parts of me in some dark recess of his mind, pave them over and lock them away. In doing so, he thought he was offering me the opportunity to be unequivocally myself, but he was actually just excusing bad behavior. I felt now that there was nothing I cou
ld do that he wouldn’t explain away, both to himself and to me.
“I didn’t want to make a scene,” I said, because I knew he didn’t like scenes, and the easiest thing to do now, as I was accepting his truest nature, was to placate him. I would, for now, be who he imagined me to be.
The lights flickered again. Michael did not approve, nor should she. But what could I say to a man who was willing to leave what should have been a larger conversation—why had I left Clara, why had I locked the door, why had I told him nothing—at it’s over? How could I tell him now that what he thought was just a footprint was a cavern a thousand feet deep? Ben wanted things to be easy, and because of this he had convinced himself that they were, had placed his faith not in God but Occam’s razor. I was unspeakably sad for him. For us. For Clara.
“Don’t worry,” said Ben. “It’s okay to let yourself cry.” He was prying Clara’s fingers off mine, rubbing the small of my back in methodical circles, resting his chin on the top of my head. He was trying to comfort me, and in doing so comforting himself.
I could never, ever tell him.
“Did Annie say anything else?” I asked through a large hiccup.
“Just that you were stressed,” Ben whispered into my hair. “That she was worried about you. Should we be worried?”
I knew what he wanted to hear, and because I still loved him in love’s simplest form, and still wanted to please him, I said, “No. No you shouldn’t be worried. I have it all under control.”
“Thank you,” said Ben. “Thank you for being so honest.”
January 1950
Let’s discuss reincarnation,” says Michael.
For all their philosophical discussions, spirituality rarely factors into Margaret and Michael’s conversation. Neither woman subscribes to traditional religion, and both know that the faith du jour would label what they do together sinful. It has always been easier not to talk about what they do together. Physical love doesn’t need language—this, thinks Margaret, is its beauty. All the worlds within a brush of the knee, or a head on a shoulder, a tongue exploring or a palm cupping a breast, spiral out with possibility—a multiverse born of the body. Name it, and the path has been chosen, the reality ordained.
But Michael’s tiredness has been named, it has been diagnosed leukemia. At first Michael blamed Margaret’s stressful influence and sent her away, hoping the calm she’d leave in her wake would be a cure. When it wasn’t, Michael turned back to God, who she’d known as a sometimes acquaintance in her youth. It is now Margaret’s fault that God has given Michael cancer; there’s only so long one can continue in sin without punishment. Per usual, Michael’s contrition is irregular. She’s yet to find a doctor who is certain of a cure, and yet to convince herself of an afterlife. She’s afraid. She calls often on Margaret.
As a child, Margaret followed her mother into the musty living rooms of Great Neck’s dabbling upper-middle-class spiritualists to be lectured in theosophy. Margaret’s mother believed in the Oneness of the Universe—that every soul returned to the One upon the passing of its patron, then was sent back to humanity in an occultist appropriation of reincarnation. Margaret’s mother is now dead. Margaret wonders if Maude’s soul ever returned.
Three years ago, when Margaret posed the question, Michael laughed. Now Michael has work to do—books to write, lectures to give, minds to enrich—and not enough time in which to do it. She’s leaving for a clinic in Switzerland in hope of convalescing—Margaret expressly not invited, but summoned to see her off. Michael is gaunt, already pulling on her gloves when Margaret gets to East End Avenue. Luggage sits piled in the hall.
“Ride with me,” says Michael. The sixteen miles of traffic between the Upper East Side and Idlewild Airport mean a wasted afternoon, but Margaret nods. She takes Michael’s purse while the doorman gets the suitcases. She stands silently next to Michael in the elevator. The doors shutting behind them feel like the ending of a certain kind of life.
Michael smooths her hands over her lap, settling into the cab. “I’ve been reading about my past lives,” she says. Margaret waits. It’s like Michael to set this as a trap, and she would rather not be caught in it. “It seems there’s no simple way to determine my next body. Whoever I once was got lucky, but that’s no guarantee it will happen again. I want to be sure I’m not some bloated politician. Some cad.”
“So you’ve decided not to die,” says Margaret.
“I’m going to die. We all will die at some point.” Michael speaks as if revealing some prophecy. The car inches over the Queensboro Bridge. Margaret’s mouth is dry. “I want to make sure that my soul is in good hands. A metaphysical estate planning, if you will.”
