I Love You but I've Chosen Darkness

by Claire Vaye Watkins

  I’d seen Ty here and there over the decade I’d been away—we’d get baked at a Friendsgiving in West Lafayette or he’d drive to Columbus to try to hook up with my friends at MFA parties—but I’d lost touch with Rust and Ivy completely. They had a bunch of babies now, the freshest not even a week old. Ty was taking me straight to them.

  “What took you so long?” he asked.

  I said, “There’s more than one terminal now.”

  “Did you check a bag?”

  “No, this is it”—I offered him my tote bag, unwieldy with my top-of-the-line Obamacare breast pump, ice packs, bottles, nipples, caps, power cord, water bottle, nipple pads, nipple butter, the old iPod I’d found alive at the bottom of a drawer that morning, headphones, wallet, phone, charger, toiletries, change of clothes, book and a pulverized granola bar.

  “You got it,” said Ty, not taking my bag. “Have you been crying?”

  “I was watching something sad on the plane.”

  In truth I’d been experiencing uncontrollable spasms of grief since leaving that morning. All through the journey, on the first plane and the second, I’d absolutely lost it at the sight of any baby. Even a TV baby sent coursing through me a seizure of raw longing so severe that I had to stop and brace myself twice while walking through the airport.

  “What were you watching?” Ty asked, uncharacteristically attentive. I must’ve looked puzzled or wobbly with feelings, some of them quite the opposite of suffering. “On the plane.”

  “HGTV,” I told him truthfully. “One of these flipper couples had a baby.”

  Ty nodded. “A baby with flippers,” he said. “That is sad.”

  It had been sort of lovely crying on the plane, or at least it was a relief not to have to deploy any of my standard crying camouflage techniques. On a plane, crying privately while watching a movie or reading a book didn’t mean you were depressed or abandoning your family. Unfortunately, my first flight had lacked TVs, and I was traveling light on this overnight to Reno for an evening reading and a talk to some students in the morning before going home, room for only one book. So I’d had to open a copy of my own semi-new novel and cry into that. Embarrassing, yes, but also honestly kinda nice, because the book was not a smash and aside from being separated from my baby daughter indefinitely, aside from my heartbroken husband who knew I was seriously contemplating divorce, aside from my post-partum depression and the ring of teeth that had grown inside my vagina, it was the book that made me want to cry. I didn’t feel like the person who wrote it. So there was a comforting symmetry at crying into my own disappointing pages, which in a way compensated for the embarrassment, so long as no one on the airplane matched me to my author photo on the back jacket. Lucky for me the photo had been taken when I was childless. In it I was so glowy that my hosts frequently assumed I was a vegan. I had been taken to so many salad bars and vegan bakeries on book tour that I asked my speaking agent to include my indiscriminate eating habits in my contracts: author is ethically omnivorous.

  So I did not worry about being recognized while weeping into my own novel, even with my fat face right up against my skinny face. These days I was a lot of things—an overweight and deeply ambivalent mother, a wunderkind burnout rethinking her impressive career, a white trash orphan spending her bourgeois salary with haste, deeply distracted by various dalliances about town and a serious so-called “emotional affair”—but I was no longer a glowy childless vegan.

  In the car Ty announced that he was reading my book. “The new one. Reading the reviews, too. Do you read them?”

  “Yes,” I said. “But if anyone asks, no.”

  Ty observed that it was difficult to imagine a circumstance in which anyone would ask.

  I said, “Let’s talk about something else. How do you like being back in Reno?”

  “I miss Boulder sometimes. Reno is rough.”

  I scoffed, an affectation I’d picked up. “Rough how?”

  Ty sighed. “People here use so many plastic bags.”

  “The fact that a person coming from where we came from would be able to say something like that almost makes me believe in the meritocracy.”

  With that Ty and I launched into a retrospective on the violence that swirled like dust devils through our childhoods: hijacked school bus, Binion’s gold, tweaker murders, busted his teeth out with a baseball bat, punched her in the stomach behind the bowling alley to get rid of it, the body of a fourteen-year-old stuffed into a beehive in a cottonwood. “That was my cottonwood!” I bragged, the one at the end of Lola Lane, where my mother and I once turned right into the alfalfa fields on our morning jogs.

