Use Me

by Elissa Schappell

  “It’s fine,” I said. “I get it.” I did. I didn’t recognize myself anymore, either. But I envied him. Billy had transformed his life. Three years ago he had started a small software company that was among the first to create RealAudio Web sites for bands. And though Billy would say the job nearly killed him, it saved us.

  “So, are there piano groupies?” I asked. He’d just laughed.

  Playing piano worked like a tonic on my husband. “I haven’t been this jazzed in a long time,” he’d said to me after playing his second set. “Okay, okay, so it’s not exactly Max’s Kansas City, still…”

  In the beginning I’d go and watch Billy play. I’d sip Maker’s Mark at the bar, pretending I wasn’t his wife, seeing if that might deliver some sexual kick, the way it used to. But nothing happened, I’d just get sad. Even when women in short skirts sidled up to him after a set and stuck tips in his jar as if they were reaching into his pants, I didn’t flinch.

  I didn’t care when he started hanging out afterward at the bar, coming home late, and later. I was tired, I didn’t want to go out. I went to bed and took Charlie with me. I curled my body around his. He made me feel loved, irreplaceable. He was who I wanted.

  I knew. Even without all the clichés. There was only one hang-up, there was no lipstick on his collar, no phone number on a cocktail napkin. I knew there was another woman because Billy was happy, and in some small way, deep in my grief, I think I was glad she existed. No one would believe that, but I had no time for Billy and all his wants. I wondered sometimes if he still loved me. If he had ever really loved me. If anyone could ever love me enough.

  With Billy, I felt like the Blob. Sure, I was shapeless, slow moving, and boring as sin, but I still managed to devour everything good, then spit out the bones. There was the quick thrill of feeling like I could annihilate him with my rage, but it was followed by great waves of guilt. I’d hurl my blobby self at his feet, beg for forgiveness, and then later I’d be angry at him for making me feel like such a monster. It was an ugly cycle. Occasionally when Billy guilted me into it, I worked. Mary Beth continued to set me up with photographers who needed assistance, throwing stylist work my way. It took all my strength just to make it to those silly photo shoots, where I was basically a robot obeying orders shouted by dictatorial photographers. I want less ankle sock and more shine on the Mary Jane—think, sadistic schoolgirl—not school marm. All I could think was, Please don’t let me start crying here. Please just let me get home to my children. Home was where my heart was.

  It wasn’t until the affair ended, until I saw how distraught Billy was, how he looked gray, like he’d been washed in gravel, his eyes half opened like there wasn’t enough oxygen in the air to sustain him, how even Annabelle’s dadaist jokes about chickens and rubber boots couldn’t coax a laugh, how he’d explode in anger and throw things at the slightest provocation, denting walls with drinking glasses, angry at us for not making it easy for him to go to her, that I saw him passionate, really feeling something, something big and deep, that I felt like I was dying. I remembered that boy, and I wanted him back. That was when I sank my claws into him. That was when I agreed to give up the nursing.

  I cheat. But I am trying.

  Billy tries to be nice about my La Leche meetings.

  “I understand this is in some way about sisterhood or whatever, but can’t you be friends with these women even though you’re not nursing—it’s not like the Moonies, right? They’re not going to excommunicate you.”

  “You don’t understand,” I say. I don’t understand either really, why I can’t give it up.

  Billy looks suspicious when I jokingly tell him that we’ve come up with a La Leche cocktail. Every organization needs their own emblematic cocktail—ours is the Naughty Mommy Slammer. A shot of breast milk, a shot of vodka, and a dribble of grenadine. If you want to use tequila, it’s a Naughty Mamacita.

  “What’s next?” he says. “Don’t tell me you’re going to start baking with breast milk, are you, like those women did in the seventies—some sort of Bundt boob cake?”

  “Oh, honey, don’t be silly. Remember, people ate alfalfa back then too.”

  He doesn’t get it. It’s not the milk.

  While Charlie lolls in bed, I take off my nightgown, pinching the flesh around my middle; even though I’m back to my normal weight, I’m not skinny like I once was. It’s depressing to admit, but my mother has a better body than me. Though you never see it under the gauzy saffron and sage colored robes she’s taken to wearing, her hair hanging down to the middle of her back in a heavy gold braid, like some sort of suburban Tibetan priestess. How did I turn into a woman who prays that one day someone will design a chic black bathing suit that doubles as an evening gown?

