Motherest

by Kristen Iskandrian

  Dear Mom,

  When I was eleven, I was mucking around in the woods behind our house and came across the torn-off cover of a dirty magazine: one naked woman posing in a shower with another naked woman standing outside of the shower holding a towel out nimbly by one finger and behind her, a naked man, his erection partially visible. It was a very busy cover. And there was so much to take in—not one big-breasted naked woman’s body but two pubic regions almost bare and practically identical, and then the man, his hairless muscled body and forgettable face, his sex somehow dominating the page, despite it being the least interesting part. I was afraid, against all logic, since I was very much alone in those woods, of being seen, convinced you were watching from some up-high branches, worried that my face would bear evidence of what I had been staring at when I went back into the house.

  I scuffed at the dirt with my sneaker and a stick until I had made a shallow grave big enough for the page, took it gingerly between thumb and forefinger and laid it down, covering it over with dirt and leaves. I ran home, washed my face and hands, and resolved to put it out of my mind. But that night, I closed my eyes and thought about the cover, allowed the narrative of the cover to unfold in my mind and imagined what might have been in the rest of the magazine. I shuddered out my guilt and revulsion from where I touched ever so lightly between my furry skinny legs, reasoning that the more sparse the stroke, the less it counted—toward some overall filth score, toward my moral decay.

  For many days in a row I would go back to the woods, dig out the page, and hypnotize myself with it before returning it carefully to the ground and running home. After a couple of weeks I had effectively memorized it into submission; thinking about it had no effect on me. At night, under the covers, my hands stayed at my sides. And then one day I went to the woods with a lighter, to say a final goodbye. It had rained the previous night, and the ground was still wet. When I unearthed the page it came apart in my hands, mud covering the women’s breasts and the man’s penis, a certain modesty suggested by dirt and paper, as though the hole itself had known my shame. I tried to ignite it but it didn’t work. I left the soggy page where I’d found it and almost forgot about it, until now.

  Maybe this would be an allegory if it didn’t actually happen. But there’s something masturbatory in every sex act, isn’t there? Something intensely solitary and alone, despite the presence of another. I still feel, every time, like I’m in those woods, guarding a secret. Like every time I do it, I’m possessed by every other time I’ve done it, until the day comes when I’ll want to take a lighter to my whole short history with boys. Speaking of history, I haven’t had a period in a while. Wouldn’t it be funny if I were pregnant? Not banana-peel funny, but I don’t know, like, death-rattle funny.

  Haha,

  Agnes

  It is the day before classes resume. The dorms are open and campus, like a cat waking up, is arching and stretching back into motion: hedges are being trimmed, walkways swept, windows washed. Joan’s roommates will be home in the afternoon, as will Surprise. Joan stands in the doorway while I pack. We are both amazed by how much stuff I brought with me, as though I were planning on staying for much longer than the week. Clothes, books, CDs, my high school yearbook, four pairs of shoes, my pillow, my bucket of toiletries, the framed family photo Dad gave me for Christmas.

  “I wish you didn’t have to go,” she says.

  “I know. Me too. Or, me neither.”

  Joan is wearing baggy linen pants under a loose patchwork dress. Her feet are bare and her toenails are speckled with orange polish. She stands with one foot crossed on top of the other. Around her neck are five or six necklaces—some silver, some hemp—and around each of her wrists are bracelets of various textiles and metals. Her hair is wrapped up in a wide blue scarf. I memorize her. I feel certain that we will never be this way again, that our togetherness this week, fierce and easy, was created by some small rip in the cosmos.

  I hesitate but decide to ask. “Have you ever taken a pregnancy test?”

  Joan laughed. “Um, yeah.”

  “Really?” I don’t know why I am surprised. It’s not the sex part. I am picturing Joan in the throes of sex and it’s not difficult. I wonder if she keeps all that jewelry on. “Haven’t you?” Now it’s her turn to seem surprised.

  “No…I…” I feel the need to try to qualify my response, but there’s nothing else to say. “No, I haven’t.”

  “I’ve taken a dozen pregnancy tests. Taking pregnancy tests is how I don’t get pregnant.”

