There was one book our mother never read with you, given to us by a friend from church, the story of Stellaluna, the fruit bat. Stellaluna and her mother are out searching for food one night when suddenly they’re attacked by an owl and separated. A family of birds takes Stellaluna in, but under the condition that she puts her bat habits aside. In fact, Mama Bird threatens to kick her out of the nest if she doesn’t start acting like a better bird. So she learns to sleep right-side up and eat bugs without making faces. How can we be so different and feel so much alike, one of the baby bird siblings asks her. And how can we feel so different and be so much alike? says another.
One day while flying, Stellaluna is separated from her adoptive siblings and comes across her bat family. This is the happy ending: the young bat returns with relief to her biological family.
* * *
I REMEMBER sitting in the pew with you at church, trying to pray to a holy mother and father, and feeling the great burden of having to love another set of parents, ones only known to us through the wild stories we learned in school. Water to wine, a miraculous conception, resurrection from the dead—it was all impressive but how could it possibly translate to love? How could we feel loyalty to a guardian who’d never physically shown up in our own lives to earn it? Sometimes, while we prayed the Hail Mary with our teacher, I would try to summon our mother’s face in case this other mother was trying to crowd ours out. I confessed this to our mother one night, and she said that it was okay to love a mother on earth and a mother in heaven. But it was no comfort at all, being asked to cut love down the center. I wonder if similar questions have troubled your heart from time to time.
I was always worrying from a young age that our mother would die on me, and then on us. She often existed as a voice-over in my head, ruling on the good and poor decisions that occurred when we were apart. This continued when I was older—when riding to a bar once in the trunk of a car, when going home with a stranger. I’m sorry, I would say, the prayer earthbound, and ask her to avert her eyes. Sometimes, when I didn’t hear her, I would feel certain that she was hurt or in a coma, that something had happened to sever the connection. Maybe when she was really gone, I thought, I would finally be able to love the other mother equally. But then our mother would probably just outshine everybody in heaven. Because when she leaned in to kiss us, there was the scent of the rose soap that she kept in her drawers, and all the jewelry on her body would chime with the motion, like the little bells that rang during the consecration—the long earrings, the medals around her neck, the two small gold bracelets our father had given her—chime, chime, chime, as if something sacred were happening.
* * *
SHE USED TO HAVE that funny saying; we would whisper it back and forth, rolling our eyes. When bad stories would pop up in the news or in gossip around the table, our mother would say at the end, And that’s why you have to be kind to each other. As if kindness was the dividing line from the killers, the key to a happy and productive life. The each other was you and me.
There was such an age difference between us that we never really physically fought, except for that time you were mad and jabbed me in the arm with a pencil, deep enough that it drew blood. I cried out and hit you across the face. I think we were both surprised at the sound it made, a thud, rather than the crisp slap of the movies. I don’t know that we were kinder to each other after that, but maybe we were a little more careful.
* * *
THESE DAYS IT might surprise your bride to know that you were once the boy who would have done anything to get out of church. Laundry, homework. For a while you were allowed to bring in trucks or coloring books, but as you got older these distractions were forbidden and you would sigh audibly, head thrown up to the heavens, as if the hour was the longest in your life.
Most of the time I understood; it’s difficult to feel awe over a routine part of life. Our weeks at school were filled with prayers before first period, prayers before lunch, confession and Communion on Fridays, the sacraments crowding into our weekends, too. But as a kid I loved the rich blue of the robe that the priest wore during advent, appearing just days before Petalumans began stringing their houses with lights. I loved the way his voice would build itself up, decibel by decibel, over the course of a sermon. I loved when he would pass through the aisles with the aspergillum and a hundred signs of the cross would wave through the church. You confided in me that you didn’t like church but you liked the music, though this was hardly a secret. You’d stand up from the floor and peer over the pew and watch the choir in a kind of trance, often humming along. I didn’t love all the songs we sang, but there were a handful that would sometimes make me want to cry for no reason, and still do.
By high school you stopped going, to the disappointment of our mother. On Sunday mornings you would disappear from the house, heading to either the park or the gym to make sure you couldn’t be tricked into changing your mind. Though I do remember you showing up once: a morning during our mother’s cancer. I was twenty-three and alone in the pew, there to collect the host to bring home to her, and suddenly you appeared beside me. You’d come for me, though you didn’t say it. I will never forget that kindness, or the comfort I felt at the sight of you. You didn’t kneel when it was time to kneel, but you sat through the whole mass quietly, your shoulder pressed against mine.
* * *
WHEN DID YOU LEARN to hide things from me? Why can’t we go back to that story I always tell, you five or six years old, your smile sly as you placed my wrapped gift under the tree. MERRY CHRSMTMAS LOVE DANNY LARSEN.
What did you get me for Christmas, Danny? I’d teased.
Not slippers, you’d said.
* * *
WHEN DID I LEARN to hide things from you?