  Mary Beth doesn’t even look thirty, and she has a child only a year younger than Annabelle. No, Mary Beth is a dead ringer for her college self, only better dressed and with the benefit of all-body salt rubs and shiatsu. It isn’t fair.

  “Mommy, am I going to die?” Charlie asks.

  “Oh, heavens, no,” I say, lying down beside him. I realize how absurd it sounds. He is lying back in bed, arms behind his head, in his Elvis T-shirt and Superman Underoos, staring at the ceiling like a man deep in thought.

  “Can you hear music when you’re dead?”

  “No,” I say, getting up off the bed. “You can’t hear anything. Nothing.”

  “Oh,” he says, disappointed, like for the first time maybe death doesn’t sound like such a good idea.

  The death of Annabelle’s hamster, Archie, has shaken our household. I’ve had to insist that she stop digging him up out of the garden. (He was too big to flush. Last winter we’d had an unfortunate incident with a pair of gerbils—Ernie and Bert—that required plunging.) I just couldn’t deal with this whole burial thing. Annabelle says she misses him, but I suspect she just wants to see his skeleton, obsessed as she is with bones. My sister, Dee, had done this as a girl too; our backyard and the woods behind it made a spacious pet cemetery. She exhumed the rodents pretty regularly, unwrapped their toilet paper shrouds, only to find them desiccated and coated in ants, skeletons still not exposed. Blossom, my Siamese cat whom we’d had to thaw out before burying her—we’d been in France and my parents insisted that the house-sitter freeze her—was eternally secure, once she had defrosted enough to fit in a nailed-up wooden wine box, otherwise I’m certain Dee would have had her way with her too.

  We’d made such a big deal out of pet funerals, scattering flower petals on the fresh graves, my mother lighting a little of the sandalwood incense she burned for dinner parties. I would read passages from our Good News for Modern Man Bible, and the four of us would sing a hymn or song, or both, my mother elbowing my father as he checked his watch, always so much to do…. We crooned “Yellow Submarine” and “They Will Know We Are Christians by Our Love” when we buried Blossom. We were singers.

  It’s funny how we’ve still not scattered my father’s ashes. It’s been over three years and still we can’t part with his body.

  Gazing at my supine golden-haired boy sucking his thumb, weighing the pros and cons of death, I can’t believe that I’d once wished that pregnancy test was wrong. I can’t believe that I’d willfully denied my pregnancy, drinking and smoking and flirting like mad with anybody who would have me. I couldn’t stand the idea that my father would never know my son. You see, I knew it was a son, it had to be, and this made me giddy, for I had this creeping suspicion—no, hopeful expectation—that I was going to give birth to the reincarnation of my father.

  I believed it.

  Charlie likes the idea that he’s named for my dead father; he likes the idea that, as I once, regrettably, put it, my father is “his angel.” I’ve overheard Annabelle telling him, “Grandpa keeps an eye on us, he protects us, you know.”

  Sometimes I wonder why I’ve filled their heads with such shit. It’s one thing to not tell your daughter she can’t be an actual mermaid when she grows up—after all,
she could be one of those synchronized swimmers at some pleasingly cheesy Florida resort—but it’s another to tell her my father is keeping her safe from traffic accidents and bee stings. Because she suspects it’s important, Annabelle tells me she remembers my father. “He loved me,” she says, clasping her hands behind her back like she’s doing a recitation. “I remember that.”

  Downstairs, Billy is at the kitchen sink finishing his second cup of coffee. He’s already painstakingly brushed out Annabelle’s long coppery hair, pinning it back out of her serious brown eyes with glittery butterfly barrettes. Dressed her and fed her.

  I am surprised at how handsome Billy looks this morning in his dark gray suit, his black hair cropped close, his cheeks pink and freshly shaven. Frankly, it’s scary. I remember how I used to stand at the foot of the stage at CBGB’s and watch Billy, his hair streaked with safety orange paint, play the bass, screaming incomprehensible lyrics about doom, plastics, and Kierkegaard. Here was a classically trained pianist playing three chords. I thought he was a genius.

