Sweetness and Light

by Liam Pieper

  It wasn’t over; Sasha felt compelled to defend the dolls’ honour. She began a campaign of ambushing Stephan with them, leaving them in places he would find them. Each time she waited for the yell of surprise and dismay when they tumbled out of his suit jacket, or he opened the desk drawer to find them arranged in a pornographic tableau over his stapler.

  One day she could not find Mitty and Sarah, and turned the whole house over, looking for them. She confronted Stephan, accused him of hiding the dolls from her, but he was weary, not in a mood for nonsense, decided the cleaner – a jolly Colombian woman who polished their home every Tuesday – must have thrown them out by accident.

  Sasha spent a miserable afternoon picking through the trash bags that piled up in the alleyway outside and finally, thwarted, tried to pick a fight. But Stephan was busy, distracted, and she, too, had other things to worry about.

  The cleaner was quietly dismissed and replaced; time moved on. The winter ended, and Manhattan’s streets began to stink of trash and possibility. For her thirty-third birthday Sasha went to a French bistro in the West Village where she paid seven dollars for a pickled egg, the taste of which took her back across the decades and to another borough. What would little Sasha make of this life? And what would it be like for her own child to grow up in it?

  Another summer; the leaves unfurled, flourished and fell. That winter, a hurricane shut the city down – they were trapped in their apartment for days, surviving on graham crackers and wine. From the window, she could see the whole city glow white under a sarcophagus of snow. She’d never seen anything look so clean.

  That winter her period was late, a week, two. She bought a box of testing wands from CVS, peed on a stick, paced impatiently while she waited for the result.

  Then joy. It began with the little blue bars, and then telling Stephan, who whooped and punched the air in victory. For weeks she walked around town beaming, a wave of happiness washing over her every time she touched her stomach, lost in the daydream of telling people. She fantasised about telling her mother she would finally be a grandmother, the news provoking a swift recovery, a miracle. The effect fell across her whole life: food tasted better, strangers on the street smiled more, the weather seemed brighter, the air fresher. She even enjoyed the nausea, the long mornings spent kneeling by the toilet bowl – right up until the nausea became an ache, and then stabbing pain, and then the bleeding began.

  She cried, for a while. Stephan rushed home, took a rare day off work, held her, stroked her hair. He told her not to worry, that there was always a silver lining, went out and returned with a pint of ice-cream and a shockingly expensive bottle of wine.

  They took it from the top. The extra layer of expectation they placed on themselves that year was not an aphrodisiac – it was hard to get in the mood when both parties were worried about hitting their KPIs. They googled; she took pre-natal vitamins and ate yams. Stephan downloaded an app on his phone to track her ovulation and they began having sex on designated days, at designated hours. She grew to hate it, to dread the days he came home from work with a firing solution for her uterus and a bottle of Chianti.

  One night she pushed him away. ‘Could you just try and relax, please? It’s not sexy to be chased around by a nerd with a calculator that says it’s time for fucking.’

  ‘But . . .’ he protested gently. ‘The app says it’s time.’

  ‘That’s not funny and this isn’t fun. You’re turning into some kind of robot.’

  ‘Sexy robot?’ he said, hopefully, and she gave him a withering look.

  Sasha resented him for his highly reductive approach to the miracle of romantic possibility, and resented herself for not being able to find a way to express this without coming off as a nag. She did not want to feel like a cliché; she began to feel personally attacked by the portrayal of hapless women in romantic comedies. She watched a lot of Netflix, and soon her relationship with it was amongst the most meaningful in her life.

  She needed her husband to know she needed more from him – but part of that meant he had to work that out on his own, to tell her she looked nice, to look up from his phone once in a while.

  The seasons passed, the snow fell again. The trees that lined the street dropped their leaves, and the endless evenings began to feel threadbare. There were nights her lack of a child made her so miserable that she let tears sneak quietly away from her while she watched television, collapsed on the couch. Other nights she was elated; opened wine, listened to records turned all the way up. What would a baby fix, really – it was a bad idea, a tourniquet on a bleed. As was marriage, really.

