Sex Object (12 page)

MY GRANDMOTHER STARTED DOING “FAVORS” FOR CASH SOON
after her husband's moving business started to fail. My mother was a child, and she remembers the older Italian man who lived in their apartment building. My grandmother would walk up the stairs to see him, my mom says, and when she came down she would have cash in hand or there would be a little more food on the table that night.
It wasn't like she was a prostitute
, my mother tells me. My grandmother just knew she had to do what she had to do to keep the family going. Besides, my mom says, she doesn't know if she had sex with him or just gave him a hand job. Or if her young brain is misremembering. She does know that most of the money her mother got was pilfered from her father's pockets.

My mother was one of five children, three of whom she grew up with. Her second brother, Robert, became disabled after contracting a terrible case of pneumonia—the extent of which was never clear to me. He was in a wheelchair by the time he was ten years old and lived in an extended care facility after he turned
fifteen, my grandmother pressured by her husband's family to move him there. Each week, for years, she would take an eight-hour bus ride to see him because of the lack of facilities nearby that she could afford. I found out about him as a teenager, when he died and she went to the funeral.

My mother was youngest, the baby, and though her mother was a housewife in the sense that she raised her children without much help from her husband and had food on the table every night, my grandma also worked ten hours a day for almost her whole life. She worked as a nanny, but mostly at factories, one called Goldsmith Brothers and another where she worked on an assembly line for a company that made airplane parts.

Her husband, Giuseppe—known in the neighborhood as Joe—owned a truck and a moving business. He piled the neighborhood children into his truck to take them to the beach on weekends, and my mother says that Joe hired men that no one else would—the men who spent all day in bars or black men who lived in the neighborhood.

It was the hiring of these men that my grandmother would blame for the failure of her husband's business. The clients didn't like seeing them, she would say. Not the fact that her husband started to drink in earnest, so much so that my mother would lock herself in a closet when he came home raging at night.

Joe died a few years after he and my grandmother split and many years before I was born. He set himself on fire after an accident with a hot plate in the apartment he lived in. He was drinking at the time. It wasn't the burns that killed him, though,
but an infection he got later in the hospital. My mother tells me that after my grandmother developed dementia, she would call out Joe's name in her sleep or sometimes talk to him when she was awake as if he was there. She felt responsible for his death, she said.

I SMELL SOMETHING BAD WHENEVER I WALK INTO MY HOUSE. I
don't know if it's the garbage can, or strong cheese rotting in the fridge, or flowers that have been left on the dining room table a few days too long. All I know is that something does not smell right.

Andrew gets furious at my insistence that something somewhere is going bad because he smells nothing and because I always seem to crinkle my nose when I come home from a days-long trip and he's the only one in the house. The smell wouldn't be there, he thinks I think, had I been home.

It probably wouldn't.

Not because Andrew is dirty or derelict in cleaning or being an equal partner but because my nose is so sensitive that I catch things early. Once when I was pregnant I refused to drink a glass of water that Andrew had brought to me because it smelled terrible.
Water doesn't have a smell!
he yelled, but still he got me a new glass because he is a kind person in that way.

Boston smells the worst. Our house in Boston, I should say. Despite the fact that we live in a large house—larger than any place we ever had in New York or ever will—the smells of the
house carry through everywhere. I can smell the cat litter three floors up, or the dried puke stuck in the crevices of Layla's crib from across the room. I feel perpetually disgusted and clean constantly.

Every time I see a dirty cup on the kitchen counter, my face gets red. The level of disrespect feels—unfairly or not—as if Andrew has hopped on the counter, pulled down his pants, and taken a shit right there for me to clean up. My husband is lovely. He is a feminist. He cooks; he supports my work in the same way I support his. Still, I start obsessively making mental lists of the things Andrew doesn't know: what size shoe Layla takes, when her next doctor's appointment is, what kind of bar soap we use in the shower. I'm jealous that he gets to stay late at work—I would kill to have an office, coworkers, even a commute.

He tells me to leave the cups on the counter and the socks on the floor. He'll get to them eventually. But I can't. I don't believe him. And I can't write in a house where something is wrong.

It may be genetic.

When I was growing up there was a running joke in my family that you could never put something down—a magazine, a set of house keys, a glass half filled with soda—because the moment it left your hand my mother would “clean it up.” We would scream at her, my father, sister, and I, that we couldn't find anything in this fucking house because she kept putting things away.

