Playing House

by Lauren Slater

  Back in my bedroom I cry into my cupped hands. The tears snake down my face and seep between my lips, tasting of tin and salt. The tears come from a place deep down and far back within me, a little knot of grief I hadn’t even known I’d had: ten years later and I am finally mourning my wrecked chest. I am mourning the fact that there’s nothing I can do to bring my breasts back. I am mourning the fact that never, ever will I show my daughter what is left, post-surgery, two shapeless lumps inflated by saline bags, the lumps scarred, dented, and blind—no nipples—they are icons of a war, a fraught and high-cost victory. They are not icons of love or nurturance or the curve of a woman’s beauty. My chest is ugly, perhaps horrific, and no amount of dieting can change that.

  My daughter comes back from school early today and swings by me on her way to her bedroom. “Hello,” I call out, and she says an obligatory “Hi” and then disappears down the hall. I tiptoe after her. I feel like a thief. What am I doing? Why am I stalking my child? Her door is closed. I don’t knock. Instead I ease it open quietly, slowly, peering in on her unaware. She’s chewing on a hank of hair and typing fast on her keyboard, her back to me. Through her thin shirt I can see the jut of her spine. I was in labor with her for forty-eight hours and finally gave birth to her in an emergency C-section. They brought her to me, with her cap of dark hair and fixed crystal-blue eyes, her open mouth searching for a nipple; a hungry baby, my breasts not yet gone, she sucked down my milk, more and more and more.

  “When did you buy your bra?” I finally ask her.

  With her back still to me she answers without missing a beat. “About a week ago,” she says.

  “Why didn’t you ask me, tell me? I could have helped you out.”

  “Papa went with me,” she says.

  “Papa?” I say, aghast. “Why would you want Papa to go with you and not me?”

  “I figured, you know,” she says, and then swivels her seat so she’s facing me. “You know,” she says again, gesturing towards my chest. She knows about my mastectomy. She was young when it happened. She came to visit me in the hospital, her child’s face white and frightened as she scanned my bandages, bloody, the morphine pump and needles slipped into my skin.

  “Just because I lost my breasts doesn’t mean I can’t help you buy a bra,” I say.

  “Okay,” she says.

  I stand there in her doorframe.

  “Okay,” she says again, and then, after another moment has passed, she says, “You can leave now. I’m kinda busy.”

  So I go.

  There are coyotes out here, where I live. They roam the roads and rule the woods, making it unsafe for dogs and cats. Our cat, Laylo, is one tough nut, but one night, late, I hear a high, horrid scream coming from the forest, and in the morning, when I go outside, I find the corpse of our feline at the edge of a copse of trees. He is torn and opened, his fur matted with blood, his body stiff in rigor mortis. I cry into his fur, which is still, oddly, warm and then carry him back to the house and lay him on a towel. It’s Sunday, so everyone is home. We all gather around the cat. “Let’s all say something we loved about Laylo before we bury him,” my daughter suggests. “I love how he purred,” my seven-year-old son offers. “I loved how he was a night warrior,” my husband says. “I loved how acrobatic he was,” my daughter adds. “I loved his smarts,” I say, but I’m thinking of those mornings, lying back naked on the bed, the cat atop me, luxuriating in my warmth, sharing with me his rich, reverberating purr and his dramatic glossy coat, lending me his loveliness for minutes at a time. Now I stroke the coat again, still weeping.

  Later that day, despite the fact that it’s Sunday, my husband leaves for his office, bringing my son along with him. Now it’s just my daughter and me at home. “We need to bury Laylo,” I say and she nods, but neither of us moves. We watch the cat lying, still, on the towel on the counter. When we lean close to him our breath animates his whiskers, making it seem like he’s still alive. We stroke his cream-colored belly, his white socks. We kiss his small skull. Together we are tending him. We are joined by mourning, and I realize my shame is gone. So too is her ever-critical eye, filled now with falling tears. A tether between us. It’s time.

