Objects of Desire

by Clare Sestanovich

  “I’m not the mother,” Susan repeated, which was not a retort at all, and left us with nothing to say.

  She dropped the hem of the dress, and it was only then that I realized it wasn’t something made for a child. It was a woman’s cocktail dress, sleeveless. The armholes stretched down to Susan’s waist, so I could see her ribs and the elastic top of her underwear. She didn’t have a round stomach, as it seemed to me all children should.

  When the elevator arrived, Susan ran inside, the dress dragging on the floor. The door began to close and fear flashed across her face. She held out her arm, which was hardly more than a twig, to stop it. She reminded me of the trees that get delivered to desolate city blocks—trunks that are more like branches, entire root systems bagged in burlap, half a lifetime before they’ll cast any shade.

  The elevator door didn’t stop when it encountered Susan’s arm, so she put her whole body in its way. She did this without any desperation. Twenty-five floors below her, unthinking metal on either side.

  The day nannies dropped their bags and jumped into action. One of them blocked the door and another grabbed Susan with both arms, pulling her back into the apartment. She looked awkward in this embrace. Her body wasn’t built for absorbing into anyone else’s. It collapsed neatly, like a chair that advertises how little space it will take up in the closet. The elevator closed, unaware of whether it was empty or full, buzzing faintly while it descended.

  It seemed suddenly perverse that so many hours would pass before I was on the ground again, that so many of my nights took place at a dangerous height. The windows were required by law to be unopenable. What kinds of lives elevated themselves like this?

  “Let me go,” Susan addressed her nanny’s elbow. “I’m already late.”

  The nannies unbuckled Susan’s shoes instead of responding. Susan pedaled her feet in the air, kicking their wrists halfheartedly.

  “Where are you going?” I asked.

  She glared at me.

  “Don’t monitor my whereabouts.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Do you know when you’ll be back?”

  Susan licked her thumb and rubbed the patent leather ferociously. She began to cry.

  “I don’t know,” she said. The shoes clattered onto the floor. She gulped for air while she cried. Her mouth seemed unjustly small.

  “Breathe,” the first nanny said.

  “Breeeeeeathe,” the second nanny said.

  They took long, exemplary inhales.

  “Do the thing,” the third nanny said.

  Susan looked at her for a few seconds. Then she cradled her arms around an imaginary bundle and began to rock it back and forth. She released a long, rattling breath, and stared resolutely at the nothing in her arms.

  “Self-soothing,” the first nanny whispered to me.

  “Take care of the baby,” the second nanny said, patting her heart illustratively. She had impressive, maternal-seeming breasts. I wondered if my flat chest was an advertisement for my professional incompetence. Could everyone tell I lacked a spiritual compass? I wore flimsy things called bralettes. I had never disciplined my imagination.

  “There’s Gatorade in the fridge.” The elevator dinged to announce its return, and the third nanny held it open for the other two. Her forearm was exceptionally strong. Her veins looked like the stems of wildflowers. I imagined them coursing with blood and, implausibly, milk. “Rehydrate after crying,” she said. Then the doors shut and they were gone.

  Susan was looking at me when I turned around. She shivered from exertion, but she wasn’t crying anymore.

  “It isn’t real,” Susan said, holding out the baby.

  I nodded, but I lifted it out of her arms anyway.

  “I have to leave soon,” she said.

  I looked tenderly at the inside of my elbow.

  “But you’ll be back,” I said, swaying gently back and forth.

  “Maybe.”

  “Will you miss us while you’re gone?”

  Susan circled her hands around my wrists. They were warm, just as they should have been. She wrenched my arms apart before I could stop her. I flinched, and felt stupid for flinching. We stood there for a moment, looking at the floor, or at the baby on the floor.

  “Don’t be silly,” she said, and we went to brush our teeth.

  WANTS AND NEEDS

  .