  She began to understand the grand farce behind her mother’s hope for Sasha’s future when she had been a child. It had been the same hyperbolic tone used by the real-estate agents who’d escorted her and Stephan through apartments in the Village – the sunny-side-up optimism of salesmen who must, out of necessity, refuse to see the vast flaws all around them; rising damp, black mould, hostile neighbours, crumbling facades. The fact that the whole adventure is only obtained through a debt that will prove nearly impossible for most people to service. Just look at this place! It could have been her mother. It’s a fixer-upper! It’s not much to look at right now, but the foundations are strong. The bones are good. The bones are so good. Imagine what you could do with it.

  She took a town car up to the facility to visit Mama. They sat by the window – out across the field ice skaters turned lazy circles of the frozen lake.

  ‘We’re going to have a baby, Mom,’ she said.

  Mama said nothing – her roaming eye was fixed on a vase of flowers across the room.

  ‘Did you know, Mom, that when I was a little girl, all I wanted was to have a baby of my own? I was so lonely. All I had was that doll, you remember? You were never home, and I remember thinking that if I had a little girl of my own I would always be there for her. I would never leave her alone, and I would never be lonely again.’

  She pictured herself in the same scene, but holding a newborn, swaddled and sailor-suited, imagined handing it to Mama and Mama starting back to life to coo over it.

  ‘Did it make you happy? Are you happy with me?’

  Mama’s wild eye rolled around and locked with Sasha’s and for one thrilling second Sasha was sure it was her mother, repaired, reborn. Then her mother whimpered softly and soiled herself.

  On the way back to the city she felt like crying. Or rather, she felt she should cry, but had no real desire to. She was sad, sure, but it was an inert, fuzzy sort of sadness. On a whim she told the driver to take her to the Natural History Museum. She wandered through the exhibits in low spirits. They were still familiar after all these years – she hadn’t been here since she was a child, just a baby herself, and now she was making herself miserable because she didn’t have one. It was silly, but then, what was life for if not that?

  Her genes were selfish, she could feel them arcing up, the primordial filibuster that tied up all higher function when she was around a child – her lips made cooing nonsense words, her keys jangled; her ovaries too. It seemed everything was linked to this biological imperative – her genetics, her friends, her religion, the over-involved lady at the bagel place – all screaming at her over the din, ‘When are you gonna have a baby?’

  How could she even know how much of the wanting was hers? Every year of life added more layers of expectation that wrapped around her just for being born, this gender, this place. Could she find a single desire that was her own, free from the programming drummed into her since before she could talk?

  She wandered through the air and space centre, past the celestial garbage, fallen meteorites and space dust. In front of every exhibit, factoids were etched into a low stainless steel dais. ‘Earth is the only planet with water on its surface.’ ‘This meteorite was worshipped as a god by Native Americans.’ Her fingers traced the letters. Imagine being so sure of your science you carved it in steel. Imagine being so sure of anything.

  She found her
self under the blue whale – life size, looming against a blue neon sky. She paused underneath, counted the bones, her eyes coming to rest on the pelvis. A memory came to her, a mortified museum staffer explaining the provenance of the whale pelvis in response to Mama’s demands.

  Pelvises were for land-dwelling creatures, and the fact that whales had pelvic bones meant that they had evolved on land. At some point, the distant ancestor of the whales had decided, no, this isn’t working, too hard on land, let’s get back in the water, and the whale was born. Sasha admired that confidence; there were days she couldn’t decide between soup and salad.

  ‘Did you know whales used to walk on land?’ she asked the little girl standing next to her, startling her into rushing off to hold her mother’s hand. It occurred to Sasha that she was behaving a little oddly, that she wasn’t quite right.

  They saw a doctor, a specialist, another specialist. They ran extensive, expensive tests and came up with nothing. A kindly fertility expert told them that they could find nothing wrong with either Sasha’s or Stephan’s reproductive system, that it was just one of those things. Some statistics: one in eight American couples have trouble conceiving. Twenty per cent of women will experience infertility that has no identifiable cause. It would probably resolve itself in time – it was too early to worry.