The house wasn't just clean but immaculately clean. Everything had a place, and everything had to be in its place. Friends who came over were amazed to see this gleaming, well-decorated house in the middle of our shit neighborhood. Even more so when they went to get themselves a snack. My mother kept the fridge so stocked with food that I often couldn't close the door without shifting things around. Our cupboards—tall doors that opened to reveal layers or swinging shelves within—held dozens of boxes of pasta and canned food. Ten different kinds of cookies, cereal, and snacks.

My father told us it was because of how little food my mother had growing up; she just wanted to be surrounded by it. To know it was there.

Layla can't really breathe in Boston, as if her lungs can sense the same thing that my nose does. We're taking her to the emergency room every couple of months when she starts to breathe too fast or when her cough just won't stop. Our insurance company won't cover the cost of a vaccination that preemies are supposed to get to prevent RSV—a lung infection that can be deadly for babies born so small. We call the company directly, hoping just to buy the vaccine from them, but the shots cost four thousand dollars each. She needs five of them over the course of the year.

Even after Layla is rushed to the hospital after contracting RSV, unable to eat, sleep, or breathe normally, our insurance company says no—her death needs to be imminent, they tell us.
And so I drive Layla to New York, where her old pediatrician keeps some of the medication for those who can't afford it in a fridge in the back of his office, and he gives her the shots as she wails in my arms. This is why I will always prefer Queens to any other place—the borough of my parents and small business owners is populated by people who know how to work around the system when it tries to fuck you.

When I arrive home in Boston, opening the door with Layla balanced on my hip, the smell is there again, but this time I can't find it. There is nothing in the fridge; the garbage has just been emptied. I even go to the side yard and clean up any leftover dog shit from our Aussie, Monty, with the hopes that it will make a change. I can't sleep that night even when I put a pillow over my face to mask the smell.

Andrew and I have been going to couple's therapy, both for my anxiety and because Andrew is so mad at the space the anxiety takes up in our relationship. Our default mood is low-level annoyance toward each other with a propensity to turn into full-blown rage at the smallest thing: his clothes on the floor, my refusal to make a salad with avocados in it. The therapist asks if I would be less resentful if Andrew did more around the house, asks him if he's willing to speak up for himself more often.

I feel like I might hate him and I suspect he feels the same. He doesn't believe, not really—not yet—that my PTSD is a thing out of my control. He says lots of people feel things, it doesn't mean you let everyone else see it. It doesn't mean you can't make it stop or that your whole life has to revolve around
it. I accuse him of being an emotional robot; he accuses me of using my anxiety as an excuse to be selfish.

Some months later we are in a session devoted to the way that my post-traumatic symptoms impact our relationship. The therapist wants to do something called EMDR, a kind of therapy that utilizes rapid eye movement to help a patient with a particularly bad memory or event. When she hands me a laminated list of “negative connotations” and asks me to pick out the one that I most identify with, I am surprised when I start to cry because the one I choose is
I deserve to die
. No, not surprised. Embarrassed maybe. It feels too performative, this sentence on a list of sentences, and yet I pick it anyway.

I don't talk with Andrew about it again.

MY MOTHER HAD LESS TIME FOR THE HOUSE ONCE MY GRANDMOTHER
got sick. She still kept it gleaming, that's true, even as she worked all day and then cared for my grandmother after work in the evening and on weekends—bathing her or taking her to a doctor's appointment. But she was around less, and even when she was home I knew her thoughts were elsewhere.

My sister and I tried to visit my grandmother as often as we could, on the eleventh floor of an old-age facility in Astoria where there were pull-cords to ring for help near the tub and the toilet. The apartment was filled with glowing paintings of Jesus and pictures of her grandchildren. It smelled like piss topped with the compact powder she used to blot oil from her face.

When she needed to go out—for an appointment or a family party—my mother would sit with her and help her “put her face on,” tracing over her eyebrows with a pencil and then filling in her lips. My grandmother would remark, often, how glad she was that she never really had wrinkles on her face. It was true, she didn't—but only because the majority of the loose skin was hanging below her neck, as if her face had melted a bit.

She got confused easily and started to make mistakes around the house: accidentally brushing her teeth with vaginal cream or feeding her dog shampoo instead of washing him with it. She left messages on our answering machine claiming that the woman who came to help her wash up was a lesbian who “wanted her pussy.” She became convinced, toward the end, that strange men were following her or waiting outside of her apartment door in the hallway.

My mother started going over more and more often but wasn't there when she died. Her makeup looked wrong in the casket—too heavy and pink for her face. I couldn't smell her powder, just the thick recycled air of the Long Island City funeral home.

SCOOT DOWN.

The feminist who gets one abortion is understandable, expected even. The woman—the mother—who gets two, though, must be doing something wrong with her life.