  The summer Val turned twenty-five, her sort-of stepbrother, Zeke, came to live with her in New York. He was nineteen, and when he appeared at her front door, two pairs of shoes dangling from his backpack, drinking greedily from a can of Coke, she was meeting him for the first time. Decades ago, Zeke’s mother had been married to Val’s father.

  In the evenings, Val came home from work—wet armpits, Band-Aids falling off blisters—and Zeke told her about his childhood. He was raised with mantras and stir-fries and a hot tub in the backyard. His dad submerged himself in the tub twice a day, the jets turning the water the same opaque white as his chest hair. For ecological reasons, Zeke’s mom took sponge baths while listening to an app that played thirteen different kinds of rain. Spring rain and winter rain, rain on concrete, rain on sand, rain on tarp, rain on jungle canopy. In their part of California, droughts were common, and sometimes it was illegal to use the garden hose.

  For every story he told, Val did the math to match it up with one of her own. He sailed across the Gulf of Mexico the same year she didn’t get a prom date. His parents showed him how to help with the ropes, hand over hand over hand over hand. He broke his left wrist while she was in college and his right wrist during the first lonesome spring she lived in Queens, when every crocus—they’d come too soon—was another false hope.

  In exchange for memories, Val dispensed worldly advice. She told Zeke that water pressure was one way of assessing wealth. If he’d gone to college, she said, he would have learned about shower shoes. She bought him a pair of stiff rubber flip-flops from the bodega on the corner and told him boys should use conditioner, too.

  One morning, Val heard Zeke having sex with her roommate through the thin bathroom wall. She turned off the water just to be sure. She stood for a while under the intermittent drip of the showerhead, watching the lather slide off her stomach, listening to their heavy breathing. Later, Val explained to Zeke that the roommate was from a famously wealthy town in Connecticut. The master bathroom in her parents’ house had a urinal and a bidet.

  “This whole thing,” Val said, gesturing to the spackled walls, the unmounted mirror, the houseplants in their cracked soil, “is just an experiment for her.”

  “So are you,” she added.

  * * *

  —

  Val took Zeke to a dinner party with eight types of cheese and one enormous salad. The guests were all women.

  “Tell them your mom does Tarot,” she told him. “They’ll love that.”

  They passed around wine and made jokes about being salad girls.

  “Don’t let yourself become a parody,” one of them said to Zeke, her hand on his arm.

  “There are so many parodies,” another agreed, as if they were talking about an infectious disease.

  Zeke ate three plates of salad while the women discussed a mutual friend. The friend had recently started working as a high-end escort.

  “She gets paid to wear a plunging neckline and eat expensive sushi.”

  “Not sushi,” said another. “Steak.”

  “There’s no physical contact involved.”

  “The men just want a dinner date.”

  “Men never just want anything.”

  Val watched someone carve away the rind on a wedge of Spanish cheese. “The wax is edible. You can eat it.”

  “I don’t want to eat it.”

  “The men are the pathetic ones,” someone else said, spearing a tomato emphatically. “Doesn’t tha
t make her the powerful one?”

  Later, when Val and Zeke were sitting on her couch—scratchy plaid, a relic from someone’s grandfather’s office—she made fun of them.

  “Every single person at that dinner party is a glorified receptionist,” she said.

  “Aren’t they your friends?” Zeke asked.

  She hesitated. “I guess so.”

  For several years, Val’s job was reading and rejecting movie scripts at a prominent production company. The scripts came from teenagers and convicted felons and grad students brimming with ambition. At first, Val wrote them long and involved rejection letters. By the end, she didn’t write them at all. She met the salad girls at some point during this slow, perhaps imperceptible, slide. They were worldly. They’d been to Oxford and to the opera, they knew the right adjectives for wine. Every once in a while, they proposed starting a book club. Most of all, they complained about their jobs, and they knew how to make complaints into stories. The boss who ate his earwax, the boss who melted butter in his coffee, the boss who ordered his kids a dog from Florida, then returned it within a week. (One of the girls wrote the email requesting a full refund, citing frequent urination and a high-pitched bark.) If the stories were especially funny or especially sad, Val wrote them down in a small black notebook.

