by Dana Spiotta
She smiled, nodded. She took a sip of whiskey. Without asking, he had ordered one for her and one for him. The sip warmed and braced her. She was braced and he was beautiful. He liked her, and his attention made her happy. Everything was yet to come, the air electric with possibility. They hadn’t even kissed, yet. Such moments were a glorious, unambiguous good, weren’t they?
“I wonder,” Sam said, “if seeing a man by himself at a march for women’s reproductive rights makes him more trustworthy or more suspect than meeting a man on the subway or at a show or in a bar.”
“Good question,” he said. He sipped his whiskey. “And now because of me, you have left the march, you are drinking whiskey in the afternoon, and you are praising commerce as a stabilizing cultural force.”
“It might even get worse from here,” she said, touching his arm, surprising herself. He smiled; then the smile gradually faded. He took another sip of whiskey, looked into the glass for a moment, and then looked into her eyes. She didn’t look away, and she could feel the heat between them. He leaned in toward her, and she closed her eyes and waited. A soft kiss: his lips pressed against hers. Once, then again. He pulled back, and when she opened her eyes, he was still looking at her. He took her hand and raised it toward his face. He turned her hand over, so that the inside of her wrist was exposed. He lowered his head, closed his eyes, and very gently, very slowly, pressed his lips to her wrist. She felt a quiver of pleasure that radiated from his kiss to her entire body. She trusted him, she realized, and it felt major already, undeniably. She wanted to go back to his apartment or back to her apartment right away. She was falling for him, now, in this moment. She wanted to leap into this new portal of her life.
She took him to her place, because he had a roommate and she didn’t. She had a very cheap illegal sublet on Jane Street near Eighth Avenue. She pointed out the Corner Bistro, right next to the door of her building. “They have a great jukebox there,” she said. She already planned to take him there, to listen to John Coltrane with him, to eat bar food and talk into the night.
He was slow and assured and attentive in bed. He was focused on her orgasms, which was new for her.
“I have never had anything like this,” he said.
“Me either,” she said. Meant to be.
Years later, after Ally was born and their connection gradually eroded, Sam would discover that even such attentive sex could become routine, ordinary, just bodies doing their thing in space while your heart still felt lonely. But that very first afternoon, on her bed under her vintage rose satin duvet, they were all there, all in, nothing short of joyful.
9
This new version of them. Sweat on his back. He smelled good. He felt muscular, strong, familiar. But also strange: him, in her nun bed, in this house, dislocated from their suburban life. It was true that their orgasms were particularly intense. The same old gestures and habits were somehow different. He was on the floor, on his knees, hunched toward her. She sat on the side of the bed, her legs apart, her hips pulled back. He leaned in and flicked his tongue on her—he knew the spot she liked; he put a finger (fingers) inside her and pressed from the inside of her toward his tongue on the outside. This, with the awkward position of her hips, was almost excruciating. A sensation of indirection and direction, an almost feeling that denied a peaking, that elongated her climax, that made her stop everything in her head and her body but those tiny points of pressure until she came with a thunderous, body-shaking relief. Yes, the sex comprised familiar gestures, but scrambled and reconstituted.
She caught her breath, looked at him. He smiled.
“This,” she said, with a slight wave of her hand at him.
“Let’s not worry about what it is. Let’s just see,” he said. He sat up. It was too hot for two people in the tiny bed. She got up with the sheet around her. Reached into her purse and pulled out a cigarette. He laughed. She shrugged.
“I will smoke by the window,” she said. He watched her crank open the leaded window. She sat in a chair, partly covered by the sheet, and she smoked.
“You look like a girl in a French New Wave film,” he said.
She laughed because she was hardly a girl; she was a hard, old woman. When will she catch up to herself ?
“What’s so funny?”
“Nothing,” she said and exhaled. He watched her.
“I like that new hair,” he said. Sam brushed her hand through her short hair. It was bristly but soft, fun to touch.
“What about my new body?” She had grown harder since she had left him.
“I like your new body, I like your old body. I like all your bodies.”
“Good answer,” she said.
