“Right,” I say, nodding, shutting the closet door. Is this a miracle, this thing that has happened to me? I don’t know. It feels too clumsy, to fleshy and utilitarian, to be miraculous. But I don’t want to argue with him, so instead I stand there and watch him cry.
The TV is huge. It might be the biggest TV I’ve ever seen, the kind you’d usually find mounted on the walls of sports bars so a person sitting in one of the back tables can still see the game. It takes up half the living room, eclipsing most of the brick fireplace against the back wall. That fireplace was the clincher for us when we were looking at houses; we imagined ourselves wrapped in wool blankets, sitting in front of crackling logs in the middle of winter, and we made an offer on the spot. We’d actually used the fireplace only once or twice, in the years we lived here before my accident. I wonder if it’s been used at all since.
“It’s a little much, I know,” Tom says from the kitchen, when he sees me standing in front of the big black screen of the television. “It was a sort of family Christmas present last year. I might have gone a little overboard.”
It strikes me that we didn’t even have a TV when we first moved in here. Our old apartment was so small that we’d watch movies on Tom’s desktop computer, and we’d eventually bought an ancient TV at the Brown Elephant when we decided that our kids deserved to grow up on Sesame Street the way we did. But I never imagined anything like this, not for us.
I’m delighted by it. Even the remote is gigantic, nearly as long as a paper-towel roll and twice as wide. It feels like a weapon in my hand when I pick it up. I’m endlessly fascinated by how things feel to the touch, now that I’m more able to discern one sensation from another. It’s gotten easier to filter through the chaos of sights and sounds and movement, and I’ll find myself running my hands over the wood of our kitchen table or the scratchy fibers of a knitted throw or my own skin, and marveling at the texture and temperature inherent in all of these things. My favorite thing is sticking my fingers into the container of uncooked rice Tom keeps on the counter. It’s a shivery feeling, like dipping your hand into water that’s not quite water, and I do it again and again when Tom is in another room, feeling my stomach clench every time at the sensation.
The TV remote is surprisingly heavy, and I point it at the TV with one hand and press the red button at the top with my other. The screen flickers to life, like the start of some great engine. The volume is so loud that it knocks me back and I drop the remote, which hits the floor with a plasticine pop, sending batteries scattering. I clap my hands over my ears as Tom rushes around the kitchen counter and fiddles with one of the black boxes in the cabinet beneath the TV, and the volume quiets to a tolerable level. Whatever Tom is saying is muffled through my hands, so I gingerly remove them from over my ears.
“. . . had his video game plugged in. He cranks the volume up and the whole house sounds like a war zone. I swear, I’m going to get PTSD, but he and Katie are just happy as clams.” He retrieves the remote from the floor. “Where’d the batteries go?”
I don’t really answer, because I’m still recovering from the sudden onslaught of sound. I feel shaken, like all of my nerves have been thoroughly plucked, and my palms are clammy. My heart is charging forward like I’ve had a near-miss on the expressway.
Tom kneels down to fish the batteries out from under the sofa, and then hands the remote back to me. “I’d tell you what’s on, but I figure you probably know better than I do, right?” he says with a too-big grin, as if he’s said something devilishly funny. I nod, but I don’t smile back.
As it turns out, the TV is quite the revelation. I turn it on as soon as Tom bustles the kids off to school in the morning and then departs for his job running his outdoor equipment service. It’s bright, so bright that I could probably sit with the curtains closed and hardly tell the difference. The picture has a clarity that I can barely believe; the characters are three-feet tall and I can see every line on their faces. It convinces me even more that Connie would make a terrific actress now, because even the sharpest of cameras couldn’t pick up a flaw in the skin of her face. It makes me feel proud in a possessive sort of way, as if I’d created Connie myself out of a perfect piece of clay.