  This morning Annabelle has chosen her cream-puff party dress, and he’s chosen the dark blue leggings she wears underneath. It’s a constant compromise. She puts on a halter top, he gives her a cardigan. A war of attrition. Out back on the deck, Annabelle is practicing her mermaid walk, legs pressed together in imitation of a tail. She despises her feet.

  “Ah, it’s the drunken rodeo clown,” Billy says, mussing up Charlie’s hair.

  “Billy,” I say, but I don’t push it.

  I put Charlie down, and immediately he protests, arms up.

  “No,” he shrieks, climbing back up into my arms and clamping his legs around my middle. Charlie would rather his feet never touch the ground, preferring instead to be buffeted through life in our arms, or upon the golden litter of his stroller, preferably in the fully reclined position.

  “For Christ’s sake, Ev.” Billy scowls, looking very grownup in his suit. I still can’t get used to the fact that from time to time he’ll ask me, “Does this shirt go with these pants? Is this tie too loud?” This from the man who used to consider a vintage bowling shirt dressing up.

  “My radio!” Charlie shouts, spying his tape player in the now-emptied cabinet beneath the kitchen sink where he left it last night. He wriggles free. Charlie’s world was forever rocked when he discovered an old box of tapes in Billy’s office. Sex Pistols, Ramones, Buzzcocks. Hasta la vista, Raffi—our boy was a sucker for that 1-2-3-4 beat. His tape player is his sacred object, he even sleeps with it.

  “See, that’s why he got into bed with us last night,” I say. “He didn’t have his radio.”

  “Right.” Billy nods, not at all convinced. We both know it’s a lie.

  The tape player provides music for Charlie’s “spaceship,” and within seconds he’s happily stowed under the sink, doors shut.

  “Ground control to Major Tom,” Billy calls out, waiting for Charlie to pop his head out. He doesn’t. “Look at my ribs,” Billy says, untucking his shirt and sucking in his stomach. “I’ve got bruises,” he says in that husbandy I’m-still-a-baby-too voice. There’s not a mark on him. From under the sink we hear Iggy Pop scream, Now I wanna to be your dog! and then there’s the sound of Charlie doing a modified pogo, his head banging on the cabinet doors.

  I kiss Billy’s tummy. “Poor baby.”

  “Remind me again who you are,” Billy says. He takes my head in his hands and pulls me up, then slips his tongue in my mouth, his hands sliding up under my shirt. He can’t keep his hands off them. Who can blame him? Finally I have tits, real stop-traffic-oops-sorry-about-your-fender tits. The guys at the deli talk to my chest like it’s an intercom. It’s a marvelous novelty. Billy will miss these breasts, I know it.

  “Mmm…” he says.

  I close my eyes and try to give in. Then, just as I knew he would, Charlie comes crashing out of the cabinet. “Owwwww, Mom!” he shrieks, holding on to his head. He’s smacked it on the pipe below the sink.

  “Remind me to kill myself later, okay?” Billy says. “Really.” He makes his hand a gun and points it at his temple. “Pow.”

  I sit down and pull Charlie into my lap. I unsnap the left cup of my bra; the left is Charlie’s favorite. I lap his tears. When Charlie was a baby, his eyes were so beautifully bright and blue, we kept expecting them to change. It seemed impossible that they could stay.

  “I swear that kid’s got radar, he knows the minute we kiss. The second I touch you, touch them…” he says, waving in the vicinity of my breasts. He turns his head in disgust as a spray of milk fans droplets across Charlie’s cheek and forehead. Charlie laughs, delighted.

  “Oh, that’s real nice,” Billy says.

  “It’s comfort, asshole.”

  My nipple juts out of Charlie’s mouth like a wet pink cigar. He taps his toes to Black Flag’s “TV Party.”

  We’ve got nothing better to do than watch TV and have a couple brews! Don’t talk about anything else, we don’t want to know!

  “Hey, they’re playing our song,” I say. I feel light-headed for a moment, as I always do when Charlie first latches on. I didn’t feel this way with Annabelle. Maybe because I was an anxious new mother. But when Charlie latches on it’s like the first kiss—for a minute you catch your breath in surprise at its loveliness, you forget how much you liked it, how that intimate skin-on-skin contact connects you to yourself, to a wellspring of feeling, and your body. After a few sucks I start to feel good, calm, and a little dopey. I get that erotic tingle in my crotch. The tingle no one talks about. His hand strums my breast like it’s a fret. I feel great. Maybe my boy will be a guitar god. When my father got sick the last time he told me that that’s what he’d have liked to have been in another life. Not a guitar god exactly, but a rock ’n’ roll star. It was hard for me to imagine. I thought he was kidding, but he wasn’t. My father said, Isn’t it every boy’s dream?

