But then a young man, handsome, curly hair, strong hands, joined me at the table. I started to panic.
This, I suddenly thought, is what it means to go out for a drink. This is the entire purpose. Have a drink, meet a stranger, have fantastic sex all night long. But I didn’t want to blow up my life. I love Sam. I love our life. Still, there was this young man beside me, interested in me, nervous even.
“Hi,” he said. “I’m a friend of Alli’s.” One of the twenty-year-old drug dealers.
“Hi.” I tried not to, but I imagined him naked, me naked. I imagined him accepting the way my body has aged naturally, despite the near certainty that that would never happen. Very few bodies this close to San Francisco are accepted or allowed to age naturally.
“Alli told me you’re a mom.”
“That’s right.” It wasn’t the sexiest thing he could say, but maybe, I thought, this is how it will work, how he’d come to appreciate the lines and rolls of my abdomen.
“I was thinking, since you’re a mom, you might have some snacks? I’m really hungry. Like, is there anything in your purse?”
After a short excavation, the highest humiliation: he was right. I found both a bag of baby carrots and a granola bar in my purse. I passed my offerings across the table to the young man.
“Thanks,” he said, disappearing with the food. “Thanks.” Some mother’s child, some mother who had at least taught her son to always say please, always say thank you.
* * *
“Can you check me for ticks?”
Sam switches on a light, picks me over, stopping at each freckle. How lucky I am to know such love, to momentarily remember what it means to have the body of a child, ignorant of age’s humiliation. “Okay,” he says. “You’re all clear.”
“Thanks. Should I check you?”
“Nah. I’m good. There’s no Lyme disease in California, hon. Not really.”
“Says you.”
He switches off the light and now it’s night. It is really, really night.
* * *
What’s the scariest sound a person can hear?
Away from the city, inside a quiet country house where the closest neighbors are pretty far away, the scariest possible sound is a man coughing outside in the dark. Because why is there a man standing in the dark, studying the sleeping house, licking his lips, coughing? Why should someone be so near to my home, to my children, in this place that is not the city?
I know the sounds of this house intimately. The garbage truck, the school bus. I know the difference between the mailman and the UPS man. I know each door. I know the sound of a man outside coughing.
“What was that?” But Sam is already asleep. Or Sam is not here. “Wake up.” I whisper so the coughing man won’t know we’re onto him. “Wake up, hon. Someone’s outside.”
“What?”
“Shh. I heard something.”
“What?”
“There’s someone downstairs. Someone’s outside.”
“Who?”
“A guy. Please.”
“Please?”
“Go see.”
“See.”
“Yeah.”
Dead and dark of night, I send away the only man who has sworn an oath to protect me. I must be an idiot. I must be really scared. I send away the man I love. Why am I so scared? It’s not like I live in a war zone. It’s not like a flesh-eating epidemic has been found in our school district. What makes me so frightened?
Sam disappears in his underwear and bare feet, leaving behind the retired baseball bat he once thought to stow under the bed for just this sort of occasion. The soft pads of his feet pass down the top risers and then there’s no more sound. He’s so gone I have a sense our entire downstairs is filled with stagnant black pond water through which he’s now wading, swimming, drowning, trying to stay quiet so the bad guy, whoever he is, doesn’t hear him, find the staircase, and tear our tiny world apart.
* * *
The uncertain position we all maintain in life asking when will violence strike, when will devastation occur, leaves us looking like the hapless swimmers at the beginning of each Jaws movie. Innocent, tender, and delicious. Our legs tread water, buoyed by all that is right and good and deserved in this world, a house, healthy children, clean food to eat, love. While that animatronic shark, a beast without mercy, catches the scent of blood and locks in on his target.
“Sam?” I call softly so the bad guy won’t know we’re separated.
There’s no answer from downstairs. What is taking him so long to come back?
