“So I’m at five months, five and a half. This is a Saturday afternoon. I’m driving home from the movie theater. I’ve started going to the movies once, twice a week. Or, actually, what I’ve started doing is buying movie tickets so I can get inside the movie theater so I can get to the snacks. The nacho cheese dip they serve, I’m addicted to it. Can’t find it anywhere else. And sure, I could tell the ticket taker, Look, I’m pregnant, I need some nacho cheese, I’m not going to see a movie, can you just let me in. But somehow that’s more embarrassing than buying a ticket for”—Sandra waved a hand—“one of the Hunger Games movies. Now I can’t even remember which one, and I must have bought tickets to it ten or twelve times, going theater to theater, just in case someone got suspicious. I mean suspicious of—Anyway. This one day, it’s a Saturday, a Saturday afternoon, I’m driving back from the movie theater, one hand on the wheel, one hand in the nacho cheese sauce, and one minute I’m driving by a strip mall with a Home Depot in it, with the Home Depot in it, and the next I’m parking my car.
“And even now I don’t—I mean, what did I think would happen? That the same couple would be there again? And even—I mean even if, by some wild coincidence, they had been, there wasn’t anything—Maybe I would have followed them around the store? And if I had, honestly, I don’t—I don’t know what I was hoping for. Some kind of magic, obviously, but whether I wanted the—the moment, the feeling, I’d experienced before, whether I wanted it replicated or explained or whether I wanted it somehow reversed, I—” Sandra trailed off. She cleared her throat. “They weren’t there. Obviously. Instead I wandered up and down the aisles for a while. Not that long. The pregnancy had given me sciatica and walking for more than fifteen, twenty minutes was painful. I got gestational diabetes in the sixth month. Not exactly a surprise. I’m sorry,” Sandra said after a pause, “I guess this story is a little anticlimactic because it more or less ends here. I walked around Home Depot for a while and eventually my back started hurting and I left. And walking out I was fine, walking back to the car I was fine, and then in the car I started crying. I started crying and I couldn’t stop. I was still crying when I got home. Russ told me it was just pregnancy hormones. That’s what he said when I came home sobbing and said I needed to move out. That wasn’t—” Sandra was speaking slightly slower now. “I don’t want to make him seem—that wasn’t the first thing he said. He wasn’t cold. Wasn’t unsympathetic. The opposite, actually. First thing, he got me a box of tissues. Made me a cup of chamomile tea. We sat down on the couch together and he wrapped me in a blanket”—she touched the blanket behind her—“this blanket, actually, and he rubbed my swollen feet and I tried to explain it to him.” Sandra smiled. “Which was hard. Because I didn’t know what I was trying to explain to him. I just knew that I’d—that I’d seen something. And that I’d tried to—to put it away. And that I couldn’t. And if I couldn’t, it wasn’t honest. Being married to him. It just wasn’t fair.” Sandra drank until her glass was empty and then she set the glass down. She did not refill it. “I don’t”—she paused—“I don’t believe in moments, really. Everything takes time. Me moving out, that took time, and working out a custody agreement, that took forever. And I’m still in the middle of figuring—but you said,” Sandra sighed, “you said moment. So. Okay. That moment in the Home Depot. If I had to pick one.” Sandra’s cheeks were flushed pink and there was a sheen of sweat on her forehead. “Does anyone,” she said, standing, fanning herself with one hand, the now-empty bottle of white she’d brought in from the kitchen in the other, “want any more wine?”
