by Alix Ohlin
“Is that supposed to be me?” the mother said. “I’m the best desperate prostitute in your life?” I cut away before they both started crying.
One night on the Lower East Side I had dinner with Olga, who was once again in town, and told her about Marianne and Robin. She observed that it sounded like a turbulent time, and I said she was right.
“And yet you don’t seem unhappy. Your life is moving, it isn’t stagnant,” she said, with the knack she’d always had of seeing something from a distance that I couldn’t see myself. Then she asked about my work. Since we last spoke she’d lost her disdain for reality TV; she’d decided it was an important and evolving art form. I reminded her that I’d told her as much before and she looked at me blankly.
“Everybody knows it is not reality, it is created, and yet it is the very blurring of the lines between the real and the not-real that is the source of its appeal,” she said, lecturing me as if I hadn’t told her the same thing.
“Yes,” I said. “Also the people are good-looking and behave badly.”
She tilted her head and began telling me about her current book project, The Epistemology of the Cut, in which she was examining conventions of editing, how we accepted the abrupt displacement in space and time as a given of narrative when in fact it was a construct. As with so many things, she said, we act like something is natural when it is artificial, and vice versa. “What is artificial?” she said loudly, raising her voice as if we were having an argument. “The terminology itself is critical,” she said. “Is it a cut or a joining together? Did you know that they sometimes call it that?”
I said I did, but I don’t think she heard me. She was talking about Althusserian rupture. I let her voice flow over me, thinking about how Althusser, the literary theorist, had gone crazy and killed his wife. Wondering why I remembered Althusser’s crime, I then thought of a scene in Vertigo when Jimmy Stewart stares at a coiled bun at the back of a woman’s head. The film treats this moment like the discovery of an important truth, though it turns out to be a fiction constructed by his villainous former friend. The feeling of a crucial secret being exposed hangs in the camera’s gaze, even after the story dismantles it. Maybe this was what Olga meant by epistemology. Or maybe I was just as strange as Jimmy Stewart, preoccupied with details like the coil of a woman’s hair at the nape of her neck. I heard Olga say something about reproduction, and I startled, thinking she was talking about Robin. But Olga, who’d never had any interest in children, had greeted the news of my sister’s surrogacy with a simple nod. Now she was talking about Walter Benjamin’s essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” I stopped trying to follow her train of thought, or rather I acknowledged to myself that I’d stopped following it a while ago, and I drank my tea and admired Olga in the candlelight, the rapid movement of her ideas, how she pulled at their strings and made them dance at her command.
That evening when I got home there was a message from Bernard, who’d never called before, saying Robin wasn’t doing well.
“Is the baby okay? I can’t really leave right now,” I said when I called him back. “We have to finish this episode by next week, and I’m working twelve-hour days. I’ll be there in two weeks.”
“Yeah that’s cool,” Bernard said, sounding unhappy. “I guess I’m just thinking, I don’t know, not sure about where Robin’s head will be at in two weeks.”
“What do you mean?” I said. “What’s happening there?”
There was a pause, then audible suction, the room tone taken over by Bernard’s lengthy interlude with a cigarette. “She’s kind of wigging out, I guess,” he said.
“More than when I left?”
Another silence, another slow intake of breath. “She wants to sleep with the wolves,” he said. “Like she did when Catherine was sick? But none of them are around.”
“So?”
“So she’s out looking for them,” he said.
I closed my eyes, rubbing a furrow I could feel cutting deep between my eyes, unable to smooth it. “What are you talking about?” I pictured Robin wandering the chilly woods in a white nightgown and bare feet, like some deranged Victorian heroine, howling for the wolves.
“Also she’s not eating right,” he said.
“Well, it’s okay for her to have a little junk food,” I said. “This is a rough time.”
“I’m not talking junk food.”
“Then what?”
“Stuff that’s not even food. Paper. Pebbles.”
“Robin’s eating rocks?”
“What she really likes is dirt. Other day I come in the house, she’s sitting at the kitchen table eating dirt out of a bowl, with a spoon.”
“What the hell? That’s insane.”
“Like I said,” Bernard said. “Wigging.”
34.
Javier told me that if I left I wouldn’t have a job, so I didn’t have a job. I tried not to think of my dwindling bank account; instead I flew to Montreal, rented a car, and was in the dark mountains by evening. I rolled the windows down as I pulled up, listening to the crunch of gravel that warned of my approach. The lights were off. Bernard greeted me at the door, where he’d apparently been watching for me. We hugged quickly, and I smelled his nicotined breath and the better, woodsy smell of his sweater. Only the lights in the kitchen were on, and that’s where he led me, both of us tiptoeing, like parents trying not to wake a child.
“She conks out early,” he said. “That’s one good thing.”
“How was today?”
He shrugged. “Same as yesterday.”
I rubbed my forehead again, that same unsmoothable spot. On the dog-food show the daughter had once gone to a raucous party with her Mexican boyfriend’s family and been served menudo with tripe in it, and she’d embarrassed her boyfriend by throwing up and then locking herself in her car. Later, she’d told the camera, “I’m so sorry. I was out of my zone.”