More than fascinating, the TV is a comfort. I fall back easily into the pattern of my days at the hospital. First a morning talk show where four D-list celebrities and one unlucky journalist sit around the table and harp on the latest news in pop culture. Then the local news, endless reports of gang shootings and teacher’s strikes and football scores. And then the stories start, inversely ordered by quality, beginning with a half-hour show about a town on the East Coast that’s infiltrated by vampires, and ending at 3 p.m. with Stratford Pines, the crown jewel of the network’s daytime lineup. The sheer size of it, on the big screen, is intoxicating. It feels more real, this close up, like if I just sink back into the sofa enough I could let myself drift through the soft membrane of the TV screen into that world. My world, the one I’ve always imagined, even after the show ends and the afternoon game shows begin.
It’s difficult to sleep with Tom next to me, snoring lightly, turning over and adjusting his pillow and occasionally mumbling in his sleep, while I remain perfectly still. Always, perfectly still. I haven’t slept in the same bed with someone in eight years. And it occurs to me one night, a few weeks after my homecoming, staring at the ceiling and listening to Tom breathe next to me, that I’m not sure if the same is true for him. The thought is short-lived though, because he turns toward me and puts his hand on my stomach. I jump, jerking so violently that I nearly knock him in the chin with my shoulder.
“Jesus,” he mutters, shifting beside me.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to—” I stop talking because his hand is back, a bit heavy, brushing its way back and forth over my T-shirt.
“It’s all right.” I can smell his breath, like warm mouthwash. I don’t remember how this works. I shut my eyes and think of the thousands of scenes like this that have played in my head during the last eight years. They always seemed to be lit differently, more like candle-flicker than this darkness, brightened only by the insistent glowing of Tom’s alarm clock and the dots of light on the TV and cable box and Blu-ray player across the room. In my head it was always more passion than practicality, the way it had been so many times with so many characters on Stratford Pines. It was never about the fact that two people happen to be lying in bed together. It was rainstorms and torrid affairs and long-lost lovers reuniting for the first time. It occurs to me that Tom and I should belong to the latter category, but my body can’t seem to conjure the same heat or the electric thrill I remember, even from imagining it. I’m surprisingly cold, lying here in our bed, even as Tom seems to creep nearer with every move of his hand.
“I’ve been thinking a lot, these last couple of weeks,” he says, his voice a murmur, his hand testing the boundary of the bottom of my T-shirt.
“Yes,” I reply, because it seems like the correct response. Two blinks.
“Do you remember what we started talking about right before the accident?” His mouth is close to my ear now, his head in the valley between our pillows. I can’t imagine it’s very comfortable.
“Yes.” I say it before I realize that I haven’t bothered remembering much of anything from before the accident. It’s the way I coped for eight years, by not looking back. By pretending my life had begun the day before, that there was no world outside the walls of my room. No world but what I saw on TV. That was the way you stayed sane, in a situation like mine. You made yourself believe you’d forgotten your whole life.
“I’ve been thinking, maybe we should try and pick up where we left off. I mean, we don’t know how this works, this whole SUB thing. If you’re really thirty-five we could only have a few years left to try.”
“Right.”
“So,” he says, his hand sweeping down then, under the waistband of my yoga pants and into my underwear, as he presses the minty heat of his mouth into the s
ide of my neck. I go rigid, my elbows digging into the sides of my ribs. I keep very still, as if I’m being sniffed by a wild animal and maybe I can pass myself off as an inanimate object until it loses interest. As it is, it takes longer than I’d like for Tom to notice that I haven’t moved an inch, haven’t responded to the workings of his hand.
“Am I alone in this?” he asks.
“I . . .” I’m supposed to want this, I know. But I can’t muster it, that want.
He lets out a long breath, extricating his hand from between my legs. I can’t tell if he’s angry or dejected. “I discussed it with your doctors, you know, if that’s what you’re worried about. There’s no danger, medically. I think they’re actually excited about the opportunity to see what happens. The more data the better.”
I’m still not terribly clear on what he’s talking about, but I bristle at the idea that he’s been speaking to my doctors about me. It feels too much like I’m still paralyzed, something to be cleaned and watered and fed and taken care of by others.
