“In this collection of stories, the art of truth-telling has been combined with the magic of fortune-telling. . . . Moving and haunting, edgy and searching, reaffirming and devastating. To read it is to be dazzled, and to be changed. A serious accomplishment.”
—Laura Kasischke, author of Mind of Winter
“What would Emma Bovary face in our twenty-first century—would she find her needed liberty, or trudge through a life that is only different from hers cosmetically? These questions arise when I read If the Body Allows It. Megan Cummins is a gifted storyteller, and these stories, intimately written, nevertheless peel off all layers from everyday existence to reveal the deep wounds, the tender hopes, and the dilemmas, tragic and comic, of the modern-day Emmas in the world.”
—Yiyun Li, author of Where Reasons End
“Megan Cummins writes with great tenderness about the world today, when nothing seems stable and everyone has to find meaning where they can. . . . There is great wisdom here, and solace, and brilliance, and surprising laughs. I loved this book so much.”
—Alice Elliott Dark, author of In the Gloaming
Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Fiction
Editor
Kwame Dawes
If the Body Allows It
Stories
Megan Cummins
University of Nebraska Press | Lincoln
© 2020 by Megan Cummins
Cover designed by University of Nebraska Press; cover image © Stocksy / Maja Topcagic.
Author photo © Francis Cosgriff.
The following chapters were previously published, some in different forms: “Aerosol” in One Teen Story; “We Are Holding Our Own” in A Public Space; “That Was Me Once” in the Masters Review; “Water Burial” in Hobart; “The Beast” in Ninth Letter; “Heart” as “Wild Beating Hearts” in Okey-Panky; “Eyes” as “Engine” in Phoebe; and “Skeleton” as “Q&A” in Joyland.
All rights reserved.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Cummins, Megan, author.
Title: If the body allows it: stories / Megan Cummins.
Description: Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, [2020] | Series: Prairie schooner book prize in fiction
Identifiers: LCCN 2019054553
ISBN 9781496222831 (paperback)
ISBN 9781496223050 (epub)
ISBN 9781496223067 (mobi)
ISBN 9781496223074 (pdf)
Classification: LCC PS3603.U66333 A6 2020 | DDC 813/.6—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019054553
The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.
For Mark Cummins
who was my father
Contents
I
Heart
The Beast
Countergirls
II
Eyes
Future Breakfasts
We Are Holding Our Own
III
Lungs
That Was Me Once
Flour Baby
IV
Blood
Water Burial
Aerosol
V
Skin
Tough Beauty
Higher Power
VI
Skeleton
Acknowledgments
I
Heart
The doctor looks at me and says—no fuss, no apology—that someone like me should never be pregnant. This medication, that complication: they keep on doing card tricks with your life, even when you’re doing better. I can’t decide whether to be relieved or devastated. What’s gone is not only the chance to have a baby but also the chance to decide whether or not I want a baby. So I say to my doctor, “Huh, that’s interesting.” Afterward the room is silent except for the crinkling of the exam table paper and the bubbling of the keyboard as the doctor finishes her notes.
I make my next appointment on my way out—Marie, M-a-r-i-e, I spell for the receptionist when she doesn’t hear me. I sit alone in my car and glide through New Jersey toward the Newark brownstone where I live.
I think of the time I lied and told a cashier at Meijer that I had a daughter. This was in Ann Arbor, during college, years ago. The years since seem to have come and gone without even taking off their coats. The cashier asked me if I had a sick kid at home when the ten bottles of Pedialyte I was buying wobbled down the conveyor belt, fluorescent against the night outside, little lies themselves. I said yes, and the cashier—I remember her hair was the color of the inside of an almond—asked how old and I said eleven.
The lie emerged from my mouth sure of itself. But it was a ridiculous lie, the type of lie that would capsize you, the type of lie that makes people believe they know everything about you. I was only twenty-one, after all.
I was buying the Pedialyte for Octavia, who was my roommate, not my child, and her colon was full of bleeding ulcers. The Meijer was familiar to us, we’d been shopping there for years, but now Octavia was bedridden and in many ways I’d gotten used to doing everything with her, so it felt strange to wander the bright empty aisles alone.
Only one month earlier we’d decided, she and I, that it would be wise to go grocery shopping in a blizzard. This was before she got sick, before I got sick, before her father died and before mine did too. Before we both left Michigan and lost each other in the world, and back when writing was easier because I didn’t have anything to write about. Maybe the blizzard was telling us: Stay home, girls, and let the world do its worst, but not to you, not yet. Instead we flew through the aisles, staticky with excitement because we loved this kind of daily danger back then, and beckoned it. By the time we were outside the wind was busy rearranging the world. The wheels of the cart tried to trample the snowdrifts, those piles of uncarved marble looking bright and starved on the asphalt. She pulled the cart and I pushed. Our laughter was crinkle cut and captured by the wind, carried to the stars, which I seem to recall shining brightly, which is impossible, but still, that’s how I remember it: the constellations looking down on us through the white silk of the storm as though we were their only constituents, the two of us and our plastic bags that flapped in the wind like wild beating hearts.
