Poor Your Soul

by Mira Ptacin

  “Well, guess what? It’s my birthday,” I tell him, “and I don’t have time for your shit.”

  I see Grace sitting at a table next to the jukebox, so I go sit down across from her. Her face looks like a porcelain doll’s. Her arms are stretched out in front of her with both hands in half-fingered wool gloves, wrapped around her beer. When I ask her how things are going, she tells me not good.

  “I’ve been drinking a lot lately,” she says, and I ask her if it has anything to do with that thingy from a couple of weeks ago. I know it is. It’s gotta be. She doesn’t have anyone else. She’s all by herself here.

  Grace doesn’t look up but answers, “Well yeah, sort of, I guess. I kind of lied to them,” she says.

  She says she heard that sometimes people react to anesthesia in bad ways, so right as she was going under, Grace thought about it and got scared, and in her dreamlike state she blurted out, “I’m on antidepressants and I’ve done acid before!” because she thought she might die during the harvest, and didn’t want anything to fuck anything up.

  “Those sons of bitches,” says Grace. “They told me I deceived them. They said that I was a liar and was only doing it for the money.”

  I get up and put three dollars in the jukebox. E9 “Function at the Junction,” F8 “Tears of a Clown,” B5 “Superstition.”

  Poor Grace. I can’t say I never considered donating my eggs, but she actually did it. She doesn’t realize how fragile she is, or at least didn’t back then and now she’s feeling like shit and nobody else cares. They don’t know, but still, would it matter? No one talks about these things. No one asks about our vaginas. My classmates know about me but they don’t ask me what happened. How I’m feeling. What I’m thinking. I don’t want Grace to feel loneliness like this. Isolation. Segregation. She’s got no one. We are women. We should be comrades. It will make us stronger. Louder. As powerless as I feel, I’m hoping that I have something to give to Grace. If anything, at least I can offer my presence as support. Poor girl, the poor soul had no idea what she was getting into, I think, and sit back down across from Grace.

  “They said that to you? They called you that?”

  “Yeah. A liar. A liar who did it for money.”

  “Well, did you?”

  “No shit I did it for money!” Grace says. “Can you show me one fool who wouldn’t?”

  “Screw ’em,” I tell her. “You don’t need them and their caviar collecting anyway.”

  Grace lets out a sigh and says, “Yeah, well, they said I can never do it again. I don’t know how I’m going to pay my loans now. I’m not sure what I’m gonna do.”

  “Who cares? It’s stupid. You don’t need to. You’re working hard, you’re a good writer, you’re young, and you’re good enough, Gracie Grace. You’re good enough and you’re gonna be fine,” I say as my song comes on the jukebox. “You’ll see. You’ll survive just fine.”

  nineteen

  “These cactus are so phallic.”

  This is what I say to Andrew in the early moments of what will spread into an entire February day spent wringing the narrow backroads of Puerto Rico. We’re just coming out of Arecibo after visiting the world’s largest telescope, rounding another bend in the road, when a knotty constellation of Prickly Pear bursts from a cliff of burgundy, dry soil.

  So phallic.

  The moment I say it is the moment I realize that what I’ve said will have the opposite effect of my intention. It sounds dogmatic, not silly, but considering what erupted last night, and what’s to come, how could it not?

  “I know the rules,” I continue while Andrew says nothing. “I know it’s cacti, it’s just that cactus sounds much better.”

  Looking out the window, I can’t help but think that everything I’m seeing just seems too charged with meaning, too cliché: the unripe banana trees and farmers in aged, red pickup trucks. The lipsticked ladies in apple-bottom, muffin-top jeans appreciated by the blond-haired, blue-eyed surfers. Their bumper stickers. The low, womanly hills along which we coast. It’s all just too textbook, too . . . perfect. Even the stray dogs look as if they’ve been cast for their role; their nipples hang down, grazing the bridges on which they stand guard.

  And then, the Organ Pipe.

  The Wooly Nipple.

  The Cephalocereus millspaughhi, more commonly known to the islanders as the Dildo Cactus.

  Phallic. No shit it’s phallic, I think, and providing the perfect varnish of irony to our current state of affairs.