Still, I scooted.

For a body that cannot abide pregnancy, mine sure does like to get knocked up. It's as if my body wants to kill me—filling me with something that I'm supposed to love but will end me instead.

The weekend that I got pregnant again we spent on a speedboat. The condom had broken the night before we were supposed to drive to a friend's house on Long Island—we talked about picking up the morning-after pill on the drive over, but the traffic was bad and we just wanted to get there.
It's okay,
I said.
It will still work in twenty-four hours.
So fucking smug.

I hated the boat. Our friend Josh was perfectly competent and in control while driving it, but still I grabbed on to anything that looked like a handle and wrapped my legs around Layla as
if she would go flying off the back of the speeding boat at any moment. She kept wriggling away from me, her white-blond hair in her face, laughing and screaming.
Wheee! Faster! This is fuunnnn!

I thought about what I would do if she fell off the back of the boat. She would probably be okay, I reasoned, because the boat was going fast enough that the motor would be far away from her. But then I thought about her small body and the motor and closed my eyes. I imagined jumping off.

Josh pulled close to a small beach so we could take a swim break and his two boys jumped in without hesitation. We weren't that far from land so I eased my way into the water.
Hand her to me,
I told Andrew.
I can swim her to shore.

I propped Layla on my hip, she wrapped her arms around my neck, and I started to sidestroke. Two minutes in I started to feel winded. Layla climbed up higher on me, pushing her feet down into my stomach. I told her to relax, that we were almost there, but she kept pushing. Her feet were under my ribs now and I felt myself sinking lower and lower.

I thought about drowning. How I could probably hold her up for someone to grab as I went under. How she could be saved, even if there was no way I would be. But everyone would say how brave I was.

But my toes hit rocks and I could put my feet down onto the ground, and I made it to the sand, winded but fine, and Layla ran to collect shells and chase birds.

A few weeks later, I took a pregnancy test without telling
Andrew—no reason to worry him, I thought—and when it came back positive, I wailed. Layla ran over, asking what was wrong. She had never seen me cry before, and certainly not like this, sitting on the bathroom floor loudly weeping. I told her I was fine, smiled I think, and picked up the phone. She, unsure, laughed.

Andrew was home less than an hour later, my mother not far behind. Andrew and I left the house and went to get patty melts at a place on Smith Street two blocks up from the Brooklyn apartment we'd just moved into. He said all the right things, carefully, but I knew what he wanted me to do. Our marriage had barely made it through the two years after Layla's birth—through what it did to me, through Boston—and that time we were lucky. That time we had a baby who lived through it all. Layla was healthy now, hadn't had a hospital visit in almost a year, and we were finally back in New York. Still, we went through the motions of doing the logical things you're supposed to do.

We made appointments with specialists, talked to family and trusted friends. I cried. The funny thing about pregnancy is that with any other health risk a doctor has no problem telling you what the best course of action is. But no doctor will tell a pregnant woman what to do.

You could do it,
they say.
But yes, the HELLP could come on within twenty-four hours, and your liver could fail.

We would watch you,
they say.
But we can't stop you from getting sick.

We don't know what will happen to the baby.

And so for a week we keep talking and seeing doctors. Because we have just moved back to the city, I don't have a regular ob-gyn. So I go to a doctor I have never met before and she gives me an ultrasound as I weep while telling her about my last pregnancy. As I recount the hospital stay, the NICU, my blood pressure and liver count, she turns the ultrasound screen away from me. She lowers the sound. But still, I see the flicker on the screen.

That day, a week after I take the test, I tell Andrew I want to end the pregnancy. He tells me he knew I would come to the right decision, that I had to get there myself. And so we make an appointment at the place I know. The place I have been before.

MY BODY HAS NEVER PLAYED NICE. WHEN I STARTED TAKING THE
subway in junior high, I noticed that when I held on to the handles above me or the pole in the middle I only leaned to one side. I could jut my right hip out, putting most of my weight on that side, and have space between my waist and hip to rest my hand. But when I tried to do the same thing on the left side of my body, there was no hip—my waist and hip bone met straight on, with no curve.

The doctor had me bend over in front of him, pulled my shirt up toward my neck, and felt up and down my back. He told my mother it was scoliosis and that there was probably nothing to do as I'd stopped growing, two years after I'd gotten my
first period. Still, my parents took me to a specialist they said was very good because he was in Manhattan and affiliated with a hospital. I got undressed for the X-rays, save for a gown that I wasn't sure how to put on because I didn't know which way the opening was supposed to face.