Then we drove home on the icy roads and we were completely fine.
As I angle my car into its spot in Newark, a light precipitation falls. Somewhere between snow and rain. I kill the engine and sit in the car, which ticks as it cools, surrounded by the quiet midday street. Ralph, my boyfriend, is gone for the day, and when he gets home we’ll pick up where we left off in our daily arguing. I should get on the train and go to work for the afternoon like I said I would, but I might call in. I want to call Octavia but she and I lost touch years ago. I’ve heard she’s better. I’ve heard she has a baby. I’ll probably cry in the shower later. There’s nothing wrong with crying in the shower sometimes, even when you’re in your thirties. Especially when you’re in your thirties.
Back then I’d been embarrassed by the lie. Now I think that it might have felt good to shock someone, to have, if only briefly, a secret life. The cashier had stared at me when I said the made-up age—eleven—and the look in her eyes had said she could do nothing for me but tell me how much I owed.
The Beast
Twenty years had passed since I’d last seen the Beast. We were seventeen and embarrassed by each other back then. I’d asked him to prom. He’d agreed on the conditions that I would cover expenses and that we would have sex. I’d accepted the terms, so we had shared one night together, me in an aqua spaghetti-strap dress and him in a cheap rented tux. We both seemed to think we could have done better as we lay together in the motel bed,
a foot of space between us.
On a Sunday morning at my kitchen table all those years later, I turned a page in the New Plains Record, and there he was. He’d become famous without my knowing it. His real name was Hadrian, and it was strange to see it in print. He and his band—a heavy metal group called Beastific—were doing what they called a Rural Terror Tour. They played small venues outside of cities, or they rented barns far out in the country.
I know we’ve played much bigger venues, noted Hadrian in the article, but we like the intimacy of a small place off the beaten track. Our fans do, too. Beastific is about the people.
“Beast. Ific,” I said. “Be-ah-stific.”
“What are you saying?” my husband asked.
I hadn’t heard him walk into the kitchen. He wore a bathrobe, though it was nearly noon. We slept like teenagers on weekends, throwing off our REM cycles and making Monday mornings hellish. Our jobs at offices eroded the idea that living a long life was a good thing. We just wanted to sleep and never wake up.
The terms of our marriage also included a no-children clause, a stipulation that remained uncontested by either of us, even though boredom had come to our hearth like a sleeping dog. I’d assumed one of us would have a change of heart, or that we’d make a mistake: an insurgent zygote would hold us at gunpoint and make us really decide if we meant it.
But that never happened, and I told myself I didn’t want children. What if I couldn’t love them? Worse, what if they couldn’t love me?
“Beverly, what are you thinking so hard about?” Robert asked. “Yoo-hoo. You look like you want to kill someone.”
“If you were going to name your band with a pun on the word beatific, by spelling it like this”—I held up the paper and pointed to the name in the headline—“would you expect people to pronounce the first part normally, like beast, or the way you pronounce beatific, like be-ahst . . .”
“I’m not sure I follow,” he said.
“I just think it’s asking a lot of people.”
“Hmm.” Robert sat down across from me and tugged at the Financial section until it came loose.
“We should unsubscribe from the paper,” I said.
“Does this beast thing really upset you that much?”
“It’s not that,” I said. “It’s just garbage. They just write garbage. We can’t afford to pay for garbage.”
“We’re actually doing okay right now, money-wise,” Robert said. “So we can buy garbage if we want it. Do you know their music?”
“No.”
“Do you want to go see them play?” Robert asked.
“Not really,” I said quickly, folding the page and tucking it beneath the Sports section. “I’m making an Eggo. Want one?”
“Two,” Robert said.
I took the box from the freezer and shook out a handful of waffles. Did the band’s name mean Hadrian remembered me? The Beast had been my nickname for him. When he transferred to my school in the eleventh grade, he had long, chestnut-brown hair and a chiseled-looking face. He looked like the Beast from Beauty and the Beast after he turned back into a prince. A trace of rage shimmered around him, but for the most part the Beast was a quiet person.
I meant to taunt him with the nickname, because everyone else sought to make his life miserable, but then I grew fond of him. I thought of myself then as having one shy foot in the popular circle, so it was important to me that no one find out about my crush. I was mortified, of course, to realize I was in love with him—but this was before I knew I was neither popular nor unpopular, utterly nondescript. No one cared what I did or who I liked.
Then he found out about the nickname. I told too many people, thought myself too clever. One day he came to school with a close-cropped haircut, and the sudden transformation made me love him even more. I wondered if I’d had an effect on him, if he cared what I thought. The next day, I asked him to prom, jumping at his stipulations because I didn’t know enough then to know I was acting cowardly. I told my friends I was doing it as a joke.
The ringing phone brought me back to our kitchen in New Plains, Nebraska. I answered.
“I’m calling about an overdue balance on an American Express card,” said the woman on the other end. She’d asked for me by name. She had a pleasant voice, but cool and firm.
“I know this is a scam,” I said. “I’ve never had an American Express card in my life. Goodbye.”
“Again?” Robert asked.
