Topics of Conversation

by Miranda Popkey

  Santa Barbara, 2016

  I tell people—” She paused. “When I tell people. If I tell people. I tell them I gave the baby up.” We were, she and I, swimming. “People assume I mean adoption. If I don’t bother to correct them.” Her shoulders rose and then fell. “It’s not a lie, not exactly.” We’d met earlier that day, our carts colliding at a supermarket. “After all,” she said, “I did.” Another pause. “I did give the baby up.” This woman, I don’t remember her name. What I do remember: it was dark. The body of water in which we swam was the Pacific and though the water was cold I was not uncomfortable. The water pressing against my body and my body pressing back, pressing through: the experience was one of minor but continual triumph. Of resistance, again and again, overcome. Yes, my primary feeling was one of pleasure. Sustained pleasure, that is, luxury. I rolled the word luxury from the back to the front of my mouth, the underside of my tongue, smooth and slick, sliding against the roof of my mouth. Also we were both naked, both drunk. If this does not explain the situation perhaps it may explain something about the kind of woman who would find herself in it. Often, when I tell this story, as I have been encouraged to in therapy and in group and by my mother, I say that I picked her, this nameless woman, up. Not because it makes more sense, though it does. Because that phrase, I picked her up, my listeners find it provocative. Provocative as in to provoke, as in to provoke interest. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: conversation is flirtation. Tease out enough rope and the listener, she’ll hang on your every word. Though it’s true: usually I am the one left hanging. This woman, for example, she certainly had me on the line. Why is it that people tell me things? I think it is because I like, liked, to drink and I am good at keeping my face quiet. Also because I ask questions. What I had asked her: “Do you have any kids?” This is female socialization, that is, the desire to be everywhere approved of, carried to its logical extreme.

  It was a Saturday. Earlier that day I’d left my son with a babysitter, gotten in my car. It was summer. Ten in the morning and the air in the Central Valley was already dry as sandpaper, never mind hot. In the cup holder nearest my ever-outstretched hand, a thermos of coffee. A thermos of coffee and bourbon. Maybe one-third bourbon, two-thirds coffee. Maybe one-third coffee, two-thirds bourbon. These details are hard to remember. Also I may be exaggerating them. Also I may be minimizing them. The difference between the two—for when a memory is retold, its particulars, inevitably, are brightened or muted depending on the arc of the story of which it is a part—a question of, determined by, desire. Am I, just now, more interested in appearing openly louche (look at me lapping at luxury) or secretly wounded? How close to the surface is my pain? Or, rather, how close to the surface do I want my pain to appear to be? How enamored am I of the clichés of female pain? Or, rather, of which of these clichés am I enamored? Do I wish to make my distress visible and, therefore, hysterical? Or do I wish to suffer in silence? How often do I clean my home? How many loaves of bread do I bake, on average, every week? Careful: do not blame these hard-to-remember details on my child, as cliché might urge. Many women fear losing, in childbirth, in the daily act of mothering, autonomy, independence, selfhood. But I had never had a self I was much interested in keeping and a child will give direction as well as, better than, a married professor. Though the satisfaction in taking direction from a child is mixed with fear. The fear of who will this child become, of what if he turns out to be, of will it be my fault. The fear of am I doing this right. The married professor, on the other hand, he tells you if you’re doing it right. Yes, he’s quite direct. And if the satisfaction he offers is mixed with shame, well, shame is not without its pleasures, not least the pleasure of knowing you deserve to feel it. Anyway, you’re not supposed to take direction from a child. Or you’re supposed to know when to take it and when not to, and I was, no surprise, bad at telling cases of the former from cases of the later.

  And so: my skin itched after too many hours with him. My son. The son I bounced in my arms as I walked the halls of my house. No, not my arms, plural. My arm, singular. The other arm was needed to lift the glass of bourbon to my mouth. I only felt him slip, I only left him in his crib, howling, while I ran to refill the glass, I only let him cry while I held my head, throbbing, these things, really they only happened once or twice. And so, from time to time it became necessary to schedule a reprieve. Driving: this was the reprieve. A way to keep my mind occupied. To distract it from the topic in which it was most interested and which I—here we imagine the I as a whole and the mind as a part, as apart—most wished to avoid. That part being the self and how it was doing. Whether it was doing it right. The self being my self. The avoidance stemming from a fear of self-knowledge, the kind of self-knowledge—no, you are not doing it right—that provokes not merely guilt but the desire for, the necessity of, reformation. Perhaps this is becoming confusing. Sometimes when I drank from the thermos that was either one-third or two-thirds coffee it became confusing, and sometimes it became clear.

