by JoAnna Novak
Your eyes climb out of sleep, acclimating to lightlessness. Russet outline of last log in fire. Carousel of ash-tipped iron tongs and pokers on jade tile before mantle. Wine glass on coffee table: when did you slug the dregs? You blinked, saw Family Matters, hated fat people, returned to sleep, heavy, dreadful, apt.
You dreamt about your mother.
Uppy: that’s what Elliot used to say. Up, up, you tell yourself, though sitting is a ruse. The living room whips, a percussion between your temples. The yeast of wine is on your tongue. Your spine aligns and your head, reluctantly, steadies on your neck. El must have turned off the TV. Did you see her, hear her pad downstairs in red sateen pajamas, reedy as a mantis underneath, as flyweight as your mother, cold-cream cheeks, set jet curls, amber brooches, apricot blush, Gallic nose, wiped-up mouth—but lined like a Latina in the casket (assessment courtesy of your El Salvadorian nanny, Estelle)—you were fourteen, in a black jumper, a poplin Peter Pan blouse—a color called noir—and you felt French at the funeral, your mother’s skin cold as marble.
Marble-heavy, a bag full of God.
Plath again? Christ.
Second-person, what a gag.
You can’t escape myself.
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On the coffee table, a napkin hides one tray of cannelloni; on another meal, the cellophane is still attached to the plastic container: that must be mine.
Quaaaack—it’s so fucking loud when I pull it off.
I hook a pinky in the tray, trace the perimeter of the interior, suck sauce from my finger. For being the body’s largest organ, skin tastes an awful lot like a corner. The cold marinara is acidic and salty, sharp with garlic powder. It could use black pepper. A lot of black pepper. Eating pizza at Salerno’s with Rolf, we’d go through a dozen pepper packets, raining gray-brown onto quattro formaggi pie on a dinged-up tin. That was twenty years ago, when everything was tin: the serving spade (tin), the paper plates (equivalent of tin), the Poppin’ Fresh French Silk (in tin) at Rolf’s mom’s, meet-the-family dinner (tin conversations), University of Chicago tin; first gasp of grad school and a deadly man, steady ready tin, booking it to seminar, Old Milwaukee’s tinny hops in my mouth; backseat of his Cobra, ashtrays and tin cigarette holders shaped like caterpillars, tin yelps when he ate me out from behind, fucking, then, tin confines of cervix; clamped-down red-checkered tablecloths, pizza sauce stains like phantoms in period-panties; napkin dispensers, two tin modes: slice your fingers or release a stack the thickness of Heart of Darkness.
Twenty years ago, twenty tins.
Now everything is frozen or plastic. I squeeze off a hunk of pasta. The noodle is gummy, peeled-feeling, like a skinned grape. The cheese tastes like cottage cheese with Mrs. Dash. I’m still drunk—otherwise, what excuses this feculence?
I pinch my next mouthful before I swallow the first. Regret, the shaky mule I rode after drinking in college, when I let anyone bed me so long as he’d listen when I told him what bimbettes the editors of the lit mag were, hay-haired Todd Rundgren groupies, chubby cheeks, wrists sprayed with Charlie: I expected motherhood to pasture that beast. Not like I saw myself as Mrs. Brady, mending Jan’s why-aren’t-I-Marcia blues, but I believed fewer occasions would present themselves for me to foul up.
False.
I gulp a hunk of cannelloni. Yes, I regret speaking harshly, rashly, grossly to Elliot last night. I regret that I did not calmly broach the subject of her self-harm. I regret that I trusted the sort of woman who becomes a middle school physical education teacher. I regret, I realize, much of life—and I regret that regret, a fruitless worry, a recursive loop, like getting the TV stuck on PBS, forever airing the pledge drive.
I regret fourteen years ago. Drugs ragged my head with turpentine, and Heathcliff, Hester Prynne, and Holden Caulfield, a ragtag cavalcade, marched through me, muddled me under the nuzzled-soft lavender blanket in the Mother Baby Unit at Rush. Elliot was in the nursery, her footprint stamped. I drifted through pain pills and IV drips, asking anyone who’d listen: have I had her yet? And then home, chafing achy nipples, sandbag breasts, one postnatal morning. Already I was bored of rocking. And Rolf told me about his mother—I’d become his mother when the Percocet torched my brain: “You sounded like her, dying,” he said. “It was losing her all over.”
My eyes don’t focus on the living room. This is one of those times minutes fizzle and you realize you’re not seeing. Mindless eating—or drunk-girl resuscitation. I lift the napkin off the second Lean Cuisine and repeat: sauce noodles fingers.
“Hello, fork, you silver snake,” I say. My voice sounds like a spent wish.