“Again. On a Sunday, too. I looked it up on the internet. Apparently, these scammers convince people to mail checks to them.”
“I just checked your credit score last week,” Robert said. “You’re looking good.”
He put down the paper and grinned. “Definitely looking good from here.”
From here was about as close as we came to each other these days.
* * *
I worked at an insurance brokerage firm as something called a marketing specialist, but I mostly answered phones and forwarded emails and acted as a personal assistant and, sometimes, partner in crime to my boss, Cal Nevins.
Once, without discomfort, Cal handed me a pair of women’s glasses and a disk of birth control pills along with an address written on a scrap of paper. I wrapped the glasses in paper towels from the bathroom and slipped everything into a manila envelope, sticking a generic return label to its corner. I thought about adding a note, warning the woman she could get pregnant on the pill if she chronically missed days, but no one needs a stranger to patronize her.
One time I walked to the liquor store on my lunch break and bought him a fifth of Grey Goose with the company card. I didn’t mind, I told him. I needed to buy a lottery ticket anyway, and a tube of Pringles for my lunch. I used my own cash for the lottery ticket, not his card, and I saved the receipt. I didn’t want any trouble if I won, but I didn’t end up winning.
Cal often went out for long lunches at the bar in the hotel next door to our building, then called me from the parking lot and asked me to bring him his car keys. I always did, no matter how strongly he smelled of booze or how red his eyes were.
I commuted forty minutes from New Plains to Omaha each day to do these things. Taking care of Cal’s twin daughters, I liked best. They could be spoiled, grumbling girls, but they were sweethearts more than anything.
I found them both sitting in my desk chair when I arrived at work on Monday morning. The office was empty except for them. They’d taken ice cream from the freezer and were sucking chocolate off of flimsy plastic spoons. The lights were off, and cartoons playing on my computer blew moonlight over the girls’ faces.
“Dad told us to wait here for you, Bevie.” Caroline looked up at me.
“Is that so?” I leaned over them and nudged down the volume on the computer. “Are these cartoons pirated?”
“No.” Maggie giggled. “You don’t have to pirate anymore, Bev, you stream.”
“Let’s go.” I frowned. “I’ll take you to school.”
Maggie cried in the car, while Caroline stared pensively out the window.
“I’ve just about had enough of the second grade.” Maggie hiccupped.
“I know,” I said. “It’s a hard life. Here’s a wet wipe. Clean that chocolate off your face.”
“I didn’t do my homework,” Caroline said. “I was supposed to make bookmarks.”
I sighed. Caroline’s poor performance in school meant Cal had to go to conferences with his loathed ex-wife. “Tell your teacher you left them at home, but that someone’s bringing them later. Okay?”
“Which home?” Caroline asked. “Mom’s or Dad’s?”
“Well, that’s up to you. Actually, say it was your dad’s.”
“I did my homework,” mumbled Maggie.
I finished Caroline’s bookmarks when I returned to the office, which was now alive with ringing phones and the rushing sound of the copier. The lights were on in Cal’s office, but the blinds were drawn and the door closed. Caroline’s smile, reflected in the rearview mirro
r, had harpooned me. I felt elated from having spent a little time with her and Maggie. Sometimes I wondered what I wouldn’t do for those girls.
The assignment was to illustrate bookmarks with depictions from The Trumpet of the Swan. I wasn’t a good artist, and my thoughts wandered from the girls to Hadrian. The night before had brought a burgeoning fantasy of the two of us together and young. I’d imagined we’d done things we hadn’t, normal things like driving around in his car or eating at a restaurant. As quickly as the fantasy brought joy, it brought unhappiness, a reminder I was no longer very young. Our old selves, or what could have been our old selves, filled me with sadness, the striking type of sadness that demands to be remedied someway, somehow, and immediately. I put Caroline’s bookmarks aside and clicked through the internet until I had two tickets to the Beastific show in my basket. Luckily they were cheap; my credit card was nearly maxed out. I paid for the tickets before I could change my mind.
I bought two tickets because one seemed desperate. I didn’t want to take Robert with me, but who else was there? The show was the next day, a Tuesday night in New Plains, when everything was so dead we sometimes wondered if the sun would overlook us in the morning.
The phone rang. I answered.
“How did you get this number?” I said. “Stop harassing me.”
The caller was a man this time, from the same supposed collection agency, and he recited with confidence my full name and my Social Security number. He gave the balance on the credit card, an astronomical amount I wasn’t sure I’d heard correctly.
“I’ve told you that I know this is a scam. If you were a real collection agency you’d send me something in the mail.”
“We have. Several times.”
I listened to his breathing as he waited for me to respond. Then I hung up. I pulled up the number for Amex’s customer service and was ready to call them—to complain, to ease my worries—when Cal emerged from his office, wearing a white shirt with thin silky pinstripes running up and down the fabric. His always bleary eyes made him look some combination of tired and high. Sometimes I thought he was the wrong sort of person to have money; other times I believed the money had made him the way he was. I often felt protective of him, or maybe I was only protective of myself: I helped him with so many of the things he did wrong.
If the Body Allows It Page 1