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 proteins 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