by Rachel Yoder
She took the broken bodies of deer, raccoons, rabbits, coyotes, and stripped the rotting meat from the bones, cleaned and bleached the bones, sanded them and polished them, donning a full-body protective suit and monstrous gas mask to keep the bone dust from her clothes, her lungs. She hollowed the bones with jeweler tools, then plated the insides with gold or silver. When she could afford it, she inlaid gems. She went on to wander through the surrounding forests, identifying cherry and walnut and pine, cutting off branches, and then taking them to be cured. She smoothed and carved the wood, combined it with bones and metals and even some furs, taking these elements and creating the skeletons of new, mythical animals. For this she was praised hugely. The artistry! her professors exclaimed. The skill set required to prepare the bones, refine them, add to them fine metals and gems! She had not only created some truly imaginative and original pieces but also showcased a vast array of sophisticated techniques.
Yet now there was nothing. Not a single creative impulse inside her, no matter how she searched. During her pregnancy, during the sleepless nights in the final trimester, she stared at her phone for hours and became obsessed with what some might call performance artists but what she thought of as people who were engaged deeply in real-time artistic experimentation. She read about a married couple who undertook extensive plastic surgery to look like each other, the man getting breast implants, the woman sculpting her nose so as to bring it into closer alignment with her husband’s. It was a lifelong project, not quite performance art but something more profound, the line between their lives and their art erased.
The mother became preoccupied with this idea—the idea of no boundaries—and researched more, about the Eastern European showman who had started out early in his career in a traveling circus yet ended up undertaking a series of what he called “performative life experiments”: a three-year stint of silence, living naked in a storefront window for a month, and, most famously, inducing amnesia and then working for years to recover the particulars of his former life.
And what about the Frenchwoman who hired private investigators to follow her lovers and then created entire art shows around this? Who put her own psychiatric surveys, given to her by a doctor, on display in exhibitions held at some of the highest-profile museums of Europe?
The mother fantasized about staging the birth of her child as an artistic happening. Could she set up a glass-sided pool in a studio where an audience might watch while she pushed the child from her body during a stoic water birth? Or perhaps she could give birth in a medical theater at the hospital, one of those rooms used for teaching where students sat up above in rows to watch. The performance would be an on-call sort of event, viewable only by those available to come at any time of the night or day.
She felt that such a performance would be better for a second child, when she knew what to expect, and so she tabled the idea, and then the baby came, and then the idea was lost for good.
She looked at her boy on the kitchen floor, playing with a metal steaming device that looked a bit like a spaceship when closed, and a big metal flower when open. He sneezed, then laughed. He was her only project. She had done the ultimate job of creation, and now she had nothing left. To keep him alive—that was the only artistic gesture she could muster.
But today she was determined to go beyond that. Start at the beginning. Back to basics. Whatever.
She masking-taped oversized sheets of paper to the kitchen floor and pulled the finger paints from the cupboard. It was just after breakfast, and the day was bright. The boy seemed tired—putting his cheek on the floor to watch the wheels of the trains turn when he pushed them along their tracks—but they just needed something new, something fun.
She pulled his pajama shirt over his head and yanked off his saggy diaper.
Do you want to paint? she asked, pointing to a plate pooled with every shade of finger paint.
You can put your hand in, your foot, she suggested. He moved his foot toward the plate and looked at her with a question.
Yes! she said, smiling. She put her own hand in to show him, then patted the paper on the floor.
He dipped his toes in, then bent and rubbed his palms in the colors.
Yes! she encouraged him.
His face lit with delight as he patted his hands on the paper and then put his whole foot on the plate, stepped backward, slipped, fell, and caught himself, but not without getting paint on his cheeks. He laughed, and she did, too. She helped him up and showed him the handprints she’d left on his belly, and he took both hands and put them in her hair.
Okay, she said, pulling them out. Okay.
The boy stood, then screamed with excitement and ran around in a circle, shaking his hands and spraying droplets of paint on the chairs, the curtains, the stove.
On the paper, honey, she said. Isn’t this so fun? Yes. On the paper, though.
He jumped on the plate, then jumped on the paper, then hopped like a bunny across the wood floor, grabbed a towel, and threw it up as high as he could.
On the paper! On the paper! she said, as she tried to grab him, then slipped herself, catching the open cabinet door on the way down, which she pulled cleanly off its hinges and finally held, detached, in her hands.
The boy was now rolling on the paper, in the paint, cackling. She examined the door, the hinges, and as she did the boy took off, into the living room.
No! she yelled, nicely.
He laughed, delighted with such a game, and she said, with a very, very serious face meant to communicate just how very, very serious the situation was: I mean it. This is not a game.
This game? he asked, naked, smeared with paint.
Noooo, she warned as she edged toward him, eyebrows raised and mouth set in a stern mom-line. Not a game. You’re messy! Let’s stay in the kitchen.
She lunged to grab his arm, and he screamed and catapulted onto the couch, up onto the big cushions, burrowed down behind one the way he liked, to hide.