  “I don’t know what they’re thinking having another kid,” I told Ty, changing the subject to Rust and Ivy. “I only have one and I’m losing my fucking mind. What did they name her? Gondolin?”

  “Guinevere,” said Ty. “Rust wanted something classic.”

  “Speaking of women’s names,” I said, “do you have any mary jane handy?”

  Ty shook his head. “I don’t roll dirty. You hard up?”

  I said, “What ‘roll dirty’? It’s legal now.”

  “I know! Damn it feels good to be in the target demographic.” He struck his steering wheel in triumph and spent some time on his prophecy that climate collapse would be reversed by Elon Musk and a northern hemisphere at last awash in psilocybin. “Anyway,” he concluded, “we’ll blaze it up with impunity after your reading.”

  I said, “Before would be ideal.”

  He raised an eyebrow. “Do you have, like, a problem?”

  “It’s not for the reading itself, just . . . the people after. They scrape me out.”

  “I think Rust has some old Burning Man weed at his house.”

  He took our exit, campus up the hill. We pulled up to Rust and Ivy’s house, a funky gingerbread number with a dead lawn and two ancient cottonwoods rising from the easement. I got out of the car and watched a shirtless Baby Boomer in cutoff jean shorts with a harness around his junk ratchet himself up into one of the cottonwoods. Ivy came out barefoot with the newborn in her arms, looking thin and happy. She hugged me—tightly, intensely, maybe even desperately, I thought—but was that my desperation or hers? How much did she know about the mess I’d made? She presented me with her smush-faced, husky slice of a newborn.

  “There’s a man in your trees.” I pointed by way of not accepting the child.

  “It’s my dad.”

  “Larry!” I waved up to him. “I didn’t recognize you.”

  Larry waved disinterestedly.

  “How did you get the pulley up there?” Ty called.

  Larry said, “Slingshot,” like it was a dumb question, and Ty nodded his engineer’s approval.

  “Where’s Rust?” I asked.

  Rust was inside, wearing a headset and playing a space war video game on their wall-size TV. He half hugged me, one eye on the screen. I heard men shouting in his ears. Joy, their oldest, sat shy in the corner beside a bookshelf. Cheddar bunnies and teething rings and laundry were strewn about, the smell of spit-up and Tucks wipes in the air. I steadied myself. When Joy was born, I’d texted. For their second, Eva, I’d bought but never mailed a twenty-four-month Beastie Boys onesie. Childless-person fuckery I planned to make up for now, kissing Joy and Eva and playing horsie with them. I took a photo of the new one sleeping on Ivy’s chest, sent it to Theo, then posted up at the sink to pry apart plates cemented with oatmeal and cashew cheese.

  “Do you believe that objects can bring you happiness?” Ivy called. “If you do, try our paper towel dispenser.” I did, feeling the gentlest ticking as the paper product unfurled, a sound if not of forgiveness then at least of moral support. I went around the house collecting discarded nipple pads, wadded tissues, wipes and dirty diaper dumplings. Rust’s game seemed to be petering out. Ivy fed Gwenny, as they were calling her, and I folded laundry.
<
br />   Somber little Joy offered Ty a sip of her pretend tea. “Uh-oh,” she said after he slurped of it, “that was poison.”

  “Oh no,” he said. “What do I do?”

  “You die!” she chirped.

  Ty did die, was resurrected by antidote only to be poisoned again. Eva disappeared, then staggered in from the hall munching a crayon.

  “Her poops are the most amazing colors,” Ivy said to her own bare breasts.

  “I don’t know how you’re doing this,” I whispered.

  Rust said, “It’s all good.” I could see why he was so serene. He hadn’t lifted a finger since I got here except to tap his controller. But the scene worked, apparently, for Rust and Ivy—I’d never seen them moonier.

