You Are Free: Stories

by Danzy Senna

  It was early evening. The two women settled onto the porch with glasses of Zinfandel. Ramona had showered and changed into a sleek black sundress that showed off her figure. She was lean and her arms rippled with muscle. She had the flat stomach of a twenty-year-old.

  Livy wore a cardigan and she caught herself leaning forward to hide her abdomen. “You look so good, Ramona, more beautiful than I’ve ever seen you.”

  “Pilates,” Ramona said without a pause. “You should try it. None of this yoga crap, where you have to chant in gobbledygook along with some white girl with a nose ring. Pilates is where it’s at, girl. No nonsense. You get the most results with the least time spent.”

  As Ramona talked, Livy took in her friend’s face. In New York, people had always taken them for sisters, but they looked nothing alike. Ramona was tall, with wide, athletic shoulders, Livy was short. Ramona had copper skin and slightly Asian eyes, while Livy was pale yellow, with wide, almond-shaped eyes. They shared the same texture hair—half-nappy curls that had been the bane of their equally confused adolescences, which they’d each spent, in different cities, passing as various other races and listening intently to Sade, as if her melancholy British soul held the answer to their alienation. Ramona wore her hair straight and long now, and Livy wore hers curly around her shoulders. Their similarity was not in their features so much as in the relationship between their features: their noses and mouths and eyes came from different continents.

  “So what was the whole birth thing like?” Ramona said. “I remember you saying right after that it was long.”

  Livy looked off into the distance, momentarily at a loss for words. When she turned back to her friend, she could only say, “Yes, long.”

  Dessa’s birth had been a bloody mess—thirty hours of labor, six hours of active pushing with a New Age doctor who prided himself on his low Cesarean rates. The baby’s head had been stuck in the birth canal for hours, but she could not push the child from the purgatory of her body. The problem, they later determined, was that the baby’s fist was rigidly held to her cheek, like Rodin’s Thinker, so that every time Livy pushed, the baby would start to come out, then get pulled back by the spring of her elbow. Finally they’d had to cut Livy and use suction to pull the child out. Livy saw the baby held high above her, glowing, red, wailing, a white rope still attaching them. She heard Christopher’s ecstatic cry and the doctor’s cheerful, “We’ve got a beautiful big baby girl!” She saw Christopher cutting the glowing white rope with the doctor’s assistance. But she had not been able to join them in their festivities. Instead she began to shriek, “Let me die!” over and over again, and leaped off the table and fell to the floor screaming for them to just please kill her now, she could not take another second of this life. They’d finally had to calm her with a shot of Demerol.

  When she woke up five hours later, Christopher was seated beside the bed holding the sleeping infant. He came to Livy smiling softly and said, “This is our girl.” She’d been dreaming that she was involved in a local campaign to abolish vaginal births.

  She had never known giving birth was so much like dying, or that, like dying, it went on so much longer than you expected it to. And that afterward you were not the same. She’d been in therapy for half a decade at that point, turning the details of her difficult childhood over and over, but after the birth she quit. The child she’d been, she felt, was dead now, and therefore not worth discussing.

  Livy’s mother was her first visitor at the hospital. She walked in bearing a cup of Starbucks chai, Livy’s favorite comfort drink—but somehow the sight of it made Livy sad. “You poor thing,” her mother said, and from the way she looked at her, Livy knew that her mother knew she had died on the birthing table. The girl she had been was no longer.

  Her mother stayed with them for days after the birth, the same mother who had in part been responsible for the problems of Livy’s childhood, the same mother who had been the subject of so many blistering therapy sessions. And yet as Livy sat there trying to nurse the baby, all she could feel toward her mother was warmth and sadness—and awe too, that she had come through the science fiction of birth four times and somehow gone on with the pedestrian task of raising her children. In those early days Livy sat for hours watching Dessa’s tiny face and thinking, sometimes whispering aloud, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry”—for what, she couldn’t say, only that she’d felt the need to apologize.