  The point is, I drove. I drove and listened to the radio. When it got, even with the windows down, too hot in the car, whose air-conditioning was broken, I parked. I located a supermarket, a pharmacy, a department store, and I parked my car and locked my doors and allowed myself, once inside the market, the pharmacy, the store, to wander the aisles. I would hold plastic bottles of probiotics. I would finger bags of savory snacks. I would walk toward my image in the convex mirrors that hung from the ceiling at the back of the store, watching that image, distorted, enlarge, transfixed, so that I did not notice the woman who was then walking down the aisle toward me, the woman who was now swimming beside me, until my cart collided with hers.

  “The truth is,” the woman said, “I abandoned my child.” I’d had a head start, true, but over the course of the afternoon and then the evening, she had caught up. How much I used to drink, it gives other people permission. And how much they then drink, this gives further permission. To speak what might be called, in a certain kind of book, their quote-unquote truth. To confess. The sitter was expecting me, had been expecting me for hours. From where I was I could not see, back on the shore, the indicative glimmer of an incoming call or text. I could not see the screen of my phone blinking on and off, now bright, now dim, now bright again. Soon the sitter would give up on me and call my parents. Would discover that they, too—it was eleven, perhaps eleven-thirty—were too drunk to drive.

  The woman had flipped onto her back, was no longer paddling, was breathing, slowly, in and out, her spine on the surface of the water, the palms of her hands cupping the moonlight. Or this is how I remember it. Certainly she was floating. But that phrase, cupping the moonlight—it cannot be anything other than a post facto gilding of—well, no, not a lily. The water was, as I said, cold, and my fingers were logged with it. Numb besides. Also where was my car and when would I again be able to drive it. Remember I was drunk. Remember my veins were full of bourbon, my skin flush with it. And so what I remember of this night is not my teeth chattering or the salt water I had swallowed, how it scraped against my sinuses, the back of my throat, what I remember is the feeling of being held. Being held by the water. How hesitant I am to say it. If I could paddle, I thought, in this water forever. In fact even paddling was largely unnecessary, the ocean’s salinity, the reliable rhythm of the waves, buoying me, their suck and swell against the soft of my stomach and the hard knock of my ribs. And from this feeling, what I have called pleasure, what I have called luxury, but which was in fact closer to relief, come phrases like cupping the moonlight, come words like susurrus to describe the sound of the wind licking at the lapping waves, comes the coincidence of licking and lapping, of comes and coincidence. I’ll say this: the feeling, whatever I call it, did share in pleasure’s abdication of responsibility.