After she’d given the boy a bath, she spent the rest of the morning washing the paint from the floor, the chairs, the stove, the cabinets, the rug, the couch, as he watched cartoons. Naptime, she told herself as she cleaned. Naptime.
She put the boy down for a nap in her bed after lunch, read him books and snuggled him and sang him songs until he lay still on his back in a tangle of sheets, rosebud lips open ever so little, his long dark lashes twitching with dreams.
Really, it was her fault he needed her to be there as he fell asleep, her fault he was still sleeping in bed with her to begin with. When he was an infant, she had nursed him in the night whenever he cried. It was so easy. They lay on their sides, facing each other in the dark warmth, the baby latched to her nipple, his small, soft hands touching her chest. She fell asleep as he nursed, and he fell asleep as he nursed, rolling onto his back, a drip of milk trickling from his open mouth. The night fell quiet and thick, and they slept and slept until he woke again. So easy. So nice.
But easy and nice is how bad habits form, after all. She should have sleep-trained the boy, should have forced him into his own crib, his own room. She should have let him cry it out. She should have nursed him when he woke instead of before he slept. She never should have cuddled him to get him to bed. All the books said so. She had done it all wrong. Really, she had only herself to blame.
She had been in bed with him for an hour when she fell asleep, too. She awoke groggy in a panic, heavy with the weight of her ambition, with her failure, so heavy she could barely pull herself from bed. It was four o’clock, and the day was lost. She groaned and told herself she’d try again tomorrow, which made her feel worse instead of better.
For dinner, she made the meal she had planned—turkey loaf full of grated veggies, and roasted potatoes, and a green salad—and even though the week before the boy had liked all of these things, he refused to eat them that night, screaming, Ma
caroni, macaroni!, until she relented and made him macaroni and cheese and peas. He ate two bites of each, then dumped the rest on the floor.
The magic-hour light cast everything in melancholic tones—the gelatinous bits of noodles left on the boy’s plastic plate, the vagrant peas beneath his high chair, the clutter of wayward puppets and matchbox cars strewn across counters and beside the cat-food dish. In such moments, she could almost touch her loneliness, as if it were her second child.
How could she possibly get through two, three more hours? How could she possibly read five books, make up a bedtime story, lie in bed for an hour, two, waiting for him to fall asleep? She was very tired, despite her nap. Feelings were just unreal things that moved through a person, right? That’s what her husband said. You could choose to attend to them or not. She told herself to be a detached observer of her emotional landscape. In her mind, she repeated the phrase emotional landscape and then saw it there, a gray silhouette against a gray sky. She drew the bath. She read the books. She told the stories. She lay in the darkness, waiting, waiting.
That night, as she waited in bed beside the boy, her husband lounged in a hotel room somewhere, reading a book or watching TV or playing video games, eating from a room-service tray laid out on the bed. Even if he was working on spreadsheets or filling out service reports on his laptop, the image of him there, by himself, in a quiet space, seemed luxurious and exotic. In her darkest moments, she imagined that her husband craved this time away from them, a wave of relief washing over him each Monday as he pulled out of the drive. Four whole uninterrupted nights of sleep! Blackout curtains! A discrete, achievable task to accomplish that day! A paycheck to expect at the end of the week!
Did he ever stay away a day longer than needed? Delay his departure from St. Louis or Indianapolis with one more cup of coffee? Anger ballooned inside her as she imagined him dallying on the Internet in a café. He should leave the moment he was finished. He should get up early—as early as she did—and get his work done quickly so that he could rush home. That’s what she would do if she were away.
Her problem was that she thought too much—“toxic thinking” and so forth—so she tried to stop, but a physical sensation of exertion remained.
Was it her fault that her husband made more money? That it made more sense for her to quit her job than for him to quit his?
Was it her fault that he was always gone, rendering her a de facto single mom for the majority of the week?
Was it her fault that she found playing trains really, really boring? That she longed for even the smallest bit of mental stimulation, for a return to her piles of books, to her long-abandoned closet of half-formed projects, to one entire afternoon of solitude and silence?
Was it her fault that, though she longed for mental stimulation, she still found herself unable to concoct a single original thought or opinion? She did not actually care about anything anymore. Politics, art, philosophy, film: all boring. She craved gossip and reality TV.
Was it her fault that she hated herself for her preference for reality TV?
Was it her fault that she had bought into the popular societal myth that if a young woman merely secured a top-notch education she could then free herself from the historical constraints of motherhood, that if she simply had a career she could easily return to work after having a baby and sidestep the drudgery of previous generations, even though having a baby did not, in any way, represent a departure from work to which a woman might, theoretically, one day return. It actually, instead, marked an immersion in work, an unimaginable weight of work, a multiplication of work exponential in its scope, staggering, so staggering, both physically and psychically (especially psychically), that even the most mentally well person might be brought to her knees beneath such a load, a load that pitted ambition against biology, careerism against instinct, that bade the modern mother be less of an animal in order to be happy, because—come on, now—we’re evolved and civilized, and, really, what is your problem? Pull it together. This is embarrassing.