The house’s quiet chides me. I sniff, giggle, and continue clawing my food.
I regret five years ago, though, then, I was better than this (crudités, Foreman Grill chicken breasts, Diet Rite, I never barfed). I almost acted on my impulses—yes, I was depressed, but at least I was driven, five years ago: Dear Rolf and Elliot, I have never expected myself to be writing a note, and I reflect on the virtues of last words over … this. The written husk. Last words are so personal. I’m thinking Oscar Wilde—“This wallpaper and I are fighting to the death. Either it goes or I do.” For all the voice in an epistolary, there’s no voice in a note. The windows in my office open, you might not know. Looking out through glass, one follows shapes and forms. But, pane removed and there’s a girl, her royal blue backpack, her auburn hair parted left of center, her ivory sweatshirt hitting her hips, the glint of sterling silver hoops as she finds her neck and scratches a long itch; this is the second floor, and I doubt it’s high enough. But Moby-Dick is on my desk, and I leave you my mantra: “I am in earnest and I will try.”
Well, I hadn’t tried. Not really. I fit my fingers, my elbow, my shoulder out the window that January afternoon, almost five years ago from today. You’d think I’d remember, would’ve jotted it in a planner or hidden it on the back of a take-out fortune in the Rolodex: January X—suicide attempt. But I didn’t.
Memories jigsaw: My back-to-normal breasts, flat empty chest, wedging my torso out the window, angling sideways, the way I did at libraries, when I needed to share an aisle. I was halfway out when I realized there wasn’t a ledge: I’d have to dive, headfirst.
Fear had pinched my trachea. I’d turned my face. I plunged my fingers in the snow capping the windowsill’s bricks and that’s when I felt something material, warm. Air stung the bridge of my nose. I hated the sky, the building, my timidity, life. I dug at the snow, baring the bricks, clawing the ice until I’d bled off my nails and found the struts and waterlogged feathers of a crushed black wing.
Around the lips of Italianate Lean Cuisines, sauce crusts the tray; I scrape that with my teeth. I savor the fierce bites, like a Butter Blasted bag. Intensity, flavor, maximal taste: Nacho Cheesier crap marketed to moms.
Better nothing for Elliot than that.
My stomach protrudes against yesterday’s sweater, baring its vacuity: it wants more of this breakfast. My stomach says, what do you mean you ate? Gobble up, cunt.
And I say: Body, enough. Food is a ghost. Time to get on with this.
I rise. Activity routes me out of the hangover. The floorboards creak as I walk to the stairs. My knee joint cracks: which? I can’t tell left from right right now. One hurts.
“Owwww,” I whimper. My head or my knee or my neck, which I kinked sleeping on the couch, or my back pocket, stinging with Rot’s coke—what hurts? Want hurts, I could scream, until an object responds: the TV zings, the sun explodes, Elliot screams, Mom, what’s wrong?
Yes, Mom. What’s wrong? taunts the cold floor under my cold feet.
Here. I want Rot to break the screen door, overturn the coffee table, snag my arm, drawl: What’s wrong, bay-beeee?
The question shackles my ankles, roots in my pelvis, firecrackers my shoulders. Brain stem: that’s where my hope gets stuck, a failed rocket.
Winter withholds Friday’s sunrise. I extend my hands, searching for the walnut railing, like Audrey Hepburn in Wait Unt
il Dark. I saw that with my mother, at the movie palace on Lake. One by one, the theater’s lights went out. The faster I inhaled Junior Mints, the surer I was that I was dying—and dying alone. I was eight years old.
What was Marky then? A teardrop, a kumquat, a zygote? Had my father screwed him into her? My mother baked him birthday cakes until he was five, until his first day at Edison, when she sprinkled her Cicero Rye with Ajax, and Stell found her doornail dead, blood-veined vomit on the petit déjeuner Color-Flyte and her daffodil charmeuse dressing gown.
Here’s the funeral: me crying into the collar of my black crepe dress, Marky gumming a chocolate Tootsie Pop, flattening the wrapper against the pew in St. Pious, trying to find the shooting star.
I don’t miss my mother as I climb upstairs. The shadowy portrait of the Egleston family, a trio of dark bodies, the parents themselves orphans. No, it’s not my mother, but her myth I miss, who she could’ve been—nurturing, patient, alive. I must be better, kinder, more assured than her, more sensible than my father who tasked me with packing Marky’s bologna and pears. I want to maintain Anna, not push away El.
