Her eyes twinkled gently. In this second, she really meant it; she really wanted to work it out between us. My heart pulled toward her slanted physique, but then it halted. I’d been hearing a lot of this “annoying girlfriend” act lately—let’s talk, we need to talk. Every time I responded, I got sucked into Mom’s maelstrom, into the mess. We would analyze our every interaction and then I would cry and apologize and we would say how much we loved each other, but nothing ever changed.
I was so sick of that. I didn’t want to talk. I didn’t want to cry. I didn’t want to pretend, to fold into her. I didn’t want to not-explain the obvious, to avoid saying that it was all so unfair.
Mom had once told me that a psychiatrist had once told her never to have children. Ha! She’d cackled. What an idiot. All I ever wanted were children. But I knew she was telling me this because she feared he was right.
“I can’t,” I now said, and looked down at my homework. “I’m busy.”
What was I doing? I knew she didn’t mean to hurt me. She was the one who struggled, who was ever busier, more tired, stressed, constantly taking care of her own mother. I glanced up at the bags under her eyes, shelves that stored sadness. Had I wanted to hurt her, to make an imprint on her as she pushed into me?
The capillaries on her cheeks lit up sequentially like a flaming fractal. “Fine,” she said, and stomped down the hall, leaving me on my floor feeling strong and horrible, independent and guilty, all at the same time. After that, I stopped inviting people.
• • •
WITH SPRING CAME the ability to go outside without being strangled in scarves. To look up if you wanted to, not hit by wind. To not distinguish so brutally between in and out. Freedom.
Olivia and I arrived at Jen’s “my-bohemian-parents-are-away” party to find a crowd of people standing around her lawn. I clutched Olivia’s arm, both nervous and excited to have been included. I’d known Jen had invited Victor, my locker neighbor, who towered over me by a full foot, enveloping me each morning in his magical Paco Rabanne. Tonight, I’d promised myself, was going to be it. I would be coquettish, giggly, fiery. I would make out. Become normal. It was almost the end of the school year: this could be my moment. It had to be!
Olivia and I approached a group of kids from our grade, huddling together around Josh. I tried to make hilarious small talk, told some lame jokes about taking drugs (I learnt it from you, Dad, I imitated the commercial, cackling) and the awkward silence revealed that everyone was in fact stoned.
So I went inside, straight to my refuge. I turned the bathroom faucet on to muffle the sound of my fidgeting. I felt like I was in a dressing room between acts, a small reprieve amid the performance. Men don’t make passes at girls who make wisecracks, ran through my mind.
Or at girls in ridiculous shirts. The orange-tiled mirror revealed my jigsaw jersey—a tight, high-necked chemise with a front that looked like two pieces of a puzzle locked together, one black, one white, connected through a series of protrusions like a fat zipper that ran from my neck to my pubic zone, like the stitches of a cardiac case showing traces of her open heart. Above it dangled my face. I sighed. I was sixteen and looked exactly like Woody Allen—in his later years. Mirror, mirror on the wall: you suck. When I’d bought it at Le Château the weekend before it had seemed sexy, Madonna Vogue-slick with its big geometry and bold, defined oppositions. But now, I feared, it made me look curvy like a ruler. Conspicuous among all the jeans and T-shirts, it looked less come-hither and more Pierrot-the-mime.
How could you be sixteen and still never have had a proper boyfriend? Never even kissed a boy? Go forth and smooch!
I turned off the faucet and put my hand on the doorknob, taking a deep breath. I was reminded of my first party three years earlier, that Mötley Crüe night, bespectacled Stu, who looked like an accountant, even at age twelve. Go, Judy! Pull out your moves!
I turned sideways, released my leg, pretended to karate kick the wall. The toilet roll holder crashed to the ground.
After attempts to reaffix it, I opened the door, but kept my breath in as I slowly walked downstairs to where the cool kids were hanging out, each step taking ages, hoping this very action would consume most of the time of the party. It didn’t. In the basement I immediately saw Victor sitting on the couch. My stomach flipped. In a blue shirt and jeans, he looked fresh, strong, affectionate, perfect. He had a round boyish face, but an older-man sensibility, someone who appreciated a witty line, a bout of repartee. I remembered how two years earlier at a bar mitzvah, he pulled me into his lap, set my torso between his outstretched arms, and for a moment, I’d felt completely enveloped, calm, like the melted cheese inside a sandwich.
