Her Body and Other Parties

by Carmen Maria Machado

  Our baby cries. I hold her up to me. She is too small for food, I think. Too small for—balancing her on my hip, I tear through my half-empty fridge, shoving aside Tupperware with velvety leftovers, a can wrapped in tinfoil. I find ajar of applesauce, but none of my spoons are small enough for her mouth. I dip my finger in the applesauce and offer it to her; she sucks hard. I rest my hand against the crown of her skull; kiss her skin delicate with baby oil. She snuffles and sobs, bits of applesauce bubbling out of her mouth.

  “Egg?” I ask her.

  She sneezes.

  “Apple? Dog? Girl? Boy?”

  The baby does look like me, and Bad—my pointy nose and brown hair, my sulky pout, her round chin and detached earlobes. The open, howling mouth—that’s all Bad. I stop, the danger of this joke still firing in my brain even as I realize that Bad isn’t here to hear it, to pause whatever she is doing to raise an eyebrow at me, maybe scold me for saying such a thing in front of our daughter, or maybe throw a glass at my head.

  I pull my phone out of my pocket with my free hand and dial. Bad’s voice echoes mechanically on other end and carves new spaces into me. Beep. I leave a message.

  What I say: “Why did you leave her with me?”

  What I want to say: “This almost broke me, but it didn’t. It made me stronger than before. You have made me better. Thank you. I will love you until the end of time.”

  I wanted too much from her, I think. I demanded too much.

  “I love you,” I murmured while asleep, while awake, into her hair, into her neck.

  “Please don’t call me that,” I reminded her. “I would never talk like that to you.”

  “I only want you, I swear,” I said, when paranoia crept into her voice like an infection.

  I believe in a world where impossible things happen. Where love can outstrip brutality, can neutralize it, as though it never was, or transform it into something new and more beautiful. Where love can outdo nature.

  The baby nurses. I don’t know on what. But she suckles just the same. Her gums catch and it hurts but I don’t want her to stop, because I am her mother and she needs what she needs, even if it’s not a true thing. She bites, and I cry out, but she is so small, and I cannot put her down.

  “Mara,” I whisper. She looks at me, directly at me, as if she recognized her name. I press my lips to her forehead and rock her back and forth, quietly gasping for air. She is real, she is real, she is solid in my arms, she smells clean and new. No mistakes. She is not yet a girl or a monster or anything. She is just a baby. She is ours.

  I make Mara a crib by shoving my bed into a corner. I build walls with small embroidered pillows. I lay her down.

  She starts to scream again. It comes from nowhere and goes on, endless and even as the horizon at sea. It doesn’t taper, she doesn’t inhale for breath, her flailing hands catch my face, cut it a little. I lay her down on the bed.

  “Mara,” I say. “Mara, please, please don’t,” and she doesn’t stop, it goes on and on. For hours I bounce next to her on the bed, and the howling has filled the room and I cannot unhear it, and the clean smell of baby is replaced by something red-hot, like the burner of an electric stove with nothing on it. I touch her little feet and she screams and I blow raspberries on her belly and she screams and something inside of me is breaking; I am a continent but I will not hold.

  A teacher overheard Bad screaming at me on the phone from the next bathroom stall. I knew she was there, I saw her high-heeled feet splayed on the tile, I heard her take in a breath as Bad’s voice dropped low and cold and leaked through the receiver like gas. She waited until I was gone to leave. She awkwardly addressed it in the hallway that afternoon, her hands twisting around the cap of a ballpoint pen.

  “I guess,” she said, “all I am saying is that it’s just not normal. I’m just worried for you.”

  “You are so kind to reach out,” I said.

  “I’m just saying that if it always sounds like that, then even if you think something is there, nothing is there.” She accidentally flipped the cap out of her hands, and it went skittering down the long hallway. “Let me know if you want me to call someone, okay?”

  I nodded, and she walked away. Even as she vanished around the corner, I was still nodding.

