by Kristen Mae
Oren was already dressed for work and making coffee when I got out of the shower. “What are you going to do today?” he asked, and beneath his innocent question, I heard an accusation. I was sure that what he really wanted to ask was: “Are you going to see Claire today?”
I shrugged. “I bet we need groceries, right?”
He nodded over his mug as he took a sip.
“And,” I said, the idea only just coming to me, “I’ve been thinking I ought to take on a few students again. I might go downtown to that music shop and submit my resume or hang a flyer or something.”
He nodded again, this time more slowly.
I sighed. “Okay, so, she emailed me.”
He did not startle or even raise his eyebrows, but he blinked too hard and slow, and a muscle flexed in his jaw.
“She told me she doesn’t want to talk to me or see me for a while,” I said. “She wants to reconnect with Mike.” My voice sounded robotic, as if I were reciting items off a grocery list.
Oren sighed with unrestrained relief. I understood; it couldn’t have felt good that instead of rushing into his arms and telling him I’d missed him, I’d gone to bed and sobbed myself to sleep.
“Are you okay, though?” he asked. “Or maybe I should say, are you going to be okay?”
I took my teapot out of the cupboard and filled it with water from the faucet while I gazed out the window. Tiny green fruit had erupted all over our orange tree. Was I going to be okay? “I want to say yes, but…” I couldn’t finish the sentence. My vocal cords felt encased in cement, and my heart pounded slow and heavy with too many emotions; guilt, regret, grief, anger. Who was I angry with? Myself. I was angry with myself.
“I’m going to try to be patient,” Oren said, and his voice was tinged with some strange inflection, a kind of brittleness I’d never heard before. It made me uneasy. I studied him carefully, but his expression revealed nothing.
I set the teapot on the burner and turned it to high. “And…I’m going to try to get back to normal.” I badly wanted to mean those words, but I didn’t have any idea how to make them true.
Oren put his coffee mug in the sink. “Hazel, you were never normal.”
Ouch.
He picked up his keys and kissed my forehead as he always had on the way to work. I listened to his car pulling out of the driveway, my teapot shrieking behind me, and understood what I had heard in his voice that had made me feel uneasy: it wasn’t just hurt. It was the sound of ultimatum.
THIRTY-TWO
I shuffled through the next few days in a minuteless, hourless fog, heedless of the rise and fall of the Florida sun, still sleeping and waking on Italy time. True to her word, Claire did not contact me again. I waded through the laundry, cooking, and cleaning like a sloth through molasses. I folded dishcloths, T-shirts, and Oren’s underwear with enough detachment that a few dishtowels ended up in an underwear drawer. I turned on the TV and stared at it without seeing the melodramatic soap operas and cheerful home design shows. I did not go downtown to hang a flyer offering my teaching services.
One afternoon I was overwhelmed by the compulsion to organize the garage for Oren, and I spent long hours ordering his many tools in a manner that made sense to me. He came home from the lab and saw my handiwork, let his eyes wander over the perpendicularity of everything, and though he said “Thank you,” it came out like a question.
At the grocery store, I turned cans and boxes over in my hands to examine the nutrition labels on the back, and though my brain would not register the words, I kept looking at the labels anyway. Once, upon returning home from the store, I discovered I had purchased three jars of olives. I hate olives.
I knew something was wrong with me, but I also knew that if I admitted it, I would be expected to do something to change it. And the truth was, I enjoyed being miserable. I wanted to feel the agony of losing Claire. Happiness without her was not a happiness I craved. I stopped wishing I’d never met her and instead drowned myself in memories of her. In the shower, I closed my eyes and aimed the shower nozzle between my legs, imagining it was Claire’s tongue and that when I came, she would press her wet body against mine and lick the running water from my lips and neck. When I opened my eyes to the gaping reality of her absence, I slid down the shower wall and croaked out great, wrenching sobs of despair.
Saturday, when Oren was off, I returned from my run and found him leaning against the kitchen counter with his arms crossed, waiting for me. “You’re limping.” His voice was filled with worry, but there was a sharp edge to it.