I’d jumped off.
Now I walked to the other end of the room and tried to join a conversation that Olivia was taking part in about the sourcing of wine coolers. I pulled down my shirt, ran my fingers through too-frizzy hair, crossed and recrossed my arms. It was going to be a long night. A long life. I looked around at well-lined bookcases, built-ins, and a displayed menorah collection: Jen’s parents were marijuana-smoking ex-hippies and even their house was clean. I donned neat geometry and was still a mess, an extra puzzle piece that slotted into no picture. And yet. I couldn’t help but glance back at Victor, just to catch a glimpse of his green eyes.
But in the midst of my glance, Victor looked back. I froze. He smiled. Smiled. His perfect smile. I flushed with heat. Finally, here was my chance, my dream of closeness, possibility. My fantasy.
So I ran.
I jetted upstairs, darted past the sofa, the kitchen, the people smoking cigarettes on the front porch. I ducked behind cars, sprinted my way down the street, through the Côte Saint-Luc underpass, all the way along Guelph Avenue, all the way home. Straight to my mother’s kitchen.
• • •
I STOOD ON a half-broken chair that I’d leaned against the cupboard door, itself coming off at the rusted hinges, frantically throwing boxes of ancient cereal. They tumbled from top shelf to the floor. The bran flakes, the same consistency as their cardboard box, were already too soft, too broken to crack anymore. My trembling hands worked quickly but carefully, avoiding any wildlife hiding out between containers of prunes. I hate mice, I seethed while furiously jetting pancake mix into a trash bag. Streaks of brown dripped down its sides. I hate liquid, I hate anything insidious, that slips through cracks, has no boundaries, no consideration. I shook, hot all over, and heaved baking sodas and Kraft Dinners, trying to scrub off the shame, to bust the blocks that stalled me.
Then, I started on the moldering tuna cans. They were stacked on the shelf like a barrack, the same formation as the cans on the kitchen counter, which functioned as a real barrier, the albacore guard (the alba-corps) blocking the sink-to-table path, hijacking family conversations, easing altercations. I threw: can can can you do the can can can. The window was open; cans fell to the floor with light thumps, as if they encountered less gravity than usual, softened by the breeze, like fish falling through water. Can can can. Clover Leaf—the brand of good luck. There were so many. No wonder tuna was going extinct.
I flung and flung, dismantling, deconstructing. Victor smiled. Throwing, tossing, pitching, lobbing, launching. I had to get rid of the mess. Clean up. Become beautiful.
I knew I had only an hour before my parents came back from their friends’ anniversary party. It was so rare, the nights the two of them had an invitation, went out together, like a couple. They were a couple, it reminded them, it reminded me. Mom had had her wiry hair dyed auburn. She’d sprayed on her Poison. It had followed her through the halls like a veil.
Mom might even be in a good mood, I thought, which could help.
I used both arms now, like a wild baseball pitcher, waving, sweat trickling down my sides, another, another, watching as the cans formed neat arcs in midair, pausing for a micromoment at the top point, the apex of the sine curve—an infinitesima
l point, yet the most important of all, marking the turnaround.
To be looked at—all I wanted, and yet, I could not handle it.
I was stuck, unable to move, afraid to become. It wasn’t a real going out. Nothing was changing. Just more and more stuff.
For a second, I stopped and stared at the can in my hand as if it had an answer, as if it could explain to me what it had been doing stashed in my kitchen for decades. Its aluminum was green along its edges, and I wondered which way the rotting worked. Had the mold moved from the tuna to the can, or did it spread from the can to the tuna? Or worse, had it come from me, from us? Were we contaminating our own surrounds?
Then I slung a sack of rice, and it rained like confetti, a wedding across my kitchen.
• • •
MOM WALKED IN.
“What the hell is going on here? It’s not your kitchen.” Her exaggerated sibilant sounds, markers of her foreigner status, her refugee narrative, peppering her otherwise impeccable English, shrill on answering machine recordings, now rang out like shots.