* * *
I hold the night the way I would a child who finally fell asleep. Like I’m frightened it will move. I am frightened it will move. I am always scared my life will suffer some dramatic, sudden change. I try to hear deeper, to not shift at all, to not breathe, but no matter how still I stay there’s no report from downstairs. What if Sam is already dead, killed by the intruder? Maybe choked by a small rope around the neck? What if the bad guy, in stocking feet, is creeping upstairs right now, getting closer to my babies, to me?
Part of me knows he is. Part of me knows he always is and always will be.
* * *
Where we live there are squirrels, rabbits, all manner of wild birds, foxes, mountain lions. There are rednecks getting drunk at the sports bar three miles away. There are outlaw motorcycle clubs convening. Drunk frat boys.
There are also children dreaming.
Other living things still exist in the night. Sometimes it’s hard to remember that.
Sam is probably fine. He’s probably downstairs on his computer. Barely Legal, Backstreet Blow Jobs. Looking at some other mother’s child perform sex on his monitor.
Night ticks by.
“Sam?” There’s no answer and the quiet becomes a dark cape, so heavy I can’t move my legs. I can’t move my body. I am only eyes, only ears. The night asks, Who are you? Who will you become if Sam has been chopped to bits by the guy downstairs? This is a good question. Who am I? Who will I be without Sam? Without kids? I can hear how well-intentioned people at Sam’s funeral will say, “Just be yourself.” But there is no self left. Why would there be? From one small body I made three new humans. It took everything I had to make them. Liver? Take it. Self-worth? It’s all yours. New people require natural resources and everyone knows the laws of this universe: you don’t get something for nothing. Why wouldn’t I be hollowed out? I grew three complex beauties. I made their lungs and noses. Who can’t understand this basic math?
The strangest part of these calculations is that I don’t even mind. Being hollow is the best way to be. Being hollow means I can fill myself with stars or light or rose petals if I want. I’m glad everything I once was is gone and my children are here instead. They’ve erased the individual and I am grateful. The individual was not special in the first place. And really, these new humans I made are a million times better than I ever was.
* * *
The bedcovers look gray in the dim light of modems and laptops and phones scattered around our bedroom. In this ghost light I am alone. The night asks again, Who are you? Who will you be when everyone who needs you is gone? My children are growing, and when they are done with that I’ll have to become a human again instead of a mother. That is like spirit becoming stone, like a butterfly going to a caterpillar. I’m not looking forward to that.
Who are you?
The answer is easy in daylight. But the night’s untethering almost always turns me into someone I’m not. I sift through the different women I become in the dark, my own private Greek chorus whispers, shrieks. Where do I keep all these women when the sun is up? Where do they hide, the women who have breached the sanctity of my home, who know things about me so secret even I don’t know these things? Maybe they are in the closet. Maybe they are hiding inside me. Maybe they are me trapped somewhere I can’t get to, like in the DNA markers of my hormones, those mysterious proteins that make me a woman instead of something else, those mysterious prote
ins no one seems to understand.
You may ask, Are these women who bombard me at night real or do I imagine them? You may eventually realize that is a stupid question.
I think about fidelity. To Sam, to myself. The light is still gray. The night is still so quiet. I let the women in, an entire parade of them, the whole catalog, spread out on the bed before me. Sam is gone and these women keep me company. These women are women I need to reckon with, even if some of them terrify me. The light is gray and the night is quiet.
I let the other women in.
CGB5
human chorionic gonadotropin
hormone produced by the embryo after implantation
An author lived for a time in a modern house behind mine, through a eucalyptus grove. She had recently divorced. She is a very good writer, though she has only written one book. The book takes a frank approach to sex and bodies. I try to copy her style in my own writing. I fail. Her book is about prostitutes, so I assume she was once a sex worker. Or maybe she just wants her readers to believe that, street cred at book parties, in university settings, etc.