  We are rubes in this mysterious land of marriage. Last night, Andrew and I sat on the back deck of an Aguadilla fish joint, one with an old jukebox covered and tucked behind the booth of a live DJ playing Western pop music CDs. We ate off Styrofoam plates with disposable forks that made me think of rusty garbage barges that float under the sky, homeless and aimlessly drifting like sad, blind manatees.

  “Let’s pretend we’re on our honeymoon,” Andrew said.

  We’ve already been married five months.

  “Let’s have a bunch of honeymoons,” I said as the waitress brought me a cocktail. It was indigo and expensive tasting, like Savannah saltwater taffy. “Tell me about the telescope we’re visiting tomorrow.”

  Andrew propped his feet up against the railing of the deck and leaned back in his chair. “What do you want to know?”

  I was excited about the giant telescope. How it would help us see the stars and the planets and all the other things we don’t think about during the daytime or forget to look for at night. “Tell me about how it all works,” I said.

  The telescope was what Andrew called a marvel of modern engineering. He has studied structural engineering, so for him, it’s an architectural wonder. People just come and look at it.

  “Will we be able to see into other galaxies?” I asked.

  “Not really. Those study energy at different wavelengths,” he said.

  I felt my face contorting. I could sense that my husband was on the verge of speaking a language entirely different from mine.

  Andrew lifted his arm and directed my gaze to the restaurant’s open kitchen. “See those lamps? When the bulb glows, you see light energy.”

  Inside the small kitchen, three cooks in dirty, white aprons were throwing various breaded things into a vat of boiling oil. It looked fun. I bit down hard in a dogged effort to round up all my concentration, furrowed my brow, and braced myself. “Okay?”

  “What you feel is infrared,” Andrew said. “Thing is, when you have something like a light bulb or a galaxy, you can see the glow in the visible light spectrum. But there is energy you can’t see with your eyes.” He took a sip of beer. “Our eyes only see a narrow slice of things.”

  A long arm deposited a red-and-white-checkered basket onto the table in front of us, and I popped a hush puppy into my mouth, then wiped the tips of my fingers onto my shorts.

  “How do you remember all this, man?” I said.

  “How do you remember anything?”

  “I don’t,” I mumbled.

  Andrew started tracing the rise and fall of an imaginary line onto the palette of the charcoal sky above us. “You remember the spectrum of visible light, right? The colors of the rainbow?”

  “Please excuse my dear Aunt Sally?”

  “Um, no.”

  “Wait, wait. Don’t tell me. Red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet . . . Roy G. Biv!”

  “Right. Your eyes can see part of the rainbow’s spectrum, which is related to its wavelength.”

  He was beginning to lose me again. Why was information like this so hard for me to retain? Even if I did remember everything Andrew was telling me, it’d be more like I was reciting the rules of some club I’d just joined. But what are the underlying causes of Roy G. Biv? I wondered. In a story, it was always love. Lack of love, secret love, tainted love, unrequited love, lust. But with physics and m
ath, each explanation and answer always seemed to leave me more puzzled than the question.

  We finished our drinks and ordered another round of the same. “Hold on,” I said. “Why is it long or short?”

  A Maraschino cherry sank to the bottom of my cup and lay trapped underneath a pile of ice cubes. I swirled them around with a tiny pirate sword, hoping to spear the cherry out.

  “Energy,” Andrew said. “It’s all just energy.” He let out a sigh, thinking we were done.

  But I was starting to become pleased with myself, or maybe just drunk, which made me feel a small, self-congratulatory flush of pride. I felt like I had all the answers to my questions.

  “Energy is coffee,” I declared.

  “There you go. Visible light is coffee on a day-to-day level.”

  My thoughts drifted to how I could never get through math in school, and how I’d always felt guilty for that.

  “Andrew, this is all just memorization, rules. Systems. Policies. This is exactly why I couldn’t get through this shit in school. Because we are supposed to memorize these things, and the things that go before them, and the things that go before them. But it always just makes me ask the question, ‘But why?’”

  “Then don’t try to memorize it,” he said. “Visualize it.”