  We carry the cat outside. Early autumn, the trees plumes of plump color—saffron, wine, plum, crimson. The air is summer-soft but the breeze has a bite, and the hairs on my arms rise up in response. We find a suitable spot, under the stand of pines that front our country house, a place Laylo liked to lie, his bed of sun-warmed pine needles gone golden on the ground. My daughter is holding the shovel and now she raises it over her shoulder and strikes at the ground but doesn’t make a dent. “Let me,” I say, suddenly sure and confident. True, I am nearing fifty. True, my curves have turned to lard, my breasts to medical waste. True, I miss my old self, and this missing is made more acute by my daughter’s slow acquisition of everything I’ve lost. But standing outside in the early fall, I realize that everything I’ve lost has left me with a gritty strength, with capacities I cannot even begin to calculate. My hands are lined and cracked from all the gardens I’ve grown, all the flowers I’ve coaxed up from the dark dirt. The lines around my eyes suggest everything I’ve seen and—oh!—I’ve seen a lot, so much more than she. Now I take the shovel from her and, expertly, drive it into the earth, again and again, cutting into the soil until a square grave emerges, my daughter watching, impressed, the grave neat and firm and deep down there. I lower the cat with confidence and sadness; this is something I know how to do. Nearing fifty, I’ve buried my fair share of felines, canines, canaries, hamsters, and even people, whom I have loved and lost. I lay Laylo in his grave-bed and then, standing, I shovel soil over him until, layer by layer, piece by piece, his body disappears and all we have of him now is a mound.

  My daughter and I place a rock to mark the mound while, in the woods—it is getting towards night now—the coyotes start to sing. “I don’t like it out here in the dark,” she says, looking back towards the house, its windows aglow with apricot-colored light. I put my arm around my daughter. She presses herself against me. Soon, soon, we will enter the home I’ve made for her, but for now, out here, my body becomes her shelter as I pull her into my plushness and give succor.

  14

  Sex: In Three Positions

  I.

  Of all the things to write about! My sex life! My innermost innermost. My early experience; my later affair; my typical-white-woman AIDS scare; my first orgasm with a partner, how it surprised me, how the sensation just slipped over me and suddenly I was rippling. How afterwards I hated that man (that boy, really; we could not have been much more than eighteen); I turned my face away. The intimacy was too much, too wrenching, too sizzling, shameful crumpled crying coming Lauren. We were lying in his room in a boarding house, the boy just recently thrown out of a college in a far-away state for a spectacular and hard-to-achieve row of F’s on his report card, which he showed me—FFFFFF—and I could not help but think the F’s stood not for failure but for fuck, because he was waiting on me, I, eighteen, maybe nineteen, and still a virgin. Shame on me. Especially because we’d gone out all summer before the start of our freshman years, his in the Midwest, mine in Boston, writing letters back and forth once September started. Not once did he ask me for intercourse, even on our last night together, but I could hear him waiting, all wrapped up in the clothing of a question: When? When? The very lack of his question only underscored its implicit presence.

  I remember confiding to my roommate that we had not yet done the deed, even though we’d spent all summer together. Hers was a pause of shock. “You haven’t gone past third?” she said. We were teenagers! And this is how teenagers talked back in the Reagan days, when you said no to drugs and yes to sex, back before AIDS, when (and probably still now) girls tossed their cherries out car windows or dropped them in the dirt like they were nothing, those fruits, that single stretch of skin. Snap. I didn’t want to snap. Bright blood on a white sheet. I didn’t want to bleed. Sheer fear of that plungin
g pain is what held me back; I couldn’t insert a tampon, never mind imagine a member, its pale, smooth head with that single squinting eye, accusing, asking, pushing. FFFFFFFFFF. Instead of telling him the truth—that I was a mere maiden, pure as snow or cool milk in a cup—I made an elaborate lie. I was raped. Too traumatized. I needed time. Writing this now, remembering this now, for the first time in a long time, I do not judge myself. I consider it a lot to ask of a newly minted woman that she offer up her intact body for this frankly difficult deed. I also find it interesting that shame, an emotion supposedly lying deep in our limbic system, untouched by time or class, is in fact a product of time, and of class and culture, too. In the nineteenth century, to be raped was to be shamed, forever. In the late twentieth century, to be a virgin was to be shamed, while to be raped was to be saved, because you’d survived. After all, we not only venerate survivors; we even make them famous. But I wasn’t after fame; I wanted only to escape the shame. So I lied, to save my skin. And then, during Christmas vacation, the boy brought home from the Midwest six deep, dark capital FFFFFF’s along with a letter from the dean saying don’t come back here. Flunked out. Which is why my first orgasm happened in this rooming house in Wellesley, a mile or so from where his parents would no longer let him live. Outside, by the curb, was his slicker-yellow taxi, inside the dingy room a warming plate, a two-slot toaster, a bed with squealing springs. He was a moody, broody bad boy with a muscular chest and head roiling with glossy curls. He did downers and uppers and acid, none of which I did, but we both loved the Grateful Dead, and when I slept over (sex, but no score), we’d wake in the mornings and listen to “Ripple,” the clearness of that music, the pure simplicity of it, affirming for me again and again that I was part of a people, a species, capable of creating great beauty. Such a song it was! And it was May. And the man in the room next door drank his life away. Ripple in clear wa-ha-ter. And through the open window, warm liquid breezes poured over our naked bodies, and then one time he touched me just so and I tipped into the orgasm and was grasped. This was different from whatever I’d achieved on my own. This was softer, gentler, full of a wide-open love, a deep falling-down love. Which is why, when it was over, I hated him. And turned my face away.