“Yeah…I’m training pretty hard, I guess.” My shin splints had finally reached the point where I could no longer ignore the pain and fake a walking gait approximating anything close to normal. At least I wasn’t throwing up anymore.
He stared hard at me. “Can I please speak with you for a few minutes?”
His biceps flexed with the impatience he tried to hide from me. He was beautiful, statuesque even. His blond hair had grown long since I hadn’t been around to remind him to have it cut, and now it had begun to curl over the tops of his ears. My stomach knotted. He was too gentle. I wanted him to push me, to challenge me. I wanted him to be direct, like Claire. I imagined the expanse of my life that still lay before me, thousands of moments yet to be lived, and all of it with Oren standing by me, softly petting my head like I was a wounded kitten. I wasn’t sure I could do it. “Oren, I’m still out of breath. Let me have a shower first.”
When I’d finished, I came back into the bedroom for my clothes.
He was standing by the door, waiting. “Hazel?”
Quickly and without looking at him, I pulled my underwear over my rear end with a snap and slid my bra straps up my arms. I would not, could not engage in our old routines. Then he was behind me; I felt his heat on my back as his fingers found my wrist. But he was too indecisive about it, too weak, and I pulled away, also weak, but more decisive. I moved a step away and fastened my bra in the back.
I heard him leave the room then, heard the kitchen door open and slam shut. The garage door rattled open and his car screeched down the driveway, and then the garage door closed again.
When the house was silent, I sat on the edge of the bed and let my stiff composure drain and flow away from me like water down a drain. My body shivered though the room was warm.
I was going to lose Oren, too.
Oren worked in the lab all day Sunday and returned to normal working hours the following day. I tried to go for a run, but my shin splints had gotten so bad that I hobbled through the house, the bones in my lower legs smoldering like hot cinders. I began to sleep later in the mornings, not waking until long after Oren had left, then falling asleep in the evening before he returned home from a late night at the lab. Many days I didn’t see him at all.
Tuesday morning, I felt him kiss my forehead before he left for work, and, still enveloped in the comforting haze of sleep, I was reassured by the knowledge that he still loved me. I only wished I could love him properly in return.
Maybe I never had loved Oren as I should have. Maybe I’d always known I couldn’t. Long ago, when we first started dating, I’d warned him. I told him everything, told him that I was broken and would never make an exciting lover for him. It wasn’t the sort of conversation I usually had with the men I had sex with. At the time, I thought it meant I had confidence in our love for one another—that who he was, his candid way of being, made me comfortable enough to be who I was, which is to say: the kind of girl who would never be capable of indulging his fantasies.
At first I think my self-proclaimed brokenness was, like everything else in his life, a puzzle Oren believed he was meant to solve. And so I made myself that much more unsolvable. In those early days, he would push my legs apart, and I would slide them closer together, leaving them barely wide enough for him to do whatever he needed to do. I decided who was on top. I decided when, where, and how often. I faked, faked, faked, to let him believe that he’d finally cracked th
e code. It wasn’t just about orgasm. I faked my presence altogether. After a while, Oren knew it as well as I did, but by then we’d fallen into our routine. Twice per week, sometimes more, he’d follow me like a lost lamb, waiting for me to open my gates so he could wander inside me and bask in my inhospitality. Now I couldn’t even give him that.
I got out of bed in slow motion and stood at my bathroom sink, staring at myself for so long that my reflection shifted, the room behind me seeming to advance and recede. I wondered what Claire was doing, thinking, feeling, and I hated myself for caring.
Thursday I tried running again, a measly two miles, but it was still too much. I reveled in the pain, but it was impossible to maintain a consistent gait because of the tiny tears in my tissue fibers up and down my shins. I couldn’t make my legs go faster than my thoughts the way I needed them to.
I limped home and did stretching exercises to relieve the searing pain in my shins, then iced them on the couch while reading a book, a suspense thriller I’d borrowed from Claire’s library before we left for Italy. I couldn’t get more than a few pages in. Before I could absorb the words on the page, my mind flooded with memories of Claire, of my mouth on hers, my fingers sinking into the wet heat between her legs while she melted and moaned and pulled me closer.