  Mara pauses for breath. So much time has passed that light streaks the sky outside of the window. She takes me in again, my whole self into her eyes, all of my shame and pain and the truth of her mothers, the honest truth of them. I feel a jolt, my secrets slipping from me, unwilling. Then the screaming begins again, but I can endure it because of that precious moment, that break. My tolerance is fresh again, my love renewed. If she gives me one of those every day or so, I should be fine. I can do this. I can be a good mother.

  I brush my finger along her curls and sing her a song from my childhood.

  “Bill Grogan’s goat, was feelin’ fine, ate three red shirts, from off the line. Bill took a stick, gave him a whack, and tied him to, the railroad—”

  My voice cracks and fades into silence. She pedals her feet in the air and howls and my ears are ringing and I crawl onto the bed next to her, my pleas swallowed by her voice.

  I don’t want to leave the room. I don’t want to sleep. I am afraid that if I sleep, I will wake up and Mara will be gone, and in the silence entropy will take over, and my cells will expand and I will become one with the air. If I turn away, even for a second, I will look back and this will be just a mass of blankets and pillows, as empty a bed as it ever has been. If I blink, her form could dissolve beneath my fingers, and once again, I will be just me: undeserving, alone.

  When I wake up, she is still here. It feels like a sign. If she cried in the night I did not hear it. I slept the kind of sleep where you wake up and know that you didn’t flop around like a fucking hooked fish, you didn’t keep me up all goddamned night with your sleep-weeping, Jesus Christ, you know that you were good and still. So my joints feel like the fat rubber bands used to bind broccoli, and my face is lined where I’d stupidly slept sleep-pressed against the seams of the quilt’s patchwork. Mara is not crying. She’s pumping her arms and legs around like pistons. Her eyes are opening and closing: morning glories screwing up tightly in the midday sun, Venus flytraps yawning wide to vibrations and heat.

  I stand up and squint into the morning. Mara makes a squeaking noise. I pick her up. She seems heavier than yesterday. Is that possible?

  As soon as I step out of the bedroom, she begins to scream again.

  We take a bus to Indianapolis, transfer in a daze. She sleeps in my arms and does not stir, except to scream, decibels swallowing all conscious thought. The bodies around me, rumpled and stale, do not react appreciatively to the silence or angrily to the sound, for which I am grateful.

  When we get off the bus in Bloomington, I realize—I remember—that it is spring. I find a ride with a kind woman who reminds me of someone I have forgotten. We drive along the highway until I ask her to stop.

  “There’s nothing here,” she says. Her body language is almost purposefully relaxed.

  The leaves rustle, as if in answer.

  “Let me take you downtown,” she says. “Or is there someone I can call for you?”

  I get out, Mara in the crook of my arm.

  It has rained recently. The mud is caking around my sneakers, more and more with each step. I walk like a colossal monster, ready to level a city.

  There, up the slope of a hill, is a house. Our house. I recognize the stained glass, the smoke curling from the chimney and lacing up through the canopy of the trees. The picnic table outside needs a fresh coat of paint. An aging German shepherd, all bones and skin, is draped over the edge of a porch, his tail thumping in happiness as we approach.

  “Otto,” I say, and he lets me squeeze the ruff of his neck. He taps his jowls against my palm, and then licks it clean.

  The door is unlocked because Bad and I trust our neighbors, the birds. Inside, the floors are stone.

  I recog
nize the cabinets, the bed. Mara is silent in my arms. She does not even squirm. Perhaps she has been crying so much because she hasn’t been home, but now she is home and now she is quiet. I sit down at a desk and roll a heavy pen across the wood. I run my fingers over the row of books alongside the wall. Behind the bookcase, a thin crack meanders through the plaster, deliberate. I touch it with my fingertip, trace it up, up, up until it is past my height. Part of me wants to move the bookshelf, look behind it, but there is no need. I know what’s there.

  I unwrap cured salmon from the fridge and examine it. The meat is drawn back from the forgotten pinbones like diseased gum from teeth. I make a mark deep in the flesh with my finger, and something inside of me is sated.

