by Amina Cain
“Like what?” I asked.
“Our friendship, for one thing.”
“But we’re cousins.”
“Okay, then our family.”
She dragged me along to an old brownstone that is owned by the historical society. In one room, a glass pitcher had been placed in a clear glass box and set on top of a pedestal along with four small cups. “Is this hand blown?” I asked.
“Everything in this room is hand blown.”
What were all of these hand blown things here for? What were we supposed to think about when we looked at them? Next we walked into a bedroom. There was a bed with a green and red bedspread on top of it, and a wooden headboard against pink and white wallpaper from another time. Above the bed was a painting. “Snow scene of a courtesan holding an umbrella being ferried across the Sumida River by a porter,” Clarice read out loud. In the painting, the porter wore something that covered his head and face, like a dust mop made out of soft straw. The brown river water surrounded the boat, moving toward it in little waves.
“Do you like this place because a rich family once lived here?” I asked her. I knew I was being ridiculous, but I couldn’t stop myself from saying it.
“No, I just like it.”
“Why?”
“What does it matter to you?”
Out on the balcony of the house, Clarice’s open coat billowed around her in the wind. She had gone out there to take a break from me, and I watched her looking at the city, an ugly city that seemed to have no end.
THE SLEEVE OF MY COAT
We have gotten into the habit of inviting other couples to our house to play cards, and once they are here they stay for a long time. I am always surprised by it. At five A.M. one would expect to be in bed, sleeping. They relax here, maybe too much. It might be that they feel relaxed by how close we are to the ocean.
In the afternoons everything happens that can’t happen at night. Time. Food. A toy horse that races across the living room floor when my neighbor comes to visit with her children. We sit on the terrace ever so tensely. Almost transparent, like the tip of a plant.
For a long time I couldn’t get settled in life. I remember this constantly. I think about it on the terrace. I would see a dog and think it was a cat. Then something got bigger. My personality.
In between visits from the couples, and the neighbor and her children, my husband and I work in our studies. My husband’s study is filled with tropical plants, which he keeps warm in the winters with fluorescent lights. My study is filled with books and dust. I like working when I know he is also working. I hear him watering his plants, and smoking. Sometimes I’m extremely frustrated when I write, and in other moments I am extremely scared. I never knew it was possible to be scared while working on a story.
One night in my study I felt I was supposed to write about our house. I had never before seen our house as a strange thing. I looked at the clothes in my closet. I knew that this was writing, to look at those clothes. Later, when the couples arrived, I was distant from them.
Tonight it seems like fall, but it isn’t. In the kitchen my husband is making a very involved salad. We sit talking about our work, and eating, and I drip olive oil onto my blouse, accidentally.
“Your face is flushed,” my husband says.
Something croaks loudly at the window, startling me.
I will never write a novel. I will never write about the couples. I will know the couples. I will know myself.
“What’s wrong?” my husband asks.
“There’s always someone here. When am I supposed to write?”
After dinner I go into one of the rooms of the house. Sitting in a chair, an antique, I feel—enormous. My personality. Mixed with fall.
My husband is calling me from somewhere upstairs. It sounds as if he is in a hallway. I get interested in my own breath, which doesn’t happen very often. The curtain moves, and I like the way it matches something inside me. But I know that a curtain shouldn’t match me, and that I shouldn’t like it.
Morning arrives and I drag myself out of bed hours after my husband has gotten up. The room is cold and airy, but I don’t care: today there’s something nice about it. I want to air out my mind. I find a pair of pale yellow tights in one of the drawers of our dresser.
“You idiot,” I say to them.
But I go outside wearing the yellow tights all the same and find my neighbor’s daughter playing with a huge stuffed animal on our terrace.
“What’s that?” I ask.
“A rhinoceros,” says Sylvie. She’s wearing a black leotard and tutu, and grabbing onto the banister she pulls herself along it. She doesn’t look like she’s dancing, but she does seem to be enjoying herself.
I ask her, because I do want to know, “Is that dancing?” and she says that it is, that she learned it the day before in her ballet class. “It’s not dancing,” I tell her and she doesn’t respond. Just like with the couples, I’m surprised at how long this “dancing” can go on, but I try to stay present.
It’s the kind of morning that’s more like an evening it’s so dark outside. A newspaper blows along the street. I feel something towards it. A tree limb sways up and down in the breeze.
Outside I can see my past. Here is where I stood with a friend and talked about a movie. Here is the exact moment I knew I wanted to write. Here’s the bed I slept in with someone I once loved. Here is the weather when I had bronchitis. Here is the emotion when I said goodbye.
That night I drink five glasses of wine, even though I usually only drink one. With five glasses of wine, I begin to admire my life. All these attractive couples are around me. How did it happen?
“I made lentil soup,” I hear one of the men say, as he deals cards around a table. It makes me realize I have no idea what the couples do when they are not at our house.