  “That doesn’t make sense,” I say, “but I get it.”

  “Because people who get pregnant don’t seem to worry about getting pregnant until they’re pregnant. I worry a lot about it in advance, and then I take a test, and I’m never pregnant because I think I’ve, like, worried the pregnancy away, you know?”

  I feel my gut spasm, a peristaltic nervousness. “I haven’t really been worried,” I say now, worried.

  “Oh, come on, you are not pregnant,” Joan says, still a bit giggly. “I mean, you’re careful, right?”

  I am not always careful. Tea Rose and I, we have not always been careful. We have not been reckless, but we have been swept up. I am trying to remember specific moments and they are getting jumbled—him fumbling with a condom, so that’s a good sign, right? If I can recall a condom? Me pushing upward on him, telling him with my body to exit before…but did he mistake my bucking for passion, for permission? Both of us gluey deep in the afternoon, with sweat, with each other, the late sunlight illuminating wheat-colored hairs on his stomach, neither of us sure where each of us began and ended, whose stickiness was whose. Panic is rising in me. Joan is still talking.

  “…not seem like the type of guy who would mess around with that kind of thing. And you—I mean, you’re, I don’t know, so controlled? I mean in a good way—like, I can’t see you losing your head. There’s no way!”

  I begin to believe I am pregnant. To know I am pregnant. My body feels dumb, like the whole of it is being stuffed with cotton. I did not think Tea Rose could get me pregnant because I did not think, not really, that I could get pregnant. That I could be a mother, when my own mother is somewhere. When my own mother, simply, is. There is only one mother, and I am not her.

  I shake my head a little, trying to clear it, to put a full stop to the cavalcade of thoughts and questions. Joan is saying something else about fear being the most effective birth control but she stops now, giving an awkward cough. After a moment she asks quietly, “How late are you?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Just…come with me, okay?”

  She takes my hand and I follow her to the bathroom. She opens the cabinet doors beneath the sink and from the back pulls out a brown paper shopping bag. She sets it on top of the sink. Inside are boxes and boxes of pregnancy tests, several different brands. I feel too sick to laugh. Joan’s face looks stuck between several emotions. The whites of her eyes are very white, webbed in the corners with tiny pink vessels. The fluorescent light makes her skin seem translucent and I notice some freckles I’d never seen before. And wedged between all of these stark micro-observations, the mossy thought grows: Who has Joan been sleeping with?

  “Go ahead,” she says. “Better than making yourself crazy. The instructions are right on the box.” Joan leaves the room. I take a box from the top of the bag.

  ONLY TEST THAT TELLS YOU SIX (6) DAYS BEFORE YOUR MISSED PERIOD!

  TOP-RATED FOR ACCURACY!

  EASY-TO-READ RESULTS: PLUS (+) MEANS PREGNANT, MINUS (–) MEANS NOT PREGNANT!

  RESULTS IN THREE (3) MINUTES!

  The instructions are six pages long and include warnings, diagrams, and frequently asked questions. I look at the drawing of the female reproductive system. I look at the image of the lower half of a woman holding a stick between her legs. I can hear Joan breathing on the other side of the door, or maybe it’s my own breathing I’m hearing. I feel many things, but the need to urinate is not one of them. I
unwrap a stick and wonder if it’s true, if this thing can know what my body has yet to find out. I put the faucet on a low trickle, pull down my pants, and sit on the toilet, sidling the stick between my legs. The whole process feels ridiculous, galaxies removed from the thing it is purporting to determine, the thing being the possibility of a life-changing reality, a fleshy reality. There are theoretical babies and there are actual babies. I will narrowly escape one for the other. I try to focus on the sound of the water and let go of my body. I close my eyes.

  But what does sex have to do with babies, anyway? Babies should only come if they are invited. Like anyone else. Why are they an exception, planting themselves so unapologetically when they haven’t even been summoned? Sitting on the toilet, coaxing myself to pee, knowing I am involuntarily holding back my pee out of a desire to not engage in any of this, I am mad at babies. I have nothing to do with babies. Babies have nothing to do with me. A knocking.

