Her: A Memoir

by Christa Parravani

  “Thanks, D,” I answered, mouth full of salty, crispy, perfect skin. I felt for Louanne when he called her by her first name. She’d birthed him, nurtured him, loved him the best she could. She may have been an alcoholic and a nightmare, but she was still a mother.

  * * *

  Most of Cara’s boyfriends made small talk, then explained they’d be happy to help with any “research” I might be doing. Conversations would usually devolve; I became a boyfriend confessor. They were clearly mostly still in the solipsistic “if only I’d” phase of grief. “If only I’d loved her more,” “If only I’d spent the time with her that she needed,” “If I’d only not left her,” she might still be here.

  We had more in common than they realized.

  They were full of guilt and longing and regret. I’d so hoped to find them that way. I picked at their grief scabs to the point of bloodshed. I took pleasure in it. I was furious with her boyfriends. We should have been able to keep her alive if we’d all worked together, but, of course, we hadn’t. The men in my life had not shown up. My father had not loved me enough. My lovers could never give enough. Cara’s boyfriends had let us down, too.

  Men couldn’t be trusted. My mother had made that clear. “They’ll fuck you. But they’ll never love you,” she’d said upon finding my middle school diary, in which she’d discovered that her thirteen-year-old twins had been having sex with their eighteen-year-old boyfriends. “If I never say a word to you about this again,” which she didn’t, “don’t forget what I’ve told you.”

  I hear her words as I lie down with a man. I hear them if I love him. The harder I love, the louder her words are.

  * * *

  My body was a machine with No.1. Bones to the grind, my flesh was a slave stone. No. 1 pushed and my back thumped the headboard. The cats kept sleeping. I serviced him like I was milking butter with my mouth.

  No. 2 painted pictures. He seduced me and put marbles in my pockets. He mouthed my neck in Union Square. I danced for him and then I cried. He left his marbles in our hotel bed. They were swirled worlds of color, round, clear, and breakable. I woke. No. 2 was not sleeping next to me.

  I cheated with No. 3, but thanked him for taking me to the ocean. We celebrated my first un-wedding anniversary and undid my marriage. I cried at Mystic Pizza and hated him for not being my husband. We fucked hard in the heavy sea air. I held my cigarette on the balcony and sat for hours plotting my revenge. I thought of all of the ways one might finally kill a heart as dead as mine.

  No. 4 had braces and curls matted down from sweat. He rocked me into the wall. My head got sore. I would have kicked him if I hadn’t invited him to fill my empty bed.

  No. 5 worked on his thesis while I pretended to sleep. I heard him tell me he loved me even though Edgardo made me deaf in one ear. I can make out words and take away their meanings. I can turn words to dust and have them forwarded to my mailbox. No. 5’s flowers wilted, waiting. I never came home to get them.

  No. 6 wore blue face paint on Halloween. He was older than I, and couldn’t save me. He kissed me and we drank blackberry brandy. We ate steak late at night, naked. We finished our meal with sweet tea at sunrise.

  * * *

  Cara had a collection of so many men. She’d ask me to come to her apartment to help her sort them. She called it “man shopping.” We’d flip through her Match.com profile, her plenty of fish account, her nerve chat history. “What do think of him?” she’d coo. “He’s cute.”

  “He’s broke,” I’d say. There were her ever-active other accounts to consider: credit cards maxed out by clothes and by the eBay home decor purchases to furnish her never-ending need for new spaces. Moves to new apartments made her feel better so she kept on making them. There was always a boyfriend to carry a box or lift the heavy end of her sofa. “Let’s take a look at the next guy.” Cara clicked her track pad and moved to the next potential suitor.

  “Oh! Look! He’s a doctor,” I said. “That’s just what you need.”

  * * *

  On my first date I met the painter. I took him to a Manhattan bar, Death & Co. I paid the bill. We ordered cocktails and I made eyes at him. I scootched in close to his bar stool to get a better listen to his part of the story. I’d already heard Cara’s over and over. The painter didn’t know this. I tipped my head a little to the side and batted my thickly mascaraed lashes. I adjusted the hem of my skirt. I asked, “How was she in bed?” or more important, “How was she after?” I thought of myself after lovemaking. I hadn’t been able to stop myself from weeping directly after orgasm ever since Cara had been raped. Eight years of postcoital crying. I was sick of it.

