Starling Days

by Rowan Hisayo Buchanan

  The bigger problem was that she had a second list: the reasons that her presence on the planet wasn’t doing any good. It was posted on her neural pathways, like a highway billboard that every thought had to drive past. She wasn’t sure when the sign had been erected. Maybe it had always been there but the pills had stopped her looking up. Until they hadn’t.

  Can’t cope with jeans belonged on that list. Has an interesting job, nice husband, good life, but can’t seem to enjoy them belonged on that list. Fucking ungrateful belonged on that list. It was a trap: being unhappy because you were unhappy. Hating yourself because you’re the sort of weak idiot who hates themselves. Mina looked over again at her husband, who was diligently making his own list on the white screen. She pinched her arm, digging her nails into the skin. Snap out of it, she thought.

  She put down the list and reached into her satchel for the diary. She lined it up on the table next to the notebook. The diary had a green leather cover. Attractive stationery was weak ammunition against the world, but it was what she had. The day she’d bought the diary, she’d penciled a tentative uptick. A little stab at hope. There was another for the dinner party and another for moving in. Such hopeful mountain peaks. It seemed a shame to ruin them. A shame to add the bite of V. So she didn’t. She made a little ^, not because she felt okay but because she thought it was too depressing not to.

  In her back pocket, the phone hummed. Facebook announced that Phoebe had accepted her request and was officially her Friend.

  Cute dog, Mina typed. A nice neutral start. Everyone she knew in New York who had a pet or a child loved to talk about it.

  His name’s Benson.

  Cute name. Surely she had a better word than “cute.” Would an emoji worsen this idiocy?

  It’s after Benson & Hedges.

  Mina had no idea what that was. A law firm? A comedy duo? She googled. At the top of the screen appeared a golden cigarette box plastered with the usual warning about how cigarettes will kill you. It always seemed like such an expensive way to die.

  The cigarettes? she typed.

  He was my gift to myself after I gave them up.

  What is he? That sounded rude. Mina added, What breed I mean?

  His mother was a Pomeranian. His father was a mystery.

  But he’s huge.

  Note the mystery.

  I’d love to meet him sometime. The Delivered sign appeared, and then there was silence.

  Mina tiptoed towards her husband. She tucked in the label. The heat of his neck warmed her knuckles.

  He turned and kissed her hand. “Got your phone on you?” Oscar asked.

  “Why?”

  “I need to download an app.”

  “Can’t you do it on yours?” There were no secrets on her phone. But the device was hers and it felt oddly private.

  “It needs to be on both our phones.”

  He turned his computer around to show her the website of a family tracking app. Apparently it would notify him when she arrived home, when she went out, where she was in the world. There were pictures of happy men, women and children delighting in their constant surveillance.

  “That’s creepy,” she said. “I’m not doing that.”

  “Mina.”

  “What? I’m not a wayward teenager.”

  “I’m trying to take care of you. I need to know where you are.”

  “You don’t need to know. It’s not going to kill you. You won’t evaporate if you don’t know that I’m buying groceries or whatever.”

  “Mina,” he said, too calmly, and she regretted using the word kill, because she could see all the retorts bobbing in his throat. “I need to know you’re safe.”

  She knew she should be grateful. Many men would have left. Many women, too. Most sane people wouldn’t want anything to do with someone like her.

  “Fine,” she said.

  “Thank you.”

  *

  Oscar watched as Mina turned off the lights and crawled into bed next to him. He pulled his arm around his wife. Her head tucked just right under his collarbone. Her body warmed his.

  “I’m sorry,” she whispered.

  “For what?” Oscar asked. He could feel his muscles go taut. “What’s wrong?”

  “For all this.” She banged on her skull with a loose fist.

  Nothing new. Okay, then. They could sleep. He felt like he hadn’t had a full night’s sleep all month. “Don’t worry about it,” he said. “Go to sleep.”