Suddenly, it’s an emergency. I must see my daughter. A scene from a children’s movie El watched comes to me: a Victorian girl with sausage curls and a sad face, plump figure pinafored and white stockinged, levitates above her bed, on which an olive-skinned goblin tramples, his every jump lofting her higher. The girl neither screams nor stirs, poor thing. She rises higher and higher until the tip of her nose grazes the pale blue ceiling and then she dissolves. A cut. She has slipped through the roof and is lofted on the soughing wind, a speck above the craggy English countryside, the grass the same green as the goblin. Eighties movie: his face appears, superimposed over the landscape: silos, lambs, brook, rocks, silt-sky, shape of girl.
My heart bumps. I turn the doorknob and walk into Elliot’s room.
Light through black pantyhose dims Elliot’s world, and there I am: the windows reflect me—my daughter forgot to pull the shades. Even though she’s tucked in, sleeping on her stomach, one arm crooked behind her head, her brown hair a rat’s nest, her bed seems fixed. Elliot’s so thin her pulse doesn’t rumple the covers.
She snores: this breaks my heart.
I survey, stepping softly. Snooping rarely woos me; I don’t frequent my daughter’s boudoir—in fact, I can’t recall the last time I was here without El. Listen to this, she’ll say, and read dialogue from a play she’s writing. Then I lean on some wall while she paces, notebook in one hand while the other darts, grabbily conducting words. She gets so excited to share herself; she keeps suggesting we swap, that I show her new poems. Sometime, summer, I say, if we go on vacation. I’m thankful that, at her age, she forgets anything not immediately relevant to her own life.
The truth is I haven’t written a poem in two years, since New York.
See El’s effects: a down comforter stuffed inside a white duvet. One pillow for her head, the other between her knees. A cherry dresser, hip-height, with brass drawer pulls; a cheval mirror in the opposite corner. Untitled (Painting) by Mark Rothko: she bought the poster from the Art Institute gift shop in third grade with report-card money. A smoldering orange rectangle hemmed by a yellow stripe: the walls’ only decoration, though I’d wager Michael Jordan still tracks El’s height, in the closet.
My daughter impresses me: Her order. Her quiet, persistent aesthetic—tidy furies like Rothko. Her hygiene: no clothes on the floor or hairball tumbleweeds. The vibe is light, transitory, Heaven’s Gate, except for the desk.
That desk: what an ordeal.
Unlike my office, my daughter’s workspace is neat. Chaste, on first glance. I shuffle to the desk. Chill and menacing as a safe, there is her computer, stenciled rainbow rhombuses crossing the screen.
I pull the copper chime and on goes the moon shell lamp.
She might stir. If that happens, I’ll say, sorry, about to leave, yoga, have a good day, stay home or go to school, either. About last night, I’m sorry. El. I love you.
But, save for snore-rattles, she is serene beneath the eiderdown.
On her desk is a Trapper and a book. The Diary of Anne Frank. An index card salutes. I turn to Elliot’s page and read:
“Once when I was spending the night at Jacque’s, I could no longer restrain my curiosity about her body, which she’d always hidden from me and which I’d never seen. I asked her whether, as proof of our friendship, we could touch each other’s breasts. Jacque refused. I also had a terrible desire to kiss her, which I did.”
Before winter break, Park’s Language Arts faculty circulated a letter to parents, warning that Anne Frank’s diary contained “mature passages”; that “past classes recoiled”; that sensitive students could “opt out.” The cautions twisted my stomach.
Comfortable, familiar, paperback, faintly warm: I imagine the worst of Elliot’s classmates, snickering over a dead girl, the word “breast.”
My daughter has said nothing about the book.
(Of course, in fifth grade, I took her to see Kids.)
Her Trapper is closed, not zipped shut. My daughter worked before bed, I think. The image—her costume-bead spine hunched over her work; her chapped lips parted in concentration; her eyes narrowed, crumbs of sleep crusting the crooks—touches me.
I’m healthily curious, I tell myself. Just a peek, like Miss P.E. suggested. I open the binder, where a pencil holds place.
El’s cramped cursive slopes up. At first, the writing seems to be stage directions, a scene’s start. “Be Your Own Paramour.”
Good word, I think. I keep reading:
Maybe you’re expecting flowers from your crush. A fuzzy red box of truffles and bonbons. Maybe you’ve got plans to arrive early for At First Sight so you can get your freak on pre-previews. (Kissing burns 300 cal/hr!) But whether you’ve got a date or not, be your own sweetheart by showing your bod some extra l<3ve.
Standing abs are a cinch in the shower: you’ll feel xxxxxxtra-bendy with the steam! Try 2 sets of 20: side bends and torso twists. In bed, kick those pillows aside! Lie flat, being sure to engage your abs. (This supports your back!) Then, scissor your legs, keeping them a couple inches above the mattress: I do sets of 25, until I hit 100!