“I’m just trying to help.”
“I didn’t ask for your help.” Her eyes darted like laser beams, examining my treason. Her face jutted side to side to side. She swooped down to my pile on the floor, grabbed handfuls of old chocolate chip packages and flung them to the counter. “What are you doing to me?” she shrieked. “Why are you doing this?”
She made me pick it all out of the garbage, every limp cereal flake. Every grain of insect-infested flour, the dead bugs occasionally alive, crawling up my arm, along the ridges of the too-tight shirt.
She went to her room. Closed the door.
Dad was in the den. He read the newspaper.
His chair faced a cheap credenza that was falling apart, its shelves losing shape from the weight of books, 1970s Judaica, but also Dad’s freebies from drug companies: polyp stationery, fuzzy hemoglobin molecules, a squishy plastic spine, bendable, collapsing. Literal skeletons were part of the closet’s skeletons. His mess was growing inside her walls of scrap. Dad?
Afterward, I sat down at the kitchen table and opened a bag of challah. I brought the entire loaf to my mouth, my teeth sinking into its soft interior, losing themselves in its sea of sweetness. Just one more bite . . . How could I feel so empty with all this stuff? What would satisfy my ancestral cavity? I looked down at my expanding shirt and saw the opposing black and white pieces breaking apart from one another, the whole puzzle exploding. I remembered learning in first-aid class that if you rubbed a person’s sternum, you could rouse them into consciousness. I rubbed and rubbed along the zipper pattern until my knuckles were numb.
I looked around my kitchen at the piles of ancient oatmeal and rotting fruit, into the dark hallway lined with laundry baskets overflowing with dirty bargains, racing to infinity. If there was one thing I’d learnt over and over, including that night, it was how to run.
I knew I had to leave.
2ND TRIMESTER:
Living Rooms
• SIX •
20 WEEKS: FLIPPING OUT OF MY MIND
New York City, 2011
“This fetus flipping.” The Russian technician sighed as she jabbed the ultrasound camera deeper into my gut. “Flipping here, flipping there, always flipping. How much coffee you have in morning?”
“Only half a cup,” I answered.
The truth was: one cup.
The truth was: two cups. And large ones. “Is everything OK? Healthy? Normal?” I motormouthed. “What are its percentiles? Anything I need to know? Deviations from the standard?” Coffee complemented my current hyper mood.
“Fine.”
The horrific physical transformation of the first trimester—a new stomach above my old one, breasts like weapons, falling asleep at lunch and waking up in the middle of the night with cramping that terrorized me—curtailed much of my thinking, which seemed a clever evolutionary strategy. That fuzzy and low period was sharply followed by second trimester hormones: the mania. Suddenly, my acne was replaced with youthful glow and the exhaustion, with vigor. Now, at my halfway mark, I was starting to feel like I could actually do this. Be pregnant. Grow a person. Hell, like I could do anything! Plus, now my bump was clearly a fetus tent rather than just pudge, and lately people could not refrain from telling me how wonderfully cute I looked, even catcalling me at subway entrances. I hadn’t felt so attractive, so seen, in years. And certainly not as seen as right now, with my fallopians in high res.
To think my mother was the first generation in her peasant family to grow up with photographs of her past, to even know what some of her ancestors looked like, and here I was about to see my baby in utero. “Do you think prenatal imaging has an impact on the maternal-fetal bond?” I chirped on. “Does technology reflect psychology or create it?”
The technician sloshed a glob of freezing-cold gel across my stomach. “You want know gender?”
I nodded. Jon grabbed my hand.
“Is girl.”
“Brilliant!” Jon said, squeezing my fingers.
I felt a wash of relief. I understood girls, and they were calmer, and could come with me to the nail salon. Mom had kept my baby clothes, of course—I could dress her in my flammable polyester overalls!
The technician reclined the table, nearly turned me upside down, jabbed me from the other side and gave me a short tour: “Is kidney, is other kidney, is face.”
And there, on the screen in front of me was a full-fledged profile, a Victorian silhouette of my genetic matter—cheruby round cheeks and a button nose. A little Aryan. She sucked her thumb.