They fucked one more time before he went back to work.
It’s a thing. Don’t worry about what it is.
* * *
—
The next day he called her. “You should get central air,” he said. “I’ll call Isaac’s and get it installed.”
“No,” she said.
“It won’t hurt or change your house. It will just use the heat registers to circulate the cool air.”
“I just told you I don’t want it,” she said, her voice rising, the heat rising. God, it was hot in her house. Or was it a hot flash? Never mind. She didn’t have time for this!
“I’ll pay for it if—”
“I don’t fucking want AC. If you don’t like it, you don’t have to come here.”
“Okay, okay,” he said. “Calm down, Sam.”
She hated being told to calm down. She moved her phone away from her ear and wiped a trickle of sweat off the side of her face. She switched ears.
“Just. Listen,” Sam said. “We can continue to see each other, but I don’t want any more support in the form of money or unsolicited advice, okay?”
There was a long pause.
“All right,” he said. “Sure.”
She hung up. His concession aggravated her. Or maybe it was that he hesitated before he conceded. She sat sweating, steaming, refusing to get AC even if it might help her sleep better. Perverse. But what she sometimes felt was beyond anger. It was a visceral and volcanic rage that came from some urgent, undeniable place. It could not be reasoned with.
10
One of Laci’s friends, Gina, surprised Sam with a visit to Clara Loomis House. She handed her a photocopied and stapled booklet. It existed in real life, in a tangible, messy form; it wasn’t a PDF, endlessly reproducible. It wore the signs of being copied, the photos abstract contrasts and the type obliterated or cut off at some of the edges. The title page: “Heresiarchs,” by Xero Zine Collective of Central New York (i.e., Gina).
“Heresiarchs are like arch-heretics. Her-e-tics. Her-esi-archs. Get it?” Gina said.
Uh, yeah.
“ ‘Heretic’ and ‘heresiarch’ both have ‘her’ in them,” Gina said.
“Yes,” Sam said. “I noticed that.”
“I put your girl Clara in it. I thought you could carry it in the shop here.”
Inside the booklet were bios of women. The photos were not much, but Gina also had drawings, which were clearer and kind of striking. Each page also had a thick block of expository text telling the story of the particular woman’s heresy. Sam flipped through it, stopping on Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Mary Ann Shadd Cary, Rosa Parks, Rachel Carson, Mary Daly. Sam nodded.
“Here is what I wanted you to see. What do these women have in common?” Gina asked.
Sam shook her head, smiled.
“When they commit the so-called heresies, they are of a certain age. Middle-aged. Midpoint, mezzogiorno, menopausers, post-period, ya know?”
“I still have periods,” Sam said.
“You’re close enough.”
Sam shrugged.
“Besides, you give off major menopostal energy. Get it? That’s ‘post
al’ and ‘meno—’ ”
“I fucking get it.”
“People used to call it the change of life. The Change,” Gina said.
“How old are you, anyway?”
“Twenty-two.”
Sam nodded. “Menopause, you know,” Sam said, “has the word ‘men’ in it.” Two can play at this game.
“Exactly!” Gina said. “You get it. I know you do.”
“You know, I think a better term for it is ‘post-use.’ ”
Gina’s eyes bugged. “That’s terrible—”
Sam smiled. She was being ironic, sort of, which apparently was not in Gina’s bandwidth.
Gina pressed on: “You know what I think we should call it? ‘Suprafertilis.’ Beyond fertility. Transcending it, surpassing it.”
“I don’t think that’s going to catch on.”
After she left, Sam stacked the zines in the More Information kiosk by the door. Everyone figured Sam was going through some kind of midlife meltdown. Sam decided that she preferred the term “climacteric.” The female climacteric, a critical, profound, protean stage in life. She was not menopostal. She was experiencing her climacteric. Okay, but also: she had some postal moments, actually some moments so angry she had scared herself.
That was yet another real reason she had to change her life: her fucking rage. She had always been an emotional person, quick to laugh or cry or scream. This was of a different order. There had been a progression of notable “rage events” that disturbed her, particularly as they continued to escalate. We live in angry times, sure. But what she felt was in a special category.