Margaret smiles, but mostly because her face isn’t sure what else to do. She has always been the fanciful one, Michael grounded in fact. When Margaret thinks about reincarnation, she thinks of the veins across her mother’s hands, thick worms under silk gloves. She thinks of airless parlors and stale curtains and frauds in beaded headdresses who promise resurrection. Of Maude too tired for her children, somehow with infinite energy for the occult. Maude so difficult to impress, Margaret still trying.
“I read your poems out loud,” says Margaret, shifting in her seat so that her leg touches Michael’s.
“And you’ll keep doing so.” Michael nods. “That is exactly the sort of thing I’m going to need. A compass, for when I return. Something to guide me toward art.”
“You’ll obliterate life if you keep trying to prove there’s no death,” says Margaret. They are crossing the East River now, a placid, muddy green.
“If I continue down this path I’ll find the secret of life,” says Michael.
Margaret says, “The secret of life is being alive.”
16
Before Ben had to go to Tampa for work, we would have Hanukkah in the suburbs with his parents. It was an annual tradition, which in the past I had survived through heavy drinking. Now, I was nursing, and would have to pass out in the guest double bed without the aid of Linda’s off-brand Manischewitz. Still, a night at Ben’s parents’ could be restorative. Maybe when we got home, Michael would realize she would rather be without us. Maybe when we got home, Michael would be gone.
WE BROUGHT THE pack ’n’ play, a sleeve of diapers, several burp cloths, pacifiers, two pairs of pajamas, the swaddles, a pack ’n’ play sheet. We brought three changes of outfit, in case of a diaper explosion or spit-up. We brought drool bandanas and bibs. We packed wipes and the play gym and the breast pump and several extra storage containers, because I never knew when I might get engorged. We brought headbands and socks and the baby carrier and a blanket to tuck over Clara once we had her buckled in her car seat. We needed the diaper rash cream and her baby soap and the tub insert that fit into the sink. We needed the monitor and its accompanying accessories, the sound machine. We packed the vitamin D drops that I was supposed to put on my nipples before Clara nursed, but almost always forgot. Lotion. Her favorite stuffed duck. Then we had to pack for ourselves.
Once the car was loaded, it looked like we were off to some cave to hibernate for the whole winter, like we would be back in several weeks rather than twenty-four hours.
“We’re coming home tomorrow night,” I whispered to Michael as I touched up my lipstick.
HOW DO YOU get rid of a ghost? The same way you get rid of anything else that haunts you: run away from it, run far away. Pack your car and your child and hop on the highway and sit in Friday-afternoon traffic while you listen to some podcast about the political resistance, which should concern you right now, but doesn’t.
I felt guilty about not being as rapt in the political discourse as Ben was, about not knowing the legalese or politicians’ names. Margaret was so apolitical that she’d brag about not reading the newspapers. During World War II she wrote to Gertrude Stein, in Hitler’s Europe, about how much she wanted someone to write a fairy tale about invading tanks. Her biographer thought it was tactless, and likely the reason her friendship w
ith Stein never caught on. I didn’t think I was as bad as Margaret. I understood the conceptual suffering, and before Clara had followed it closely, vomiting up my dinner on election night, blood pressure rising with each threatened ban. But I couldn’t hold all of it at once—my own pain and the country’s. I suppose I was more like Ben than I cared to admit in how easy it was for me to pretend and to bury, to stare at Clara and convince myself that pretty soon things would be better, that things were already getting better, that she would grow up in a world that would be cleaner and fairer and kinder to girls. I’d seen on Facebook that someone had drawn a swastika on the walls of my ex-boyfriend’s high school, scrolled through the comments, regretted it. Now I changed the input from Ben’s Bluetooth to the radio, a secular Christmas song.
“We should play her the dreidel song,” said Ben, but he didn’t really mean it.
LINDA WAS READY for us, waiting at the window when we pulled into the driveway, ushering us from the frigid gloaming into the house, where a gas fire burned prettily behind glass and a shiny blue banner wished us a happy Hanukkah from the wall above the first-floor landing. I didn’t remember such festivity in the past—Linda didn’t like her paint marred by Scotch tape, her topiary disturbed, her kitchen spoiled by the persistent funk of latkes. But here were sparkly little stars, here was a vast mixing bowl of grated onion and potato.