I ONCE READ love defined as a refusal to think of someone in terms of power. I’d never considered love in this context, in the context of power, and in that way the definition felt far from me, even though in theory I practiced it. After all, your brother-in-law and I had shared everything from the beginning. Keys and friends and a perpetual cold. A degree and its corresponding ambitions, and shame for those ambitions. A coffee grinder and a pan and a pot and a horrible sweatshirt with a psychedelic wolf. Money, even, right away, because neither of us had much to keep tabs on. Staying in love seemed as simple as the words themselves, a matter of keeping put someplace happy.
But power structures don’t cease to exist just because two people refuse them, and now I think this definition holds less weight. To try to forget power in the name of love is only a sacrifice from the person who lacks it.
What feels true is this: problems in a marriage result from a shift in the balance, a disruption in some unspoken agreement upon which happiness has been built. Maybe a child always tipped the scales, triggering one person’s rise or descent. Whatever I had lost of myself in the process, though, hadn’t seemed to transfer to my husband. So where did the power go then? Who ascended? What if nobody did?
* * *
ONE NIGHT at a party, pumped full of hormones, I spotted your brother-in-law talking to a woman. Her hands were thrust coolly in her pockets, as if pinning her otherwise weightless frame to the earth. Her shoulders were pulled back and her hair was pulled back and everything about her seemed open, switched on, electric with sex, and I tried to remember the last time I’d done anything that wasn’t instigated by my calendar. I looked at this person and recalled an evening last month when, in our small window of procreational hope, I’d been so sure I was getting strep throat that we decided to go through it without kissing, bearing it bravely, civilly, mechanically, like two virgins obliged to their wedding night. And probably it should have been funny, stumbling around the body I knew best—Sorry, this way, did you? Good night—trying not to get him sick, but I realized that in the old days he wouldn’t have minded sickness at all, that he would have put his hands and mouth in a hundred different places and taken sickness without thinking, because back then we shared everything, be
cause back then we touched each other with a different desperation, and I looked at this person and I looked at my husband and I became so tired of it that I walked out the door. On the street I ran the five blocks to the train and when I boarded my heart was beating so loudly I wondered if the stranger next to me could hear it. My phone rang halfway through the ride, and when I answered with satisfaction that I was almost home, it was my husband’s confusion that brought me back, and I stopped hearing myself and instead heard only the amazement in his voice. You … left?
In that moment, my anger seemed tied to the evening’s events. It was hard to see that back then that same anger fueled everything, burning up even the smallest of trials. Because if you were always angry, how could you distinguish the heat of one perceived injustice from another? I was furious with the commute, with the perpetual clog in the tub, with an imaginary child who had become too stubborn, with a husband who’d remained physically unchanged. I was furious with myself, that there were so many other desires that comprised my personhood but somehow I had been boiled down to this, this chemically altered creature. In the dark window of the train I saw someone else, a monster, subhuman, subwoman, a contaminant, and when I got home an hour passed, and then another, and then another, until finally I heard the key, the toothbrush, the slump into the bed. I knew that in the morning I would apologize and that he would forgive me, but the thing about marriage is that certain fights leave their marks, the permanent stains on one’s record, the wife who left her husband behind.
Maybe that time was less about anger and more about an affliction of possibility, the feeling that if I just held on a little longer … But how long could a body live in the almost of that space?
I didn’t know how to talk about any of it, Danny. Nobody around me knew, either, because silence is the accepted consolation for so many things, and so the isolation grew. The calls stopped coming, a close friend neglected to tell me she was pregnant. Nobody asked anymore if I was still trying, as if it would remind me of something I’d forgotten. As if, monster that I was, my curse would somehow transmit to them.
* * *
THE FIRST RECORD of the infertile woman was the lion-headed demoness Lamashtu, in the eighteenth century BCE. The story went that the gods flooded the earth while at war with men. Upon restoring humankind, they introduced a third group of people, who would prevent the world from ever overpopulating again. Enter Lamashtu, who, barren and envious, roamed around causing infertility, miscarriage, and infant death. Apparently she could be warded off only by reciting all seven of her names.
* * *
I DIDN’T MISCARRY; we were never baited with a positive test. One afternoon a nurse said she spotted a promising follicle. This one is a very nice size, she said, very promising, and I practically ran home to tell my husband. We readied the disinfectant, the shot, the sex, and in the two weeks that followed, I practiced a kind of catholic abstinence. No white flour, no alcohol, no tight clothing, no exercise. I jogged across the street to catch the light one evening without thinking and then repented the rest of the way home.
And the world looked different again, except this time it all seemed to point toward a yes. I could feel it in the way strangers looked at me on the train, in the rare heat that was pressing into the evenings, as if the strangers knew something I didn’t, as if the heat nursed from a life that now whirred within me. I could feel it in my body. Don’t get your hopes up too much, someone had said, and I didn’t know how to answer, I didn’t know where exactly my hope was by then. I just understood that it was an impossible thing to ask of a person, of a person who still wanted to live, who was covetous of life.