  I imagine the cherry red Fender Jaguar I’ll give my boy on his thirteenth birthday—was that what Thurston Moore played? Or maybe one of those Buddy Holly specials, a Gibson, I think.

  “Ev,” Billy sighs. “I thought—”

  “He’s hurt. Okay? We discussed this—right?”

  “What the hell happened to Band-Aids? It seems an Elmo Band-Aid and an ice cube worked just fine with Anna.”

  “Anna was different,” I say.

  “You’re different,” he says. I wonder if Billy weren’t such a success, if my nursing wouldn’t bother him so much. If maybe he would care so much what people thought.

  I haven’t told Billy that the milk has already tapered off, that Charlie isn’t nursing as much. He hasn’t wanted to. Without the protection of that pleasing, narcotizing fog, I’m irritable and anxious, always anticipating my next fix. If Billy has noticed my shrinking breasts, he hasn’t said anything. One day the milk won’t be there at all. I’ll be empty. Never again will I nurse. Never again will my son need me like this, want me. Never again will I feel that warmth and intimacy, that closeness, that tingle. Soon he’ll move on.

  These thoughts are what pushed me to try it. Sitting on the toilet, weeping, I’d finally sucked at my own breast. Just for a second, then I’d stopped. It was so ridiculous. Then, I thought, just once more, just to see. I was surprised at how warm and soft the nipple felt between my teeth, how large and alive to my tongue’s touch it was, as it flattened it on the roof of my mouth, sending a gusher of sweet, fatty milk down my throat. I was surprised at how fast milk filled my mouth, how I gulped it, that pearl-colored elixir coating my tongue, its aftertaste waxy like coconut milk. I sat and sucked, eyes closed, mouth latched onto breast, a perfect unending circle.

  It wasn’t until I started imagining what I would look like if someone walked in on me that I had to stop, it was like catching a glance of yourself masturbating. Actually, masturbation would be much easier to explain.

  “What’s your plan for today?” Billy asks, putting on his running shoes. He walks the three miles to his brownstone o
ffice on the far side of the park.

  “Mary Beth and Ondine are coming for a play date.”

  “Ondine, what kind of name is that? Doesn’t she have any clue about the Factory gang? Ondine was the big speed freak, right?”

  “It’s pretty. Mary Beth was determined that her daughter have a fabulous name. In college she used to say, If there’s a more dreary name than Mary Beth I’d like to hear it—we struggled to come up with a good nickname for her, but she’s just not the nickname type.”

  He shrugs.

  I neglect to mention the nurse-in. I am surprised that I haven’t canceled lunch with Mary Beth. I really prefer socializing with other nursing mothers. I cancel on everybody else, but Mary Beth, she would act like it didn’t matter, that she wasn’t hurt. “Don’t worry, darling,” she’d say, but she has abandonment issues. There would be other rallies.

  I also didn’t cancel on Mary Beth because it was almost spring. The time of year my father died, and in this season I am always hungry to be with people who knew him, if only tangentially. Actually, that is best. I prefer that. I like feeling as though I knew him better than anyone. When people recall my father I can see him in a new pose, imagine him in a fresh setting, but it’s still just a snapshot, his image flat. Unmoving. Sometimes I might hear his laugh, but that was it.

  Mary Beth, unlike Billy, unlike my other old friends, doesn’t think my grief is inappropriate, or strange, or if she does, she’s never said so. I appreciate that. Sometimes I wonder how much of our friendship was founded on keeping our mouths shut.

  “We’re going to talk about work,” I tell Billy. “She says she can set me up with a regular gig at the magazine, in the art department doing layout. Some stylist work, back-breaking stuff—you know, swiveled-up lipsticks, prepubescent supermodels slathered in seaweed. Good stuff.”

  He sighs. I know this appeals to Billy. We aren’t desperate for cash but he believes I need to get out of the house more. He’s also been at me to rent some studio space with some other artists. Last Christmas he bought me new brushes.