  Ramona leaned forward. “So listen, I have to tell you a secret.” She glanced in at Christopher. “I’m switching careers.”

  “To what?”

  Ramona paused, studied Livy’s face for a moment, then said, “Don’t laugh, but I’m studying to become a life coach.”

  Livy laughed a little. “What do you mean?”

  “There’s this institute in Union Square. I go for six weeks and get an accreditation—something to put on my wall. But the fact is, I’m already qualified. I already have my first client.”

  “You’re not going to practice law anymore?”

  “Oh, I’ll still do it, sure, select clients, but this is where I want to put the bulk of my energy.” Ramona paused, squinted out at the mountains. “My client, Lizette, is just the tip of the iceberg. Do you realize how many rich women there are, our age and older, desperately in need of coaching? I mean, powerful women, but they’re overweight and lonely. I have this idea: I can combine life coaching with being a personal trainer. See, with Lizette, she’s the head of a corporation, and her time is limited, so I coach her on her life while we work on her body at the gym. At first we did it together to save time, but I realized and she realized that it actually works better that way. The mind-body connection, you know. Adrenaline. Everything about it just works. So I thought—why not make it my signature? Nobody else is doing life coaching this way.”

  Ramona spoke fast, her eyes trained on Livy’s face. She rolled her wineglass between her hands as if it were a magic lantern. A copy of O Magazine Ramona had brought off the plane sat on the small wrought-iron table between them, Oprah’s maniacally happy face bursting off yet another issue. Ramona’s cell phone sat beside the magazine, a small silver thing the shape of a suppository. She’d made a show of turning off the sound when they settled out on the patio with their wine, but every few minutes Livy could see the phone light up and Ramona would pick it up and glance at the screen, and although she put it down each time, Livy had the sense she was itching to talk to whoever had called.

  From inside the house she could hear Christopher whistling as he cooked, the sizzle of something hitting the pan. She felt a wave of longing for Ramona to be gone, longing to be alone with Christopher and Dessa again. She had the sense of being intruded upon, as if something not exactly dangerous, but certainly foreign, had entered their home.

  “He seems awfully sweet, Livy,” Ramona said, narrowing her eyes as she stared in at Christopher through the glass. “It must be nice to be taken care of.”

  “Well, I still work,” Livy said, but she let the sentence trail off because she worked less, so much less, than she had when they’d both lived in New York.

  Ramona was still watching Christopher, but some dark memory flickered across her sharp features.

  Livy couldn’t help but ask. “Do you ever think about Julian these days? Do you miss him?”

  Ramona shrugged. “Not much. I hear things. He’s living with a rich white guy now in Chelsea. Can you believe it? Some trust fund brat. They attend a Unitarian church and are interviewing surrogates. Julian found God and wants to have a baby. He goes around telling all our old friends how once he was lost but now he’s found. He’s never been happier in his life. I was his period of self-hatred. That’s what I represent to him.” She shook her head, smirking. “These mixed dudes, you gotta watch out. They start out one thing and end up another. I mean, does anybody know who Julian really is?”

  They were both quiet then, letting the words about Julian hang there over them.

  Livy remembered going to sit
with Ramona in those weeks after her assault, after Julian moved out. The house was airless, stuffy with grief, and Ramona sat on the couch under an afghan with the television flickering nonsense before her, alternating between sleep and deep, frightening, guttural sobs that seemed they might break a blood vessel. Livy kept repeating, “You’re going to be all right, you’re going to get through this,” but really she had not been so sure.

  At Ramona’s request, Livy had booked them a day at the spa. It was world famous, a faux-Buddhist retreat about twenty miles out of town. Livy had heard of the place but had never been.

  She had printed out a description of the spa from the Internet and Ramona read from it in the car. They’d picked the Buddha Day Special. “Oh, this sounds delicious,” Ramona said. “We get an hour in a private hot tub, a deep tissue massage, something called a salt glow scrub, and a craniosacral massage. And some free soap.” She clucked her tongue. “It’s criminal that you live so close and have never been to this place. I’d be here all the time if I were you.”