The pictures came back immediately and the doctor showed my mother how I had two curves in my spine: one at the top near my shoulder bones that was slight, and one at my hips that was nearly at a thirty-degree angle. It explained my inability to lean but one way and the pain I got in my back if I stood for too long, sat for too long, or slept for too long.

I was too young to appreciate the medical reality of this news but knew that I really, really liked my X-rays. You could see the outline of my breasts—which I thought looked good—and in my skull you could see my earrings and a piece of gum that I'd forgotten to take out of my mouth before placing my back against the machine. I asked to keep the images and the doctor put them in a large brown envelope for me so I could take them home.

Sometimes, when boys I liked were over at my house, I would show them the X-rays under the auspices of how funny it was that I had gum in my mouth, but really it was to see their reaction to the image of my tits, even if it was just the outlines.

Now, in my thirties, I wonder if the scoliosis is the reason I'm so clumsy—if I'm somehow off-kilter and that's why I keep banging into things as I walk around the house or why I've broken the same pinky twice already from stubbing it too hard.

I wake up with bruises that seem to have appeared out of nowhere, like they did in my drinking days, but I'm not drinking. Not sleeping either. When I take Ambien, or melatonin that I get from my parents' health food store on Queens Boulevard, I mostly sleep through the night, but still get up to piss at least four or five times. My doctor says don't drink water before bed but still I get up. Sometimes when I wake I stay that way and watch as Andrew and Layla, who has come into our bed in the middle of the night, sleep and it occurs to me how different they are from me.

And so I walk through the apartment, or I sit on the living room couch looking obsessively at real estate listings on Zillow for houses I will never live in, until I'm tired enough to try again.

ON THE MORNING OF THE ABORTION THEY CALL ME WITH THEIR
address—a fact held back nearly a week for security purposes and one I don't remember given the years gone by. But I do remember that they were in midtown somewhere, on a high floor of a nondescript building, more office space than clinic. Just like last time, I am the only person there. This time it's over a thousand dollars for the privilege of being alone. I wonder if they remember me. After my book was published a few months after my first abortion, I sent them a copy with a thank-you note—they had helped to make that book happen.

Like before, it is more midwifelike than a hospital—from the tea to the candies and the hand-holding nurse with the soft
voice. But that doesn't stop me from crying when the doctor tells me they no longer offer IV sedation, just a single Vicodin I know won't make a dent. World's worst combination: a low tolerance for pain but a drug addict's tolerance for painkillers. Still, I take the pill, hoping that maybe I'm wrong this time.

I wish I could say that it hurt less the second time around—that the knowing what to expect helped. But I did not want to be there.

I hated myself for waiting a day to take the morning-after pill. I hated Andrew for not having to do a goddamn thing but sit there at my head pretending he knew what it was like to have people doing things to your body, inside your body. He didn't know shit.

When I was in the thick of it with Layla's birth there came a point where I tried to convince the doctors not to deliver her—even though every moment I delayed I got sicker.
Keep her in
, I said.
I don't matter.
But as I begged them to keep her in, my body worked harder and harder to get her out.

Now, once again, my body ignored my wishes. It clenched and held on even as I assured the doctor that this is what I wanted. It fought me, trying to hold on to this pregnancy, this pregnancy that could be a baby that could be a death sentence, this pregnancy that could be.

I did not give in but the pain of the procedure overtook me. The speculum felt high up in me, cold and hard, and the pain emanating from my vagina into my abdomen felt like I was being skewered. The nurse at my side told me to bear down as if
I was having a bowel movement and that would help relax me, and it did, but it still hurt so much. I start to see double.

I felt pins and needles in my face and hands. Andrew looked alarmed, and I heard the doctor say it was all over and she came to where my head was.
Get her legs up,
she told the nurse. They lifted my legs, like dead weights, above my head and the nurse pressed wet paper towels onto my forehead and wrists.

They said I had a lower pain tolerance than most—
You're so sensitive!
I lay there, waiting for the warmth to come back to my face. And it did. My breath became slower; I stopped crying.

The doctor went to the sink with what she had pulled out in the syringe and looked for proof that it was all there. Andrew tells me later that when they were done looking, they washed what was left down the drain.

Slowly, I was able to sit up, Andrew still at my side. The wet brown paper towels are sticking to me; my pants and underwear are on a chair nearby. I feel better.

My daughter is waiting at home for me. My mother is with her and will stay a few more hours as I crawl into bed and settle in with a heating pad and painkillers. I think I'll feel well enough to cook with my daughter, keeping up our weekend ritual of making pasta from scratch that we'll cook with tomato sauce.

Before I leave, the nurse asks if I want a candy. I picked cherry.