There is my husband. He’s been with the same couple all night. I begin to admire him, the way the couple is very easily in his presence. I am usually rigid, and though many couples approach me, I have a hard time allowing them to stay. I make my excuses and go out to the terrace. I look down at the grass. Inevitably a couple comes and sits with me quietly. This is the kind of couple I am most suited for.
When we try to sleep that night my husband is like a dog or a cat, and I’m unsettled by it.
“A couple came upstairs,” he says.
“When?”
“After you had five glasses of wine.”
“What did they do up here?”
He paws at the darkness. “They wanted to see your study.”
“What did they think about it?”
“They said they felt at home.”
The next day it’s warm again, as it should be. The ocean is calm and it looks as if a shark will come out of it. Then my neighbor appears.
“What’s wrong?” she asks.
“When I look at you I see a character from a book.”
“I am not a character.”
“You are. An annoying one.”
She doesn’t leave. The water moves through its waves. “It’s you who looks like a character.”
“Which one?”
“The one who—.” She stops. “Dies.”
At home I ask my husband, “Where’s our neighbor’s husband?” I am sitting in his study among his tropical plants. There are so many of them. One plant blocks out one couple.
“I think he left.”
The couples and my neighbor and her children, I write in my notebook.
“What are you writing?” my husband asks me.
“It’s too new to share.”
“Are you worried she’s lonely?”
“No. Will you play some music? Something pretty.”
He plays something stressful.
I like having to wear tights under my dress. It’s because of something inside me. Their hair blowing back lightly from their faces. You’ll never understand how angry I am. Today the plants are like a painting. It’s not a cry to writing, it’s a cry
to a future novel. Always ignoring her. People have fucked in here. Here is a novel in which—I know them in a certain kind of way. Sylvie has picked up a rhinoceros and is hitting it against a wall.
“You’re writing in my study.”
“Is it okay?”
“Of course, you’re my wife.”
“When the couple’s in my study, can I be here?”
“Don’t you want to be in your study with them, to make sure they don’t mess anything up?”
THEY’VE BEEN BRINGING THEM HERE FOR DECADES
“Can you see?”
“No, it’s too dark.”
“Hang on to this railing.”
“It’s so desolate here, like a corral. It feels like I’m holding on to something people tie their horses to.”
“It’s true. People bring their horses here. They’ve been bringing them here for decades.”
What were we doing in a corral? I had agreed to spend time with my friend; I hadn’t agreed to be in a place I couldn’t see. Lately he had been doing versions of this, asking me to participate in one thing or activity, and then putting me in another situation. I should have been used to it, but I wasn’t. To be in this place in the horses’ absence was … what? My friend knew this; it was why he had brought me here.
I tried to take everything in; I tried to be in this place. I think my friend wanted us to be in the place without talking, but I wanted to talk, so I did. “Last night I went to a dinner party,” I said.
“Really?”
“Really. The table was set up outside in the grass, not far from a hive. We sat there; we ate. There was a conversation about a book I had actually just read, but I didn’t join in.”
“Why not?”
“I liked listening. I thought it was such a nice coincidence, a long conversation about a book I had just finished; it was as if something or someone had brought this to me, said after you are done there will be a conversation for you to listen to.”
“Who would’ve brought it?”
“That doesn’t matter. After dinner I went to look at the hive and saw the bees flying in the air. They were so small. It was dark out by that time, but not as dark as it is now.”
I turned to my friend, but I couldn’t see him. I could see a shape of him. I stuck my hand out and hit his sleeve.
“What is the book about?”
We could see each other now; we faced each other, at a table. Lights were on.
“It’s about a man and a woman who spend time together, but in a way that most of us don’t spend time. He is repulsed by her because she is a woman. She doesn’t care; she wouldn’t trade their kind of relationship for another. Can I read some of it to you?”
I took the book from my bag: “The woman says, ‘it suits her very well, what she’s going through with him now. She wonders what she would have done instead if they hadn’t met in the cafe. It’s here in this room that she’s had her real summer, her experience, her encounter with hatred of her own sex, and of her body, and of her life.’”
“Did you like it?”
“I loved it.”
“What did the people at the dinner party say about it?”
“They thought it was funny.”
“How is it funny?”
“The female character puts black silk over her face and says she’s a writer. Listen to this part: ‘One night she asks him if he could do it with his hand, but without coming close to her, without even looking. He says he couldn’t. He can’t do anything like that with a woman. He can’t even say how he feels about her having asked. If he agreed, he might not want to see her any more, ever. He might even hurt her.’ But he wants her to be there, every night, just lying in that room. Just lying there.”
“Would you like to be in that situation?”
“Yes. Well, I don’t think I would like it while it was happening, but afterwards I would.”
“Why after?”
“Because from that safe distance I could appreciate what had happened.”
“What do you think would happen?”