So the days passed and I hoped and I slept. I slept a kind of beautiful sleep that I’d lost since I was a teenager. The bed returned as a place of comfort and I dove into it like a vast, warm ocean, in which sleep was one long, continuous float.
It was still dark the morning I took the test; I checked the time and went into the bathroom, closed the door. My husband was sleeping and I wanted it that way. I peed and waited and picked up the stick and even then I told myself it could be a mistake. New stick, dribble, wait, same mistake. I went back to bed and knew that my husband was now awake. The sheets were cold and I faced away from him. And this is the hardest thing to explain, but I mourned the loss of that follicle so deeply, that pathetic, nothing, fluid-filled sac. I wondered who, in another’s body, with another’s luck, that follicle could have been.
I started traveling more frequently for work, bumping into myself in the hotel mirror. Sometimes when I called home I’d feel certain that my husband wouldn’t answer, that he’d be at the bar down the street, talking to women who didn’t make him feel lonely. But he always did.
LANGUAGE always seemed to be the great current you were working against and, to fight it, you began picking up words of untraceable origin, lending your own meaning, explaining them to us as if you lived with a household of idiots. There was the period where you created a pejorative out of the word biscuiter. It made you seem like some miniature play actor, flinging Shakespearean insults across the stage, ones that made a modern-day audience laugh while scratching their heads. Where did you pick this word up, one who biscuits?
Our father had a theory that the word was a warping of busk. He thought it was something you’d heard on the street, though our mother was skeptical: the number of actual buskers in our suburban town was minimal.
What does that mean, I’d cry at the table each time you hurled the word at me.
A beggar, you once said darkly, only leaving me more confused.
* * *
BY KINDERGARTEN you found your first love, a girl with hair the color of corn husks. You followed her around school as you had done with our mother those first days in the hotel.
Maybe language fell like a boulder, blocking the path for all those feelings to come through. Maybe you didn’t know how to tell her you thought she was beautiful, how to ask her to be your friend. I just know that instead of throwing yourself on the ground, calls began to come in from her mother, the principal, asking to put an end to the harassment. The crime itself was loosely defined, left to the testimony of five-year-olds. How, in turn, was our mother supposed to communicate this to you? And would those calls still have come, our mother wondered, if your features were light like hers, too?
But I didn’t do anything, you said. We sat on the floor of my room, both of us cross-legged on the carpet. It didn’t occur to me then that we wouldn’t always be like that, just a knock away.
* * *
I WATCHED YOU once with a group of boys after soccer practice; I was across the field and couldn’t hear the conversation, which is what made me notice how you’d taught yourself to talk with your body. You pulled on the shirts of the boys you liked, attaching to them like a superfluous limb, pushing others away.
That’s just boys’ stuff, our father said.
Eventually our parents sent you for those speech and language evaluations; you’d gotten in trouble with the principal for calling him dude. He thought it was funny, you said, and I’d marveled a little at your guts. But our parents were growing concerned; similar complaints had been cropping up from coaches and teachers about the way you addressed them.
The speech therapist came back with a phrase that I’d begin to hear often in our home, central auditory processing deficits. These could be common for children who’d experienced deprivation of sound and language in a critical language period, she said. What kind of interactions had he had in the orphanage? Our mother always gave the same answer: she wished more than anything that she knew. Regular speech therapy was recommended.
I remember at one point our mother set up a playdate with one of the adopted children from Mexico, but you preferred a classmate named Nick, who lived up the road in a house with a big swimming pool. You spent a good deal of time over there for at least a year until one day the invites stopped coming; our mother followed up with phone calls, but couldn’t seem to get an
answer on what had happened. You also didn’t have an explanation.
You and I ran into him a few months later downtown, as he was crossing the street with another friend. You waved and as I watched his mouth tighten into a smirk an insane anger blazed in my chest. What the fuck is so funny? I screamed, and he scurried away. You looked up at me. I can’t remember if you were impressed or horribly embarrassed, only that my heart raced the rest of the afternoon.
* * *
AT THE SAME TIME you were growing so strong. On the weekends, reprieved from his city job and long commute, our father would take us to the park across the street. From the garage you would pull out all the necessary equipment: baseball gloves, soccer balls, Frisbees, bats. But the three of us inevitably wound up on the blacktop because the Bulls were on TV and because at that time I had serious ambitions to play in the WNBA.
Watching you dribble was like watching someone run through a bounce house with a hot beverage. You’d trip down the court and make our father laugh and laugh. Then you’d astonish him by using the same wobbly hands to chuck the ball up to the net, six feet over your head, and sink it. Our father made no secret of his admiration.
Many years later, when I’d return for a weekend from college, you and I would still find ourselves at the blacktop, usually within an hour of my coming home. It was the way for us to make up for lost time, become comfortable around each other’s bodies again. By then you were better than me, short but fast. I’d blink and you’d be five feet behind me, sinking a layup. I was impressed but I kept this from you because you were happier when I looked upset. Sometimes we’d just shoot around, and sometimes we’d play in silence, without keeping score.
Immediate Family Page 9