“I don’t want you talking to my doctors,” I say, trying to make out the fine webbing of cracks in our ceiling through the darkness. Those are familiar, even if the rest of the room is not. Even if my body is not.
“What?”
“I don’t want you talking to my doctors without me there. I deserve to know as much as you do about what’s happening to me.”
He’s silent then. I wonder if I’ve upset him. I don’t remember ever speaking to him in such a way, when I was the old me.
“Fine,” he says, raising a hand, miming his innocent frustration to an invisible audience. He’s not a very good actor though. Connie would be appalled. “But that doesn’t change the fact that we wanted more kids. We’ve always wanted more. And now we have a chance.”
Oh dear. The rest of the conversation clicks into place for me. And he’s right, when we were first married we talked about having more children, as many as three more, in fact. But I’ve just come back to myself now. I have just stopped being something that has to be tended to, something hooked up to machines, something that lives and breathes because other people have made sure of it. How can I tell him that this body is something sacred, no matter how clumsy or fleshy or unfamiliar it is. How can I tell him that I want this body to be mine more than I want it to have his children?
“The doctors want to see what happens?” I ask, imagining them discussing me like I’m a lab rat running in its wheel, observed from behind glass by the men who will decide my future.
“They want to include it in the study data. A healthy pregnancy could go a long way to getting FDA approval, apparently. But that’s not really what I’m concerned about,” he says, peeling the sheet away from me and dragging up my T-shirt until it bunches under my breasts. My stomach is enviably flat, unmarked by my former pregnancies or Jack’s C-section. It’s funny, this is the body I struggled so hard to get back to after the kids were born and never could. I guess there really is a price for every wish, isn’t there?
“God, you’re so different now,” Tom says, examining my exposed skin in the darkness. At first, his touch is an examination only, drawing his fingertips over my skin, as if testing to see if it is real. He’s pleased. I would be gratified, if this body were my doing, if it were not a lucky happenstance of a very unlucky life. Instead, it feels like just another mark against the woman I was, the body that still feels more kindred to me than this one.
He kisses along the bottom edge of my ribcage, his hand sinking back to its former position. It reminds me of a night in the park, less than a week before my accident. The kids, sleeping in their car seats in the back of my minivan. The sharp roughness of the wooden picnic table under my thighs. There is a price, I think. There is always a price.
“There you go,” Tom breathes into the skin of my stomach, his hand more insistent now. I wonder if this body is capable of disobeying me, the way the last one would, my legs and hands and hips moving even when my mind told them to stop. I wonder if this body knows any of what it is capable of. But it is a different body now, I remind myself, as Tom pulls down my yoga pants and rolls on top of me. I’m a different person now.
Hannah
I stare at my closet, trying to find something that will work, anything to replace the baggy sweaters and the one old pair of jeans that I’ve been wearing since I got out of the hospital. Jeans from high school, the ones I found folded up in the bottom of my dresser. They’re the only ones that fit around the sharp, narrow bones of my new hips. I’ve all but given up on wearing bras; their wires pinch my ribs and the cups gap around the shrunken remains of my breasts. I feel like a little girl, young and unformed, trying on the silk and lace of her mother’s clothing, imagining a world she does not yet inhabit.
Everything I own feels large. Even my shoes are a half-size too big. I don’t wear rings for fear of losing them off of the narrow, supple joints of my fingers. And my clothes—clothes designed for a woman, dresses cut to reveal cleavage, high-waisted trousers that hugged my hips, fitted sweaters and pencil skirts and over-priced lingerie—they have been made inanimate. They have been made inanimate on my new body. They hang, lifeless. Even the brightest ones seem to lack color when I put them on.
Penny and Connor are having us over for dinner. Nothing fancy, of course, but still. I can’t wear my ratty jeans or any of the thick sweaters I curled myself into when I was sick. Everything in my closet seems wrong, made for someone ages older and much more proper than I am, especially in this body. Clothes that I bought as much for Sam as for me, replacing the T-shirts and thrift-store jackets and hippie skirts of my former wardrobe. Things that would suit the world of newspaper offices and cocktail parties and yacht clubs in which he moved. Things I could imagine Lucy wearing. I think of Lucy, and realize that I hate every scrap of clothing I own.
