Alone

by Michelle Parise

  I’m filling out the form I have to fill out every single time I get an MRI, once a year. No metal filings in my body, check. No shrapnel, check. Shrapnel. This makes me laugh every time, as though since last summer I’ve been out to the front lines or something. The admitting nurse is staring at me. She’s old, too old to be working this late if you ask me. I look up from the form and she says, in this gorgeous East Indian old-lady voice, “You are so pretty I can’t help but notice. But I have never seen such a pretty girl look so sad inside of herself.”

  She’s looking at me expectantly so I try to respond, but I’ve got nothing for you, lady. I can’t think of anything to say. I’m a pretty girl. A sad girl. A pretty sad girl. Yeah, I know. “I’m thirty-seven and I’m alone,” is what I finally say. She pats my hand and it’s all I can do not to fall into the deepest hole.

  In a small room, I take all of my clothes off and stuff them into a locker. I put on two hospital gowns, one forward and one backward, as instructed. I remove all five of my earrings, and the rings on my right hand. The locker needs a four-digit passcode, so I punch in my childhood address. Freezing, I sit on a plastic chair in an empty waiting room, alone. TV news on top volume for no one. My socks on the cold floor. Soon enough, I’m sliding into the MRI machine.

  Here I am, lying on this table. It’s really snug. Dark. And there’s this cage-type thing holding my head in place. The technician tells me not to move. You aren’t allowed to move or else the pictures they’re taking of your brain will be ruined and you’ll have to start all over again. I don’t want to start all over again. It is snug in here, remember? And I’m going to be in here for the next forty minutes. Don’t move don’t move don’t move.

  And then it begins. Clang clang click click click! Holy Lord it’s loud. But quickly, it gets really rhythmic sounding to me. Really musical. I hear … music. Each time the machine takes a picture of my brain, it sounds like a different “song” to me. The songs are actually called “pulse sequences” and they are as deliberately composed as any sequence in a piece of music. What, I’ve done my research, okay?

  It’s cool, this magnetic techno I hear. And after awhile, I forget about the lonely empty hospital and how pathetic — and cold — I feel lying in this tube. My breathing starts to lock in time with the high-pitched whirring and clanging of the magnet’s coils.

  Rhythm is all about movement. But here, inside this giant machine, I experience rhythm in the very absence of movement. Lying very still, in a cold room in the basement of a hospital. Tuning in to the pulse sequences like songs on a radio. Songs that create images of my brain. And make me forget about my heart. For a little while.

  When it’s over, as the two MRI technicians help me out of the machine, I crack a joke about them having magnetic personalities. In the change room, there’s a young woman putting on a blue hospital gown. I tell her she can leave her socks on and her underwear, even though they told her to take everything off. “Oh! Thank you,” she says, and then, “I’ve never done one before.” So I give her a spare pair of ear plugs, as well as my old sleep mask. “Trust me, it’s super-creepy to watch yourself slide into a tube so you’ll want your eyes covered. With your forehead held down by that clamp it’s a little too Clockwork Orange, you know?” We laugh and I see her whole blue-gowned body relax.

  When I leave, I smile at the sweet old nurse still sitting at the desk. That’s just me, I guess, The Saddest Optimist. A pretty, sad girl who never gives up hope.

  Two years later, when I have to go in for an MRI, The Man with the White Shirt is with me. He has packed an entire bag of supplies, as if we’re going away for the weekend. He’s got his laptop, loaded with episodes of the old TV series Lost, which we’ve been bingeing together obsessively, two sets of earbuds and a splitter, a two-litre bottle of water, two sandwiches, and a chocolate bar.

  He covers my cold, exposed legs with his jacket.

  He tells me I look sexy in my hospital gown and, even though I roll my eyes and say “Okaaay,” we both know I like it. He does a little low growl in my ear and pretends to try and get under the gown, slowly running his fingers along my thigh. I pretend to push his hands away and we laugh, sweetly, the way joking lovers do. He nuzzles my neck, he tucks my hair behind my ear, he kisses me. And it is all just as it should be. This. This is the way love used to feel, this is how I want love to feel.