But nothing’s more important than eating lovely lunches. Bonus points if you score red fruit (à la raspberries) and a red veggie (bell peppers!) in your midday munch. Be sweet to yourself; go for pretty noshes. You and your valentine will thank you!
I laugh. If nothing else, I’ve taught my daughter to pack a lunch. I wonder if Park is starting a humor magazine, something Lampoon.
I turn the page and lift my head. Did I hear something? My blood thunders so loud in my ears, Elliot must be faking. I pause, waiting for a hitch in her breathing. A decrescendo to her snore. But there’s just my heart harrumphing, my guilty reflection, soap-scum skin in a dark window. I read.
“Dear Lisa, everything has been weird since before Christmas, I don’t know what more I can do” is unconvincingly crossed out. Below, in block letters, round letters, crosshatched all-caps, lowercase polka dots, in sweeping cursive and analog print is one word, a hundred fonts: Lisa.
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My own bedroom is a sty. Tidying doesn’t entice me. Why? I clean before Rolf returns, when we share the sleigh bed, our backs and feet reacquainted. I pull off my sweater and unclasp my bra. My eyes shut and I force them open. I am weaker than I thought; I need to get out of the house.
I pull on a singlet for yoga. I smell my sweat, potted, stewed.
I’ll shower at the studio.
I know what to do with bad news. Analgesia is a tool. I can turn a blind eye to Elliot’s problems: probably anorexia, definitely comorbid dysthymia. I haven’t had her admitted. I haven’t suggested meds. But I read Prozac Nation.
Is a girl crush so awful? Elliot is obsessed with Lisa. Can I worry over that when I’m obsessed with Rot? What is a day without obsession? Jane Eyre: “I have little left in myself—I must have you.” And th
e Cosmo diet? I tell myself it’s prewriting for a play or parody, one component of a worthless project assigned by her Health teacher.
I take off my work pants from Thursday, pull on my black yoga Spandex, pack a gym bag with a dress and pumps. My mind is on-task and resuming proper functioning when I remember the coke.
My nails are not long enough for a bump. What I have is a necklace, an ugly thing that predates Reagan’s first term. There, in the jewelry box on my dresser. A strip of buffalo suede and a gold, tubular bead, like a Kraft Macaroni noodle.
I’ve used that before. I use that now. I tap out the powder onto my vanity. I draw out my sniff, let my eyes flutter, exaggerated, like someone’s watching. I love watching: do I constitute someone? When I’m fucking, I love finding the cock as it enters me, seeing me in action.
The burn is pleasant. It restarts my heart. My sternum sweats.
Coke, I’m not bringing it back to campus. If Rot finds me, we’ll sober-talk. I open the closet, scoot aside a fleet of garment bags. There’s my old sewing box: I’ve had it since my mother died, when I inherited it from her. Hideous, 1950s shade of brown. I hide the baggie under a stack of denim patches, beneath a plastic tray, beside a tomato-shaped pin cushion. I used to be a girl who darned stockings and hemmed men’s pants.
I grab my yoga mat. Stop in the kitchen to write El. Precipitation wasn’t in the forecast, but snow has started falling, lightly, glitzily, like the bright spots that arrive behind your eyes when they’ve been squeezed shut in terror.
Wake up and smell the coffee, I almost write. What a note. I slap my hand.
Now I wouldn’t dream of mending. I spend wantonly. I ignore signs. I relish the slow drip that mounts in the back of my throat.
2 ·· ELLIOT
I WAS BRAIDING THE BABY hairs of 1999, the Friday before Martin Luther King Day, home alone, considering how I’d make a better adult than Anna. Did I spend the morning bed-hopping and red-cup-clutching with The Real World? Did I watch a single pop-up video on VH1 or one of the Top 20 countdowns Lisa had given me an appetite for, choke-sobbing to “Candle in the Wind,” “I Don’t Want To Miss a Thing,” “My Heart Will Go On,” or any of the sad anthems from 1998, another year that had proven the decade cursed, steeped in celebrity death and misfortune: Christopher Reeves and Nancy Kerrigan and Kerri Strugg—utter tragedies—Princess Diana and Titanic, Tupac, Biggie, Kurt Cobain, John Candy, Phil Hartman, Audrey Hepburn, Jackie Kennedy, Krissy Taylor. Did I dog-ear the dELiA*s catalog, long for skater skirts as I blasted B96, cackling at Eddie and JoBo’s pranks, breakfasting on Toaster Strudels, nay, worse, mainlining the foil packet of gluey cream cheese icing, squiggling it on my tongue like the semen I’d seen in porn? No! I slept in and did my Spanish so I’d have a clear scholastic conscious before I avocado’d.