  But she didn’t. He could feel it through the dark. Eventually she said, “Tell me about when we were perfect.” Her face pressed against Oscar’s breastbone, as if she were trying to nuzzle inside. His hand rested on the small of her back, which was warm from the shower.

  “We’re not perfect now?” It seemed like the response he should give.

  “You know what I mean. Before all this.”

  “We were perfect when,” he began. And he told her of the afternoon after the results of a big Greek test. She was always better at Latin than Greek. He’d wanted to celebrate her A grade. But she’d had a shift at the ice-cream parlor. The one where the servers had to sing to you if you gave them a tip. So instead he met her after work. She made him a waffle cone of mint choc chip, and he hadn’t said anything about refined sugars, although by then he was already on a high-protein regime. As she passed it to him, she sang in her flat, husky voice. He’d forgotten the lyrics but he still remembered that she closed her eyes as she sang. The ice cream tasted of the winter just gone. When they kissed, so did her lips. And he’d hoped they’d be kissing next winter.

  “Mmm . . . Tell me another.” Mina ran her fingers along his jawline, her breath soft and even. One thigh was tucked around his.

  “Do you remember the first of my birthdays we had together?” he asked. She nodded, her lashes beating against his chest. They’d been dating a few months. He hadn’t even mentioned his birthday. But she’d found out somehow. “And the cupcake?”

  “It was just a cupcake,” Mina said.

  “With twenty-one candles.” It was more flame than flour. She’d knocked on his dorm-room door, and when he’d opened it, there she was lit from below by the blaze.

  “Did I ever tell you there were supposed to be twenty-one cupcakes?” she asked.

  Oscar blinked. “No?”

  “Yeah, I baked twenty-one cupcakes and there was supposed to be a candle in each. But I must have timed it wrong because they all burnt. Our kitchen smelt charred for days. I borrowed—stole—an egg, and I had just enough flour and sugar for one last cupcake.”

  “You never told me that.”

  “I guess I was embarrassed,” she said. “Another.”

  “Mina, we need to sleep. All the articles say it’s not good to mess with your sleep cycle.”

  “Please, Oscar.”

  “Okay, one more.” He described the parties they’d thrown after moving into their first New York apartment. Mina had just begun her PhD and he’d just started work. He’d ordered crates of Japanese craft beer and taken notes in the name of research. Everyone told them they looked perfect together. His accent was just so cute.

  He’d watch Mina talking on the other side of the room, surrounded by yet more friends. There was always the hum of music in the background and too many people talking for him to catch her words. But he’d see everyone around her fall into laughter. There were tea lights on every surface. They’d felt immune to fire in those first years. By the end of the night, he’d have Mina back, folded in his arms.

  “Another,” she said.

  “Mina, I can’t.” His shoulders and head hurt. His lids were falling. He willed himself to summon up the past. His brain flicked to the narrow dorm-room bed they’d shared, so narrow that her hair had got into his mouth and her tailbone nuzzled his dick as she slept. But sleep tipped him forward into darkness and dream, and he didn’t tell another story.

  The bathroom was only an arm-span wide and dominated by the large tub. Mina pulled back the
plastic curtain and turned on the shower. She slipped the razor along her legs. Fish day, she thought. That was what they called them in their secret couple-script. Fish days and bear days. On fish days, she shaved legs, armpits, and plucked her eyebrows. On fish days, she was slippery, soft, almost but not quite liquid. Bear days were the days in which black fur rose from her skin. Those were the days when the scraping away of follicles was too much. They made a joke of it, Mina curling her hands into paws, flicking the nails like claws. Oscar said he loved her either way. He said he wanted her either way too. But she knew he preferred fish days. If she couldn’t give him a clean and tidy brain then at least she could offer him this: a body and skin that provided no resistance.

  She got out of the shower and toweled down. Oscar was out of the house, running. In the bedroom, she pulled up the app. There he was, his little body going around and around the city. She had the odd notion that if she found the right button she might be able to drag him across the tiny buildings. His dot was almost back at the flat.