  By the time Zeke came to live with her, Val had become a paralegal, and she, too, had learned the art of the story. For a while, it had been a small, reliable pleasure: to unfurl each detail in just the right sequence, to hold the girls’ attention and be rewarded with their conspiratorial laughter. Eventually, the conspiracy grew boring—she stopped writing things down—but she kept complaining, anyway.

  The couch was small, only slightly larger than a love seat, and she and Zeke sat with their backs against the armrests, their shins nearly touching.

  “The sad thing is, I wish I were bold enough to answer Craigslist ads,” Val said. “You know, to do something ill-advised.”

  “Something memorable,” Zeke said.

  “I take pride in not clicking on Internet ads,” she said.

  “What’s wrong with that?”

  He rolled them a joint, which Val said didn’t count as illicit, because his dad had taught him how.

  “All my rebellions are fake.”

  Zeke wore a hemp bracelet and a hemp anklet. Val had snipped off his hemp choker with a pair of nail clippers shortly after he arrived. She said only teenagers wore chokers.

  When Zeke wasn’t wearing a shirt, Val couldn’t help staring. Pectus excavatum, he said—a concave chest. It looked like something had been scooped out of him, or else like something had been pressed into him. His chest sunk inward and his ribs popped outward, like an overturned rowboat. Val was surprised by the urge to touch it. She looked down at her own chest, dismayed by the weight of her breasts.

  “My parents couldn’t handle another fuckup,” Val said.

  Zeke mumbled agreement while he sealed the joint with his tongue.

  “Do your parents even believe in fuckups?”

  The smell of weed brought Val’s roommate out of the kitchen. Zeke swung his feet onto her lap. His boxers were old, the elastic curling away from his waist like a sneering lip, and from a certain angle Val could see his scrotum, more grey than pink. Eventually he disappeared into the roommate’s bedroom, and Val stayed on her half of the couch. The roommate giggled on the other side of the door.

  While she listened to them laugh, Val traced a scar above her kneecap. On bad TV shows, the victims of crimes were always identified by moles or scars in strange places, places only someone who really knew you would have seen. Val had looked for distinctive markings—a freckle in her armpit, maybe, or a birthmark inside her thigh—but she never found anything. Everyone could see the scar on her knee, and even she couldn’t remember what it was from.

  * * *

  —

  When Val was eighteen, her older brother had tried and failed to hang himself. Her high school graduation was only a few weeks away. Her teachers exempted her from final exams, and one of her friends said it would have made a great college essay.

  Val’s parents consulted a family therapist, and a half-hearted reckoning followed, in which Val and her brother learned about their father’s previous marriage for the first time. The therapist said that secrecy was toxic. Reluctantly, her father told them the story of meeting his ex-wife, Naomi. They were at a campground in Colorado, he said, both of them ankle deep in a stream. He was washing his sandals and she was panning for gold. In all her life, Val had never seen her father wear sandals.

  Val’s brother contacted Naomi right away, hoping to find someone who would share his resentment toward his parents. In the end, Naomi was a disappointment. Her emails were sporadic and badly punctuated, sentences and half-sentences strung together with ellipses. She said she turned on the computer only once in a while, and it frightened her every time: an animal whirring to life. Naomi said that she had sat with her anger and no longer harbored any ill will toward her ex-husband. Maybe his presence, she wrote, was more difficult to endure than his absence. She mentioned her husband and son, but never by name. The emails got shorter and the ellipses got longer and eventually the messages stopped coming.

  Val made no effort to get in touch, and several years went by. Occasionally, she told people about her long-lost, not-quite stepfamily for the sake of a good story. Tell us one thing we wouldn’t guess by looking at you.