11
The first time she noticed something, some alteration in her self-arrangement, her disposition (let’s call it that), happened last year, after she began lifting weights with Nico. She was working out on her own at the Downtown YMCA in the weight room. This was in the basement, and a real no-frills space, open late into the evening. It had barbells, dumbbells, weight-plate machines, boxing equipment. No Nautilus or ellipticals or anything like that. And it seemed exclusively male. That evening there were three men, all in their twenties or thirties, and Sam. She started by putting two forty-five-pound weights on the leg press sled. One of the young guys—an ugly, paunchy, pockmarked bro—watched her as she lugged another two weights over to the bar, shoved one on each side and clamped them securely, just as she had seen her trainer do. The ugly man continued to watch her. Sam didn’t look up. She didn’t want to see his amusement, his condescension. She felt a little heat on her neck. Great, she had to be watched, just what she wanted, a goddamned gawker. She decided to ignore him. She lowered herself under the weight, put her feet against the plate, and readied herself to push up so she could release the safety lever.
“Hey—”
She knew he would say something, she just fucking knew it.
“Are you sure you want that much weight?”
What happened then was almost a dissociative state. She was animated by a force within that, unleashed, gathered momentum. Later she would joke to Matt, to her friend Emily, to Ally, and even to her doctor, about how she had gotten a little ragey. But only on the phone to her mother would she admit the truth: how what she’d felt was strange because it was irresistible.
“So I said, ‘I know what I’m doing,’ but the voice I said it in was not my usual voice, you know?”
“How?” Lily said.
“It was deeper, and it had a real warning in it, like back the fuck up.”
“Good,” Lily said.
“No,” Sam said. “I then went on. I said, ‘Why are you talking to me? Because I’m a woman, you think I need your help.’ My voice was loud, a kind of snarl in it. The other men looked at me, then looked away. I was breaching some protocol. But I knew I was right, he was wrong. I spat my words: ‘Because I’m a woman, you think I don’t know what I am doing. Just leave me the fuck alone. If I need your help, I will ask for it.’ ”
“Oh, Sam,” her mother said. Then she said, “Good for you.”
“I was unnerved then, and embarrassed, and now doubting the weight I had put on the bar. So I just left, didn’t put the weights back like you are supposed to. I was like, fuck this. But I was shaking.”
Lily sighed. “You were in the right.”
“You know what I realized?”
“What?”
“It wasn’t that the thought, my objection to his presumption, was new to me. I realized I have had these feelings my whole life. It’s just that in the past I would have thought it instead of spoken it. If I had said anything, I would have couched it in gratitude, I would have—”
“You would have thanked him for his concern, laughed it off.”
It was true. Sam was a big laugher. And she knew men found her laugh bright and appealing.
“Yep. I would have vouchsafed his male ego, before gently refusing his help. Worse, I would be flirty or jokey or humble.”
“I know it well,” her mother said. “But swallowing and accommodating also takes a toll.”
This Sam knew was true. But the outsized rage, the body quaver of it, that took a piece out of you as well. The post-rage moment was not good. The sense that proportion was becoming out of reach. And the disorienting feeling that you couldn’t recognize yourself. Like an out-of-body experience, a possession of sorts.
The next incident occurred on a plane a few months later. She was flying to LA to see her friend Emily when it happened. Boarding in ridiculous microcategories. All of the them, her fellow passengers, fighting for space. She was there first, her appropriately sized carry-on bag fit easily in the bin space above her seat. She felt relief that she had overcome a stressor (will I get space, will I be okay), but then some latecomer, some late boarder with a giant rolling suitcase (well above, she noted, the size limit for a carry-on) came down the aisle. He lifted his big roller and tried to cram it into the space over her seat. Her space, her seat. It didn’t fit. He was holding up the flow. He no doubt felt pressure, the crowd of anxious passengers building behind him. He tried his suitcase wheels in, wheels out. Then sideways, and she could see him pushing things around up there. She stared at his hoodie-clad midsection. He feels entitled to all the space he wants, doesn’t he? He just needs more than everyone else. Then she watched as he pulled her bag partly out—he touched her bag, her appropriately and previously situated, modest bag. She inhaled, pushed out an “Uh,” in a warning, I-see-you huff, which he ignored, and then she watched him shove—ram, really—her bag into the corner to make room for his suitcase.