  And that’s all I’m going to say. I’m going to stop right here. I have discovered, in the writing of these prior paragraphs, that, while I am no longer a maiden, I am still a lady. And this is a discovery I don’t know what to do with. It seems impossible, and yet, ’tis true. I find this, this assignment . . . burdensome, if not in bad taste. Am I alone in my response? Or do many women have little ladies inside? Surely I am not the only one. But it feels especially ironic that I, the teller-all of tell-alls, the four-memoir madam, should have such a teacup attitude when it comes to a task like the one I am presently engaged in. You would never guess the presence of this teacup by looking at me. From a pure looks perspective, I am as far from a lady as a mule is from a mare. Today I am wearing gray sweats, my pockets full of stones. Right this minute, as I sit here typing, I am literally weighed down by dozens of stones crammed in the capacious pockets of my tattered sweats. The stones I found this morning in a streambed by our house.

  For the past three weeks, I have spent most of my mornings in this streambed, with a shovel, occasionally on my hands and knees, scraping madly to expose the pearly surface of a solid piece of past. Stones. Where did they come from? Is it possible they landed here by way of an asteroid that broke free from its planet billions of years ago, so I am finding not only stone but space? Is it possible we will someday run out of stones just as we are running out of oil, or trees? Could we survive without stones? Would we miss them, and in missing them, retrospectively discover their value? After all, think of what you can do with stones. I could build a house, a hearth, a road, a fire. Some stones you can crack open and discover, inside of them, a perfect crystallized geode. Stones are secret. Stones whisper. I am a little lady who is also a stoner, the second part of this statement cancelling out the first. Late at night, when I am through with everything else, I boil my stones, just to see what will happen. I polish my stones with olive oil, just to see what subtle shifts in shading I might get. Today was incredible. I discovered that I could use my stained-glass grinder wheel to actually sculpt a stone. The stone’s strength was no match for the bite of the diamond bit. I held the stone to the wet bit and felt it give way, felt it melt in my palms gone slick with stone silt as the wheel spun in water and the solid, stolid rock acquired waist and curve, acquired an impossible smoothness. When I was finished, I had a small body in my hands. This was a speckled stone body, at once utterly impenetrable and yet totally yielding. This was my body. This was my orgasm. This was my shame, my turning away, my turning to stone, my no-speak. This was my lady, here, so shapely and pursed. This was my wildness, my insanity, my boundary-breaking body and multi-memoir madam, hands slick with stone silt and yipping with glee as I discovered all I could do, one Monday in November, in my forty-fourth year around the sun, which sets so early now.

  II.

  I could chalk it up to age, the fact that sex interests me these days about as much as playing checkers. After all, at the unripe age of forty-four, my estrogen is probably plunging, and my periods, although still regular, are brief and bright, more like a wink than a flow.

  But the fact is, I’ve never much liked sex, even though it has, on occasion, captivated me. I see no inconsistency here, because in general I associate captivity with guns and danger. So, yes, I have been gripped by sex the same as the trap grips the ferret’s leg and he has to bite off his limb to set himself free. What kind of fun is this? Says the proverbial therapist: Sex threatens you, Lauren. You feel overcome.

  Another definite, though altogether less sexy, possibility rather than feeling overcome is that I have never much liked sex because, when all’s said and done, there’s not much to like. I mean, really: what is the big deal? The stretch and snap and blood on the sheet is a big deal, but after that? Especially when it’s with the same person, over and over again; that just couldn’t be right, from an evolutionary standpoint. I, for one, have always become bored with sex within the first six months of meeting a man, assuming the man is not psychologically torturing me. Leaving those unfortunate instances aside, the fact is that sex has always paled for me just like the sun is paling these November days, and as predictably, too.

