The Rending and the Nest

by Kaethe Schwehn

  We sent things to Lana via Ida. Chester sent his fortunes, the most inappropriate ones he could find, words crossed out or reinserted to make her laugh. I sent her anything I found on the Piles that I thought might distract her: a book of Sudoku puzzles, a pink faux-fur stole, a hideous necklace made of seashells. Into a Care Bear calendar, Chester and I pasted color portraits from a history of WWF Wrestling: Tenderheart Bear offering a plate of cupcakes to Hulk Hogan, The Undertaker riding shotgun beside Funshine Bear, André the Giant sweating onto the unadulterated clouds.

  I should have gone to her, should have ignored what she wanted, should have sat beside her, held her hand, napped beside her unwashed body. I should have been the one to empty the gallon bucket she was using as a chamber pot. I thought of my father a lot. Wished I could send him in to her, wished I were brave enough to know how to sit in that kind of silence. But the truth was that I thought I’d be called upon to say something. That she would ask me what to do or to explain what it meant. And I wouldn’t have an answer or worse, I’d laugh. That was my biggest terror. One night, after Chester had unrolled his pallet, I lay next to him and we thought up the worst things we could inscribe on a sympathy card:

  So sorry you gave birth to a doll. At least she’ll sleep through the night!

  She looks just like you except for the lack of blood, breath, hair, skin, bones, eyes, and internal organs.

  When God closes a door, He always opens a window. I’m sure the blessings of your little one will reveal themselves soon!

  She is so much cuter than Raggedy Ann.

  On the day I finally spotted Lana walking across the quadrangle toward my room, I ducked inside, hurriedly straightened my room, and began to mash a leftover sweet potato with some ghost fruit. By the time I returned to the doorway I heard the click of the beads on Chester’s door. Heard her murmur something low to him. Then silence, for a long time. Just the sound of Chester’s rocker and an occasional cough. I know because I sat with my back against the wall that separated our rooms, hoping that, even if I couldn’t understand the words she was saying, the vibrations of her voice might come through the wall, might worm their way into my head. I missed her.

  After she left I went into Chester’s room. He looked at me with his sad doe eyes and shrugged. Ida wasn’t much use either, though I tried daily to pump her for information, sometimes subtly, sometimes rather aggressively. She mostly looked at me through her halo of frizzed hair and offered up colloquialisms that made her sound like an aunt in the country: “She’s coming along,” she’d say, or “She’ll get there when she’s ready.” As though there were a place, a location Lana would eventually reach where she would be fixed, free of the pull of this strange grief.

  Experiencing the Rending together had brought Lana and me close, but where she was now, after the birth, was a place so surreal and extreme, I couldn’t begin to know how to inhabit it with her.

  And I couldn’t shake the fact that I’d been so busy not loving Rodney, so carefully avoiding that trap, that I’d placed my affection on Lana. And now she was gone. She hadn’t been taken away physically, but she was occupying a different version of the present. She wasn’t with me in the way she had been only days before.

  Post-Rending grief had felt like a weight in my body, an anchor, the eternal gray of the sky wound into a skein and stuffed into my gut. But the loss of Lana, the birth of the first Baby, didn’t feel this way. My grief was heat and anger and motion.

  And I want to say that, faced with the loss of my friend, or the loss of the way our friendship had been, I grieved by spending more time on the Piles or by composing sonnets from the list of objects in the back of my notebook, by helping in the orchard or by practicing yoga breaths. But I didn’t.

  I went to Rodney instead.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Though I didn’t have much of a wardrobe to select from, I’d considered many times what I’d wear if I ever went to Rodney. This was the language used in one of my mother’s “recovery” books, the romance novels she read when she wanted to recover from her day—books I paged through when I had the house to myself, skipping to the passages that included phrases like pulsing member and gush of warmth. “She went to him then,” the books always stated, the word went always the close cousin of wet, dripping with desire. There was a bra I’d never shown Lana, one I’d never worn for more than five minutes at a time. It was too small for me really, peach and lace with a little rosette in the middle and underwire that made my boobs look, from my angle, as though they might precariously roll over the edge of the brassiere and off my body at any moment. I kept a clean pair of underwear too. Just in case.