  “Oh Jeez,” I slurred and took another mouthful of my cocktail.

  “Think of oil,” Andrew said. “Oil has heat when you burn it. And what do you have without heat and light?” he asked.

  “Michigan?”

  And with nothing more interesting to say, I looked back behind me and surveyed the restaurant. Everyone was dressed up. Women carried boxes of Whitman’s and had balloons tied to their wrists. I’d forgotten it was Valentine’s Day. “This place looks like the Ball Joint,” I told Andrew and nodded to the waitress to bring another Blue Lagoon or whatever the drink had been carelessly named. “Did you ever go to the Ball Joint? That big sports bar in my hometown?”

  “When would I have gone there?” he answered.

  And then, something.

  Ever since the sudden end of my pregnancy, I couldn’t have a drop of alcohol without changing into an entirely different person. A few swallows, and I’d simultaneously become relaxed and outraged.

  When would I have gone there? This question gnawed at me because I had recently found out that, in the late hours of his bachelor party, the groomsmen had taken Andrew to Hots, the one and only strip club in my hometown of Battle Creek, Michigan. It’s open 24-7, and in the morning, they serve Breast-fast.

  An aggressive pang hit me in the middle of my forehead as I slowly turned back to Andrew, who had ordered himself another beer and was looking quite content.

  “Not even for your bachelor party?” That instant, with a sudden twinge, we both knew where we’d be going next.

  “I just don’t see anything wrong with going for a bachelor party,” Andrew said.

  “Give me a break,” I said and crossed my arms. “You went, after I asked you not to go.”

  “Come on,” he pleaded. “The boys took me there. I had no choice.”

  “For Christ’s sake, Andrew! It wasn’t a normal wedding! We. Did. Not. Have. A. Normal. Wedding.” I cried, slid off my ring, and threw it at him.

  The waitress winced at us from behind the kitchen. “Happy Valentine’s Day,” Andrew said and sighed tragically as she brought us a menu.

  “Look,” he said. “I don’t remember anything other than Gabe falling in love with one of the strippers. And if you really want to know, since I was the groom, I got dragged onto the stage and whipped, but I just sat there.”

  “I asked you not to go, and you said you wouldn’t. It was disrespectful.”

  “Look,” he said.

  “No, you look. Do you know where I was when you were getting spanked on a stage?”

  “At a male strip club?”

  We were getting nowhere fast.

  “No,” I said, and stood up. “I was at home.” Then I twisted the knife. “And I was still bleeding!”

  “Please,” Andrew said. “Maybe you just weren’t quite ready to be married.”

  With that, Valentine’s Day quickly drowned under a tidal wave of misunderstanding.

  “So what’d you think about Arecibo?” I ask Andrew as our car passes another village nestled in the flora. “Did the telescope blow your mind?”

  “It was okay. It’s just cool that we have these big machines that can look deep into the universe.”

  I thought Arecibo was okay, too. I ate some astronaut ice cream from the gift shop and learned that a James Bond movie was filmed inside the telescope, but mostly I enjoyed watching my husband’s face when we walked onto the ramp and saw the telescope. He looked like a little boy.

  “I’d put it in the same category as going to see the Golden Gate Bridge,” Andrew says. “I really wanted to climb around it, but they don’t let you.”

  “It looked like an egg. And it seemed like it was being cradled and protected by all the pastures and hills surrounding it,” I add, twisting the wedding band around my finger.

  “You know,” says Andrew, “all the energy from space travels at the speed of light, so it takes a few minutes for the sun to reach us.” He scratches his ear. “So in a sense, what we see today might have happened years ago. In a sense, we’re looking at the past.”

  At the end of last night’s dinner, Andrew and I sat in our car in the restaurant parking lot with the engine turned off. We could hear the muted laughter of people walking behind us and into the restaurant. We didn’t talk. We didn’t try. We just sat and just let everything be. After a brief foray into silence and introspection, we looked at things from a different perspective—from a distance, and together, as a team—finally agreeing that the strip club was not the issue.