  “It’s hard when you have a baby,” Liv said, “hard to get away for hours on end.”

  “Livy, girl, this is something I’ve been meaning to say to you,” Ramona said. “You’ve got to start pampering yourself. Just because you’re a mom doesn’t mean that has to stop. You need to take little day trips with friends. A massage. A well-rested mother is a relaxed mother is a good mother—”

  But they had arrived. At the end of the gravel parking lot, a line of Japanese lanterns led up a long stairwell to the entrance, and beyond was a stone room with a fountain gurgling in the center.

  In the changing room Livy saw that Ramona had brought a bathing suit—a bright fuchsia bikini to wear during the Jacuzzi part of their package.

  “Oh God, a bathing suit, I forgot to bring one,” Livy said, embarrassed. She had not even read the description of what they would be doing. “Should I just wear underwear?”

  Ramona shrugged. “Whatever makes you comfortable, Liv. Plenty of women go naked. You should go in your birthday suit. No shame in your game.” Her eyes flickered over Livy where she stood in her plain black cotton bikini bottom, worn thin from repeat washings, and a nursing bra that flapped open to reveal her nipples. “Girl, we need to take you lingerie shopping.” Ramona wore a delicate cream-colored lace thong and a matching push-up bra, the bikini laid out before her on a bench. She examined herself in the mirror as she spoke. “Not for the guys or anything. It’s to make you feel good about yourself.”

  “I already feel good,” Livy said, but as she spoke she caught a glimpse of her body next to Ramona’s. She looked like a mom—the kind of woman she had sworn she would never become when she was living in New York.

  She followed Ramona up a stone path to the private outdoor bath area, feeling impatient. She was eager for the three hours of spa bliss to be over. She wouldn’t admit it to Ramona, but she missed Dessa—the weight and smell of her body, her bewildered black eyes—and she missed Christopher. She missed the three of them, they were a unit now. She would miss the quiet evening ritual—bathing the baby, feeding the baby, showing the baby her video before rocking her to sleep. Once they put her down in the nursery with the white noise machine beside her crib, Christopher would start cooking while Livy played sous chef or cleaned up the mess of the day and music played from the radio or the television droned in the background. They relished those adult evenings of wine and food and talk—not because Dessa was absent but because she was present, her sleep the grand prize in the other room. After dinner they would read in bed, side by side, the smell of lavender floating in from the desert darkness outside, or listen to jazz, or make love, or take a bath together, or watch something trashy on television.

  They were in the bubbling Jacuzzi now, under a canopy of trees. Livy was naked and Ramona, in her bikini, was telling her a story about her latest man mishap. She’d been seeing another lawyer, somebody she met at her neighborhood Starbucks. He was a white guy, Jewish, stout—cute, but nothing like the golden peacock Julian had been. Ramona said she felt safe with him. A few weeks into them sleeping together, she walked past his computer and saw he had ads open from “JDate,” the Jewish matchmaking service. She asked him about it and he said, matter-of-factly, that he found her ravishing, but that he planned to marry a Jewish woman someday.

  “I was his thirty minutes of difference,” Ramona said. “I’m swearing off white boys and mixed nuts. Mark my words: I’m going black and I’m never going back.”

  They both laughed together the way they used to do, only Julian had been with them laughing too back then, like a third girlfriend.

  They sat quietly then, waiting for the front desk to call them to their next treatment. The only sound was the gurgling from the jet under the water.

  “So, Livy, tell me,” Ramona said into the darkness. “Are you and Christopher happy?”

  She couldn’t see Ramona’s expression, but her voice sounded hungry. Livy recalled all the evenings she’d spent in her old life, bonding with her other single women friends. It was like some ancient ritual, the way they offered each other their tales of love lives gone wrong, men behaving badly, how they offered up their dissatisfaction and ambivalence like pieces of fruit at the feet of the Buddha.