  But when the time actually came, I didn’t bother with the bra or the underwear. Grief and desire had scrubbed me, momentarily, free of self-consciousness. I put on the necklace instead. Took it down from its peg above the door, watched my fingers remember how to slide back the claw of the clasp, how to fit the small silver circle into its mouth.

  Rodney’s room was south of the ghost fruit orchards, out near Curly, about a ten-minute walk from my room. He’d built the room on stilts, as though he were expecting a flood or intruders. I’d been there once, after he’d first built it, to see the view, the land scraped clean and brown. In the distance the remains of the real Zion, the one with the real houses we’d scavenged and partially dismantled, the water tower we’d sucked dry after two years.

  It was twilight when I got to the bottom of the ladder. Light sifted through the cracks in the floorboards above me. I climbed up without announcing my arrival, poked my head over the plane of floorboards. He was standing with his back to me, staring out the window at Curly or Moe. I thought of my father then (Freud would be pleased to know), of climbing the utility ladder propped against our house a month before the Rending. I’d poked my head over the edge of the roofline, and there was my father sitting on the shingles, his cell phone pressed to his ear, head bowed slightly between his bent knees as he listened to whoever was on the other end. He kept not seeing me and I kept not making myself known. His tennis shoes were off, socks stuffed inside, bare feet pressed against the warmth of the shingles. I watched as he reached his right hand to the base of his neck, watched him run his hand over the fuzz there, where it had recently been cut. He did it for pleasure, I could see. And I was shocked, caught by the gesture because it looked natural but I’d never seen him do it before and whoever was on the other end of the phone seemed to be bringing it out of him. But even more because he kept not noticing me, kept not sensing my presence, and I’d thought that somehow, no matter what happened, he’d always know where I was. Maybe because when my father spoke of God’s promises it was hard not to hear them as his own.

  I looked at Rodney; I hadn’t made a sound. One beat. Two beats. He turned and saw me but he wasn’t surprised. He’d known who it was that was there, knew me before I made myself known.

  “Hi,” I said.

  “Hi,” he said. “It’s good to see you, Mira.” He smiled and the branch on his jaw moved, seemed to open.

  He helped me up the last few rungs of the ladder but then he just stood, looking at me, hands at his sides.

  I glanced down at my dirty Keds and all of my self-consciousness came flooding back into me. I remembered that the underwear I was wearing was a size too small, that I’d cut the elastic to keep it from driving a red hula hoop into my midsection. I longed for the bra I’d left behind. That little rosette. I’d been so certain that once I decided to be with Rodney (with all the weight and heat that he entailed), every gesture and moment would flow easily, a Jacob’s Ladder where one rectangle of wood unfolded into the next and the next and the next.

  He was still looking at me. I didn’t know whether he was purposely making things difficult out of amusement or spite or whether he truly didn’t know why I was there. What would Lana do? Who the fuck knew. She’d told me a few obscene details about her encounters with clients but I’d never bothered to ask about what happened in the momen
ts between when the client entered the room and when he entered her. Crucial, awkward, stupid moments.

  I met his gaze. “You’re tall,” I said, like a complete idiot. I’d always admired Rodney’s size but this was the first time I realized my five-foot-three frame made me look like a hobbit beside him, a garden gnome with breasts.

  He grabbed an overturned milk crate, lifted me quickly onto it, and then went back to staring at me, arms dangling. He smiled at me, slightly, but didn’t move.

  I reached out with my index finger and traced the branch along his jaw. He closed his eyes. The line of the branch was graceful but in places it was interrupted by the prick of whiskers poking through. I touched the hollow at the base of his throat; his jaw relaxed and his mouth opened slightly. I ran my palm across his head; his hair was brittle, a little oily. I drew my fingers across his scalp. He sighed and I felt the tiny gust of breath against my cheek. I was crying, I think. I kissed his lower lip, both his lips; I moved my tongue inside his mouth and pressed so close that I could feel his whiskers, his teeth. I had known I wanted Rodney but my brain hadn’t really understood what that meant.