I snuck a sleeve of saltines from Sandra’s kitchen and went into the bathroom to eat them, but then it turned out I also had to pee, which meant resting the sleeve on the edge of the sink while I pulled my jeans down, maternity jeans with the stretchy side panels, the only pair that fit, and underneath them the high-waist control-top bottoms I still reinforced with panty liners because giving birth vaginally had weakened the muscles of my pelvic floor and that made bladder control more challenging, or so my gynecologist said. Practically it meant I could no longer consistently hold it. Only I had already opened the sleeve of saltines, before resting them on the ledge of the sink I mean, so that when, peeing, I reached over to grab them, I discovered that the first five or six saltines were now damp and several more had probably come into contact with the ledge though they retained no physical evidence of this encounter, which meant that they, too, would have to be dumped. I stopped peeing, dropped ten or so saltines into the bowl, resumed peeing, began snacking. There was a logic to it. I mean, I didn’t want to eat the saltines with presumably soiled hands, post-pee, and to wash with both hands would require setting the saltines down again, and them possibly getting wet again, and then having to dump more, and I needed to eat all of the remaining saltines, plus to gulp some water directly from the faucet, if I was going to drive home. Peeing, eating, I wondered how profoundly I had embarrassed myself. Not telling my story, no, Sandra’s story had been just as shaming, its telling neutralizing, retroactively justifying, mine. No it was the connection I’d imagined with Dominique that I was pondering, peeing, how I’d tilted my body toward her as I leaned over my wine glass, hoping she’d look down, see the shape of my breasts, my shirt was a V-neck and some of the pregnancy weight had settled, as weight I gain always does, in my tits, which were now, still, though I was no longer breast-feeding, surprisingly full above the cage of my ribs. I’d hoped then that she’d notice them, my tits, and I hoped now, peeing, that she hadn’t, that she hadn’t noticed me trying to get her to notice. To flirt was to expose one’s desires, an act inherently shaming. Not that I’d been flirting, exactly, my attraction to Dominique was not sexual, just as my attraction to Artemisia had not been sexual, not exactly, though in both cases the attraction was also hungry, was also greedy. It wasn’t that I wanted to fuck Dominique it was that I wanted to devour her. Wanted her to devour me. At this time I imagined intimacy as a kind of literal entanglement, which perhaps explains why, when the thrill of an intimacy newly forged wore off, my first and most powerful desire was to run. In my defense it’s very hard to get much of anything done if you’re physically attached to a second person.
I finished peeing and finished the saltines and wiped and flushed and washed my hands and gulped some water. To indicate interest is already to expose oneself to humiliation. To admit the existence of a desired object is to admit that to be rejected by the desired object, to admit that the desired object’s disappearance, one of the two always inevitable, even if only in death, will be painful. Or maybe it’s that to desire something is to believe that you know it, and if you’re wrong about the knowing you feel foolish and if you’re right you’re still wrong because to know something or someone in one moment is to know a version of that thing or person that can only exist temporarily, that must and will eventually change, that cannot and will not ever reassume the precise form in which you first desired it. Anyway, probably Dominique had taken my interest as a simple interest in friendship, which it also was and which was also embarrassing, to desire this different and lesser kind of intimacy, but less so, not as embarrassing as wanting to devour her, not so embarrassing that it would be impossible to face her at work, at our next gathering, should I run into her at the grocery store, etc. In short, could have been worse was my ultimate determination as I dried my hands. Having reached this conclusion I allowed myself to indulge the thought that I had been nursing since the end of Sandra’s story, which was that only someone born and raised in this ass-end, middle-of-nowhere, this so-mediocre-only-clichés-can-describe-its-mediocrity, this alleged city whose culture was as dead as the land surrounding it was fertile, only someone born and raised here could, one, have a lesbian conversion at the age of are you kidding me forty-one in, two, a Home Depot, and, three, manage not only to experience homosexual desire along the vector of heterosexual desire but also, in her interpretation of that homosexual, that is quote-unquote nontraditional, desire, reify tradi
tional gender roles in the most stereotypical way. I tossed the saltine sleeve in the bowl and flushed again. You, I said to my reflection in the mirror, are a real bitch. Perhaps, I thought as I left the bathroom, I could sneak one more sleeve of saltines from Sandra’s kitchen on the way back to the living room, stash them in my purse, eat them in my parked car before I drove home, which was not, thankfully, so far away.
In the living room, Sandra was collecting glasses and Dominique was standing, rummaging in her purse. Fran was looking at her phone. I stashed the crackers in my own purse, was heading to the spare bedroom to collect my son, when I heard Fran’s voice, high, thin, already, always already, pitched at a whine. “Wait,” she said, “don’t you want to hear my story?” Sandra was bent over the coffee table, reaching for a wine glass. Fran’s head swiveled from right to left. “The kids aren’t even up yet.” This was true. Though also Dominique had not told a story, not to the group at least, which meant that no one wanting to hear Fran’s story—and I took for granted that no one did—could be chalked up to accident rather than malice. Two out of the four of us had bared our souls, the wine was gone, it was getting late, we should be getting home now, shouldn’t we, the babies would want their own beds.