  This was a good city. It was good of Oscar to have brought her here. They said that to be loved you had to love yourself. Bullshit. How were you supposed to love yourself if no one else could see anything of value beneath your skin? No, she thought, it was the other way around. To love yourself you had to be loved. She was lucky to have Oscar. She was lucky to have a man who looked at her like she was a precious creature.

  She decided to fill him a bath. The bathroom was still steamy from her shower. She turned on the taps. There was a pause, a hurk, and a gurgle. Mina fumbled in the bag of toiletries she’d brought from New York, until she found the sachet of bubble bath. The sample was the size of a condom packet. In New York, they only had a shower with an earnestly bent neck. But the package’s elegant cardamom and rose had been too seductive to toss. Finally, it would have its use. She squeezed and slime glooped out, turning the water milky. As a last thought, she turned off the hot water leaving the cold to run. Oscar’s skin was delicate and sensitive to heat. The tall, serious man was endearingly wimpy about hot coffee and showers. She dipped her fingers into the water, a breath too cold for her and perfect for him.

  He arrived, red-faced and panting.

  “I ran you a bath,” she said.

  He put a hand on the wall to steady himself and held up a finger, smiling through the gasping.

  “I thought it would be nice for your muscles,” she added.

  He thumbed her chin with his hot hand. “Thank you.” She watched him ease into the water, one foot and then the other.

  “Hey, keep me company?” He beckoned.

  “There’s no room,” she said. But she dropped her towel.

  She maneuvered so that he had one end and she took the other. She propped her ankles against his shoulders. The curls of his hair stuck close to his head. Looking at the long-muscled frame of her husband on the bath’s white plinth, she thought of a Roman statue. Or would Greek be more accurate? The Greeks had carved their statues all the way around. The Romans carved only the visible parts. If the back of a statue faced the wall, they left it rough. She knew she was supposed to admire the pragmatism. But it disturbed her. The larger empire was built by people who cared only about how things looked, not how they were.

  “What’s wrong?” Oscar asked.

  “I’m fine,” she said, and batted his cheek with the side of her” foot.

  “Hey!” he said, and grabbed her heel, laughing. “Fish day, huh?” He ran a hand along the inside of her leg.

  “Yup,” she replied, and the pleasure of his noticing bubbled in her chest.

  For a while they lay, softening and wrinkling. Heat misted the mirror. She had the premonition that she would remember this tableau, these two recently married people sharing a bath, and the thought scared her. It seemed ominous. She didn’t want this to be a scene she looked at in retrospect as she stood alone in front of some future sink, wondering where the years had gone and why she’d let everything drift away in a cloud of steam and self-pity. Her eyes felt hot. She didn’t want to cry. This was supposed to be a happy time.

  “Mina, what’s wrong?”

  “Nothing,” she said, hating herself for snapping. She jumped out, kneeing him in the chest in her hurry.

  “Ouch,” he said.

  “Sorry. I’m going to be late for my appointment.” As she made the excuse she realized it was true. She grabbed the first clothes that came to hand, black jeans, blue T-shirt, and a hoodie. The bra was old, the cups awkwardly warped but the gynecologist had probably seen worse.

  Since coming off the pill, her period had vanished. She had no nostalgia for the eight-day ordeal. But Oscar had asked her to get checked out to make sure it was nothing serious. Their insurance would cover it. It had seemed easier to make the appointment than to object.

  *

  The gynecologist looked like Anna Wintour. It was the perfectly bobbed hair and the long tendons that supported her thin neck. What would the editor-in-chief of Vogue make of having a gynecologist doppelgänger? Diplomas hung on the wall. Their golden seals beamed like tiny suns. Mina had once been to an astrologer and that woman had had framed diplomas too. The gynecologist wanted to know if Mina was trying to have a child. No. No. Her hand went to the small swell of her stomach. Her ovaries were squished in there. She didn’t know exactly where. The cotton of her shirt was soft, and she left the hand there—holding herself.