  My body understood.

  Desire made me fierce and ragged. I remember being angry, truly livid about how long it took for his clothes to come off. I hated the fabric for the few seconds it kept my skin from being on his skin. We were on his bed then. This body, his body before me, was a landscape. And it was mine. I was an animal frantic to mark its territory. I bit his earlobes, his chin. I kneaded his thighs and the thick band of muscle and fat around his waist. There was so much of him. I burrowed my nose in his armpit, his neck, his groin. I wanted his scent on my face. I scratched his back and his ass. I covered every inch of his skin with my skin and wound my legs through his, holding his arms above his head, swimming into him, his cock pressing into my belly. Then I slithered down and took it into my mouth so far and so fast that I came up choking, gasping and crying.

  The gust of cool air that hit me as I sat up brought with it a recognition of the savage strangeness of my body’s behavior. I had meant to be seductive, I had meant to be intentional about each gesture, coy and knowing. Instead I was a boiling mess of need and want and he’d been so still the whole time. Maybe he was just being kind to someone who was the sexual equivalent of a toddler at the end of a tantrum. But when I looked at him I saw that he’d simply been waiting. Being polite. Letting me take my turn.

  He put me on my back. He held my face while he kissed me. Then he squeezed my shoulders, my biceps, my forearms, my breasts, my thighs. He worked his way down my body until I was tenderized; not in pain but on the cusp of pain. He put his face between my thighs and he was nothing like the boy I’d slept with before, who’d used his tongue like a quill, raising his eyes to check in with me after delicately carving each letter. Rodney was an animal in need of sustenance; he licked and lapped, his tongue open and rough and wide, as if trying to clean a wound I hadn’t known was there. Then he was inside me. Without asking. Without gentle maneuvers or slow insertions. He was outside me and then he was inside me. There. Fully present. Entirely. It hurt and he kept going. I cried out and he kept going, his eyes measuring mine every second so that I knew he would stop if I wanted him to stop. I didn’t want him to stop. I closed my eyes. He kept going and going, until the pain sighed into something that felt like pleasure, until the distinction didn’t really matter anymore, until something inside my brain tore open. And when I opened my eyes he was there: heavy and emptied and mine.

  We slept. When we woke in the morning we did all of it again. At the end I kissed him the way I’d wanted to the night before, not with frantic need and desperation, but simply with love. There is a gold light in certain old paintings. Words from a poem that I didn’t remember until then, that seemed to be written on the other side of his lips.

  Then I rolled away from him so we were both on our backs. I put my hand against his chest. “Did you have a dog,” I asked, “in the Before?”

  “Yep. We had a dog named Patsy.”

  “Patsy?”

  “I got to name him. I don’t think I meant it as a joke.”

  “How old were you?”

  “Seven or eight. We got him a few weeks before Halloween. He was a Jack Russell Terrier, a low-key terrier. My mom bought a little pirate costume for him. Patsy even let us put the little black patch over his eye. But then he kept walking into things: table legs, the sofa, the door. My dad kept saying ‘fuck’s wrong with that animal?’ and my mom kept yelling ‘language!’ from the kitchen. She was in there making caramel apples. She did it every Halloween, twenty-four of them, even though we lived on a busy street and hardly got any trick-or-treaters and the ones that did come didn’t want an apple weighing their bags down. But she had this way of sticking the apples into the caramel and then twisting them so the caramel wrapped around just perfectly. It was beautiful. I was trying to guide Patsy around the living room by holding out a bit of bacon so he wouldn’t run into things. We figured out later he was blind in one eye. And we’d covered the other eye with the patch.”

  “That’s terrible!” I said. But I was laughing. I’d never heard Rodney string together so many sentences in a row.

