by Susan Choi
“What?” Aileen said, belatedly grasping that Nora had offered to act as a go-between for reasons other than sparing her feelings.
“That wasn’t all he said, about Thanksgiving and Christmas. It wasn’t even the main thing. He pretended it was, but I felt it was his way of testing the waters. I said I’d speak to you about Christmas, that’s all. I didn’t mean to let on what I thought you would say. But he must have seen more from my face. That’s when he said this other thing. He didn’t sound angry. He sounded very…calm. And cold. As if that was what he had come here to say all along.”
“For God’s sake, Nora.”
“I just want to repeat it precisely as he said it! He made me feel like a stupid little child. As if I was supposed to repeat his words back so he’d know that I’d learned them. He said, ‘I know Aileen is not concerned about the Bible’s prohibition against what she has done. Perhaps it will make more of an impression on her to know that the courts take the same view of her kind as the Bible.’”
“Of her kind?” Aileen said, waking John. “Of her kind? What the hell does that mean, my kind?”
“Aileen, don’t,” Nora said, her face furious.
“He’s an infant, Nora. He doesn’t understand English, let alone filthy English.”
“He understands tone.”
“Then what does that mean,” Aileen hissed, in a stage whisper, lifting John to her shoulder, where he continued to emit little yelps that were as evenly spaced as a siren’s.
“I was hoping that you could tell me.”
For a moment they sat quietly, letting John’s hiccupped cries fill the room. As the cries grew in strength, Aileen undid her blouse again with her free hand, and in the same moment Nora brought a pillow from the bed and adjusted it beneath Aileen’s elbow, in precisely the way that she wanted it, not only as if they had not just been hissing like snakes at each other but as if they peacefully shared the same mind. Their silence lasted until well after they’d both heard, with satisfaction, the soft clicking noise that John made when he fed.
“Your friend Mr. Lee,” Nora finally said.
“Lewis’s friend,” Aileen clarified automatically.
“When you told me he’d been so…understanding, when you and Lewis began having problems, and so helpful when you were upset, and such a good confidant…” Nora looked out the window again, as if she sought in the majestic old oak a few more anodyne formulations to do justice to the chaste and enlightened relationship she was describing. Aileen felt the heat of impending exposure and shame beating out of her skin, and because Nora was her sister, and because they shared the same opaquely pale complexion, which could magically burn like a furnace while showing almost no tint, Aileen knew that Nora was blushing as well, because Aileen had so brazenly lied to her.
“…were you telling me everything?” Nora finally concluded.
“No,” Aileen said.
“So you’ve been with him,” Nora said, her face, still in profile, extremely immobile.
“Slept with him. Yes.”
“This man whose house I drove you to, the day I helped you move out of your house.”
“For God’s sake, Nora, I didn’t go to bed with him while you were waiting in the car.”
“Don’t,” Nora said, wheeling to face her again, and as their eyes met, Aileen’s lungs seemed to die in her chest.
“You just answer my questions,” Nora said, after a moment.
“All right,” Aileen murmured.
“Did you tell Lewis you’d been with this man?”
“Yes.”
“You told him everything. You told him you’d slept with his friend.”
“Would it have been better if I’d lied to him, too?”
“I wish you would shut up and answer my questions.”
Aileen felt her eyes flood, humiliated, as if they were children again. “Yes, I told him. In no uncertain terms. Not how often or how long.”
Nora held a hand up, reflexively warding off these embellishments, and Aileen felt an unfamiliar leap of hatred that left her almost dizzy. “And what about the note you left for Lewis, the day you left the house?”
“What about it?”
“Did it talk about Mr. Lee, too?”
“Only to tell Lewis to leave him alone.”
“But that says it all, doesn’t it,” Nora said, in a tone of conclusion.