  “I’m happy, yes,” Livy said, and it was mostly true. And yet even as she said it, she felt a longing for her old self, poor little Livy Thurman, the old maid of Brooklyn. That lonely misery of hers had made her, in a sense, one with other women. That misery of hers had made her feel that her life had not only a plot but also an audience. It wasn’t that she didn’t have problems anymore, but they were of a different tenor—both quieter and graver. And they remained private: It was Christopher she would talk to about them, not the girlfriends.

  She heard distant thunder now, and hoped it would rain while they were in the hot tub. But it sounded too far away.

  She recalled a summer when she was a kid and her family had rented a vacation house on an island off Cape Cod. A week into their stay, there was a hurricane warning. The whole island went into a state of hysteria. Her mother and father made emergency preparations: taped the windows, filled the tub with water, stocked the pantry with canned goods and batteries. Livy remembered how much she’d loved the feeling of being safely locked inside with all of them, her brothers and sister and mother and father. The hurricane never materialized, but she’d enjoyed the threat of it so much it didn’t matter.

  Marriage had given her a similar feeling—that she was, with Christopher, battening down the hatches against the hurricane. There were so many lonely souls getting knocked around in the storm out there, the way she had been, but now she was inside, with Christopher and Dessa, huddled together for warmth.

  The rest of the spa date felt interminable to her, the endless ablutions. A little hippie woman massaged her and salted her and basted her with ointments. Livy kept an eye on the clock through it all, imagining Dessa’s bedtime ritual going on without her, imagining Christopher sitting down to dinner without her.

  When at last it was over she wasted no time showering and dressing, but Ramona took her time. She groaned and stretched and rubbed her belly. “Do you realize I still haven’t gone? Jesus. I’m not going to eat another bite, I swear, until I’ve gotten this out of me,” she said, brushing her hair in front of the mirror. After that she did deep breathing exercises and massaged her temples, and examined her toned and glowing figure in the mirror. She slathered herself with yet more oils and serums. She put on her expensive lingerie and stood beside Livy, who was already dressed in her jeans and T-shirt. Ramona stared at them both in the mirror as she spoke.

  “That was amazing, girl, wasn’t it amazing?” She put an arm around Livy’s shoulder and squeezed. “Now promise me you’ll do stuff like this more often. Promise me that you’ll come back and really start taking care of yourself.”

  Livy nodded and said, “I promise,” though she knew she would never come back.

  Ramona squ
eezed her shoulder again and stared into her own eyes as she said, “If I’ve accomplished anything on this visit, it’s to make you take better care of yourself.”

  Livy saw herself beside her friend—small, ten pounds overweight, with stretch marks and that belly and those rings of exhaustion under her eyes. She looked older. And Ramona looked strangely victorious to her. It was as if once again Livy had performed a public service. Ramona had come to New Mexico to see poor Livy Thurman’s dowdy life as a wife and mother, to discover that Livy’s husband wore clogs and her baby was fat and demanding, and that Livy herself wore raggedy old cotton underwear and had given up on herself. It was as if Ramona had come to New Mexico to see just how awful married life, mother-life, could be—and she would leave newly reassured of the superiority of her life being single, free, back in the city.

  Christopher was asleep in bed with his reading glasses on and a book open on his chest.

  Ramona and Livy tiptoed around the kitchen, fixing themselves glasses of water.

  Before they said good night, Ramona checked her cell phone and, smiling, whispered, “This guy I met at the gym keeps texting me,” then disappeared into the guest bedroom, her eyes still on the phone.

  Livy remembered most clearly the evening she got back from her first meeting with Christopher in Santa Fe. On the cab ride from JFK to Brooklyn, she’d stared out at the gray dusky light over the city, thinking that after New Mexico it looked like a trash heap to her. She had just landed in a heap of trash.