  Love sits with you in the basement of a hospital at 2:00 a.m. Love tells you how much you’re adored, even when you’ve got bags under your eyes and are wearing a hospital gown. Love keeps your bare legs warm. It comes back here with you, year after year, with varying arrangements of snacks, so you never have to do this alone again.

  Love waits with you. It waits.

  TRAINING

  The personal trainer looks at me with concern. It’s 7:00 a.m. and we’re in a park and she’s about to put me through a full hour of serious workout. It’s a Tuesday.

  The personal trainer is twenty-six, beautiful. I am thirty-seven, still drunk. God, I remember that once upon a time I was twenty-six with my shit together, looking at drunk people with concern. But hey, I’m here, aren’t I? I didn’t cancel on her! I never cancel. I always show up no matter what state I am in, two, sometimes three, times a week. I’ve committed myself to being pushed hard by her. Some guy left my bed at 3:00 a.m., and here I am at 7:00, doing an unbelievable amount of lunges, squats, and sprints. Jesus Christ.

  It’s early September 2012. Back when The Bomb dropped, I gave myself a six-month time limit on feeling sorry for myself. So here we are, six months later, and I have to get on with it. The beautiful personal trainer is the first step. She says her first priority is to get me to stop drinking, then smoking. She wants me to eat again, properly, but I’m still not that into eating. My whiskey-and-cigarettes diet has given me a body like I’ve never had, but I want to be strong again. I need my body to get stronger so that I will get stronger.

  From this point on, I push myself. I get lines in my abs I didn’t even know you could get. When I run, I’m faster, less winded. My soccer game improves because I’m more agile thanks to Beautiful Trainer and her crazy regime. Everything tightens up. I buy clothes in sizes I’ve never bought clothes in before. And then I buy more. So many clothes, I can’t stop, because for the first time in my life, I actually fit into everything I try on. I get stronger and stronger. I can lift my fifty-pound daughter now without any trouble. I can carry her sleeping body plus a thousand bags all the way from the car to the elevator then down the long hallway to my apartment and I don’t huff and puff or even crack a sweat. I feel awesome.

  Beautiful Trainer is changing my life. Sure sure, I am, but really it’s her. She says, “Ten more,” and I do ten more. She says, “That’s okay,” when I burst into tears, sobbing through abdominal crunches, crying through squats, saying over and over to her, “I don’t know how I got here. Why am I here? I don’t know why my husband did this to me. Why did he do this to me?”

  Something about pushing myself physically is pushing the words out of me, pushing the confusion right out with the sweat. Beautiful Trainer nods her head, her eyes fill with tears. “You are amazing and strong. He did it because he’s a jerk. And you’re going to get better. Now do that set from the top.” And I do. I do every set she tells me to, twice.

  By the end of the first month of training, I’ve cut down on the smoking and I ease up on the booze. A lot. It isn’t daily anymore, and it will never be again, thank God. I put some weight back on because without all the drinking I’m hungry for food again, and anyway the weight is good because my muscles are strong.

  I actually stand in front of the mirror now, and see something I like. Everything is leaner and tighter but still super curvy, still lots of meat. It looks great. For the first time in my life, I love everything about my own body. It’s an incredible achievement, to stand there in your skivvies and say “Damn, I look good.”

  All these years later, I still do this. No matter how much weight I
’ve gained, or how many rolls I have, I continue to look at myself in the mirror and say “Damn, I look good!” even if I’m not totally feeling it. It’s one of the best things I’ve learned to do. The best gift I’ve given myself. Because I do look good, and so do you, goddamn it.

  PAST IN PRESENT

  In this first year since The Bomb, The Ex-husband and I have settled into our complicated relationship. He comes over and fixes things for me, brings his drill and hangs pictures and wall lamps. He listens to the water heater and tells me why it’s making that clicking sound.