  “Are you okay?” Joan sounds like she is somehow part of the door, like the door itself is speaking.

  “Yes…fine. Sorry. Just taking me a little while.”

  “Oh, no, take your time. Sorry to…interrupt. I’ll be upstairs, okay? Do you need me…for anything?”

  Funny how politeness imposes itself in situations that feel dire. Like, the nicer we are to one another, the better the outcome will be.

  “No, I think I’m okay. Thanks, though.”

  I stare ahead of me at the shower stall, the soap-filmed Plexiglas door. I hear water meeting water and realize that I am finally peeing, first in stutters that splash my fingers and then in a disciplined stream, the test stick getting thoroughly doused. If there were a test for taking this test, I imagine I would do very well on it, following the instructions, as I have, to the letter, as though that will give me the better outcome.

  I finish, wipe myself, and lay a strip of toilet paper on the back of the toilet. I dab the bottom of the test stick and lay it on top of the paper. I figure neatness might help eliminate the chance of error. And, superstitiously, the chance of a plus sign. I wash my hands, careful not to upset the stick, careful not to even look at it. I count to one hundred, putting “Mississippi” between every number. I do it again. I consider leaving the bathroom, maybe getting something to drink, and coming back when I’m sure the five minutes have passed. I put my hand on the doorknob but I do not leave.

  And the plus/minus thing, what is that supposed to mean? Being pregnant is a plus, a positive? That seems presumptuous. Or is it plus-one, like a date to a wedding? Is the minus meant to signify negativity? Less than? Minus one person, which, if there was only one person to begin with, means you are nothing? You are zero? The plus makes you two but the minus makes you none?

  When I am sure five minutes have passed, I pick up the test and shove it in the front pocket of my jeans, where it’s concealed by my long sweater. On my way out of the bathroom, I grab another of the test boxes and slide it up my sleeve. Back in Joan’s roommate’s room, I pack both tests in my bag and zip it up tightly. I jog up the stairs and find Joan lying on her bed, reading a book.

  “You were right!” I say brightly.

  “Phew!” Joan says. She comes over and hugs me. “I knew it!”

  I hug her as best I can. “Thanks so much for everything. I’m so glad I stayed here.”

  “Me too.”

  “I’ll see you soon, okay? At the music library, or we’ll get lunch or something.” I leave before anything else can get said.

  Dear Mom,

  Or should I say Grandmom.

  This is not a joke,

  Agnes

  I have learned about unwanted pregnancy from television. I have struggled through my thinking that I was not wanted. That it is me, and not Simon, who made my mother go away.

  I have spent the better part of six hours pacing my small room, holding two positive pregnancy tests, one in each hand. If asked, hypothetically, Tea Rose would not want a baby. We are not in this for love or for babies, I have been thinking to myself, pacing, my two test sticks like relay batons I have forgotten to pass off. We are in this for bodies and for loneliness.

  But maybe, maybe in trying to be more substantial, more here, we have lost all ability to float. Maybe, in trying to stay above water, we have thrashed ourselves into exhaustion, into drowning. If Tea Rose knows about the baby, it will be harder to extricate myself. He will feel a heightened responsibility to save me, which will make us sink faster. All three of us. Or will the baby be the thing that makes him let go more readily? Will he be the guy from TV who “can’t handle it,” or will he be the “my baby too” guy, indignant? Pacing, I try to determine which guy is better. Both seem bad.

  I expect flowers or a drawing or something when I see him—Tea Rose has presented little cadeaux for a lot less than a week’s separation. There is a shoebox under my bed that’s filled to overflowing, all trinkets from Tea Rose, some scribbled on notebook paper while we’ve sat in the fireplace room of the library, or on napkins from the dining hall, or on cutouts from magazines or books. Tea Rose has no problem tearing pages out of books. The first time I saw him do it I actually gasped—such a small but wild transgression. “What are you doing?” I’d said. “What? This is a good page. You’ll like it.”

  He has said that he misses me even when I am around, because he anticipates missing me when I leave, to go to class, or to go back to my room to shower, or to go to work, or once in a while sleep in my own bed. The more I leave, the more he wants me. And it is the frequency of leaving that occurs here in our little shoebox of a world—moving from one building to the next, from one class to the next—that intensifies the missing.