  “So why did you decide to come off the pill?” The gynecologist looked at her the way Mina suspected Anna Wintour looked at a model who’d put on a few pounds. This woman was not a therapist, psychologist, psychoanalyst, psychiatrist, spiritual healer or mindfulness coach. This woman’s job was ovaries, wombs and fallopian tubes.

  “I just thought it would be good to take a break from medication,” Mina said.

  The gynecologist’s plucked eyebrows pulled together.

  Mina added, “Not for religious reasons or anything. But I’ve been on the pill since I was fifteen. Heavy irregular periods.” Her gift from puberty was a rope of pain that knotted itself above her pubic bone, mood fluctuations and the sort of PMS that misogynists think all women get.

  “And you’re not a virgin?”

  “I’m thirty-two. I’m married.”

  The gynecologist made a note. “I have to ask these questions. How many times a week would you say you have sex?”

  “It depends. I mean, there isn’t a pattern.” Some weeks, Oscar looked at her more like a doctor than a lover. He looked at her as if he was trying to find what was wrong, and then Mina curled up inside, like a weevil. Other nights, their bodies collided in sorrow-hunger that was all teeth and tongue.

  “I see. And do you use protection?”

  “Yes. Condoms, after I went off the pill.”

  “Very good, and since you quit have you noticed any changes to your body?”

  The gynecologist asked about body hair, unexpected weight gain, and surprising pains.

  I wish I was dead, Mina thought. Blue sky tipped in through the big window. She was in a tasteful office. She’d eaten enough for breakfast. But there her brain went again: I wish I was dead. Mina felt like the background music should change. The lighting should change. The blue sky stayed blue. The gynecologist still looked like the editor-in-chief of Vogue. Mina felt queasy. The world was full of good and funny things and her brain did this. She smiled at the gynecologist, a big smile with lots of teeth. The woman looked alarmed.

  Mina stood on the medical scales with the rubber ribs of the mat digging into her feet. The machine’s metal tongue pressed the top of her head. I want to die, thought the brain. Which was silly because she was dying all the time. In a few years her brain’s myelin would begin to decay. What was the hurry? Why upset Oscar? Why make everyone angry and tired? Take the fact that she’d ruined her wedding. She couldn’t even remember why.

  Her friend Alex, who’d majored in film, had videoed the ceremony. They’d got married upstate in the woods. The video began with
the pine needles shimmying in the breeze. Her wedding dress sprouted like a button mushroom among the moss. A tinkling piano soundtrack overlaid the scene. Unfilmed was the girl who’d go back to their cabin and swallow all the pills left over from her wisdom-tooth extraction, garden-variety painkillers, and sleeping pills. She must’ve gone to her washbag and rooted past lip balm and toothpaste, until she found the orange tube with the long name, a box of Tylenol, and a packet of those green sleeping pills. Had she taken them one by one? Tipped them all into her palm? She couldn’t remember what had made her swallow. Was it her brain saying again and again, I want to die? Or was it more specific? Mina had no idea. The number of pills and the feel of them on her tongue had vanished.

  Part of her had died or got lost in the attempt. Some cluster of cells. Brain damage, she supposed, of the most minor sort. There were different types of memory loss. Her grandma began to forget words because her nerve cells were decaying. When the words failed, she’d put her hand on her mouth as if reaching to catch them. On the other hand, a blackout from drinking usually meant your brain had never made memories at all. Had the electric score of Mina’s wedding night ever been written inside her skull?

  Big deal. She’d forgotten the events of so many days. She’d forget all this eventually. She might as well smile through it now. She smiled and realized that, yet again, it was inappropriate. The gynecologist’s rubber-gloved hands were examining Mina’s interior.

  “Sorry, I was away with the fairies,” Mina said. Where had those words come from? She would never put it like that. The gynecologist nodded. Mina’s phone hummed in her bag. She flushed with further embarrassment, as if it were a movie she’d interrupted, not the careful prodding of her own body. The gynecologist said she’d need more tests. Mina nodded, okay, okay.