Sandra stood. She set the wine glass back down. “Fran,” she said, “I think everyone wants to—”
“No,” Fran said. She didn’t raise her voice. She didn’t stand, sound angry, just the whine, which was always there, growing, yes, I’m afraid the word is shrill. “No,” she said again. “No, you need to listen to what I have to say.” Sandra sat back down. I slid two saltines into my mouth. Dominique sat, her phone in her hand. She glanced down, typing, maybe she was sending a text. “Look, you’re all imagining yourselves,” Fran said, “as people in some kind of story.” The way she said story, like it was a dirty word. “Like you”—she looked at Sandra—“you had a weird feeling in a Home Depot and so you just had to leave your husband? Or you”—she looked at me—“so a guy fucks you over once, and, what, you can’t ever have a healthy relationship again?” She shook her head. “I don’t buy it. Everyone makes choices. Do you know how many women raise children alone? We’re not special because we were left. Or because we left. A bunch of self-centered—” She shook her head. “And okay, you all probably think I’m an asshole, whatever”—she waved her hand—“I don’t care. And I’m not trying to be an asshole, I’m sure you think I am but I’m not. I could give a fuck. The point is, who cares about understanding why. The point is there is no reason. No one has a plan for you and your life doesn’t have a soundtrack, it’s just a series of”—she shrugged—“accidents and split-second decisions and coincidences and demographics, where you live and when you were born and who your parents were and how much money they had.” She glared at me. “I know you think I’m an idiot but I’m actually not. I wanted a supportive group of single mothers I could share colic stories with, not a bunch of self-aggrandizing pity partyers. Like anyone cares.” She shouldered her diaper bag. “And look, for the record, I’m”—she turned to Sandra—“an actual lesbian, and how my child was conceived, it’s a fascinating story. Which I will never tell any of you.”
At least this is what I think she said. What I remember her saying. I think at least I got the tone right, her anger, and also the register, the word demographics shooting out from between her withered lips, I mean that was memorable. I do tend to think I’m the smartest person in every room and it doesn’t help that lately I have been. Fran was, certainly, the first to leave and she did not attend our gatherings after, which were, perhaps understandably, less regular. In the moments after she spoke I remember thinking that if she was in some way correct she was, however, not right. That of course life is random, a series of coincidences, etc., but that to live you must attempt to make sense of it, and that’s what narrative’s for. I believe this, people of a certain sensibility believe this. Mostly it’s harmless. Though perhaps sometimes you find yourself doing things because you think the narrative arc calls for it, or because you’ve grown bored with your own plot, things you shouldn’t do because they will, these things, hurt the other characters in your story, who are not characters after all, but people. But then people do evil often and with less elaborate justifications.
Dominique and I collected our children, walked out to our cars together. I’d sobered up, Fran’s speech like a slap to the face, my cheeks were even red, though that was probably from embarrassment and/or the wine I’d been drinking. “Well,” Dominique said as we reached her car, which was parked a block closer to Sandra’s house than mine. “I’ll see you tomorrow.” I nodded, kept walking, but then Dominique said, “Wait,” and I turned around. “Do you think,” she said, “what Fran said, about how one guy—” She paused. “I mean, is that what you think happened?” I considered this. “No,” I said. “I think, actually”—my back was against Dominique’s car now, so that I was facing not her but the other side of the street—“what was deadly about that, that guy, is how much I liked it. Not that he screwed me over but how, later, what I remembered was that it felt—right. I mean I felt, sure, I felt embarrassed, too, describing it, it was so clear how sort of manipulative—but not having to make any decisions. Like, I couldn’t call him, he could only call me. And since he had a family, since he had all these family commitments, if I wanted to see him it had to be when he had time, even if I was busy. It felt—I mean it also felt terrible, I never knew, I could never quite trust—and if I ever got upset because I wanted to see him more, because I wanted to introduce him to my friends he’d get cold, just immediately he’d shut down, he’d never try to comfort me or apologize or—he’d just shut down, usually he’d just leave and if I was lucky after a few hours he’d come back and I’d better be done crying. But when I thought about it, especially right after, right after it ended, usually what I remembered was feeling like—like oh, this is what I can do, this is what I’m meant to be used