And Again (15 page)

Oh dear. The rest of the conversation clicks into place for me. And he’s right, when we were first married we talked about having more children, as many as three more, in fact. But I’ve just come back to myself now. I have just stopped being something that has to be tended to, something hooked up to machines, something that lives and breathes because other people have made sure of it. How can I tell him that this body is something sacred, no matter how clumsy or fleshy or unfamiliar it is. How can I tell him that I want this body to be mine more than I want it to have his children?

“The doctors want to see what happens?” I ask, imagining them discussing me like I’m a lab rat running in its wheel, observed from behind glass by the men who will decide my future.

“They want to include it in the study data. A healthy pregnancy could go a long way to getting FDA approval, apparently. But that’s not really what I’m concerned about,” he says, peeling the sheet away from me and dragging up my T-shirt until it bunches under my breasts. My stomach is enviably flat, unmarked by my former pregnancies or Jack’s C-section. It’s funny, this is the body I struggled so hard to get back to after the kids were born and never could. I guess there really is a price for every wish, isn’t there?

“God, you’re so different now,” Tom says, examining my exposed skin in the darkness. At first, his touch is an examination only, drawing his fingertips over my skin, as if testing to see if it is real. He’s
pleased. I would be gratified, if this body were my doing, if it were not a lucky happenstance of a very unlucky life. Instead, it feels like just another mark against the woman I was, the body that still feels more kindred to me than this one.

He kisses along the bottom edge of my ribcage, his hand sinking back to its former position. It reminds me of a night in the park, less than a week before my accident. The kids, sleeping in their car seats in the back of my minivan. The sharp roughness of the wooden picnic table under my thighs. There is a price, I think. There is always a price.

“There you go,” Tom breathes into the skin of my stomach, his hand more insistent now. I wonder if this body is capable of disobeying me, the way the last one would, my legs and hands and hips moving even when my mind told them to stop. I wonder if this body knows any of what it is capable of. But it is a different body now, I remind myself, as Tom pulls down my yoga pants and rolls on top of me. I’m a different person now.

I stare at my closet, trying to find something that will work, anything to replace the baggy sweaters and the one old pair of jeans that I’ve been wearing since I got out of the hospital. Jeans from high school, the ones I found folded up in the bottom of my dresser. They’re the only ones that fit around the sharp, narrow bones of my new hips. I’ve all but given up on wearing bras; their wires pinch my ribs and the cups gap around the shrunken remains of my breasts. I feel like a little girl, young and unformed, trying on the silk and lace of her mother’s clothing, imagining a world she does not yet inhabit.

Everything I own feels large. Even my shoes are a half-size too big. I don’t wear rings for fear of losing them off of the narrow, supple joints of my fingers. And my clothes—clothes designed for a woman, dresses cut to reveal cleavage, high-waisted trousers that hugged my hips, fitted sweaters and pencil skirts and over-priced lingerie—they have been made inanimate. They have been made inanimate on my new body. They hang, lifeless. Even the brightest ones seem to lack color when I put them on.

Penny and Connor are having us over for dinner. Nothing fancy, of course, but still. I can’t wear my ratty jeans or any of the thick sweaters I curled myself into when I was sick. Everything in my closet seems wrong, made for someone ages older and much more proper than I am, especially in this body. Clothes that I bought as much for Sam as for me, replacing the T-shirts and thrift-store jackets and hippie skirts of my former wardrobe. Things that would suit the world of newspaper offices and cocktail parties and yacht clubs
in which he moved. Things I could imagine Lucy wearing. I think of Lucy, and realize that I hate every scrap of clothing I own.