“Says what all?” Aileen mocked, thinking that Nora looked much older than a woman eight years and one child ahead of herself. She’d hoped the little flame of hatred was one of those idle experiments carried out for their lack of connection to everyday life, like romantic speculations about unpalatable men on the bus. Now she noticed a storehouse of tinder concealed in herself, as if against a long winter ahead; the little flame cracklingly multiplied.
“That Mr. Lee is your lover,” Nora said very quickly, as if the words were indigestible objects she wanted out of her mouth.
“Lewis already knew, as I said at the start of this inquisition.”
“Yes, he already knew, because you had to tell him. You just couldn’t wait. You knew you were unhappy, that the two of you might be headed for trouble, and then you had to run ahead and rub his face in it, without it ever once crossing your mind—”
“Without being ashamed, you mean. Without showing adequate shame for my sins.”
“Without being prudent, you little idiot.”
“I would have thought of all people you’d understand that some shred of emotional honesty where there’d never been any was what we needed. We should have never existed, someone had to admit that—”
“Oh, please stop it. You’ve been dying for your moment on the soapbox, to wave around your ‘honesty’ banner and say ‘someone had to admit’ and ‘at least I was honest,’ and that’s why you couldn’t keep your mouth shut with Lewis, but don’t do it with me. I don’t care, Aileen. I might have last week or last month, but I don’t anymore, and neither does Lewis. He’s gone on to the next thing, can’t you see that? He wants John. He wants to take him from you. And he will at this rate, with your mouth. With your honesty,” this last almost spat, as if she’d said “whorishness.”
“He can’t take him from me,” Aileen said, reflexively clutching John so that he grunted in protest—but the foreignness of the idea, a cold steel sliding into the sac in which she’d nestled herself, somehow spread, making John feel strange in her arms. “I’m his mother,” she said. Even this statement seemed suddenly tinged with bizarreness. As a corrective she thought of the moment she’d first seen the slick, brushstroked head bloodily inching forth from her crotch, but now the crazed luminosity of her condition at that time was gone, and, stripped of its fiery grandeur, the stark scene seemed remote and grotesque and unlikely.
“And you’re Lewis’s wife,” Nora was saying, “no matter how you might feel, and he is John’s father, no matter how you might feel.”
“Children stay with the mother.”
“Not if the court finds the mother unfit.”
Now, thank God, the creeping sense of strangeness, of John as a mere lump of animate flesh in her arms, of the yawning abyss of her time as his sole guardian against infinite dangers—forever, forever—was scoured away, like a pestilent fog in the face of a strong, cleansing wind. “Get out,” she said to Nora, the hateful flame having comfortably grown to the size of a coat, sealing her and John safely together.
“Get out?” Nora said, almost gently. “Of my spare bedroom, in my house?”
To her shame she was relieved when, unwilled and to her surprise, tears began pouring over her face. What am I turning into? she thought. What kind of manipulating, theatrical monster? But soon her relief, at having won back Nora’s pity, and her shame, at having done it with a ploy, were both eclipsed by her alarm at the force of her tears. Without meaning or wanting to, she slipped into hysterics, sobbing so convulsively she couldn’t catch her breath or govern her muscles. Her arms went slack as if they’d been anesthetized
, and John, sobbing also, almost fell on the floor; Nora plucked him from danger and carried him from the room. A moment later Nora returned, John still sobbing into her shoulder, and handed Aileen a hot washcloth. Aileen pressed it to her face and heard a shriek come from herself—it was inexpressive, another attempt to gain control of her lungs, but it sent John to a new pitch of wailing, and it deepened her fear. Nora took John out of the room again. Aileen had the sensation of a subtle division interleaving itself between parts that had before been united, like metal sheets being dropped into place. Herself now and herself at the instant that John had been born. Herself now and her tears. This made her wonder what boxed cavity her mysterious “self” was confined to.
After a while she was breathing again with just a catch at the back of her throat. Beyond that soft rasping, she realized the house was silent. Her watch said four; Nora’s children ought to be home by now. Warren would follow, at a quarter past five. John’s bassinet would be moved to the kitchen, and they would all try to sit for a civilized dinner at six. She didn’t think she could stand it, another day as an unwanted guest in this house, confined by her child’s helplessness, which was now hers as well. But there was nowhere for them to go. Was there?