I could kind of see into the rear windows of her house at night with a pair of binoculars. These voyeur sessions never lasted long because all she ever did was sit there. Maybe once or twice I caught her walking to her kitchen. It was boring. She was alone all the time, and while she was no doubt thinking amazing, fantastic thoughts about the nature of art, my binoculars could not see these thoughts.
The town where we live is small so it was inevitable that we would meet. We did, many times. We once even shared the dance floor at the local bar, a Mexican restaurant, moving together like robots from outer space. But then, each time we met again it was, to her, as fresh as the first time. “Nice to meet you,” she’d say. When once I had to deliver a piece of misdirected mail, she invited me in for a glass of wine. In an instant I developed a fantasy of the famous writer and me as best friends. I dropped that fantasy quickly because it was clear that her alien robot routine back in the bar/restaurant had not been an act.
When I mentioned that I had three children, her jaw came unhinged. “Oh my god.” Her hand lifted up to her face as if I’d said I have three months to live. Maybe that is what children mean to her. I recalled an interview where she had likened motherhood to a dairy operation, where she said children murder art. She dismissed me after one glass of wine. “I have to eat my sandwich,” she said, as if that sandwich was something so solidly constructed it would be impossible to divide, impossible to share. I left.
The next time I saw the famous writer she was in the grocery store. Once again she didn’t recognize me or acknowledge the four or five times we’d already met, the wine we had drunk together, so I was able to freely stalk her through the aisles of the store, to spy the items of nourishment a famous writer feeds herself upon: butterfly dust, caviar, evening dew.
I stood behind her in line at the fishmonger’s counter, my own cart bulging with Cheerios, two gallons of milk, laundry soap, instant mac and cheese, chicken breasts, cold cuts, bread, mayonnaise, apples, bananas, green beans, all the flabby embarrassments of motherhood that no longer embarrass me. I heard her order a quarter pound of salmon. The loneliest fish order ever. I stepped away, scared her emaciated solitude might be contagious. She kept her chin lifted. Some people enjoy humiliation. Maybe I used to be one of these people, but I don’t feel humiliation anymore. The body sloughs off cells every day. So much mortification that, after all that, what is left to feel humiliated? Very little indeed.
THRA1
thyroid hormone receptor
regulation of metabolism and heart rate, development of organisms
The commuter bus that runs between my town and the city is one small part of America where silence still lives. It’s a cylinder of peace moving through the world swiftly enough to blur it. Some days I ride this bus when I have work to do in the city. Compared with raising children, going to work is extremely easy. I turn off my mind. I eat lunch in silence. I have conversations that follow logical patterns. I stop steering a family as unwieldy as an oil tanker.
Once, on a return bus, there was a woman seated ahead of me. People do not speak on the bus. We understand that this hour of being rocked and shushed is the closest we’ll get to being babies again. This woman was not a regular. She’d gone down to the city for the day. She was ten to fifteen years older than me, mid-fifties, though I never saw her face. I could feel her buzzing. She’d taken a risk traveling to the city by herself, such a risk that accomplishing it had emboldened her to try other new things like the voice recognition software on her smartphone, that “newfangled” device purchased for her by an older child who had tired of a mother living like a Luddite.
There was nothing wrong with her hands but she wanted to demonstrate that even though she was middle-aged and less loved now than she’d been in the past, she could be current with the modern world. She could enjoy the toys of the young. On the quiet bus, she began to speak into her phone as if recording books for the blind, loudly and slowly. Everyone could hear. There on the silent bus, the woman shouted multiple drafts of an e-mail to her friend, laying plain her regret, fumes of resignation in the tight, enclosed area.
Hi. Just on my way home. I spent the day with Philip and his glamorous wife. He had a concert at the conservatory. I hadn’t been back in years. It was great to see him. His wife is gorgeous. They live in Paris. Ouch. I just
The woman paused and considered. She tried again. Her voice even louder, as if it were another chorus, a building symphony of mortification.