  I had rapid-fire questions for the painter: “Did she cry? Did she make a scene and try to cloy you back into her grasp? What about her hair? Had she bleached it to straw yet? Did she wear sexy underwear? Any at all? Was her pubic hair waxed and trimmed? Were her nipples pierced then? Tattoos? How many dates to find out?” I twirled my hair around my finger and crossed and uncrossed my legs. “Did she wonder what your children would look like? When was the last time you spoke? How about the last time you went out? What was that like? Did she talk about me?” I knew that in all of the dates I’d had since she’d died, I’d certainly not left Cara out.

  The painter moved in close, put his hand on my face. “You don’t look anything like her,” he whispered. “It’s weird.”

  * * *

  On my second date I met with Brian. I hadn’t seen him since Cara’s funeral. He’d told me over the telephone that I’d be surprised to see him now. He’d made a change, in his new position as partner in a law firm; he’d turned into a man who was well paid and well loved.

  “I’m getting married,” Brian told me.

  “Congratulations.” I tried to sound happy for him.

  “That’s sweet of you,” he said, relieved. “I’d love for you to be there but I wouldn’t want to confuse the relatives. They still remember your sister.”

  “Of course, I understand.” Did I? I did. I was used to making people uncomfortable solely by the sight of me.

  “How about we plan to meet up?” I asked hopefully. “I’d like to interview you.”

  “For what?”

  “I’m working on something about Cara. I’ve got questions.”

  “We could go and see Amma?” Brian suggested. “She’ll be in town next Saturday.”

  “Amma?”

  “I go every year. She’s at the Manhattan Center in midtown. You’ve got to get there early to get a token,” Brian said. “It’s not worth your while to go if you don’t get a token to be hugged.”

  “Got it!” I was perplexed and wondered what a token might possibly be, but didn’t let on.

  “Does nine a.m. work?”

  “I’ll be there,” I promised, even though I hadn’t been up that early in months.

  Immediately, I researched Amma. She is a curing saint, born to a family of farmers in a small village in rural India. She’s reported to have come from the womb into the world, smiling. She cooked, cleaned, and reared her siblings. When she met a person in need, she brought them food and clothing. But food was scarce; she rummaged piles of trash from the homes of higher-caste neighbors, brought scraps of bread to feed her family; picked bones clean and scavenged rotten chunks of vegetables to cook soup. When Amma was fourteen, she looked around at the men and women sifting through trash alongside her; she dropped her gatherings and extended her arms, embraced a skinny weeping woman who held on to a fussy, starving infant. After that, Amma hugged strangers on the street. She would not stop hugging people. It was not acceptable for a teenage girl to touch others, especially men, and she was scolded, cast out. She kept on hugging.

  The week I was to meet Amma, there was a heat wave. With an air conditioner that was low on Freon blasting, D and I didn’t bother getting dressed and spent our days and nights in bed drinking port, eating takeout, and making love. It was good to sit shoulder to shoulder in bed and eat. With D, food tasted good agai
n.

  But the night before I met Amma, I barely slept. And I woke the next day just as I’d woken most days in recent years—at late morning, stiff and agitated, hair stuck up on one side, pillow creases on my cheek, head heavy and full with foggy hangover from a nightmare.

  I was naked except for the crisp white top sheet wrapped around my legs. I’d stolen the sheet with my nocturnal tossing and turning. I glanced over at my sleeping and completely naked boyfriend and felt a pang of guilt. Uncovered, he looked cold and vulnerable. He snored lightly; I tiptoed to the foot of the bed and flapped the sheet up in the air. It floated down on top of him.

  The night before, I’d gotten carried away talking with D and had spilled a glass of wine on myself. I looked down and touched the sticky purple wine stain that ran from my breasts to my belly. I’d paid my spill little mind the night before. I’d pulled my dress up over my head and tossed it quickly and excitedly into a corner, wiggled over to D, and straddled him on the sofa. He brushed me off of his lap. “You’re drunk, C,” he said. “Later?” I sat naked on the sofa, beside him, rubbed the back of his neck. D adjusted his glasses and put his arm around me, pulled me in closer, lit a joint.