She found Nora reading in the front room, John asleep on her lap. As Aileen gazed down at him, this also seemed like a fresh possibility: that he would heedlessly sleep against some other body, his soft lower lip pedaling, in dreaming pursuit of her breast—or perhaps any breast.
Nora looked up at her, either questioningly—did she want her son back?—or invitingly—there was room on the couch. “He looks comfortable,” Aileen murmured, and sat in the armchair Warren usually claimed to read the evening newspaper. The first time she had left John with Nora, her first day home from the hospital—so that she could bathe—she had been gripped by such a sense of coming danger, as if she’d stepped into the path of a train, that she’d almost cracked her skull in the tub, she’d been so clumsy and hasty. She had known that it was her body, installing John as an imperative, annexing him to her self-shielding instincts now that he was no longer housed inside her. Leaving him to walk around the block, as per Nora’s orders, even leaving him to go to the toilet had made her tremble, an animal facing immediate threat. She had marveled that Nora could calmly shut her children’s bedroom doors in the evenings, let alone watch them walk off to school each morning, yet at the same time she’d known that this crushing consciousness of danger would have to recede, if only for the sake of real safety. She couldn’t protect John, or herself, so long as she quaked like a deer in the crosshairs of somebody’s gun. And indeed the next day her terror had faded a little, and the next and the next, so that now, a mere five days into John’s life, she could look at him from a distance of almost eight feet and feel utterly calm, almost empty.
“Do you think they could? Find me unfit,” she asked quietly, as if their conversation had been civil all along, and uninterrupted.
“I can’t imagine such a thing, but it seems that he can. That’s what he meant when he said the courts take the same view.”
“As the Bible. We don’t live in a theocracy.”
“I’m only repeating what he said, Nini.”
“And I’ve given him his case. All the evidence he needs, and then some.”
“That’s what I’m afraid of. I know you were unhappy, but I’m so frightened now for our John.” This time Nora’s face shone with tears, but they streamed without bodily tremors, and John continued to sleep, his tiny form rising and falling with Nora’s regular breath. Aileen briefly thought, Let him do it. It was an old habit of nihilistic bravado, for protecting herself. So she still wasn’t in the firm habit of thinking for two. To atone, she moved onto the couch and wiped away Nora’s tears. Then they both watched the baby together.
“Where are the children?” Aileen finally asked.
“I told them to go play at the Millers’ after school, until dinner. I wasn’t sure how long Lewis would stay.”
“You’re good to me, Nonie.”
“I can’t be forever.”
Before Nora could repent of her outburst, Aileen said, “I know.”
“It’s not me, it’s Warren,” Nora said wretchedly. “I love you. I love little John.” Her tears started anew.
“I know,” Aileen said again.
That night while John slept, Aileen wrote out her letter—the letter that had been composing itself eloquently, sometimes ecstatically, always effortlessly, for almost a week, since her water had broken and she’d gone to the hospital. Everything that had happened to her, everything she had felt, had been slightly dilated by the echo of her internal narration, though she’d been too exhausted at the end of each day to commit it to paper. Now she was tireless, even strangely stimulated, as if she’d drunk coffee. She wrote with great speed, as if simply transcribing something already printed.
Dear Lee, she began, and then page after page of her pad of drugstore writing paper, the night passing not hourglass style, in a trickle, but with the intermittent force of a thaw. Great snowmasses of night giving way all at once to drop sighingly into the void. The clock said twenty minutes to midnight; the next instant—sigh—it said two-fifteen. She wrote without any idea of securing Lee’s loyalty to her—his loyalty was the one thing she was certain she had. His love, his comradeship, his sympathy. She missed him as her only true ally—it was no painful revelation to her that Nora’s duty to Warren came first, she had known this more easily than Nora had—and if her letter was unrestrained, it was not because she sought to make a certain impression, to a particular end, but because she felt the rushing relief of unself-consciousness—because she felt free.