Instead of getting dressed, I pull handfuls of hangers out of my closet and toss them onto the bed. I retrieve a bunch of large black garbage bags from the kitchen and fill them until they’re bloated with artifacts of my former life. I stack the garbage bags by the front door and leave them there. Sam can drive them over to Goodwill or throw them away; I don’t care. I change into the one dress I’ve retained, a wrap dress that looks sad and baggy without breasts and hips to fill it out. But at least it’s something. I pull it on, cinching it tight around my waist. All of my heels are too big, but I grab a pair of black flats from the discard pile and stuff cotton balls into the toes so they’ll fit, at least for one night. By the end I’m feeling worn out and sorry for myself, as if I’ve been airlifted out of my life and deposited somewhere I don’t quite recognize. I hear Sam arrive home from work; the door opens and hits the garbage bags. They slide across the wood floor. But he doesn’t mention them when he joins me in the bathroom and brushes his teeth. He doesn’t say anything.

We don’t talk on our way to Penny and Connor’s apartment. We speed down Lake Shore Drive as the sun falls below the metal and glass of Chicago, and everything is a shimmer of color. Homesickness hits me hard, choking me up. It sits somewhere under my breastplate, a barb of muted grief, though I don’t understand it. I’ve always loved this city so much it makes my bones ache, but it feels impossible to be homesick for a place in which I still remain. Yet as I look at the familiar skyline and the wind whips off the lake, hammering against my window, it’s there. That sour agony. And I wonder if someone can be homesick for herself, for the person she was just months ago. I rest my head against the car window and shut my eyes, trying to drive the feeling away.

Penny and Connor live in a one-bedroom on a quiet street in Ravenswood, a place that is perpetually falling apart but has enough early 20th-century charm to make it endearing. The walls sport built-in bookcases with pitted glass doors, the ceilings are high and
framed in intricate molding, and there’s a giant claw-foot porcelain tub in the bathroom. It has always seemed the perfect blend of both their sensibilities; it has a certain artistic rhythm mixed with an air of antiquity, particularly when its bookshelves are stuffed with Connor’s dissertation research on post-Colonial political violence. It reminds me of my apartment, when Penny and I used to live there together. As Sam and I let ourselves in, the air is rich with olive oil and garlic.
Astral Weeks
is playing in the background.

“Hello?” I call out, heading for the kitchen, where Penny is bent over a steaming copper pot. The kitchen lights cast a buttery glow over everything, and for a moment I can imagine Penny’s Jamaican grandmother bustling about in front of her hot little cook stove, occasionally turning to cool her face against the salty air floating in through the windows. But then Penny turns, and she’s the same wry, effortlessly modern hippie that she’s always been. She grins when she sees me.

“Should I be afraid?” I ask, approaching the stove with exaggerated caution. “I don’t know if I can take anything five-alarm quite yet.”

“Don’t worry, Sam called ahead, told me all about your recent dietary proclivities,” Penny says.

“Of course he did,” I reply, and my tone is more annoyed than I expected.

“Would you have preferred I made my mother’s chili?” she asks. I feel like shit.

“No, I guess not.”

She offers up a spoonful of white-cheddar macaroni and cheese. “It took everything in me to keep from putting chipotle pepper in it.”

I taste it, and the sharp richness nearly makes my eyes roll back in my head. “Jesus, Pen, that’s phenomenal.”

“Is anyone else from your group the same way?” she asks as she taps a bit of smoked paprika into the pot.

“All of them. The shrink in charge thinks it’s because children
have all these extra taste buds that die off as you get older, and that hasn’t happened for us yet.”

“So you’re going to be stuck on fish sticks and oatmeal and . . . whatever else kids eat for what, like the next decade or so?”

I shrug. “It’s not like anyone’s tried this before. They honestly don’t know.”

“That’s a lot of years without a glass of wine,” Penny says, brandishing her wooden spoon like a nun with a ruler.

“I’m aware. Speaking of which, Sam brought a bottle of Beaujolais.”

“Tasty.”

“And he’s treating me like I still have a catheter in.”

Penny wrinkles her nose. “Not so tasty. So that’s why you’re so prickly. I would have thought he’d be all over you after what you two have been through.”

“I guess it takes some time for the hospital smell to wash off.”