Instead of getting dressed, I pull handfuls of hangers out of my closet and toss them onto the bed. I retrieve a bunch of large black garbage bags from the kitchen and fill them until they’re bloated with artifacts of my former life. I stack the garbage bags by the front door and leave them there. Sam can drive them over to Goodwill or throw them away; I don’t care. I change into the one dress I’ve retained, a wrap dress that looks sad and baggy without breasts and hips to fill it out. But at least it’s something. I pull it on, cinching it tight around my waist. All of my heels are too big, but I grab a pair of black flats from the discard pile and stuff cotton balls into the toes so they’ll fit, at least for one night. By the end I’m feeling worn out and sorry for myself, as if I’ve been airlifted out of my life and deposited somewhere I don’t quite recognize. I hear Sam arrive home from work; the door opens and hits the garbage bags. They slide across the wood floor. But he doesn’t mention them when he joins me in the bathroom and brushes his teeth. He doesn’t say anything.
We don’t talk on our way to Penny and Connor’s apartment. We speed down Lake Shore Drive as the sun falls below the metal and glass of Chicago, and everything is a shimmer of color. Homesickness hits me hard, choking me up. It sits somewhere under my breastplate, a barb of muted grief, though I don’t understand it. I’ve always loved this city so much it makes my bones ache, but it feels impossible to be homesick for a place in which I still remain. Yet as I look at the familiar skyline and the wind whips off the lake, hammering against my window, it’s there. That sour agony. And I wonder if someone can be homesick for herself, for the person she was just months ago. I rest my head against the car window and shut my eyes, trying to drive the feeling away.
Penny and Connor live in a one-bedroom on a quiet street in Ravenswood, a place that is perpetually falling apart but has enough early 20th-century charm to make it endearing. The walls sport built-in bookcases with pitted glass doors, the ceilings are high and framed in intricate molding, and there’s a giant claw-foot porcelain tub in the bathroom. It has always seemed the perfect blend of both their sensibilities; it has a certain artistic rhythm mixed with an air of antiquity, pa
rticularly when its bookshelves are stuffed with Connor’s dissertation research on post-Colonial political violence. It reminds me of my apartment, when Penny and I used to live there together. As Sam and I let ourselves in, the air is rich with olive oil and garlic. Astral Weeks is playing in the background.
“Hello?” I call out, heading for the kitchen, where Penny is bent over a steaming copper pot. The kitchen lights cast a buttery glow over everything, and for a moment I can imagine Penny’s Jamaican grandmother bustling about in front of her hot little cook stove, occasionally turning to cool her face against the salty air floating in through the windows. But then Penny turns, and she’s the same wry, effortlessly modern hippie that she’s always been. She grins when she sees me.
“Should I be afraid?” I ask, approaching the stove with exaggerated caution. “I don’t know if I can take anything five-alarm quite yet.”
“Don’t worry, Sam called ahead, told me all about your recent dietary proclivities,” Penny says.
“Of course he did,” I reply, and my tone is more annoyed than I expected.
“Would you have preferred I made my mother’s chili?” she asks. I feel like shit.
“No, I guess not.”
She offers up a spoonful of white-cheddar macaroni and cheese. “It took everything in me to keep from putting chipotle pepper in it.”
I taste it, and the sharp richness nearly makes my eyes roll back in my head. “Jesus, Pen, that’s phenomenal.”
“Is anyone else from your group the same way?” she asks as she taps a bit of smoked paprika into the pot.
“All of them. The shrink in charge thinks it’s because children have all these extra taste buds that die off as you get older, and that hasn’t happened for us yet.”
“So you’re going to be stuck on fish sticks and oatmeal and . . . whatever else kids eat for what, like the next decade or so?”
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