  I press my cheek against the wavy glass windowpane. Otto has followed us inside and is trailing behind me, bumping his cold nose into Mara’s foot. I pull a cookbook off the counter and flip it open. The cover thuds. Aunt Julia’s Bean Salad, I read. So much dill.

  The last night of us, Bad threw me into a wall. I wish I could remember why. It seems like context would matter. She was all bone and muscle and skin and light and laughter one minute and then a tornado the next, a shadow passing over her face like a solar eclipse. My head cracked the plaster. Light sparked behind my eyes.

  “You cunt,” she screamed. “I hate you. I fucking hate you. I have always hated you.”

  I crawled to the bathroom and locked the door. From the outside, she rained punches into the wall like a hailstorm, and I turned on the shower and undressed and stepped inside. I’m a Cancer. A water baby, always. For a moment I was there, the Indiana woods, the rain striking the leaves, the gentle Sunday-morning drizzle during which we slept, only waking to see a sleepy, preteen Mara come in, complain about a nightmare, and curl into our arms. This will not always last, one day she will be too big for this, and for us, her old mothers. Then the not-memory washed away like a wet painting in a storm, and I was in the shower, shaking, and she was outside, losing me, and there was no way for me to tell her not to. There was no way for me to tell her that we are so close, we are so close, please don’t do this now, we are so fucking close.

  “What do you think, Mara?” I ask her, spinning around a few times before coming to rest against a wall. I lay her down on the heirloom quilt that is snapped smartly over the big bed. One day I want to teach Mara to quilt like this, the way her grandmother did and the way that I am learning. We could start small. Baby quilts. You can do one of those in a night.

  Otto barks.

  The door opens, and around it curves a skinny arm. Then a face, and a bright yellow backpack. A little girl of ten or eleven, hair in an unraveling braid. It is Mara, old enough to walk, old enough to speak. Old enough to be bullied and then to face the bullies down. Old enough to ask questions without answers and have problems without solutions. Behind her, another child, a boy—her baby brother, Tristan. I remember his birth like it happened last week, like it is happening now, he was all blood and sideways, he was up in my ribs and refused the midwife’s advances. Even now my stomach is still not the same, the walls once severed and pulled apart. And he will grow, and then he grew, and Tristan followed after Mara, and follows her still. She said she hated it but she loved it, I could tell she adored the attention. Mara and Tristan, brown-haired children. Brown like—someone’s grandmother. Maybe mine.

  A man behind them, and a woman. Both staring at me.

  The woman tells Mara to stay away, the man clutches Baby Tristan across his chest. They ask me who I am, and I answer them. Otto barks. The woman calls him, but he barks at her and at me and does not cede his ground.

  Mara, remember how you kicked sand into that neighbor child’s eyes? I yelled at you and made you apologize in your best dress, and that night I cried by myself in the bathroom because you are Bad’s child as much as you are mine. Remember when you ran into the plate glass window and cut your arms so badly we had to drive you to the nearest hospital in the pickup truck, and when it was over Bad begged me to replace the backseat because of all the blood? Or when Tristan told us that he wanted to invite a boy to prom and you put your arm around him like this? Mara, remember? Your own babies? Your husband with his Captain Ahab beard and calloused hands and the house you bought in Vermont? Mara? How you still love your little brother with the ferocity of a star; an all-consuming love that will only end when one of you collapses? The drawings you handed us as children? Your paintings of dragons, Tristan’s photographs of dolls, your stories about anger, his poems about angels? The science experiments in the yard, blackening the grass to gloss? Your lives sated and solid, strange but safe? Do you remember? Why are you crying, don’t cry, don’t. You cried a lot as a baby but you’ve been so stoic ever since.

  Inside of me, a voice: There was nothing tying you to her and you made it anyway, you made them anyway, fuck you, you made them anyway.

  To Mara and her brother, I say: Stop running, you’ll fall, stop running, you’ll break something, stop running, your mother will see, she will see and she will be so angry and she will yell and we cannot, we cannot, I cannot.