  Ty read a story to Joy and Eva and I watched as little Gwenny set to suckling again on Ivy, my own milk portending descent. I regarded my pumping rig wearily from across the room. We watched the video game, some war with zombies and cars, so many cars, in the future. Ivy smiled down at us from the stratosphere, all doped up on oxytocin. She told me her latest birth story and simple words—home, water—made my teeth throb.

  When Ty interrupted to ask Ivy whether she and Rust ever incorporated breastfeeding into their lovemaking, I said, “Don’t be disgusting.”

  Ty was aghast. “People in Boulder do it all the time!”

  I told Ty it seemed to me that Boulder had nearly ruined him.

  “She’s right,” said Rust, finally interested enough to remove his headset. “If you had lived in Boulder for one more week I wouldn’t have wanted to be your friend anymore.”

  “You know what he said to me in the car?” I offered, hungry for Rust’s attention. “He said ‘Reno’s so rough.’ ”

  “It is rough!” Ty said. “Boulder has bike paths and—”

  “Boulder! Boulder! Boulder!” Rust shouted merrily. “It’s all I hear about! It’s making me want to fucking autoerotically asphyxiate myself.”

  “Language, my love,” Ivy cooed.

  I turned to her. “Ty told me on the freeway that he only eats mushrooms for ‘spiritual exploration.’ ”

  “ ‘Consciousness expansion,’ ” Ty corrected.

  “He said, I would never do it to ‘have fun.’ ”

  “I didn’t do that, those bunny ears. That’s you! You’re like”—he clamped and unclamped air quotes and began to sing—“little bunny Foo Foo hopping through the forest . . .”

  Ivy gently touched my neck. “You are wearing turquoise.”

  “It’s lapis,” I said, finding my pendant. “It’s a power stone.”

  “You look like one of those Santa Fe ladies. What’s with this bracelet?”

  I gripped it. Sterling silver, mailed to my campus office by my biologist. “It was gifted me at a conference.”

  Ivy stroked her little chunk’s fontanel. “I don’t understand a thing you are saying.”

  I missed Ivy so bad, sitting beside her. I prayed for the two of us to go outside and smoke a bowl, though Ivy didn’t smoke. She and I loved but no longer understood each other. Motherhood had wrenched us into separate spheres—she the attachment parent, me the detached mother. I had hoped she might be the first person I told about my teeth. But she’d been breastfeeding for four years straight. She’d slept in the same bed with her children every single night of their lives. I was trying not to judge her, but the Madonna radiance rolling off her scared the hell out of me. She’d been at home, unschooling her free-range babies since we last saw each other. I dropped mine at daycare forty hours a week, hours I spent at yoga, fucking around with various Innocents, or smoking weed in my hammock, crying and wondering what my baby thought of me. No, I didn’t have to wonder—I knew.

  My bitch mama left me with a stranger named Miss Moonbeam. A lying stranger baby wearer when what I need is to be free, naked as the day I was born, not so long ago. I like dancing and clapping and being startled. I like the yays at the ends of songs. I hate my lovie. I hate naps. I like putting little rocks into my mouth, and coins and beads, too. I like to find the buffed shiny islands of gum in the carpet at the library. I like to make things go all gone. Miss Moonbeam taught me to say all done and more and milk and eat with my hands but she did not teach me to ask for anything I actually want like iPad or latte or make these teeth stop. Miss Moonbeam says the earth is our mother and I wish she was right that way she’d never leave and always be holding me. My bitch mama hardly holds me, only 90 percent of the time I’m awake and 15 percent of the time I’m asleep. Miss Moonbeam says to share but my bitch mama does selfish things like take a shower and try to finish a meal in peace. My bitch mama says she had a life before me and with my hands I say, all done. Miss Moonbeam says we don’t bite and with my mouth I say, oh yes we do. Miss Moonbeam says we don’t hit our friends and I say, Augie is not my friend; Kayden is not my friend; River is not my friend. My bitch mama signed the barefoot waiver. My bitch mama put me in tumbling class. My bitch mama wants me bilingual. I want to inchworm under the couch for some alone time. I want to lick lint. I want to jab a stick into the roof of my mouth. I want my body to listen to me, want my fingernails to stop growing, want to hoard my snot. My bitch mama doesn’t understand me. She doesn’t know what I want. She says this all the time. I don’t know what you want from me. Listen. I want your teeth in my hurting head. I want all the milk you can make and more. I want your whaley heartbeats. I want to rip your earrings out and your nose ring too, so that there is nothing shining in my way, nothing glinting between your eyes and mine mine mine.