  At a quarter past five, we’d made our way to the bedroom. I lay on my back in bed. The sun was rising, lighting the sky from behind the day’s early smog. The brick exterior of a neighboring building had begun to glow. D and I were discussing how one day soon I’d be taking pictures again, and he’d finish the novel he’d started years before. I tried to focus my eyes on his but couldn’t. I was looking toward him but not at him.

  “Pop out of it, kitten. I’m here.” He ran his hand along my shoulder. He’d gotten to be a pro at redirecting my drifting thoughts, sensing my unease. I could hide nothing.

  “I’ll try,” I said and turned away from him, pretending to fall asleep.

  Our relationship had begun on faulty footing, as an affair, and I had grim imaginings of how it would all end. We’d spend the rest of forever talking about living together in D’s Brooklyn apartment, but never really do it. Because he was twenty years my senior, D and I would continue to think of our age difference as an obstacle to settling down together.

  I looked over at the dresser by the bed. I’d crammed all of my clothes inside of it, so many clothes that they pushed open the bottom drawers. I wondered if there’d ever really be room in D’s place for me. I saw everything through the veil of loss. Loss, I reasoned, was the inevitable consequence of love.

  D had lived in the apartment for two decades, the first longtime location he’d been in since his childhood in rural Virginia. He’d made himself a sweet home, decorating it with cheerful art deco pottery fired in orange and lime glazes. He had a full library of books he’d collected over the years; hundreds of volumes of poetry and rare first edition novels filling bookshelves from the floor to the ceiling. It was the kind of home I’d fantasized about in high school; it was a sweet breezy walk-through in a bustling city. But I couldn’t bring myself to fully live there, and I couldn’t trust that D wanted me to.

  “We’re at the brink of marriage,” he had said once, “and I am nearly selfish enough to go ahead and do it. I just can’t bear thinking of you in this world alone.”

  “Oh, D,” I’d sighed in frustration. “Don’t even think it.”

  “I’d understand if you took a younger lover. I could handle it. Fidelity isn’t negotiable as much as it is flexible,” he said, keeping the door open for his own out.

  * * *

  I was both over- and underdressed to see Amma; I wore a purple silk dress with a lotus flower print. I’d washed the dress in hot water in D’s bathroom sink the night before, and draped it on the back of a kitchen chair to drip-dry, actions that didn’t adhere to the care label sewn into the dress. The garment bunched up at the waist, riding up in a way that made my chest appear too big, and its thick regal purple shoulder straps had warped into long elastics.

  At noon, I ducked out of D’s apartment in my shrunken silk and made my way onto the subway, into midtown, and then marched toward the Manhattan Center to meet Brian, looking for him through a swarm of Amma hopefuls.

  Other women crowded outside—New Agers, drum circlers, hacky-sackers, cancer survivors, unfaithful wives, job seekers, midlife transitioners, and spinsters. Their shoulders and heads were covered, or they were dressed in slacks, long skirts, blouses that buttoned at the elbows. I looked more hooker than worshipper. Sweat dripped from my armpits, circled out onto my dress. I kept my arms down and made a half wave at a man I thought was Brian but wasn’t.

  The terrible heat had stopped the city in its tracks. Sidewalk eateries were empty, flies flew logy, hair went limp. But the convention hall for Amma’s gathering was booked to capacity.

  Hippies and cultists leaned up against the gray stone exterior of the Manhattan Center, counted prayer beads, tranced in the shadows. Sage and nag champa faded sweetly down the block, falling off somewhere between the avenue and the aroma of a storefront Chinese take-out operation. The greasy food smelled delicious to my growling belly. I’d gotten better at feeding myself in the last year; I’d gained back nearly all of the weight I’d lost. I was up to 115 pounds, my fighting weight. But I’d forgotten to eat breakfast in my dash to see Brian and my blood sugar had dropped. I was hungry.

  “Hey, do you want a rebirthing?” A monastic woman put her hand on my upper back, moved it to my naked arms, undeterred by my sweat. She leaned in close, pointed to a small trailer that was parked curbside. “There’s a Cherokee woman in there giving them for sixty bucks,” she whispered.