  I say: Don’t leave the faucet on. You’ll flood the house, don’t do it, you promised it would never happen again. Don’t flood the house, the bills, don’t flood the house, the rugs, don’t flood the house, my loves, or we could lose you both. We’ve been bad mothers and have not taught you how to swim.

  ESPECIALLY HEINOUS

  272 Views of Law & Order: SVU

  SEASON 1

  “PAYBACK”: Stabler and Benson investigate the castration and murder of a New York City cab driver. They discover that the victim had assumed the identity of another man years before, because he was wanted by police. In the end, Stabler discovers that the stolen identity of the man in question was also stolen, and he and Benson have to begin the investigation all over again. That night, as he tries unsuccessfully to sleep, Stabler hears a strange noise. A deep drumming, two beats. It seems like it’s coming from his basement. When he investigates the basement, it sounds like it’s coming from outside.

  “A SINGLE LIFE”: The old woman couldn’t bear getting dressed alone anymore. The solitary donning of shoes broke her heart over and over again. The unlocked front door, through which any neighbor could wander, would have been an afterthought, but there was no thought, after.

  “OR JUST LOOK LIKE ONE”: Two underage models are attacked while walking home from a club. They are raped and murdered. To add insult to injury, they are confused with two other raped and murdered underage models, who coincidentally are their respective twins, and both pairs are buried beneath the wrong tombstones.

  “HYSTERIA”: Benson and Stabler investigate the murder of a young woman who is initially believed to be a prostitute and the latest in a long line of connected victims. “I hate this goddamned city,” Benson says to Stabler, dabbing her eyes with a deli napkin. Stabler rolls his eyes and starts the car.

  “WANDERLUST”: The old DA irons her hair before court, the way her mother showed her. After she loses the case, she packs three changes of clothes in a suitcase and gets into her car. She calls Benson from her cell phone. “Sorry, buddy. Hitting the road. Not sure when I’ll be back.” Benson pleads with her to stay. The old DA tosses the cell phone onto the road and pulls away from the curb. A passing taxi reduces it to splinters.

  “SOPHOMORE JINX”: The second time the basketball team covers up a murder, the coach decides that he’s finally had enough.

  “UNCIVILIZED”: They find the boy in Central Park, looking like no one had ever loved him. “His body was crawling with ants,” Stabler says. “Ants.” Two days later, they arrest his teacher, who as it turns out had loved him just fine.

  “STALKED”: Benson and Stabler aren’t allowed to notch any of the precinct’s furniture, so they each have their own private system. Benson’s headboard has eight scores that run along the curved oak edge like a spine. Stabler’s kitchen chair has nine.

  “STOCKS AND BONDAGE”: Benson takes the bag of
rotten vegetables out of the trunk when Stabler isn’t looking. She throws it into a garbage can and it hits the empty bottom, wet and heavy. It splits open like a body that’s been in the Hudson.

  “CLOSURE”: “It was inside of me,” the woman says, pulling the bendy straw out of shape like a misused accordion. “But now it is outside of me. I would like to keep it that way.”

  “BAD BLOOD”: Stabler and Benson will never forget the case where solving the crime was so much worse than the crime itself.

  “RUSSIAN LOVE POEM”: When they bring the mother up to the stand, the new DA asks her to state her name. She closes her eyes, shakes her head, rocks back and forth in her chair. She begins to sing a song softly under her breath, not in English, the syllables rolling out of her mouth like smoke. The DA looks to the judge for help, but he is staring at the witness, his eyes as distant as if he were lost in the forest of his own memory.

  “DISROBED”: A disoriented, naked, pregnant woman is discovered wandering around Midtown. She is arrested for indecent exposure.

  “LIMITATIONS”: Stabler discovers that even New York City ends.

  “ENTITLED”: “You can’t do this to me!” the man shouts as he is escorted to the witness stand. “Don’t you know who I am?” The DA closes her eyes. “Sir, I just need you to confirm that you did tell the police you saw a blue Honda fleeing the scene.” The man pounds his open hand on the witness stand in defiance. “I do not recognize your authority!” The mother of the dead girl begins screaming so loudly that her husband carries her out of the courtroom.