  1975

  Dear Denise,

  It’s been so long since I’ve written that I don’t know where to begin. Work has been good and getting better, in fact that’s where I am right now, in the darkroom at Cashman Photo. We are in the between-show lull, so I wanted to write you.

  Three days ago I got a splinter in my eye and now have to wear a patch. I also encountered the flu, so I’m in great shape. Then I got caught by Morgan Cashman himself making off with pictures I made myself (very much against the rules), and there was a big scene in which I almost got fired. I was pretty worked up when I got off, so I went with some people after work and got drunk down at the bar here.

  I’ve had two offers from other photography studios to go work for them. So far, I haven’t acted on either, but I’m seriously considering going to Alan Photography. The cat from Alan came right into the lab looking for me. Alan is Cashman’s arch enemy—they have a lab in the basement of Caesar’s and do tremendous volume (I could handle it). I don’t know how these people heard about me, but what they heard must’ve been good.

  I have gone out with so many people since we last spoke, but mostly two cats—one named Brian (with the cabin—did I tell you about him?) and another named Jerry. Brian is nineteen and my favorite. He is really cute, looks a lot like Keith, but innocent. Jerry is (brace yourself) forty years old. He’s into meditation and a vegetarian. Really a super nice cat, but a little too together for me, if you know what I mean.

  Desperately need to talk to you. Short version: I’m flunking out of school. Haven’t gone in two weeks. Was on “Intervention” at UnLove (my GPA got too bad) and then they kicked me out. I’m short one credit at Western, which will stop me from graduating. It’s really a drag. I’ll have to go to summer school to get that old piece of paper.

  Sorry it took so long to write. I’ve got a million things to say, but work calls . . .

  Dearest Nese,

  I’m here in summer school, which started an hour late because of the flood. Did you hear about it? It was bad. I was at Caesar’s when it hit, trying to get in to open up the lab and there was this river flowing through the middle of the parking lot. And this was no meager trickle. There were like 200 cars being washed into each other and down into the wash that runs water under the Strip. Then I heard the loudest crack: the bridge. When the bridge went, the riv
er jumped over the Strip and completely flooded the Flamingo. Cars (with people in them) were washed away from the MGM and more from the Marina. Caesar’s was literally an island, no way to get in or out without going through rushing water and mud and debris knee-deep at the shallowest point. I rolled up my pants and found a way. When I finally got in, I was covered with mud and panicked because I’d seen my mom’s car go under the bridge. Totally destroyed. I found out later she wasn’t in it.

  The big fountain at Caesar’s was completely drowned. The water ran all the way around the hotel and inside it. People crowded on the steps and waded around in the muck. I’m taking pictures the whole time. In a way it was like I’d wished it . . .

  Death toll is four. Blacks in North L.V. were stranded on their roofs for a day, some more. The gas tanks at Valor broke and power lines are still down on the north side. The Huntridge flooded up to the stage. Many, many accidents, cars stalled all over town. Our living room flooded. I’ve never seen Las Vegas in such a state, and old timers say they haven’t either.

  Hey-O Nese,

  As you’ve probably heard, I flunked out of school. For good. Fucked off on summer school royally and that’s it, I’m told. Oh well. Don’t you love these cheery letters? I don’t have a soul here I can talk to. Jack and Monica moved out and it’s just Mom and me now. She’s gone by the time I get home. Mom is alone all the time except for when Mark decides to come by. The only thing worse than when he doesn’t come around is when he does. Is it better to be completely alone or be married to someone you don’t like? Are these the only options? I just don’t want my only companion to be the T.V. Denise, where will we be? Left alone, like my mom? Or living with some adult baby, cooking and cleaning for him, feeding him, smelling his farts?