I too felt out of my zone. I looked at Bernard, and we smiled weakly. He put his hand over mine, a more welcome touch than Elena’s had been, and one more likely to make me cry.
“I did this to her,” I said, by which I meant the pregnancy.
Bernard shook his head. “She’s always had a weird streak,” he said without judgment. He rolled up his sleeve and showed me a scar on his forearm, just below the elbow. “Took a chunk out of me once,” he said. “That was back when we were abroad.”
“She bit you,” I said. The mark on his arm was puckered and faint, a ragged hole that had closed up over time.
“Nope. Corkscrew,” he said. “We were arguing in a park. She dug right in there.” His tone held a little admiration, a little nostalgia, only a little hurt. “I had it coming, kind of,” he said.
“Do I?” I said. “Have it coming, I mean.”
He wouldn’t look at me, which I took to mean he thought I did. I traced the scar with my fingertip, then drew my hand back. His skin was warm to the touch, and I was shivering. It was always so much colder here than I remembered.
* * *
—
Upstairs, I crept past my sister’s room. The door was shut and I opened it, half-hoping the creak would wake her, but it didn’t. I could see her huddled lump in the darkness, and hear her raspy breath. I stepped inside the room and sat next to her, pressing my palm against her forehead, which was damp with sweat. Although the room was chilly, she’d flung most of the covers off and heat came off her, along with a pleasant yeasty smell, like rising dough. I felt that she must’ve known I was there, even in her sleep, and I got in beside her, pulling the quilt over me, warmed more thoroughly by her body. I touched her shoulder, her elbow. She turned on her side, her back to me. My eyes got used to the darkness and I felt lively and clear and awake. She had the window cracked and its little lace curtain fluttered, then stilled. As I l
ay there she nestled against me, curving the small of her back, and I arranged myself around her, watching her as she slept.
* * *
—
In the morning she woke up slowly, wiping crusts of sleep from her eyes, and propped herself against the pillows. “What are you doing here?”
“I was worried about you. I heard you’re turning into a lunatic.”
“I might be,” she said. “You should watch out.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, putting my arms around her, but she shook me off. “I’m sorry I’m putting you through this.”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“It does matter.”
“What I meant was,” she said, “it’s too late to worry about it.”
She sat up and pressed her head to her hands. The effort seemed to exhaust her, and she lay back down. I brought her tea and toast in bed and then suggested we go for a walk, and she followed me around the property, her steps slow, draggy. We unlocked the barn, and she sat down at a piano but said she didn’t feel like playing.
Bernard made us chicken noodle soup and I forced Robin to eat it, spooning it into her mouth. She grimaced as if it were poison. Regular food tasted terrible, she said, like metal in her mouth. She craved burned matches and stones. She showed me a little grey rock she carried in the pocket of her jacket, clean from licking.
“You can’t go around eating bowls of dirt, though,” I said.
A little time on the internet had informed me that Robin’s disorder was called pica, and that it sometimes occurred during pregnancy. The word pica, I learned, meant magpie, a bird that would eat almost anything. I remembered how I used to think of myself as a magpie, collecting tidbits of information like shiny objects; but this, I also learned, was folklore. It turned out magpies didn’t like shiny objects. Scientists had performed an experiment proving that magpie thievery was a myth. The magpies have been exonerated, one scientist had written. When I told all this to Robin, she was unimpressed. She asked me to look online for clay that was safe to eat.
I said no. Instead I took her to the doctor, who recommended iron supplements and gentle exercise. So we walked, circling the property every day, Robin’s face round-cheeked, windswept, and troubled. At night I slept in her room, sometimes in bed with her, more often in a sleeping bag on the floor, and throughout the night, waking, we’d murmur little things. It’s going to rain tomorrow. Remind me, we said. I need to pull the tarp over the woodpile. Don’t let me forget to buy milk. Sometimes we fell back asleep mid-sentence, so that we just murmured to one another, Don’t let me forget.
35.
I’d brought my computer, and I spent some time editing my footage of Marianne. I stitched together her pauses, her stutters, the instants when she looked up at the ceiling or out the window, gathering her thoughts, or trying to gather them, and failing.
My sister didn’t understand how I could spend hours at a time looking at our mother’s face, listening to her voice. But I was absorbed. I found patterns and rhythms; just before Marianne changed subjects, I noted, she’d glance sideways, out the window, as if aware of some sound the camera and I couldn’t register. When she talked about her parents she licked her lips, and then when she gossiped about people in the neighborhood she pressed her lips together, firmly, as if condemnation brought her back to surer ground. I noted the moments when her eyes grew distant, interior; and then the moments when they sharpened again, often in anger, which seemed the surest route back to lucidity for her. I tried to cut at these exact moments, the pendulum shift between hazy departure and focused return. I took out the stories themselves, the useless clutter of her anecdotes, and edited the footage down to a steady stream of her face as she lost and regained her concentration. I took everything I’d learned in reality TV—the attention to the minute shifts in human expression, and how these signaled mystery, drama, emotion—and applied it to my mother. It was a study of her effort to keep her mind from changing. Eventually I composed a six-minute film called Marianne Forgets. Robin refused to watch it; Bernard sat through it politely and then said he didn’t understand what it was about but that Marianne was a nice-looking lady.
