by Tara Ison
You will be the only man who will ever lie in this bed, it all announces, Please.
They get into the new bed that night, the sheets’ uncrushed fibers scraping their elbows. They get in wearing long T-shirts and underwear, but they get in together. They get in together, but on opposite sides of its wide, crisp, California-king expanse, and they stay there, a gutter of space still between them. He is turned protectively away from her, like children are taught in grade school to curve away from bomb-blasted windows, from flying and dangerous debris. Protect your vulnerable organs, your face. But she wants to touch him; she wants him to touch her. She wants him pressing her knees apart, her thighs. She slides her hand across the bed toward him, she sees his shoulders cringe away, and she stops. He might succumb to the pressure of new sheets, yes, he might lay himself on those virgin sheets free of sweat, hairs, flakes of skin, but no, he won’t bear even the slightest touch of her hand. New sheets, bed, what a ludicrous, superficial try. Every inch of her skin, she understands now, finally, is stained with someone else’s breath, tongue, come—You’re a bitch, you know that? he’d yelled, throwing shirts and slacks in the duffel bag, The mother of my kids, you didn’t think about that?—and she wonders how to burn the reek of that away, sear from her every dirty layer, cell, molecule ever possessed by someone else. She can’t, and it takes seven years for a body to regenerate itself, cell by cell, marrow and organs and bone; can she live this way for seven years, her children lured away from her—They’re my kids, too, she’d thought back then, in protest, thinks even now—and every night having to face the thickening fence of her husband’s back, until she’s clean and new again? If she has to, she will, but he can’t. He doesn’t deserve that, any of this, he doesn’t deserve a used, handled, loaned-out wife. A wife she made common—fucking bitch, slut—public.
No one could ever love you as much as I do, it’s still true now, she knows, despite what she’s done and although they’re sharing the house, the bed, like strangers. It will always be true; he will always be true. So what was she doing, what made her do it, and how does she show him she believes him, that she knows he’s right, and that she’s still, forever, his?
SHE WEARS ONLY a nightshirt a few weeks later, one of his, an old-fashioned pajamas’ top cut like a man’s shirt, soft checked flannel, with a pocket and three buttons down the front. Her drawerfuls of lingerie, all that fancy lace, won’t do right now. It didn’t take a holiday or special occasion; he’d come home once or twice a month with small bow’d boxes and tissue-stuffed gift bags crammed with lace, frills, gauze, pricey little wisps for her to wear. She’d model for him, walk around the house like that, No one will ever love you, this body, all of this body as much as I do, he’d say, his eyebrows making it a mock-threat, putting his hands, his mouth, on her breasts, pushing fingers between her legs, until Esther was maybe twelve or eighteen months old, then she’d just wear those things underneath her clothes, give him a flash in the morning as she left for work. But after Justin was born, two years ago, she had trouble losing the weight. She’d always been full-breasted, full-hipped, Voluptuous, he used to say, making chomping noises, but after having Esther and then Justin, it was hard. Her flesh looked awful, she thought, clumsy and bulging against net fabrics and elastics and lacy strings—Honey, you’re so beautiful, what about those diet shakes, what about aerobics? he’d suggest oh so helpfully—and all that lingerie, forget it, she could barely squeeze into her old suits for work. She tried, but nothing she tried had any effect. What about getting up early to go running?
Then, Michael, you have to meet the real power here, she’s who really runs the place, Nancy had said, leading over the new guy, the new operations manager, who shook hands pleasantly and laughed at her embarrassed retort to Nancy and later that week saw her drinking peppermint tea, day after day—Honey, what about that cabbage diet, what about fasting once a week?—all day with no lunch, and so a few weeks later brought her a Lipton’s Herbal Mint Sampler, who two months later invited her for a cheesy afternoon high tea at the Hilton to discuss accounts and blinked, bewildered, when she refused cake, then ordered her a bowl of fresh berries instead and fed her the first one, spread with clotted cream, by hand. She remembers touching her throat and neck, confused, ruffled, and suddenly feeling the strap of her bra, still wearing a maternity bra then, although Justin was two, the huge cotton cups the only kind that felt like support. This new guy, this Michael, this now faceless and arbitrary person, smiled, and she remembers hoping he wouldn’t see the strap, and then hoping that he would. And she remembers remembering those drawerfuls of abandoned lace, the feeling of blood rushing to a hot swell.