Actually, if you thought about it, it really wasn’t fair to call her a night bitch. Such a gendered slur didn’t account for the fact she had made a boy with her own body, nurtured his multiplying cells for months and months to her own detriment, to her own fatness, to the decline of her youthful sex appeal, which wasn’t supposed to matter. A real feminist wouldn’t care about such things as the shape of one’s body or being thin or appealing to heteronormative cis men, and actually she did not care about this, but she did care about being hot in her own eyes. It’s just that a person has ideas about herself, has a vision for herself, and her vision for herself had not been of a mother, but now that she was one, she felt strongly that she needed to be a hot one.
But there wasn’t really a commensurate word to degrade men, was there?
If she was Nightbitch, was the boy, then, a rotten little cock when he looked her in the eye and then proceeded to dump an entire bin of freshly collected toys on the floor, his only explanation afterward that of macaroni? No.
And was her husband, in turn, a computer nutsack when he was leveling up his Pit Lord for long hours into the night, thus effectively curtailing the potential for a satisfying sex life, thanks to his absence in bed and also to the fact that he was playing video games? Was he a nutsack? Maybe.
Bitch just had a ring to it, that condemning, inescapable ring, a ring that fucker or asshole could never fully conjure for a man. Bitch was flat and sharp and final. She thought of a bored, small-town bureaucrat in a shabby little office with orange carpet and flickering fluorescent bulbs stamping official yet pointless documents with clicking, metal thuds. Bitch. Bitch. Bitch. Thank you. Have a nice day.
The house waited silent and clean, the paint smudges of that day a distant memory. The boy, beside her in bed—bathed not once but twice, for he needed a midday bath and then a night-night bath, to calm him, to try to soothe him into sleep any way she could—was also finally, gloriously asleep. She inched from bed, down the stairs, into the bathroom. She had bruised her tailbone in the fall earlier, or else the tag in her pants had been irritating her back. In indistinct yet nagging discomfort, she reached toward the base of her spine. Her finger found a swollen lump, and when she checked it in the mirror, she saw a raised mound, hot to the touch.
She pressed the spot at the base of her spine with two fingers and flinched at the pain, then twisted around again to examine it in the mirror and, when she couldn’t get a close enough look at it, retrieved a hand mirror, which provided little enlightenment as to the nature of the bump, then opted to take a picture of it with her phone, only to find a blurry red mass on the screen after repeated tries. She thought she felt a hair protruding from the bump and decided tweezing it would relieve her discomfort, and so picked at it blindly for a time, only exacerbating the pain and causing the thing to begin to seep.
Fuck it, she said to no one, and stomped to the closet in the guest room to retrieve a box of her old art tools. As she opened the lid, the pungent smell of the paints and putties and the noxious tang of old glues calmed her and immediately transported her to those long hours alone, fingers dirty and sore, every manner of clay and paint and glue splatter on her clothes. She inhaled deeply, intoxicated, before steeling herself against the tears she felt welling from a place of profound and desperate longing to return to her projects—any project—and the complete inability to do such a thing. She quickly sorted through a shallow tray to find a sharp X-Acto knife—what she had been looking for all along—then washed it at the kitchen sink and held it above a flame on the stove. In the bathroom, she traced the tip of it down the red lump and felt instant relief as it oozed open. She held a hot washcloth to the lump, pushing to drain the fluid, then dabbed it with a hand towel. When she looked again, it had deflated. A flurry of hair poked from the incision she had made. The only word she could think to describe it was tail.
* * *
—
YOU NEED TO CONSULT with a medical professional, her husband said kindly. I can’t believe you cut into the cyst. It’s unsafe.
Okay, but can you please address the fact that I have a tail?
He laughed. He was always laughing at things she said.
I’d hardly call it a tail. Cysts in that region are known for their hair.
She knew all about such cysts. When located at the top of the tailbone, they were called pilonidal cysts, and they were most common in young men and often contained hair and skin debris. She had, of course, searched the Internet for such cysts, looked at pictures, watched videos of them being drained and extracted, and none of them looked like what hers looked like, a plug of dark hair that resisted plucking and that she could almost imagine wagging when she was happy, though whenever this feeling overtook her she quickly quashed it, because it was too strange to imagine such a thing: wagging.
Actually, honestly, she allowed herself only one good wag a day. Other than that, it was off limits. Who knew what else would develop if she gave in to these urges? Who knew what would transpire if she fully embraced her desires to wag, to lovingly lick the fine hairs of her son’s head, to trample down a nice flat area in the bedsheets before herself curling there—chin resting on her forearms—and falling asleep?
She wasn’t turning into a dog. She did not have a tail. Her teeth had not sharpened. And the hair that now covered the entire back of her neck was not fur. Her husband was right, and she truly needed to hold fast to reason in times like these. Oh, she simply could not let herself imagine such fanciful things, and didn’t, except at night, once the boy was asleep, when she sat, panting, at the window, staring into the open, dark night.