“Watch my bag!” she finally screeched. “It has my laptop, please don’t crush it!” Her face was hot. She was the only one speaking. People did this boarding and bag storing while grunting, not looking at one another. The misery of forced adherence to unpleasant procedure radiated off everyone, but no one spoke. He reached up on his toes and gave his suitcase one more shove. His bag was in, he was free to sit. She got up suddenly, gave his hoodie—not his face—a glare. “My bag,” she said, defeated already. She stood in front of him, peered into the bin. She saw her bag squished in the corner, trapped by the tension of his bag against hers. She pushed at his bag—see how it feels—but no give. Through her bag’s fabric, she could feel that her laptop was jammed under the tension of his hard-wheeled suitcase pressing on her property, no doubt compromising her laptop’s structural integrity. But the hoodie guy had moved on, sat down in a seat. The crowd was now behind her, milling with anxious, impatient energy. “My bag needs room too!” she huffed to no one, really, as she pushed it until her laptop fell a bit within the fabric, at least loosened from the bin pressure. She was indignant. She was entitled to her ticket’s 1.2 cubic feet of airplane space. She sat back down, feeling a blotchiness rise on her cheeks and then settle, making her hot. No one else had uttered a complaint, or even a sound.
She was right, righteous. Her bag
was small. She had followed the rules, which were clearly delineated in the carry-on sizing measure at the gate. True, she did have the advantage of being first. Guarding her advantage felt awful, her sorry purchase on getting ahead, getting in. She knew she protected these small things jealously, ridiculously, but she could not help it. She wanted to scream. She was right, but the post-snarl feeling was shameful, humiliating. She had become this snarly, awful person. A person who snapped at fellow passengers if they dared to touch her property in the overhead bin. What was worse was that afterward, she compensated by acting super friendly to everyone: flight attendant, fellow seatmate, even tried to catch the eye of hoodie guy to smile at him. She forced her unctuous smiles and nods, pretended sanity, stability, calm. She fooled no one. “Thank you so much!” she said to the attendant when he gave her a club soda with a mildewed lemon wedge.
She knew how she looked: bitchy, old, bitter. Unfit for the pressures of the world. She seemed that way because she was that way. Unfit, unforgiving. Inflexible. How had she come to be like this? So impatient, so touchy? (“Touchy” was the exact right word for how she was, how she felt. Do not touch me or my shit.)
But even that wasn’t the worst of it; she had to admit that lately there were spaces where the unleashing of the snarl brought no shame, even approached what she might describe as bouts of genuine pleasure. When she was driving, for example.
When she was in her car, in her closed, private but windowed space, when she drove, she kept up a steady stream of invective, of curses, hurled at other drivers. At a four-way stop, she waited her turn but others didn’t. Some people would barely slow as they approached a stop sign, forcing her to stop abruptly to accommodate their purloined right of way. “Goddamn you!” she shouted. “You fucking asshole,” she spat and worse. All the curses flew out of her mouth and didn’t stop. At the intersection of 690 and I-81, in an insane bit of highway engineering (designed to sabotage the very idea of merging, it seemed), the on-ramp lane merged quickly into the right slow lane and disappeared. One must merge or crash. And yet the driver alongside of her refused to yield, and she almost ran out of merge lane. “Are you fucking kidding me?” she bellowed, honking. She swerved, and finally got into the lane. “You have to yield, you selfish motherfucker!” Her body was hot, and she felt the special toxic energy of rage spill into her blood. She twitched with it, her heart beating faster. Her sympathetic nervous system jacked her body into a synaptic frenzy. Cortisol, blood pressure, adrenaline: she felt the rush of it wave through her. And there was nothing like shame in her, anywhere.