But she can’t wear any of it now, maybe ever again, not after he saw it on the floor, his lingerie, his peach lace bra and panties on the floor. She knows he still sees it. And it still hurts. It hurts both of them, still. She can’t even wear a bra right now, not since she had it done. She gets into bed wearing his nightshirt, and this time she does reach over to him, she reaches determinedly for his hand. For the first time, he lets her. She tugs, and he rolls over toward her, but not meeting her eyes. She puts his hand on her neck, her throat, she wants him to reclaim her. She wants his weight pinning her, flattening her out. His fingers tighten a moment on her throat and then stroke. She unbuttons the three buttons of the flannel pajamas’ top and brings his hand down to her breast, her left breast, it’s still sore but the itching has stopped, the slight scabbing has worn away.
Look, she says to him, but he shakes his head, this is agony for him, and he closes his eyes. The needles had hurt most around her nipple and over her breastbone, her collarbone, the thicker needle for the outline a deeper, sharper pierce, the finer needles for shading like a ruthless scratching of cats’ claws, like relentless bee stings. A good hurt, a willing, penitent hurt. Please, look, she implores. He opens his eyes and sees what she’s done: his name, thick, black, cursive, etched wide across her thorax, her left breast engraved with a scarlet heart. A seal, a label, a brand, she’ll wear it forever, I’m all yours, forever, it pleads. He covers his scripted name with his hand, his face warps; he presses his mouth against her throat and starts to cry. She kisses the top of his shaking hair. Believe me. His grip on her breast grows tighter, distorting the scrawl. He cries, and she cries, too, grateful, thankful that he’s crying like one of her babies she can comfort, do for, make everything right for, finally, then he takes her nipple in his mouth with a hard suck, a bite. She’s grateful for that, too, remembering the needle there, the black ink stabbed into the thin rosy skin of the areola, but then he bites harder, beyond bruise, beyond show, grinding his teeth on her flesh. He’s going for blood, she realizes, and she cries out for him to stop.
He does, he shoves her away, and she closes her eyes in failure. And shame, that she couldn’t take it, couldn’t begin to bear what he has had to. She hears him leave their bed. She hears the faucet blast violently in the bathroom, hears the splash of water and the slick, lathery rub of soap.
INTERESTING, WHAT HURTS and what doesn’t. Piercing the fleshy lobe of your ear is a dull crunch, there are no nerves there, really, no blood, no pain, or you misinterpret the sudden needle punch as pain when it’s really just something abrupt. Esther wants to get her ears pierced like her mother’s, but she’s told her she can’t until she’s thirteen. Esther hates her for that now, too. Five years old, and she’s lost the right to be her mother. Esther knows that, she wields it, and she’s right. She’s glad Justin is still too young, too innocent, to really understand. Maybe there’s still a chance for them, a chance for her little boy’s unadulterated love.
Ice helps. She bleeds, she swells, but the ice pack, clutched clumsily as she makes her way to the car afterward, numbs her out. It didn’t, doesn’t really hurt. Not like the hurt she’s caused him. Not like the hurt of knowing how what she’s done to him hurts.
Feel, she says to him a few weeks later. Here, feel. His back is to her, still, always, but the curve of it is less t
ight, as if his exhausted spine and muscles can no longer sustain such rigid guard. She slides her whole body toward him, carefully, and presses up behind. His hand is lying on his thigh, unclenched, the fingers limp as a child’s. The fingers tremble a bit. She puts her hands on his shoulder and gently tips him onto his back. He lets her. She lies carefully on top of him, careful not to crush, her head in the pillow above his shoulder so he doesn’t have to see her face, and after long, tense-relax, tense-relax moments, she feels his arms steal around her body, a hand caress her hair, his fingers pressing into her waist. She takes his hand, carefully places it between her legs.
Here, feel, she says. She feels before he does, though, she feels his fingers clutch at the heat, the damp, the hair, then stop. She feels the jolt in her nerves, and then she feels the confusion in his hand. His fingers fumble with the two tiny rings in her swollen flesh, the cold surgical steel chain. The links clink. A tiny metal lock, too, in the shape of a heart, like you’d find on a young girl’s diary, the kind that opens with a tiny medieval-looking key. She hands him the key.