And what was she doing? Did she have anything of mine that would send her into paroxysms of grief? Did she even care enough for that to be a possibility? Finally I lay back on the couch, crying and clutching the book against my chest, begging my phone to buzz with a message from Claire. I’m crazy. I am fucking crazy. I kept thinking it, saying it, over and over until I fell asleep hugging the book and phone.
Oren messaged me to tell me he’d be working late that night, so I decided on pasta salad for dinner since I could stick it in the fridge and it would still be good when he got home. It was when I was chopping the celery that I stopped caring whether I was crazy or not. I watched in fascination as the sharp ceramic blade sliced through the celery’s thick fibers as if they were as soft as goat cheese. I had a sudden thought, a thought that should have scared me but didn’t: How easily might that knife slice through my own skin? How deep would I dare go? I didn’t have to wonder if it would hurt—my blood pumped with renewed vigor at the prospect of a different kind of pain. I stood there slicing that stringy vegetable, slow and observant, imagining how, if it were my hand and not a stalk of celery, the blood would first fill the creases of my palm and then dribble onto the counter.
I shuddered over the image, not with revulsion, but with arousal. My breath quickened. My nipples had gone hard and I had goosebumps all over my arms. I left the celery partially cut so I could hold the knife up for closer inspection, listening to my heartbeat thud in my ears.
A little voice broke through my excitement: What would Claire think? She would pity me. Oren would have me committed. Did they say “committed” anymore? With the still hand of a surgeon, I pressed the edge of the knife blade hard against the open palm of my hand. But not hard enough to break the skin.
Oren finally got a break from the lab Saturday. My abused legs were still not working properly, so I was confined to the house, lying on the couch still trying to read the novel I’d borrowed from Claire. Oren walked by me several times before finally stopping in front of me with his hands on his hips. “Why don’t we go to the beach?”
I’d managed to go a full ten days barely speaking to him, so when he spoke with an expectation of reply, I startled and gaped at him as if he were a toad who had suddenly burst into song. I only barely managed to nod my head in response.
At the beach, the lifeguard stand flew an orange flag cautioning swimmers to be wary of the rip current. The waves were massive, though, and the surfers were taking full advantage. I scanned the water for Claire. Of course she wouldn’t be here; that would be too beautiful a coincidence. Had Oren checked with Mike first? I wondered if he was capable of being that jealous—if he was brave enough.
He set up the umbrella, then rubbed sunblock on my back for me. “You’ve lost weight.” He tried to make it sound like a simple observation, but I could hear the concern in his voice. I wished he’d just shut up and let me be skinny. I turned and took his hand in mine and pressed it against my cheek, silently begging him to understand.
I tried to read, but I couldn’t stop myself from staring out over the waves, willing Claire to appear in that flesh-colored bikini of hers. You’re an asshole, Hazel. But every time I closed my eyes, there she was, gasping beneath me, grabbing fistfuls of my hair and whimpering in that uninhibited way of hers. And the man I’d hurt (killed?)—I saw him too, saw his broken face with the blood pouring from his mangled nose, and then Trey’s face, with crimson goo trickling from the place where his eyes should have been. My body twitched as memories writhed together like snakes, mixing the good and the bad, the divine and the unspeakable.
I couldn’t take it anymore. I set my book on the towel and shuffled down to the water, stepping over shell fragments and seaweed. One wave after another broke over my feet and returned to the sea. The water was cool but not cold, a refreshing contrast to the blistering August heat. Sea gulls screamed in the air overhead and children squealed and giggled under their parents’ watchful eyes.
I waded in up to my waist, plugging my nose and submitting to the waves each time a whitecap came crashing over me. My shins burned with the effort of fighting the sucking sea. I understood now why the lifeguard’s flag was orange, but I also knew that once I got beyond the break I could tread water and relax in the rise and fall of the waves. I kept walking until the sea floor dropped away, and then—though I was weak, though I knew I was not the greatest swimmer, though I knew the orange flag meant danger—I paddled.