  When I go to his place, I straighten out the clothes in Birdie’s closet. I counsel him on the finer points of dressing a five-year-old girl. I secretly marvel at how put together his place is, how exactly him it seems, even though it has all my furniture in it. I oddly feel good that he has his own space, his own sense of style in it. I don’t tell him this.

  One day when I’m there, I go into Birdie’s room and notice that he’s hung two big frames over her bed. One is a collage of a bunch of different photos of him that I took before she was born. The other is a collage of photos of me from the same time period. The two of us in our twenties, all smiles and swagger. As soon as I see them, I freeze. I can hear Birdie: “Mom? Mom?” but it’s like she’s at the end of a tunnel. My head is swimming. We were so young once.

  In a sad trance, I lie down on her bed but can’t stop looking at the photos. Birdie runs to get her dad and he rushes in and immediately grabs my wrist (which is so him, you know?) to check my fucking pulse as if I’ve had a heart attack instead of knowing these happy photos of us would tailspin me.

  When he realizes what’s wrong, he crawls onto her bed beside me. He curls his arms around me, his right leg folded over mine, in the exact way we slept each night for the last twelve years. Birdie jumps into the bed with us and looks so happy she could burst.

  His hand on my face, gently. He says, over and over, “Should I take them down?”

  “Of course not,” I say, once I return to earth. I tickle Birdie and kiss her goodbye. Then I walk across the street.

  WHEN SHE’S HERE

  When Birdie’s gone I feel emptied out. There’s no other way to say it. It’s like I have a phantom limb — I can feel her here with me even though she isn’t.

  She’s with her father, she’s fine. She’s happy and healthy and getting everything she needs from him during the 50-percent-of-the-time she’s there, and not here. But it eats away at me, this part of the loneliness, this walking past her bedroom with its purple walls and stuffed animals, here, right here in my apartment, but empty. The place where a child once was and now isn’t. But will come back to.

  So many goodbyes, so many reunions. It takes adjusting to. Mostly for me. Birdie’s unfazed by her two homes. She acts like it’s all completely normal. We’ve been parenting her, together, every step of the way since we separated, and it’s paying off.

  Just look at her.

  She’s wearing her Supergirl costume … again. It’s nowhere near Hallowe’en. I don’t care. I let her wear it whenever she wants, what’s the difference? Right now she’s putting together an Ikea stool, and has all the parts laid out perfectly on the apartment floor. She studies the manual thoughtfully, as any Supergirl would. I take her orders: Hold the legs in a cross pattern! Use the star screwdriver to put in the long funny little screwy things! Her orders are all shouts. She is half-Italian. Together, we make a pretty good little stool. It’s still in her room all these years later.

  She’s starting Senior Kindergarten at a new school in our new neighbourhood in our new life. She’s got a brand new pair of white sneakers. “So plain,” she says, so I hand her a black Sharpie. “Go for it!” Her blue eyes wide with excitement, she tricks out those sneakers like she’s a five-year-old graffiti artist. They look so cool.

  Now she’s six. She wants to get her ears pierced. No, her ear. Just one. “That’s my style,” she says, so I hold her little hand as she gets it done. She squeezes me hard and says, “Holy, that hurt!” but she doesn’t cry out or cry. We walk back home swinging our arms, trying to guess how many windows are in each tall building.

  Birdie at every age slips tiny notes into my purse and sometimes my lunch bag for me to find later when I’m at work.

  Oh hi mom! Have a GRAT day! says one.

  Oh hey Mom do you NO you are totalle the best? says another.

  I keep them all. In my purse. Any time I feel like a sad lonely loser, I pull them out to remind myself I’m the luckiest loser that ever lived. I may have loved and lost, but at least I loved and lost. And this unbelievable little human is the result.

  Here’s Birdie at seven. We’re walking in a big downtown park and we see a hip-hop artist I know. He’s making a music video in the park and Birdie and I get pulled into the fun. Dancing and lip-synching along to the track in a little ramshackle booth. Afterward I say, “Wasn’t that the coolest? We’re going to be in a video!”

  “I really liked your friend’s dog,” she says. “And the song I guess.” She takes off to play with the other kids in the playground.