No other man will ever touch me again, it vows.
She rolls onto her back and draws her legs apart. There are tremors all through him, but he’s growing hard; he grasps the key tight, determined, his eyes narrowed on it, and unlocks the tiny locked heart that seals her closed, unthreads the chain from the rings, and spreads her wide. He sits back on his knees, pulls her toward him from under her hips, his eyes still focused there, and enters her abruptly, good, an abrupt and tearing drive. She’s waited until she was mostly healed but not all healed, because she doesn’t have the right to be all healed before he is. Then, he does it harder.
You’re a whore, you know that? he says, moaning. You’re just a fucking whore to me now.
She hears a padded shuffle in the thick carpet pile outside their bedroom door, a hiccup, Justin’s sweet baby hiccup—Whore, cunt, he says, louder, and a crueler plunge—and she cringes at her little boy on the other side of their door, needing her and hearing this. She cringes, and then she hears a soft, hesitant pad of retreat. It’s too late, there’s nothing she can do but stay where she is, wide open, apart, and flat. Each deeper thrust he makes is both a splitting and a pact. She arches and spreads wider for him, the only way to show him she’s his, all his, that she’s willing to sacrifice. To exist with him wholly in a slick open pain, to become all wound.
No one will ever love you as much as I did, he groans, and now, she realizes, it is a curse.
THEY WERE GIVEN service for twelve: the Rosenthal china (“Eden” pattern: dinner, salad, bread and butter, coupe soup) and Baccarat crystal (wine goblet, champagne flute, tumbler) she’d cut from a magazine. She chooses a flute, sets it at a place for one. An ivory lace cloth on the dining room table, and the kids, his kids, gone to bed without protest, a brief hug from Justin, a cold, resigned peck from Esther. This is how it is now, how it will always be, as long as she lives in this house, his house. She sits, takes a deep breath, admires the silverwork on the polished handle of the sterling knife, steadies herself, then cuts with much care. She slowly fills the flute, and the crystal turns warm in her hand.
He comes home late, just as she expected, because she understands now that he will always come home late. But he will always come home.
She offers the glass to him with a shaky hand.
Is this what you want? she asks. Will this finally do it?
He takes the glass from her, looks at it; in the fading light its contents glow a thick, sanguine red. She feels her very marrow has begun, at last, not to regenerate but to seethe. Too late. She’s shaking, she’s limp and drained.
Will this be my life now? she asks. Will it?
Yes, he says, looking her dead in the eye. He raises the glass.
I’m sorry, he says, and drinks.
FISH
She is in town to dispose of her uncle, but she can’t do that until he dies. It is Any Time Now. She is eyeing the creeping analog clock hands on any wall, the digital display outside every savings and loan. She is tapping her foot, drumming fingers, chomping at the bit. And, she is organized: The local Neptune Society phone number is entered in her always-charged phone; the power of attorney document is in her datebook and the DNR form is on file, for if and when there’s any ugly hospital debate over invasive procedures or more tubes; she has gone to his dingy studio apartment, in a seniors’ complex smelling of Pine-Sol and fish bones and flakes of skin, selected his final clothes, and has them in a plastic grocery bag in the trunk of her rental car. Jeans and once-white cotton Henley, the kind she remembers him wearing when she was a child, gone now to a stale ivory. She figured that was the best choice, natural, biodegradable fibers. The Neptune Society had not offered explicit instructions on this, but she imagined polyester or rayon or viscose wouldn’t burn well. She had a terror of getting a call that a bad melt of synthetic fibers had ruined the crematory slab or emitted a toxic gas. She was concerned she’d get billed for it. That there would be a protracted legal dispute, all of it angry and ultimately pointless. She wonders why the body needs to be dressed at all—let’s just unhook the monitors and IV, strip the gown away, wheel it off to the oven. She pictures her uncle’s doughy naked body splayed on a big, wooden pizza paddle, a burly Neapolitan man giving it a quick jerk of a shove into flames. Afterward, the Neptune Society will throw the cremains in a body of water for her, if she wishes—the Mississippi, she assumes—or hand them over to dispose of herself. They’re sensitive to the family’s preference. She doesn’t want them. What would she do with them? Does anyone in real life keep ashes on the mantel, in an urn? She’s not buying an urn. She wishes the river, by all