  “No thanks,” I told her. “I think that’s the last thing I need.” It was really, probably, the first thing. I pushed my way through the crowd gathered at the doors and went inside. A flurry of people moved through the convention center. Women danced in broomstick skirts that skimmed the ground; kids sat in circles and chanted; vendors sold beads and prayer cards.

  A token was really a single raffle-style ticket lettered in black ink, its crisp green paper stock bowing at the edges, that admitted you into Amma’s arms; I hadn’t arrived in time to secure one.

  I found Brian on the third-floor balcony of the convention center. He was meditating with a group of middle-aged women he’d traveled with from White Plains. The group was dressed in yoga wear. Brian wore wide-legged cotton pants and a white shirt with a mandarin collar. He’d grown his hair; it fell in russet-colored curls just above his shoulders, sprung out in waves he tucked behind his ears. Brian sat calmly in tripod position with his hands extended out onto his knees, palms up. He was chubby but cherubic; shorter and stockier than I remembered him, but lighter in aspect.

  “Bri?” I interrupted his meditation. “I’m here,” I said. “I haven’t got a token.”

  “I knew you’d make it,” he said, lifted from a trance. He reached into his pocket and pulled out his own token and studied it, as if this would cause another to appear. “Well, we’ll need to get you one.” I grabbed his hand and pulled him to his feet.

  We made our way through the crowd to a booth where a woman sat behind a table of Amma-related goods and a cash register. “This is my friend, Christa,” Brian told her. For a moment I thought he’d known her, been her longtime friend, but it became clear that the two were strangers. This was merely a transaction and not an introduction. “She doesn’t have a token to hug Amma.”

  The woman looked unconcerned. “I’m so sorry, but we haven’t any left to give.”

  “Her identical twin has recently passed away. She’s in need of a token.”

  I didn’t correct him. I hadn’t seen him since the funeral, so this apparent lie must have been truth for him. As I stood before him my loss was as fresh to him as the day Cara had died.

  The woman smiled at me in a way I’d come to recognize. She pitied me. She reached into an envelope that sat beside stacks of cash in the register and pulled out a token. “These are reserved for special cases,” she said and handed one to me.
r />   I looked away from her and toward the convention floor.

  I’d made a picture once of Cara and me atop a frozen field, beneath a gnarled apple tree, on a red blanket, kneeling, holding hands. In the picture the red of the blanket is radiant, floating magically off of the bright white snow like a flying carpet. We posed kissing on the lips, porcelain urns turned in to face each other. It was the coldest day I can remember being outside in all of my life. The two of us held still, face-to-face, our breath freezing the other’s rouged cheeks. Our eyes stung from the bitter wind, tears pooling at their corners. We blinked them away as best we could, but I left the shoot with a frostbitten tear duct.

  “Sexy, sexy,” Cara teased, trying not to move her mouth so the picture would be sharp. We put our hands in each other’s pockets to keep warm between exposures. Cara had forgotten her gloves, so I gave her mine, a bright red pair with short-cuffed wrists. In the picture I hold her red-gloved hands tightly, my Lady Macbeth. We laughed as we tried our best to pose seriously, waiting for the timer to wind down and the shutter to click. We giggled as we harmlessly pecked our twin-lipsticked mouths.

  It looked as if Amma was doing the same face-to-face, leaning-into, hand-clutching, and loving, but with strangers, and while we all watched.

  Amma, tiny, in a blazing green sari, hunched over a man who clung to her as she swayed back and forth with him in her arms. His arms were bony, arthritic; he wrapped them around her waist as she held him; he lunged forward into her arms, pressed himself with force against her. His head hung down over her left shoulder; his face turned in toward her neck.

  It appeared from where we stood that Amma had cronies. Pairs of men stood on either side of her, collecting hug tokens, like ride operators at a carnival. Stiff backed, they lined people up single file in front of the saint, escorted one person at a time to Amma, hurried people along. It was an assembly line of touch. The men seemed to be timing each embrace. After a few seconds, one walked over to Amma and bent down, put his hands over the shoulders of the devotee she held, and ripped the person out of Amma’s arms. One person was pried out of a hug and another was promptly pushed into one. Push. Pull. Push. Pull. Worshippers emerged from Amma’s embrace shell-shocked, shipwrecked.