I wiped a tear that trickled, warm, down to my ear.
“You’re going to be a horrible pushover,” I semijoked to Jon later as we walked along the quiet Upper East Side street back to the subway. “I’m vomiting just picturing your total lack of discipline.”
“What about you?” Jon teased. “You’re going to dress her exactly like you. You’ll go crazy when she doesn’t share your taste. You’ll be a totally annoying mom-of-a-girl.”
Mom of a girl. My daughter. Daughter. An odd word with its hidden “gh,” mysterious, Celtic, ancient, primitive. Suddenly, my fingers felt clammy and I nearly dropped the printout I’d been clutching. I flashed to the image: she was real, in me, a girl like me but a whole other person. She sucked her thumb. Not its. Hers.
All the pregnancy books I’d read dwelt on fears—the mucus plug, bleeding nipples, the fact that bikini season may have ended, forever. But I was afraid of more: having my life sliced open. My interior was threatened in every sense. It had taken me so long to grow up. I’d only just begun to pursue a writing career. I needed more time on my own to take care of myself and achieve my goals before smothering someone else, before having to worry about yet another person.
I stopped and sank to the ground. Other women prayed and suffered for this, I chastised myself; I was living their dream.
“What’s wrong?” Jon swooped down beside me. “Are you sick?”
“Don’t know,” I said and thought: You cannot run away from being a parent. Ever.
VERITAS
Cambridge, 1996
Our car pulled up to the sign marked FRESHMAN REGISTRATION PARKING and my stomach swirled. I was here! At Harvard. In America. I was leaving Canada, Montreal, my parents’ home. I was leaving home.
“That way, Dad,” I instructed from the backseat, but as he turned to see a jam of cars with furniture legs oozing out of their windows, I could hear him huff. Again. All this money and look what I get. Even though I was running away—not to be a parking-lot psychic at Phish concerts but to the global center of academic rigor—it was still a rebellion. I’d sensed right away: I was betraying him, betraying them. Leaving the overly full nest, which did not want to be emptied. Almost no one in Montreal went away to college; local university was good, and free. It was Mom who played Moses,
convincing Dad to let me go. I liked to think, on some level, she knew I needed to be freed.
And freed I was! I ignored the malaise in the minivan (which Dad had rented, and whose price I was never to hear the end of) and declared, “I’m getting out.”
I hopped from the car and bounded my way to the Yard, the archetypal site of world-class learning with its grand golden-and-maroon Veritas statues and slogans. I was not a tourist or a visitor. I was a resident. I bounced my way to the welcome tent to pick up my orientation package. “Batalion,” I declared loudly, seeing my family name typed in a stylish, intellectual font on an official manila envelope. Inside, I found my new address. Weld Hall. Former home of several political oligarchs. Kildare to Kennedy . . . I nearly fainted with excitement. I grounded myself by looking around: buzzing students, laughing parents, siblings dragging boxes and bins. I recognized no one. New people, brand-new potential. Butterflies inside all of me. Pretty ones, though. I’d make friends here, fit in at last. Belonging, I sensed, would just happen. If I could be here now, heading to my dynastic dorm, magic was possible.
I made my way to the parking area and saw my family approaching with bits of luggage and horribly awkward oversize skin-cancer-defying sun hats, but I didn’t care. “Let’s go see my room!” They trudged along behind me as I followed a map and led this incredible expedition. A few days earlier, I’d taken a subway to Mount Royal, an artsy neighborhood of Montreal, where on a whim I had a hip hairdresser dye bright purple streaks in my hair. I’d never before colored any part of myself, and suddenly, I sported punk. Now I was wearing Mom’s green polyester bell-bottoms from the 1970s and a purple tank top. My new New Balance sneakers felt like platform shoes; their air soles made me feel like I was coasting over the earth.
I arrived, family behind, to find Victoria, one of my roommates, standing in the living room. She was thin with long blond hair, but was my exact height and wearing black bell-bottoms and a pink ribbed tank top. “We’re twins,” she said, laughing. Victoria and I had spoken on the phone the week before. She played guitar, was a painter. Loved Ani DiFranco. So cool. “You and I are sharing a bedroom.”
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