  “The next morning Patsy came up to my room, his hair all stuck together with wads of caramel. My mom had left the apples out and he’d gotten into them.”

  I liked watching his profile while he told the story. The tiny dark blades of his whiskers coming in. Adam’s apple moving up and down his throat.

  “So my dad took him away because he hadn’t wanted a dog to begin with; getting Patsy had been some kind of concession to my mom, I think. Dad dropped Patsy far enough away he couldn’t find his way back. He told me Patsy was at a farm. I didn’t really miss Patsy too much but I missed the way my mom never made caramel apples after that.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  I could feel his body shrug beside me.

  “Tell me something,” he said, “from your Before.”

  I told him about the way my mother could step delicately through a tangled garden hose, in heels, without looking down. Then Rodney told me about how he and his cousin wore the same size shoes but walked with different gaits. His shoes would wear on the outside of the sole and his cousin’s on the inside; every few months their mothers would make them switch pairs. I told him I always licked around the entire rim of a juice bottle before taking the first sip. He described the front window of his house, how it was almost entirely covered with window ornaments, glass flowers because his mother couldn’t have a garden.

  We went back and forth for a long time. Then he watched as I wrote in the back of my notebook: Patsy, caramel apples, daffodils made of glass. Finally he raised himself up on his elbow beside me.

  “When you arrived at the gelato place with that douche security guard, I could tell you’d been crying. You had streaks of black down both cheeks. Streaks isn’t the right word. Rivers?”

  “Rivulets?”

  “Yeah, I guess. Rivulets. But what got me is that the rivulets were dry. You’d stopped crying and you looked ready to kick that guy’s ass. I had to save him from you.” He touched my cheeks where the rivulets had been. Then he touched the necklace.

  “I’m glad you saved him,” I said.

  CHAPTER TEN

  I loved Rodney. I love Rodney. But my experience of falling in love with him was different than the way Marjorie or Lana described love. Different than the way my mother had described her romance with my father. Most of the other women I knew had loved a few men, or been deeply infatuated at least, and so they talked about patterns and types. A penchant for a particular body shape or boozy charm or wry intelligence. My divorced aunt with the What Love Is book noted through tears that every man she’d ever loved had been born in April. Marjorie’s conquests were all big men who couldn’t resist adopting stray animals.

  My mother had preferred to line up the men she’d loved and describe them as markers on her own psychological journey
. This man taught me to love myself, this man taught me to forgive, this man taught me how to let go. It was an interesting narrative but I didn’t know what this meant about her relationship with my father. Was he simply another stop on her road to self-knowledge or did marrying him mark a moment of Buddhist nirvana, the eightfold path unfolded to a glory bed of matrimonial bliss? But then I thought about my father talking on his cell phone on the roof. His bare feet and a voice I didn’t know on the other end of the phone.

  And then there were the romantic stories of high school literature and cineplex rom-coms, where love was simultaneously predictable and impossible, the result of a blind God picking two random human beings and banging them together until they sang a Celine Dion song.

  But I didn’t have other loves before Rodney or after Rodney so I never developed a type. He stood as a singular marker of where I was and would be. The only place he never entered, could never enter, was my Before. This is true of many romantic relationships, of course. Most people don’t have a past that contains the beloved. But the Rending made Rodney’s absence in my past more acute. He would never meet my parents or Bim, never hear my father singing “The Riddle Song” while he grilled hamburgers, never watch my mother set out inappropriate snack combinations (a can of tuna and a wedge of cantaloupe; almonds and uncooked asparagus; leftover wilted salad and three squares of chocolate). So we tried, both of us, to make a picture of the Before wide enough for the other to enter. It didn’t occur to either of us that the worlds we offered one another were false, mosaics constructed of only the most appealing shards of glass. While I withheld my guilt about the moment of the Rending, the way religion had permeated my life, how desperate I had been for love, it did not occur to me to wonder what Rodney was withholding. I simply received each shard he offered and gazed on each as Truth.