means. Let the ashes float like a tap of fish food, let the bone fragments and Levi’s rivets sink down to the silt. She will have him ready to go. That’s her job. She has already boxed up his meager belongings, has glanced at then thrown away the album’d and carefully framed family photos he’d kept all these years—everyone in outdated clothing and hairstyles, posing together with camera-false smiles—and donated the rest to Goodwill. She’d hesitated over the long-unused fishing rod and tackle, the hat with its dangling hooks, wondering if they might fetch a good eBay price, then tossed all of that in, too, not wanting anything prolonged. She’s already written deceased on a copy of his lease and sent it to the complex manager; it’s premature, but he certainly won’t be going back there. Which she’s glad of, it’s a blessing, no more need to imagine him banished to a lonely beige box of a room, watching an endless loop of cop-and-game-show TV, eating salmon from an individual serving can and munching on saltines from the pack. She’ll write deceased on his final round of bills, on any junk mail, on the stub she’ll send back from his final Social Security check. Which ought to cover the cost of the Neptune Society. She estimates, thanks to her organization, that roughly one more total hour of her time, no more, will be spent on all of this once he’s dead. She imagines herself getting a stopwatch, going click with it at the final rattle of his final breath, saying Go!, and timing it down to the second. She is not the true, technical next of kin—there is still her mother, the uncle’s blood sister, and her two own older siblings—she is merely the one who assumes this kind of job, the one everyone assumes will do it. And she is the one her uncle had chosen; it is her name, in what she assumes was a moment of perverse nostalgia, or punishment, or trust, that he had written on forms. No, no one will question her account of events this time, or get in the way. The family’s wishes are all hers to wish. She is happy to fulfill this obligation, to be the one in charge of closure. She is pawing at the ground, chewing her nails, twisting her hair. If she smoked, she’d be constantly lighting up, one eye squinting at the clock through a nostriled plume.
For now, she is sitting in chain restaurants with photos of food on their laminated menus, reading used pulp mysteries bought for twenty-five cents off a cart in the hospital lobby. She is sucking relentlessly on small hard candies she keeps in her pockets, leaving their cr
umpled cellophanes behind wherever she goes. She is going to matinees, for the discount admission and chunk of time it kills. She is checking her office voicemail, e-mailing updates with brief declarative sentences to her parents. She is seeing the sights: the Arch, the plane that Lindbergh flew, the world-famous Botanical Garden. She goes to a riverboat casino that calls Twain to mind, methodically inserts twenty dollars’ worth of quarters in a slot machine, and leaves without winning or losing another cent. She is eating frozen custard, which people here seem to eat a lot of, even as the weather is turning chill. People in the Midwest in general seem very large to her. She wonders how the local Neptune Society deals with this. If all that fat makes it harder to do their job. Her uncle has gotten fatter, too, in the dozen plus years since she saw him last, waving good-bye to her from his car, his fishing hat askew, although he seems shrunken at the same time; she remembers him as jolly-fat, energetic, always proposing to the child her some fun game they could play together, some special adventure they could go off on, just the two of them, alone. She hopes the guy with the pizza slide won’t have a problem getting him to burn. She knows no one in St. Louis except, of course, her uncle and, now, the doctors and nurses. She goes to the hospital for fifteen minutes in the morning and fifteen minutes in the evening to check on How He’s Doing. It is Any Time Now, they tell her. It is A Waiting Game. She is called upon to do nothing; there are tubes going in and tubes going out, the pillows and sheets are arranged, and the meds, now, keeping pain managed, organs running hydrated and calm. She sits in a chair in the corner of his room, listens to his shallow breathing, to the beeps and faint hospital-speak PA announcements, and reads until the next quarter hour. Sometimes she brings chocolates or little hard candies to the doctors and nurses. They’re sure he knows she’s there, they tell her, despite his incomprehensive gaze and his incomprehensible mumbles. She’s relieved he is incapable of actual speech. The nurses tell her he is lucky to have such a wonderful niece. They asked, when she first arrived, if there were other family members they should contact.