“I would be intimate with someone in a new way. Or, I would at least recognize our time together as intimate, admit to its qualities of intimacy. I would experience those qualities.”
“Is lying in a room every night intimate, if you and the other person are strangers, aren’t even attracted to each other, and are possibly even repulsed?”
“It’s intimate because of the repulsion.”
“I don’t know if I see that as intimate.”
Later it was dark again. I thought I could hear the faint sounds of something, some animal, drinking water. I imagined its tongue making contact with the water. “Can you hear that?”
“No, I don’t hear anything. I think I was asleep. Aren’t you tired?”
My challenge is to relax with another person in the way I relax when no one is there. Sometimes I can’t let go when I’m with my friend. Some part of me stays stiff, and then that stiffness seems to expand over the whole surface of my body, even when I am moving.
Again I listened for the water, but I couldn’t hear it anymore. I thought, It’s already gone. Then I thought, Let yourself go.
I said out loud: “I’m trying to relax.”
“Is it working?”
“Yes, but if you weren’t here it would be easier.”
“Should I leave?”
“No, that would be a failure.”
Relax, like the animal relaxes when it is drinking water. Relax, like I relax when I drink water. “Once you took me to a movie. This was years ago, when we first met.”
“I remember.”
“On the way to the movie it was windy, but the wind was warm. On the freeway, our hair blew around our faces. I remember the inside of your car, which was messy. From the lights on the dashboard I could see all the things you’d thrown on the floor. For me you hadn’t shaped yourself into a full person yet. You were someone I could introduce myself to. I know how to do that.”
“Do you know how to stay friends with someone for a long time?”
“I’m not sure.”
That night, while we lay in bed after we had finally stopped talking, I had a vision. Someone went crazy in a community, but was supported by everyone and everything around her. In the vision, the support was palpable in the green grass people walked through to get to wherever it was they were going. I could see her. And I knew she could see me.
WORDS COME TO ME
Even though I don’t write stories I create them in my actions. I create a feeling I don’t believe in and then I act on that feeling. I wear my puffy coat out into the snow. I walk through my neighborhood and look at the antique shops. Snow and antiques are good together. I sit in a warm place to read.
The one time in my life I had to escape from something, I created a story about the longest February of my life.
Here, I want to show you something; it is several cats.
Like a creature that won’t get down from the bed, words are coming to me.
Here I am on the street with so many people. It’s beautiful to be alive, to go into a floral shop in winter and look at fine plants sitting darkly in their pots. To be among a crowd hurts me.
“Let me see this plant,” I say to the florist. And she lets me look at it for quite some time while she works in the back. It’s strange how long I stay there.
Now words come to me. I have not asked them. Sighing, I take my notebook out of my puffed pocket and write the words down in my best hand. Though I will never be a writer, the words allow me to study a certain kind of writing. If I close my eyes I will see my written self staring back at me. If I walk to the lake something will be revealed in the waves frozen up in their certainty. Did I tell you the waves freeze here? I will feel something I don’t actually feel. Then I will fall asleep in my bed like the waves.
So much happens when I am inside my mind, but I still haven’t left the floral shop. I have not left the fine plants.
Remember when I was k
idnapped by our “master” and forced to be a part of his life in a way I never would have wished for? He took me to a dairy farm, expecting me to like it. He took me to a fancy party where the other women looked at me with rage and jealousy. How could they want that life?
My notebook is too modern. When I hold it up next to myself it contrasts greatly. Still, I am safe now. To look at antique furniture in shop windows instead of sitting on it. To know that no one will handcuff me to a wrought iron gate.
My desk is waiting for me. Softly, softly, the books. In my apartment, I draw the bathwater. I’ve been outside all day, with people, and now it is time for me to be alone. Taking baths has always been important for me, especially in winter. I am more receptive then. I can feel myself going out, and then coming back in. It’s hard not to feel connected to yourself when you’re in a hot bath.
I had good friends; I had you. We served food to the family we “worked” for. When you set the table or ladled out the soup, I looked at you lovingly. I looked at all of you this way. I wasn’t able to stop myself from doing it. Once I was beaten for standing there doing nothing while everyone else worked. “It’s just that I really wanted to see them,” I said during the beating.
The bath warms me. I will be able to emerge into the room as a warm person.
“They’re not your real friends,” my master’s wife said. Our “mistress.”
It’s too late, I thought. I know the warmth of love. I watched her pink face while she beat me. Then she pushed me onto the floor. Down there, all I had were pointy black shoes to look at. I hadn’t realized how many people, how many shoes, were in that room.
When you lie in a field with a friend and tell each other stories about your lives—when you have explored friendship—it’s impossible to forget. It comes back when you’re lying on a cold floor.
It comes back when you’re lying in the bath.
Lovingly, Juliet, blank page, edited by Anne, women of the rural areas. This is written on a piece of paper on my desk. If you sit in my chair and look down at my notebook my words are waiting for you.