  The woman’s feet dipped below the surface of the water and she was upright again, paddling, paddling toward me until her breath was louder than the waves and the wind, louder than my own breath,
and she said, she was looking at me, or best I could tell she was looking at me, remember it was dark, remember I was drunk, she said, again, “I abandoned my child.” And then, quickly, “Her. My child was a girl.” More slowly now: “You know, I read somewhere—and of course it’s true, self-evident—that even in times of crisis, times of war, under dictatorships, after a natural disaster, people continue—But wait.” She lifted a hand from the water. “To understand how it was, how bad it got, how bad I made it, you have to know how good I had it. For example: my house, the one I shared with my husband, it was featured in Architectural Digest. When we got married, I got two pages in Brides. Me in my dress, the train spread, the veil lowered, surrounded by bridesmaids. My flower girl in the foreground spreading petals. Me holding a cream-colored bouquet. His four-year-old niece, his older brother’s daughter, she was our flower girl. Not that that particularly—and I know what you’re thinking. We were rich, we were beautiful.” And she was beautiful, too beautiful to be in a supermarket at five o’clock on a Saturday afternoon, this was perhaps the reason I attempted conversation after my cart collided with hers, clipped her ankle. Being in the company of an exceptionally beautiful woman, all clean lines and precise movements, when I’m sober it makes me feel huge and grubby and spherical, but when I’m drunk, proximity to beauty, it’s like being, myself, chosen. “But there wasn’t, beneath that, the darkness, the emptiness.” She paused. “It’s nice to believe that the rich must be, in exchange for their money, unhappy. And surely some are. But we were not. I was not. I am not a depressive person. I have always had a great capacity for happiness, and when we were dating, during the period of our engagement—You know,” the woman said, “it’s normal for couples to argue when they’re planning a wedding. The sheer number of decisions to be made. Plus money, plus family, plus seating arrangements, and how many bridesmaids and who and what color will their dresses be and—” She stopped. “My point is we didn’t. Happiness is boring. I mean to describe. Sometimes to live, too, I suppose. For some. Not for me. I was happy. I was happy enough that I didn’t think about my own happiness. No. I enjoyed it.” Splashing, the sound local, not the waves against the rocks, against the shore. The woman’s arms were extended, her back was curved, the smooth semicircle of her body emerged from and then reentered the water as she turned one, two, three backward somersaults. Then her head came up, she was shaking it. “Water in my ears,” she said. “Very briefly, I was a competitive synchronized swimmer.” Perhaps if she’d been closer to me, if it hadn’t been so dark, I would have been able to see her smile. “That’s a lie.” A brief pause, an intake of breath. “We decided to get pregnant. I wanted a child. He wanted a child. We decided to get pregnant. It happened almost immediately. The pregnancy was easy. Two weeks of morning sickness. I gained twenty pounds, maybe twenty-five, total. This part,” she sighed, “I’m sorry but this part is boring. I’m going to skip ahead. I give birth. Also easy. Four hours of labor, start to finish. No epidural. My perineum doesn’t tear. No problems breast-feeding. No problems sleeping. The baby weight comes off. The stretch marks fade. This part is boring, too, but it’s important—” She paused. “I need you to understand how easy I had it, with the baby. Like I need you to understand how good I had it, with my husband. What else?” She shook her head. “We’re both lawyers, my husband, my ex-husband, and I. Our firms are, again, improbably understanding. I take six months of maternity leave, three paid. When I go back to work, he takes three months. When he goes back to work, the baby, the girl, she’s nine months old. We get a nanny. We offer a fair wage and reasonable hours and I do not feel any guilt about hiring her. She comes highly recommended and she doesn’t disappoint. I make it home in time for bedtime, not every night, but say four nights out of five. On weekends I cook. Saturday nights, we trade off; one week I’ll go out after bedtime, catch up with a friend, have a glass of wine, the next it’s his turn. It helped that we had money, of course, but we were, also, I can say this now, ten years later, with a certain amount of objectivity, good parents. Together, I mean. A handful of fights—or, not fights. Disagreements. Disagreements we go to couples therapy to work out. And it’s going so well it takes me a whole two years to realize—” She laughed. Then a silence. I opened my eyes. Not that I’d been falling asleep, just that total darkness, it heightened the feeling of being not a body but a collection of sensations tied ever so loosely to a brain. “I need you to ask me,” she said. “I can’t quite”—she smiled—“give myself permission to say it if you don’t ask me. Therapy-speak, sorry.” A pause. “Ask me,” she said, “what I realized.” “What,” I said, “did you realize?” Another pause. And then, quickly: “I realized I didn’t love my child. My daughter. She has a name but I’m not going to say it. Jesus I sound dramatic.” She swam a few lengths away from me and then back. “I had never—this seems, now, ridiculous, but it’s true—I had never asked myself if I wanted a baby. Children. I