  But apparently it is not a matter of duration. Apparently, for Tea Rose, the longer we are apart, the easier it becomes to be apart, the less I may be missed. I learn this immediately, without being told, when I hear Tea Rose’s signature knock—a rapid, low thrumming with his knuckles—and open the door to find him empty-handed, his face absent its usual flushed excitement. Usually it is his face that tells me everything—his desire to touch me, his desire to be alone with me, his desire to absorb as much of me into himself as he can.

  In Tea Rose, for a while, I had a mirror of my own longings, and the reflection was enough to keep us enthralled. But here, now, with him standing before me in the empty hallway, his hands heavy at his sides, his body resolute, I see that the mirror has gone dark.

  “Hi,” he says, and then steps in, too quickly, to hug me across the shoulders. “Hi!” he says again, more brightly, before straightening back up. He leaves his hands on my shoulders briefly, like a father having a talk with his son.

  “Oh,” is all I manage to say. Is this his baby too? I wonder. Is it his right to know? I am distracted by these thoughts and distracted by how distracted he seems to be. I thought seeing him would be all I needed in order to know what to do, to know how to tell him or how to stay quiet. I thought any confusion would be mine, coming from me. I did not count on him being so strange. Like a stranger.

  “Do you want to go for a walk or something?” he says in the same bright tone.

  “Sure. Let me just put my coat on.”

  We walk wordlessly down the hall, down three narrow flights of stairs where no parts of our bodies touch, and out into the night. There is the smell of rain but no rain. We walk in the direction of the track and practice fields. Campus exudes a barely contained glee, a collective relief to get back in the swing, to have spring finally beginning to take hold and summer just around the corner. We pass the library, whose lights in a month’s time will still be on at this hour, whose carrels will be filled with anxiety and the students producing it, whirring like turbines, like generators in a power outage, cramming for the mandatory emergencies known as final exams, so close to the end they can almost taste the first celebratory beer on their lips.

  I think about what Professor Donald said once: that however you try to make writing a paper or studying a fun event—surrounding yourself
with other studiers or going in groups to the library or computer lab—in the end, it’s work you do alone. Walking now with Tea Rose, I feel acutely what she meant. There is no us. There is him, and there is me, and there is the work of being alive. My relationship to everything around me feels more precarious than ever, now that time has been newly minted onto my body, now that my biology has been reincarnated as a ticking bomb. The world looks different.

  We pass the student center. Several people stand outside talking, making plans, their voices carrying high and glad. Tea Rose takes something from his jacket pocket. I know what it is before seeing it—an airplane-sized bottle, just like we had that night at the very beginning when we huddled on the field until sunrise.

  “Do you collect those or something?”

  Tea Rose grins. “Nah. I nick them from my dad. This one’s from the London trip, but he always has them since he travels so much for work. He’ll order three drinks at a time, drink one, and pocket the rest for his hotel room or whatever.”

  “Does he know you take them?” This is nice, I’m thinking. Maybe we’ll just talk about this kind of thing. His parents. Their quirks.

  “I think by now he has some idea. He never says anything, though. You can pretty much always find at least one bottle in all of his coats and suit jackets. I don’t think he keeps track.”

  “Is he an alcoholic?” I don’t necessarily mean to ask this, but there it is.

  Fortunately Tea Rose laughs. “I think if he were an alcoholic, he’d keep track.”

  He sips from the bottle and passes it to me without touching any part of my hand or arm. I hold it loosely. We have reached the bleachers and I follow him a few rows up, our shoes sending clanking echoes into the night that has become thick and dark, a much heavier night than the one we set off in. We sit next to one another, the coldness pressing through my jeans and jacket. I put the bottle to my lips. The bit I can taste tastes good. I take a sip, a tiny one, and then a bigger one. A gust of anger sweeps through me, and I gulp deeply before handing the bottle back. It is now a little more than half empty. Or, if I were a different sort of person, a little less than half full. Take that, I want to say to the cluster of cells in my basement, see how you like having something crammed into your existence.