I had intended to find a peaceful place to rest, but there was no peace anywhere out in that dark water. But I could settle for something close to peace. I could keep paddling until I found a place that felt…worth occupying. I paddled and paddled, and though something felt wrong in my head, though I sensed I was going too far, there was nothing in me, nothing left that was powerful enough, assertive enough, sensible enough, to stifle my compulsion to swim. And so I kept swimming.
From the back of my mind came the gentle suggestion that I turn around to get my bearings. I raised my head to look. Nothing. Nothing but water. My chest squeezed with fear. I was alone in the vast ocean, and I’d been the one to put myself there. My arms burned from the effort of paddling. Panic rushed over me and turned the rest of my muscles flaccid.
But then a swell lifted my body, and the water I’d just swum through sank away, and there was the shore, far in the distance, but at least I could see it. And Oren’s tiny, angry head punctuating that vast expanse of grey, his arms pushing the water away from him, inching closer and closer to me. He was yelling something, but before I could make out what he was saying, he disappeared behind another swell. I treaded water and waited for him, trying not to give in to my weakening muscles.
When Oren arrived by my side, he was gasping and splashing and frantic. “Hazel!” He screamed, his face lobster red. He’d never once screamed at me. The terror in his voice echoed back at us off the bowed surface of the water. “Fucking shit, Hazel! You can’t fucking swim!”
“I can swim fine!” I choked on a mouthful of water, and Oren’s arms circled me, buoying me up, lifting me the extra inch I needed to breathe.
“Were you trying to kill yourself?” His voice was strangled, grisly, almost, awkward with the convulsions of a man’s tears. The panicked throb of his heart was palpable even through the lapping water.
I laid my head on his shoulder and kicked my legs in circles so I wouldn’t bring us both down. “No,” I said. “Not that.”
“Then why?” He squeezed me so tightly it almost hurt. “Why did you swim all the way out here like this?”
I lifted my head from his shoulder and turned my face to the feathery white clouds drifting lazily above us. “I think I needed to see if you would come ge
t me.”
THIRTY-THREE
Even with the waves propelling us forward, it took us a long time to swim back to shore. Once we’d passed the break and the water became rough again, Oren struggled to keep me afloat; I wasn’t strong enough to fight the rip current. The lifeguard rushed out with his red rescue float, wedging it under my arms and tugging me toward shore. Oren followed close behind. A crowd gathered as the two men deposited me gently onto the sand, but the curious stares of strangers sapped what little energy I had left. Oren crouched beside me and I sagged against him, utterly drained.
At home, I let Oren shower with me, or rather, was grateful he had the intuition to know that he should stay. I had to pretend I was “letting” him. Needing him was too much.
The hot water of the shower beat on my back as I laid my head on Oren’s chest. He held me up with one arm and massaged shampoo into my scalp with his free hand, then used a loofah to wash my body while I swayed back and forth like a too-tall tree on a windy plain. He remembered to apply conditioner to my hair so it wouldn’t get tangled. As he worked, he made quiet grunting sounds, the muscles in his jaw twitching and flexing, but he would not make eye contact with me. He was like a resentful nurse in a nursing home, I thought, cleaning up shit from a dementia patient’s rear end; it wasn’t a job that anyone wanted to do, yet it had to be done. He washed himself quickly and turned off the water, grabbed a towel and wrapped it around me.
I shuffled to the bed and fell into it naked, dropping my towel on the floor. Oren stayed in the bathroom for a while, making tinkering and scuffling noises, the familiar sounds of a husband, and I lay on top of the covers waiting for him, my exhausted heart skipping beats in my chest. When he came into the bedroom, I patted the bed beside me. He sighed but stretched out alongside me so that we lay on our sides facing one another, and when his head hit the pillow, he finally looked at me. His eyes were bloodshot and swollen, and I understood then that the little grunting sounds and the flexing in his jaw I’d seen in the shower had been him crying.