  In these moments with Birdie, I’m whole again. I’m relaxed. I’m relaxing into being a part-time parent to her, not having her dad to defer to or negotiate with about what happens in the small moments. We’re just two people here, me and Birdie. We create our own space, develop our own rhythm. I try not to worry about how other parents parent. I run on instinct. I don’t put her in any classes or extra-curricular activities. When she’s with me, the city is one big adventure.

  Birdie’s with me every other weekend, and that’s when we make art together — collages, paintings, drawings, sewing projects, elaborately decorated cupcakes. I refuse to make plans for us on Saturday mornings. I want us to have this one time, every two weeks, where we don’t have to rush off anywhere. The not rushing is what brings me closest to her. Carving that space out for us is the best decision I’ve ever made as a parent. Every Saturday morning is a master class in just chilling out — staying in our pyjamas and making things and making a mess of the place. Who cares? I don’t look at my phone, I don’t answer calls. We become remarkably in tune, doing our own things but still interacting. Mother and daughter in parallel play. It’s wonderful.

  When it’s time for Birdie to go I say, “Don’t forget about the invisible thread!” and she says, “I won’t, Mom!” The invisible thread that’s always connecting us, whether we’re physically together or not.

  When she’s here, we’re both learning and growing, everything’s new for us both. So we design our life together, over the years. We redraw the lines of parent and child, woman and girl, human and human. We make it all up as we go along. In pyjamas and taking no calls.

  RINGS

  I only ever think about them when I’m on public transit. Engagement rings. On a crowded streetcar, they’re everywhere — on fingers gripped around poles, tapping on cellphones, or curled around a book, their diamonds twinkling and taunting me. Oh, there’s another one, look as she absent-mindedly twirls it with her left thumb, the way I once did with my own, this girl who looks too young, all edges, all high-pitched complaints, as she shout-talks to her friend.

  For months after The Bomb I would twirl the space where my engagement ring once was with my thumb, minutes passing before I’d realize it wasn’t even there anymore. It would never be there again. Now it sits in a little box beside my wedding band, both nestled together on soft black cloth. Closed away forever.

  I never wanted a ring, you know. I never imagined owning a diamond or wearing one, never looked at them longingly in a shop window. It just wasn’t my thing. But once he gave it to me, that beautiful ring he designed himself, I never took it off. Never, not till the bitter end. Not even during my pregnancy, until I was so swollen I had no choice. The Husband used butter to try to get those damn rings off my enormous finger. We killed ourselves laughing, there in the kitchen of the house we had just bought, and teasingly I said, “Couldn’t you just ha
ve used hand cream like a normal person? Why butter?”

  “But I love butter!” he said, and we laughed some more.

  Once the butter did its magic, I immediately put the wedding rings on a chain I wore around my neck day and night, the platinum and the white gold pressed to my heart as I slept, swishing across my skin while I was at work, something for me to fiddle with while riding the bus home. I didn’t take that chain off until after Birdie was born and my fingers went back to normal size. And then I put those rings right back on.

  I think about his ring. His wedding band, which he also never took off. I think about the day I bought it for him, how I had it inscribed with my nickname for him: My Rogue. (I know.)

  I think about him touching her face, her body, while wearing the ring I put on his finger on our wedding day. I think of the cool platinum running along her skin, through her hair. Touching her in places and in ways I don’t want to think about, places and ways I used to need booze and sleeping pills to eradicate.

  Rings. They’re just objects. They’re just symbols. We just give them to one another in front of all our friends and family and in front of God, that’s all. We say eternal and everyone reaches for the Kleenex. But what we mean is for as long as I can stand it.

  He had my wedding band inscribed with Me Vision. That was his nickname for me, the lilt of his Newfoundland brogue, the dialect that replaces “my” with “me.” Sometimes he’d call me his demon. Vision, Demon, Vision, Demon. It’s hard to say what he meant by these things. I never really knew. Anyway, he had long stopped calling me either of those names by the end. The end I didn’t know was the end.