“Well I’ll have Connor mix you up something with training wheels on it, help you forget your troubles. What do you think, rum and coke? Something with grenadine in it?” Penny opens the fridge, peering inside. “Shit, I can’t even remember what we used to drink when we were young.”

“A shot of raspberry Smirnoff in our dorm room freshman year,” I say, remembering the hot feeling in the back of my throat, trailing down into my stomach.

“With those shot glasses of Lucy’s that lit up when you hit them on the table.” Penny laughs, her hand toying with the red strings of beads around her neck. “We were such babies then.”

“You know, she’s pregnant again. Lucy.”

Penny gives a short laugh. “Funny, isn’t it. How our worst-case scenario is another woman’s miracle.”

“Do you think she’s happy with Roger?”

Penny pauses in her culinary ministrations. “Where does that come from?”

“I don’t know. When she came to visit at the hospital,” I say, playing with one of my un-pierced earlobes. “She lights up like a fucking Christmas tree whenever Sam is around. And he . . .” I think of the way he held her when she cried.

“What?”

“Nothing. Like I said, must be the hospital smell.”

Penny picks up her spoon, gives the sauce a decided stir. Sam and Connor appear behind us brandishing glasses of red wine. Connor hands one to Penny.

“I wasn’t sure what you’d want,” Sam says to me, the hint of apology in his voice spurring a pinch of annoyance in my stomach.

“Con, why don’t you get her a vodka-tonic with some grenadine,” Penny says, glancing at me. “That sound good?”

I nod. The music is louder now, thrumming in the background. Penny dances as she tends to the macaroni. Sam stands across the kitchen, sipping his wine, examining the line of cookbooks crammed onto the windowsill. He’s wearing the navy blue V-neck sweater I got him for Christmas two years ago. I wonder if it’s an attempt to be nice. Then the darker, bitter part of me wonders if he even remembers that I was the one who got him that sweater, and I’m angry again for no good reason.

“Just so you know,” Connor says, returning with my drink. “I may have been a little heavy-handed.” He adjusts his wire-rimmed glasses, looking about twelve years old despite the sparse goatee he’s sporting. “So, proceed with caution.”

“Thanks.” I raise a mock toast to him and take a sip. It’s fizzy and sweet, cold in my mouth and scorching on the way down, with the sharp, slightly medicinal tang of liquor. The burn spreads from my throat to my chest, and I cough into my palm.

“That’s my girl,” Penny says, clapping me gently on the back a couple of times. “Just like last time. We were hacking like a couple of tubercular old maids after that first shot.”

Sam’s eyes are on me now, with an intensity in his expression that I haven’t seen much since I left the hospital. I think of the way
his eyes would always drift to the screen next to my bed, watching my pulse ox drop a bit more every day.

“I’m fine,” I say, raising my glass for a second time. “Just burns a little.”

He nods, shaking off the look, though it occurs to me that this is what it will be like every time I catch a cold, every time I drink a sip of water too quickly, or eat something with too much pepper in it. I think of how it must be for him, like sleeping with a decaying stick of dynamite under his bed, never knowing if it might go off without warning. I take another sip of my drink, relishing in the fact that it’s going straight to my head, driving out the heaviness there, wrapping everything in a fine mist, like breath fogging a windowpane. I don’t want to have to think anymore.

We sit down to dinner in the mismatched chairs surrounding their dining room table, which is so crowded with candles we almost don’t have room for our plates. Above us hangs the chandelier Penny fashioned out of the painted shards of cut-up aluminum cans. It would be worth an absolute fortune if she ever decided to sell it, but instead it hangs over the dining room table Penny picked up in a garage sale and painted a robin’s-egg shade of blue. Penny has always had a hard time seeing the value in things; she would happily sell her paintings for five dollars on the street, instead of thousands of dollars in an art gallery, if I had not forbidden her to do so. It’s probably the part of her I love the most, the part of her that is chronically confused by the arbitrary nature of worth and value and societal expectation. She is so different from me, in that way.