When she was done, she was as exhilarated and drained as the traveler who’s relived every inch of the trek in the chronicling of it. But there were many inches—those at the end—she left out. She did not mention Lewis’s comment to Nora, about the courts and “her kind.” She did not mention Thanksgiving and Christmas. Gaither’s persistence in seeing his son, Aileen’s finally relenting—this was the chain of events that seemed to end with Gaither’s peaceful departure forever, as if the single glimpse was all he’d ever wanted.
That night was the beginning of a series of insomnial nights, as though the stimulation she’d felt while composing the letter were now trapped in her body, in the form of an antisleep toxin that only sleep would remove. She had never before been unable to sleep when exhausted. Now she responded to John’s rhythmic subsidings with frantic attempts to accompany him; she would set him in his bassinet and then strip off her housedress and pull on a nightgown, raking her nails over her prickling skin and scalp as she climbed into bed and adjusted her pillow, her blanket, the sleeve hole of her nightgown that bit at her armpit, the hem of blanket that tickled her cheek, the sagging pillow that failed to cradle her skull, the teeming spot on her calf, her lower back, the nape of her neck, the tip of her nose, that now itched intolerably—she could not stop twitching and flicking as if sleep were flies, and then after twenty or seventy minutes John would whimper, and she’d vault from the bed like a jack-in-the-box. She had resolved to no longer allow Nora to help in the night when John was hard to console. It was as much for her sake as for Nora’s; she knew that Warren had complained that Nora acted as though John were hers, disrupting Warren’s sleep in the process with her comings and goings from midnight to dawn. In the first week of John’s life, Aileen had scarcely seen past him to their shared situation, but now, even as she was somehow less able to meet her own and John’s needs, she was increasingly aware of how much their dependence antagonized Warren. And so she sought to hide her fatigue from Nora, which was feeling less like fatigue than a form of madness. When John shat so wetly that it spilled from his diaper and onto her lap, her limbs were seized by the impulse to hurl him into the wall; she felt she’d fought to restrain them, and then she sat crying in fright, while John cried also, the two of them glued to each other by his mustardy feces. She had found the cea
seless physical awkwardness of caring for a baby almost entrancing in their first days together, like a puzzle to be constantly solved—place baby on changing table, but the diapers are still in clean laundry basket; lift baby, balance baby on forearm, squat to level of basket, snag diaper, return to the table, place baby on table, fold diaper, but where are the pins? lift baby again, locate pins, folded diaper somehow has been left on the far side of room where pins were; lift the baby, grab diaper, open pin with one hand, but the force of the metal tines coming apart makes the pin jump down onto the floor—but now any of the thousands of little rebellions the material world seemed inspired to stage in response to a helpless infant could reduce her to tears—or inflate her to rage. And she was surly to Nora and Warren, and even their children, and, worst of all, the almost rapturous state of contentment she’d felt with her son now seemed permanently out of reach, on the far side of the sort of renewal that she imagined, illogically, death might provide.
The answer she had given Gaither, via Nora, was that he could not take John on such short notice for Thanksgiving, but that she would be willing to discuss the matter of Christmas two weeks beforehand, on December 11. The rationale provided in both cases was that John was nursing; he couldn’t be expected to learn to take a bottle overnight, but by December 11 he might have mastered it and so be ready for a first separation. He would be one month old, to Aileen an inconceivable milestone—but every possibility referred to in this message was for her equally fantastic. Her answer to Gaither would no more be yes on December 11 than on any other day for the rest of all time, even if by the age of one month John happened to have learned how to cook. It was Nora who had insisted on framing the answer this way. “It buys you time,” she said, sealing the envelope that contained Aileen’s answer—written out by Aileen after Nora’s dictation. “There’s no reason to give Lewis more ammunition.”