was—I am—what I think the kids would call a,” she giggled, “a basic bitch. I was a real cunt. You know I am a real advocate, I consider myself a real champion of”—she giggled again—“yes a real champion of the renaissance of, of the resuscitation, of the reclamation of the word cunt. Like, okay, we can say asshole, we can say dick, but oh god, oh no, don’t you dare try to make a swear word out of the female—” She broke off. Even drunk the giggles disturbed me. Perhaps, even drunk, they disturbed her, too, because again she paused. “I’m not trying—no, I am trying to make light of this. Because I think there’s no other way of talking about—” Another pause. “I didn’t think about having children because I had myself been a child. It’s as simple—as stupid—as that. A woman had given birth to me. I was a woman. I would give birth to someone else. But then the baby came and though everything was—perfect, so much better than almost anyone in this country, in any country, can expect, I didn’t”—another pause—“I didn’t love her. My baby. My daughter. I felt, toward her—” She swam away again and swam back. My eyes were open now, trained on the edges of her body, what outline the low light illuminated. “I felt nothing. No hate. No resentment. Just—nothing. Toward”—here she swam a bit closer—“toward myself, too. As a mother I did not—recognize myself. Toward myself as a mother I had no feeling.” She flipped herself onto her back and I paddled closer so that my head was near hers, so that I could be sure of hearing what she said next. “It may have been postpartum depression. But the hardest part of this to admit, the part that feels the most shameful, the reason I don’t tell anyone—it’s the fact that I don’t feel guilty. I don’t regret it. The decision I made. I feel certain it was the right one.” She turned herself so that she was upright in the water again. “I was saying, earlier. About how during bad times, well—life goes on. It’s a cliché but it’s a cliché because it is, on some level, on the deepest level, true. It’s something I find frustrating about—you know those big historical epics? The ones that come out every year around Christmas. Oscar bait. Every single scene is about the big historical problem. Every single conversation is about Hitler or the trenches or the assassination of JFK. I used to like them, before, but after—after, I realized that in real life, no matter what”—she shook her head—“people get up in the morning and they wash their faces and they make themselves breakfast. They tell jokes and they read to their kids and they go on dates and they fall in love and they fuck and they have to wash the dishes and deal with the electric company. What I’m trying to say is, after I left—I mean it was hard, mostly because I didn’t know how to talk about it, how to explain what I’d done, what I felt, what I didn’t feel. But every morning I got up and I washed my face and I brushed my teeth and I ate my cereal and I went to the office. I went shopping and to the movies, and out to dinner. I dropped clothes off at the dry cleaner’s. On a certain level it’s grotesque. How we end up, how we always focus—how self-centered we are, how self-centered life forces us to be. I mean, no matter what, even if you’re not, you know, personally in the middle of a war, somewhere
, someone—lots of someones—are in the middle of a war, of a famine. And we ignore it. What I’m trying to say is that you can change everything, anything, as long as you’re prepared to deal with the consequences. No—that if you change something, you will deal with the consequences, even if you’re not prepared to. Because you have to. Because the will to survive—no, not to survive, that’s too—it’s just the bullshit of life. That always trumps—” She shook her head. “Look, like I said, I don’t regret it. In some ways, in many ways, logistically, it was hard. But I don’t regret it. I packed a bag. I left a note. I blocked his number and I called a lawyer I knew and I told the lawyer that I wanted all further communication with my soon-to-be ex-husband to go through him, the lawyer. All communication with my soon-to-be ex-child, too. I think about her only occasionally. On her birthday. On Mother’s Day. When I’m drunk. And when I think about her, mostly it’s with relief. That she gets to hate me. Instead of knowing that I—not that I hate, but that I don’t feel anything.” The woman swam away from me and swam back. “I’m trying to tell you that I was sure. That I am sure. That I did the worst thing a woman can do, even though men—you know, you must know, men do this all the goddamn time. Fuck a woman and make a child and a few weeks or a few months or a few years later they just, you know, they just wander away, and no one—And I say can, but it’s not that a woman is allowed to do it because in fact it is not allowed. It is specifically forbidden. And for no reason except I knew it was right. And that I don’t regret it.” She laughed again. “You may think I’m a monster. Many women—many people—would. Most, even. And it’s not that I don’t care. It’s that I don’t care enough. To behave differently. To feel differently. And what is that but more proof? To be so selfish, now—what is that but more proof of the fact that I shouldn’t be a part of my daughter’s life? How much easier is it, for her, now, to understand this simple story. How helpful. Her mother was—is—a monster. It’s a fairy tale, sure. But on some level, I mean—I can see it. I can use words like simple or helpful or fairy tale. But on some level. It’s also true.”