  The issue was that we were moving on. We were experiencing life from different perspectives, just as we always had, but I suspected we’d continue to see things differently, much differently. I didn’t want to grow apart. I didn’t want to be alone. I was afraid. Ever since losing the baby, everything that was once common and normal about life was bizarre and hard for me to overlook. I wanted Andrew to see things the same way as I did because I wanted proof that I wasn’t crazy, but it was clear to me that the common ground between us was being overshadowed by the differences, and this made me angry. I was a changed person. I was terrified of myself, this new self. And despite it being terrifying, at the end of last night, I realized that I would never see things the exact same way as my husband, or that I never had. I knew that we would never fully lose the baby we never had.

  “I need you to see it,” I said. “Just try to see how I might feel.” But I knew he couldn’t, and he never would, so I leaned over and pulled my wedding ring out of Andrew’s blue jeans pocket, where he’d safely placed it after I’d thrown it at him, and set it on his knee. Eventually, the atmosphere between us thawed. He asked me to be his wife again, put the wedding ring back on my finger, and kissed it.

  “So do they just sit and wait? I mean, at Arecibo, do they ever find what they’re looking for?” I ask as our car pulls onto a freshly paved road.

  “I mean, they don’t see images, because if you look at something burning across different wavelengths, you can pretty much register everything from uranium to gold to nitrogen to helium,” Andrew says.

  “So aren’t the stars just exploding gases?” I say, petting his head.

  “They’re nuclear explosions,” he answers.

  “Like the sun?”

  “Like the sun.”

  “Like Uranus?” I kid.

  “Exactly.”

  epilogue

  After Puerto Rico, we return to New York and try to settle back into things. Andrew goes back to work. I achieve my master’s degree. I continue working like a maniac on my thesis, but feel guilty about Maybe
being bored while I work. Andrew and I talk about adopting another dog; I want to save another animal. I find a rescue from the South, a Bluetick coonhound–Shar-Pei mutt with a giant head and incredibly long tail that was fostered in a men’s prison in Kentucky and has been in need of a loving home for some time, according to his online profile. His profile also says he likes to collect things and put them into organized little piles. Once I show Andrew the dog’s photos, he falls in love. We adopt the mutt and name him Huckleberry. Maybe is pissed.

  We gently kick out our roommate in the hope of living as real newlyweds. We invent routines. We have dinner parties. We go to the movies. Shouldn’t I be joyous? Shouldn’t I be relieved? No. I am tired. I am tired. I am tired.

  Life is moving on. I try to move on, too, but I can’t. It’s been months since I lost Lilly, and still, I feel like my body is filled with cement, yet fragile and faulty. Lilly is gone and it’s not my fault. I’ve accepted this fact, but my heart is still electric and popping with rage.

  I venture out of my apartment cocoon and force myself to be around friends, a few of the girls from grad school, because they are women and young and ambitious and fun. They are also artists, and from Sarah Lawrence, too, so I figure they’re feminists, at least mildly at their core; I figure they would understand my pain, hold a fist to the air in my honor. I am invited to a get-well gathering for a classmate who has broken a bone in her foot and just had surgery to fix it. We bring her flowers and casseroles and balloons; she tells us how hard it has been for her, what a traumatic experience it has been, and everyone coos like hens. None of these faces were ever in my hospital room, ever in my apartment like this. Still, I do it, too. I coo.

  When it is over, I walk home, wondering, Why her foot but not my baby? I am thinking about it with a red-hot wretchedness and, as I turn the corner to our street, a giant man walks directly into my body and keeps walking. “Get the fuck out of my way!” he shouts.

  Soon, too exhausted by feigning contentment, I cut off my relationships. I embrace solitude. My Manhattan apartment becomes a bomb shelter where, for weeks, I spend my time zoned out on a couch with a tub of peanut butter ice cream, flipping through TV channels. I don’t read, I don’t write, I don’t exercise, and I can’t fit anything on my body. I have the old maternity clothes, too big in the waist, too much a reminder of the loss. Nothing is fitting me. This enrages me. I become paralyzed. So I sit and I wait: wait for Andrew to come home from work, wait for the day to end, wait to feel better again. But the longer I avoid examining my grief, the stronger it becomes.