Everything in my life felt paused, tensed with waiting. When I think about that spring now, I remember Robin’s moods, her vagueness and torpor, her frequent crying, and then her less-frequent crying. I remember the birds. I’d spent my life indoors, in the buzzing fluorescence of editing bays, my ears garlanded by headphones. At Robin’s house, sleeping with the windows open, the birds woke me. I learned to identify the finches and cardinals and swallows. The little brown larks. Once as we were walking Robin told me she’d always hated her name. “It’s so ordinary,” she said. “Robins are everywhere. Puffed out with their boring red chests. And the name is so dated.”
“Lark isn’t so bad,” I said. “It’s a bit hippie, though.”
“It’s never suited you at all,” she said. She was right, of course. The robin is common, grounded, unremarkable; the lark is a slip of a bird, known for melody and flight. We should have traded but we’d each held on instead, and now it was too late to change.
36.
I brought Robin things I thought would please her: a body pillow, comfortable maternity clothes. She used the pillow but disdained the clothes, preferring men’s jeans and plaid shirts that had been left behind by who knew which previous guests. The only thing she asked me for was a full-length mirror, which she hung on the back of her bedroom door. As her belly grew and her mood lifted, she started staring at herself in it. When I knocked, I sometimes found her naked, turning from side to side, examining all the angles. “Look at this,” she said, not proudly but impartially interested, as if her body belonged to someone else.
“You look beautiful,” I said, which was true.
Robin wasn’t after compliments. “I’m like an incubator.”
She said she could feel the baby move, but when I asked to put my palm to her skin, nothing happened. The baby seemed to dart and hide from me like a fish in an aquarium tank, and I tried not to show how much this pained and concerned me, as if the baby, like all those blastocysts before it, sensed there was something wrong with me.
“I feel like I’m swimming underwater all the time. Like I’m growing gills. You know?”
I didn’t know. She sent me these postcards from the world of pregnancy, and I received them with a combination of curiosity and gratitude and envy and sadness. When I looked at her pregnant body, I felt a fascination so intense, so physical, that it was almost akin to lust. At one point I asked if I could film her, to record the baby as it grew, and she shook her head and told me I was staring at her too much already. I would, she said, just have to remember it on my own.
“Think about Marianne,” she said now, “at sixteen, and then again at twenty. With two different guys.”
She was staring at her belly button, which protruded like a pebble perched on a mountain. Bright blue veins plotted her stretched skin. I saw tears in her eyes.
“No wonder she was such a fucking maniac,” she said.
* * *
—
Bernard went back to Baltimore; maybe he worried about intruding on us, or maybe he needed his own distance. Until he left, I hadn’t realized how strange it was to be alone with Robin; we’d grown used to living as a triangle. The house felt too big for the two of us, and we knocked around inside it, loose and adrift.
One night we were sitting outside after dinner. Always hot, Robin’s cheeks were rosy, despite a chill in the air that had sent me inside for a sweater. Earlier it had rained and now when the wind blew the fir needles shook the remaining drops off. Robin was talking about sleeping outside that night, and my stomach dropped uneasily. She saw me frown.
“Don’t be uptight,” she said. “It’s so stuffy inside.” She kept all the windows open, sometimes even the
doors, and the house was drafty and eerily open; one morning I’d come downstairs to find a swallow picking at some crumbs on the kitchen table. “Maybe I should have the baby here. Just lie down on some hay in the barn and let nature take its course.”
From her lifted eyebrow I knew she was saying this to provoke me. We had a doctor at the hospital in Rivière-Rouge. I’d timed the route; we could reach a sterile medical environment in twenty-five minutes. But fear still gripped me, an anxiety and confusion that hadn’t been lessened by the forms I’d watched Robin fill out at the doctor’s office, listing a previous pregnancy that hadn’t resulted in a child.
“In Sweden,” she said now, “they spend practically the whole summer outside. Kids run around naked. It’s…” She rubbed her palm over her belly. We were sitting in Adirondack chairs Bernard had scavenged from a yard sale in town, and I remember rubbing the flat armrests of mine, instinctively imitating her.
“Summer with Monika,” I said, thinking about how we’d watched the Bergman movie together before she left, Robin saying it was boring and couldn’t we watch Independence Day instead.
“Monica?” Robin said. I was sure she didn’t remember the film or her own complaints about it. After she disappeared for those six months, every conversation we’d had tripled in significance for me; I’d combed through them, sifting each word through my fingers. But Robin was off traveling, exploring, whatever she’d done; she likely hadn’t given them any thought at all.