Hi. I’m on the bus back from the city. What a day. I saw Philip. He had a concert at the conservatory. His wife is gorgeous, glamorous, everything I’m not. They live in Paris and their kids
She paused again. Take three. Loud and utterly desperate. Words falling apart.
Saw Philip and his gorgeous wife. Conservatory. Paris. Kids. I just
I turned to the window, which was of course sealed, but at least reminded me what fresh air meant, what it was to breathe without the toilet cabin leaking air freshener, her echoing regret.
ESR1
estrogen receptor
sexual development and reproductive function
People should be more careful with their language. People shouldn’t infect innocent bystanders with their drama.
There’s a man I hardly know, an academic. He began sleeping with a graduate student when his wife was pregnant, but everything was cool because, you know, everyone involved reads criticism and all three of them want to test the bounds of just how much that shit can hurt.
I imagine that shit can hurt a whole lot.
I know a lot of professors who fuck their students, graduate and undergraduate. Every time I hear about another professor with a student I think, Wow, that professor I know is way more messed up than I ever thought. Stealing confidence from eighteen-, nineteen-, twenty-year-olds.
Nasty. Vampires.
This professor, he cleared the fucking of the graduate student with his pregnant wife, and for reasons I don’t understand yet, the wife allowed him to dabble in younger, unwed women while she gestated their child, while her blood and bones were sucked from her body into their fetus.
Though the wife is an interesting part of this triangle, it’s neither she nor the husband I’m thinking of here in bed while Sam bleeds out his last drop of life on our living room floor. I’m thinking of the poor, stupid graduate student.
She and the academic attended a lecture together one night. Though it is a city, almost every person there who identifies as “academic” knows every other person there who identifies as “academic.” The city becomes small by types. The academic and the grad student attended a lecture and a party afterward. She was in the insecure position of being a student among people who were done being students. And though everyone was staring at her—they knew the wife—no one wanted to talk to her or welcome the grad student into the land of scholars.
This was not a
cceptable. She likes attention. She likes performance. She cleared her throat and the noise from the room as if readying for a toast. She stood on the low coffee table. Everyone stopped drinking. Everyone left cigarettes burning. In a loud, clear voice that must still reverberate in her ears, she said, “You’re just angry because of what I do with my queer vagina.”
On my living room wall I keep a photo of my Victorian great-grandmother engaged in a game of cards with three of her sisters. These women maintained a highly flirtatious relationship with language. “Queer” once meant strange. “Queer” once meant homosexual. “Queer” now means opposition to binary thinking. I experience a melancholy pause when meaning is lost, when words drift like runaways far from home. How did “queer” ever come to mean a philandering penis and vagina in a roomful of bookish, egotistical people? How did common, old, vanilla adultery ever become queer?
I feel the grad student’s late-blooming humiliation. How she came to realize, or will one day soon, that her words were foolish, creating an unwanted idea of an organ, her organ, that, like all our organs, is both extraordinary and totally plain. Some flaps of loose skin, some hair, some blood, but outside the daily fact of its total magnificence, it is really not queer at all.
CYP17
cytochrome P450 17A1
a key enzyme in the steroidogenic pathway that produces progestins, mineralocorticoids, glucocorticoids, androgens, and estrogens
A once-beautiful woman, who married for money, is mean as a mad dog. She sometimes calls salesgirls cunts. She has a couple of kids. She might remember a few good years, but now she hates her husband. She hates her husband’s parents, too. She didn’t grow up with money and nannies, and now that she’s wealthy, she can’t believe how much the rich just phone that shit in. She’s also mad because, by now, she’s been rich so long that she’s completely dumb. She doesn’t know how to do anything anymore. All those years spent hiring people to do everything for her. She’s mad because her husband, an ugly troll who thinks women make really good holes for his cash and his dick, uses a high-end escort to take care of certain desires he’s never had the courage to discuss with her, his wife.
The Dark Dark Page 13