  He told them there was a thing called the fertility cliff, but not to worry about it. ‘It’s a bit of a misnomer actually. It’s more of a fertility slope. Chances to conceive naturally do reduce after a certain age, but not all that fast. You have time.’ He checked his notes again. ‘You have some time.’

  She had nothing but time. She spent a lot of it online, searching for solutions. Her time studying medicine was enough to make her cynical about it, realise just how often the doctors got it wrong, how much was guesswork and placebo.

  She signed up to a newsletter run by a celebrity who sold wellness accessories to women of means. She read forums about crystals and numerology. The internet took her to some strange places. She’d read somewhere – medical school? Facebook? – that by age thirty a person was more or less exactly who they would always be. What a horrible injustice. Bad enough that life was a fixed fight, worse that you know how it’s going to pan out just a couple of rounds in.

  How strange that moving to a new borough and a couple of years watching Netflix turned the city into a different world, one she couldn’t understand at all. A couple of years ago New York had been full of Jeeps pumping songs about blunts and dime bags, now everywhere she went smelled like weed and girls in dungarees with skin like mascarpone talked earnestly about how they’d replaced therapy with CBD. Sometimes it seemed like she was the only person in Manhattan without a trust fund, and then it would occur to her that no, she had one of her own now.

  There were just so many hours in the day, and life was so easy it was unbearable. She could hardly bear to look out her window at the vista; the snow – which seemed somehow cleaner and more expensive uptown – falling on streets that parodied the hardship she’d grown up in. Down the road was a deli that had survived gentrification by becoming a wildly overpriced tourist destination. Folks flew across the world and lined up in the cold for a twenty-dollar bagel of the sort Mama had salvaged from her work for years. It was madness, maddening.

  Sasha had worked so hard to escape that life – Mama had sacrificed so much – and in the end, none of it mattered. She got lucky, was lucky, didn’t deserve it, no more than anyone else.

  The lunatics who slept rough on her block, who once upon a time had been as much a part of the sidewalk as steam and dog-shit, were suddenly so real in their suffering it made her soul itch. She applied for jobs, NGOs, charities, put her name down to volunteer at a soup kitchen. When she went out to the store, the gym, she carried extra cash to give to the needy.

  Sasha knew she had no reason to be unhappy, which only made it worse. She began to understand depression as a finance term – you have everything you could possibly want, but your resources are scuppered by inflation, practically useless. Her spirit made no sense to her anymore.

  She found a new doctor, who put her on Zoloft. The pills didn’t ease her unhappiness, but she found herself cloaked in a foggy sort of competence – the pills had built an invisible exoskeleton around her that kept her moving, washed dishes, helped her chew her breakfast.

  In time, she began to resume the chore of living; went to the gym, got her hair cut, started taking vitamins, initiated sex with her husband and found it a waste of time. The pills reanimated her, but her libido remained stubbornly depressed. Her once vital, fizzing sex drive now felt like a lump of pizza dough that had been beaten down and refused to rise. She could have sex, didn’t mind sex, just couldn’t imagine ever wanting sex again, seeking it out as a recreational activity.

  She went to another doctor who ran another physical, told her again nothing was wrong with her. ‘Your blood pressure is a little high, but that’s it.’ The GP put down her pen and levelled with her. ‘You need to give yourself a break. Cut down on alcohol. Do something that relaxes you.’

  ‘Alcohol relaxes me.’

  ‘Try yoga.’

  Sasha picked a fight in her first class, twenty minutes in, when her thighs were trembling in protest and the yogi, a blonde twenty-year-old who was all upward inflection and affirmations, asked the group to return to their intention for the day, to be aware of their sacrum, of their breakfast. She encouraged the class to pursue a vegan diet, on the grounds that every day was a type of rebirth, that each cell replenished itself, so that every seven years a human being was completely replaced and on a vegan diet after seven years they would be made entirely of plant matter.