  Years later, Zeke was the one to reach out. He sent Val a message on Facebook, which she checked more often than she liked to admit, monitoring the whereabouts of her ex-boyfriend’s ex-girlfriend. Val told herself this was an inventive form of surveillance—born of something less like jealousy and more like curiosity. At least she wasn’t wasting time on him.

  By then, Val’s brother had moved to San Francisco and Bali and North Dakota. He had worked at a frozen-yogurt shop, an ashram, an oil rig. Student debt notices and jury summonses piled up at addresses he no longer remembered. Inevitably, he returned to their parents’ house, where his bedroom—the guest room—had been painted dusk rose, or dust rose, no one could ever remember which. He stored his clothes in a suitcase and left cash for the electricity bill in the kitchen whenever he could, even though no one asked him to. His mother said, Make yourself at home, but he insisted: I’m just a guest.

  To Val, a stepbrother sounded refreshing. In Zeke’s old profile pictures, he peeked out of a tent and grew a scraggly, adolescent beard. He leapt into the air, fingers grazing a Frisbee. He pinned a white corsage on a girl’s satiny waist.

  Val decided she was tired of cultivating her own complexities. Maybe they didn’t actually exist. She let a few days go by, and then she messaged Zeke back.

  * * *

  —

  One afternoon in the middle of August, when the fancy parts of the city had emptied out, Val and Zeke rode the Staten Island Ferry until it got dark. It was her birthday, but she didn’t mention it. Tickets were free and the view was good. She brought a bottle of wine, which turned lukewarm after one round-trip journey in the sun. Val had imagined there would be something luxurious about this tedium. The other passengers would get off and get on, beholden to some invisible, meaningless imperative—to go somewhere, to get somewhere. There would be something impressive, she thought, in their determination to stay put, to oversee the herd of arrivals and departures, to stretch out across the seats when the deck emptied out, to pass the wine back and forth.

  The truth was that the men smelled of beer and the children of sunscreen. The engine idled noisily. Trash rustled underneath the benches. The wine got warm and conversation slowed. Every time someone held a phone aloft to take a picture, Val imagined it falling overboard, swallowed up in the curdled white wake.

  They ate eggplant Parmesan and two fist-size meatballs at the only restaurant within walking distance of the ferry stat
ion, and when they got home Zeke began to vomit. Val stood outside the bathroom door uncertainly, listening to the sound of him gagging. The faucet ran for an entire minute. When Zeke emerged, Val thought he looked yellow and somehow shrunken, but maybe she was imagining it.

  He puked three more times that night. In between the second and third times, Val bought him a liter of fluorescent Gatorade and a package of curly straws. The fourth time, she opened the door even though he told her not to. He was mostly coughing up mucus, flecked here and there with black eggplant skin. His back was cold and damp to the touch. When he turned to look at her, his eyes were desperate—fear that made him look either extremely young or extremely old. She took the fear to be honesty, and was filled with bitterness for all the other faces that had refused to reveal themselves to her. She rubbed Vaseline into the cracks of his chapped lips. She overdid it. The skin around his mouth glistened.

  * * *

  —

  It was a twenty-four-hour bug, and Val felt guilty for wishing it would last longer. Her roommate came and went, changing from one outfit into another into another. Office clothes and gym clothes and a dress that showed her whole spine. Zeke didn’t appear to resent her indifference, so Val resented it on his behalf.

  She had called in sick to work, expecting a gradual recuperation, but by the afternoon Zeke had regained his strength.

  “I’m good at bouncing back,” he said, shrugging.

  He took off somewhere on his bike, and Val had no excuse when a friend invited her for coffee. Waiting for their drinks, they observed, as they always did, how many storefronts had opened in recent months. Her friend had ordered something frothy with unnamed health benefits. The first several sips of Val’s coffee tasted chemical.

  “Have you told your parents that Zeke’s living with you?”

  Val crinkled a packet of raw brown sugar but didn’t open it.

  “I’ve been googling pets on Craigslist at work,” she said, without looking up. “Do you think that’s a fireable offense?”