for. I do know”—I looked over at Dominique—“I do know how that sounds. But basically the problem was I liked not having to decide. And so that meant, one, this kept happening to me, this kind of guy, and, two, when I did try to decide, I mean romantically, I just—I was just no good at it. Both because I didn’t have any practice and because I couldn’t trust myself, couldn’t trust my gut when it told me what I wanted because apparently what I wanted was a married guy whose house I wasn’t allowed to see.” I smiled at Dominique. She did not smile back. “Um,” I said, “what about you? What”—I shifted the weight of my son’s car seat from my right arm to my left—“what do you think happened? To you?” “Well,” she said, “for a bit after, I hated myself. At first because of course eventually he stopped sleeping with me and then later because I realized what he had been, what I had let—what I felt like I had let happen. And then I didn’t trust anyone, and then I was angry. I slept with a lot of men during the angry bit, I was rather cruel to them. And then,” Dominique said, and she raised her eyebrows, “I went to therapy and sorted a lot of this out. Have you considered therapy?” “Oh god,” I said, laughing, “on my salary? On our health plan?” “I could give you some names,” Dominique said, “if you wanted. A lot of therapists, good ones, work on a sliding scale.” I shifted the car seat again and smiled, shook my head. I had imagined us as allied, allied in our difference: her with the accent and the functional bookshelves, me with my all but PhD. Okay by difference I mean superiority. “That’s so nice of you.” I was walking backward, toward my car. But if she thought the answer was therapy, well. “Let me think about it?” Dominique shrugged, opened the passenger-side back door. “Offer’s on the table,” she said.
I know how this sounds; I mean, now I know how it sounds. Then I thought Excuse me this is a very interesting story I’m telling you about me, a very interesting person, I thought If you think I need therapy because of it the word for that is pathologizing, I thought And also I never liked you that much anyway. “Right,” I said, shouting now, “thanks again.” I had almost reached
my car. “See you tomorrow!”
My son didn’t wake up on the way home. Didn’t wake up when I stopped at Vons to get a bottle, a couple bottles, of white wine, didn’t wake up when I lifted him from the car and carried him into the house, back then he slept well, slept soundly. I settled him into his crib, uncorked one of the bottles, poured myself a glass. As a child I’d watched a television show in which a girl, half-human, half-alien, was able to stop time by pointing her index fingers toward each other and joining them. Her father, the alien, was a cube of some kind? A trapezoidal quartz crystal? I poured myself another glass of wine and tried the thing with the index fingers, knowing nothing would happen, treating the trick as a sobriety test, passing it, congratulating myself. If it were possible to stop time, I thought, I’d take a week, maybe two. Read some books. Develop a meditation practice. See a therapist, fine, sure. Journal. Get my story straight. The problem wasn’t thinking of myself as the protagonist of a narrative it was that I hadn’t figured out the right narrative yet. I just needed one that looked less like a bell curve, and me on the downward slope, and more like a tangent, a tangent to a vertical. A vertical line meant x equaled a constant, I remembered that. Yes, me and the kid, my son, zooming up the y, bigger and better things in the future for both of us. I poured myself another glass of wine. Truth didn’t help. Everything that had ever happened could never be integrated into something coherent. The trick was picking the right moments. The trick was knowing when to lie. I’d drained my third glass, part of a fourth wouldn’t hurt, two-thirds of a glass, three-quarters. I’d stashed bourbon somewhere, the trick was finding it. Drinking now, white wine or maybe bourbon, maybe two glasses in front of me, drinking first from one and then from the other, thinking, What’s the story, thinking, What’s the story, Morning Glory, was that an album, maybe British, thinking, You are the master of your destiny, thinking I missed the weight of a body on mine, how the weight tamed and taught my body, how easy it was for my body, under a weight, to do nothing but be. Thinking one more drink couldn’t hurt. Thinking I wasn’t so old now, was I, thinking in the morning I’d get another shot, another shot at getting it right, getting it all right, making it all right, and this was the last thought I had, the last I remember, before falling asleep, my hand on a glass, the baby monitor waking me three hours later, my son’s sharp, wordless cries, my head resting on my shoulder, my neck sore from the awkwardness of the position, his cries impossible to interpret, no time to think. All I had to do was respond.
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