  At this, Sasha snorted, dropped back from cobra pose to slump on her haunches. ‘That’s not true.’

  The yogi blinked – it took some time. ‘Excuse me?’

  ‘That’s not even remotely true. Most cells don’t replace themselves. In fact, by your age, many of them are already dying forever. After twenty, your brain starts shrinking. You’re already in decline.’

  ‘You’re ruining it,’ complained another student from the back of the class.

  ‘You could try to be a little more open minded,’ chided the yogi, gently.

  ‘And you could try not being a fucking idiot,’ snapped Sasha.

  She went back to the GP about her temper, who referred her to a shrink. More and more often she was angry, furious over some little thing. She was turning into her mother; sudden jolts of fury, the urge to do crazy, violent things. She’d always thought it was the booze that did it to Mama, but perhaps it was something spiritual, some rotten thing that had built up inside Sasha and broken loose, a kind of stroke for the soul. The doctor put her on Lexapro, told her he could always take her off it again, should anything change. He nodded meaningfully at her tummy. She hated him. She took the pills.

  She tried yoga again, a few different studios, and this time one of them clicked. The instructor talked less nonsense, gave clear instructions, padded quietly around the mats, stopping to make adjustments to Sasha’s pose with soft, firm hands. The first couple of times she felt the yogi’s touch she flinched against it, stiffened, but in time she learned to go with it. The first class was annoying, the second bearable, and the third joyous – she floated out of it, the thick coil of tension in her spine gone for the first time in months. She went again the next day, then started going every morning.

  Sasha tried to get Stephan to try it out, but he would not be convinced. He was too busy; he was too stressed out to find time to relax. Every morning there was more hair on his side of the twin bathroom sinks. She worried that he was realising, in dawning horror, that he had made a bad investment, joined the ranks of his friends who had purchased ageing brownstones with bad pipes and rising damp, those who lost a fortune in tech stocks during the crash.

  He worked late, coming home only after midnight. She ate her dinner alone in front of the television. She went to yoga twice a day now, stud
ied every variation she could find. She found herself travelling to the outer reaches of Bushwick, to a class led by a diamond-cut woman in her mid-thirties with a deep French accent and an even deeper tan. By the end of that class she felt as though a train had run her down – and she had not felt so good in years.

  Afterwards, she approached the yogi, who took her for coffee. They sat outside on the Bushwick sidewalk. The day was clear, and a brisk wind whipped the steam from their coffees and wicked the sweat from their Lululemon as they talked, falling immediately into an easy intimacy.

  Sasha confided in her instructor about her blues, their trouble conceiving, the problems in her marriage, and the yogi listened patiently.

  ‘You know, I’m not into telling you how to live, but I can tell you about me. I’d given up on being a mother. It wasn’t until I stopped worrying about it that it happened.’

  ‘You’re a mom?’ Sasha’s eyes skated over the yogi’s body, delighted and outraged. ‘Get out of here.’

  Her instructor shrugged. ‘I know it sounds kooky, but I gave up and gave myself time, and that finally let my child know I was ready for her to come into the world. You can’t bring a baby into a toxic place.’

  ‘What does that mean though, “give yourself time”? If I’m the toxic place, how do I fix that?’

  ‘I went to study yoga. I went to the source. This is American yoga,’ the yogi spits the word, ‘but there is something else, another level.’

  The yogi explained the practice created by a visionary guru, a return to the roots of yoga, a rebalancing. It is practised only in an ashram in south India – a sacred place – by a handful of people selected by the guru herself.

  She’d been to that ashram. She said the guru was an astonishing woman. She personally knew women who had been told they would never conceive and who had healed themselves under the guru’s guidance. She knew people who had been cured of cancer. Anything was possible.

  The yogi leaned close and, in a voice barely above a murmur, told Sasha she had seen things she wouldn’t believe. ‘When yoga is elevated to the level this guru has . . .’ The yogi said she had seen people develop clairvoyance, telepathy, had heard talk of levitation. When the full potential of the body was unlocked, the mind could follow.