  I met and fell in love with my husband for his grand good looks, his beautifully colored hair, his gentle ways, his humor, etc. We were together many years before we married and, so, sex faded. Then we decided to get married. Predictably, almost as soon as the engagement ring slid onto my finger, I fell in love with someone else. I fell madly, insanely, obsessively in love with a conservative Christian man who believed that I, as a Jew, was going to hell. We fought long and hard about that, and then had sex. This is so stupid it pains me to write about it. This man . . . he played golf. He went to church on Sundays. He wore shirts with those nasty little alligators on them. What are those shirts called—Lamaze? Or is that the name of a childbirth technique? This was not a man who cared one whit for birth-control techniques; he wanted his women barefoot and pregnant, and I fucking FELL IN LOVE WITH HIM.

  I made him a beautiful chest. I worked on it for weeks. I painted the under layer white, over which I sponged a deep marine turquoise. I then shellacked twenty times, so the wood looked wrapped in glass. I painted the inside of the chest a Chinese red and decoupaged it with cut-up phrases from the New Testament. I snipped a huge and beautiful Jesus from a religious book, and then I cut the Jesus in half. I put Jesus’s top half on the top half of the inside lid, his bottom half on the bottom half of the inside lid. I then shellacked Jesus until he too turned to glass. I gave my lover the box. “Open it up,” I said. It was Christmastime. He did. What a spectacular gift. When you opened the lid, you saw Jesus slowly rise, resurrected, until, when the lid was raised completely, he stood solid and tall. It was a gorgeous gift that reflected a gorgeous sex li
fe in the midst of a crazy relationship filled with clashing values and shredded bits of Bible.

  And, of course, I was engaged during this whole time. A terrible thing, I know. And yet, this affair I sensed was absolutely necessary in order for me to move forward with my marriage. The affair was a test. Sex had somewhat cooled between my husband-to-be and me. I thought, but could not be sure, that that was to be my fate no matter what, no matter who, in which case my fiancé was the man I wanted to marry. But suppose I was wrong? Suppose there was someone out there with whom I could have passionate, slick sex my whole long life, a sex life like one endless Christmas morning? Wouldn’t that be wonderful, especially because I’d never celebrated Christmas, so it had all the more magic and mystery to me. Thus, I fell wildly, passionately in love with a conservative Christian, very smart, very handsome, very short-sighted, and we had fantastic, obsessive sex while, the whole time, I had one eye on the clock. I was just waiting to see when, or if, this affair would run out of fuel. I prayed to Jesus and anyone else who might be up there that it would, so I could marry the man I loved. And yet night after night I left the man I loved to be with the man I was in love with. I could not wait, I was like one of those primates, what are they, bonobos, with the scarlet vaginas—yuck.

  Actually, I just recalled a small detail. I don’t know if it makes a difference or not. I never actually had intercourse with this man. He did not believe in sex before marriage. Therefore, when my fiancé asked me if I was “having sex” with someone else (why was I coming home at 3 a.m.?), I could answer no. On the Christian man’s end, when his god asked him if he was having sex with someone else, he too could answer no, and so we both lived highly honest, righteous lives filled with perpetual sex.

  But because I am not a bonobo, the inevitable started to happen. It happened the night the man took me to church and asked me to eat Jesus. Enough is enough! I am a lady, am I not? Ladies do not eat deities, and they also do not understand complicated, nonsensical theories like transubstantiation, which allows you to at once eat but not eat the deity or its stand-in, a saltine. Enough is enough and was enough. I never have and never will put the godhead in my mouth. As for the mere mortal, as for the man, after that request and all those gospel songs, after, I’d say, the twenty-third or fifty-fifth nasty little reptile appeared on his stiffly ironed shirts, he lost his appeal. Sex turned tepid, and then revolting. While the revolting part was particular to this crazy relationship, the tepid part was wholly within my experience and proved, for me, that there is no god of monogamous passion. It ain’t gonna happen. Thus, freed from the tethers of this Christian affair, I returned to the gentle arms of my pagan husband, who, on occasion, also calls himself a druid. We are going on our tenth anniversary, and despite the fact that, like all good druids, he dances amongst trees real and imagined, things are tough in our fairy land. He wants hot sex. I turned tepid long, long ago.