Luster(30)

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I creep around the house and try to be racially neutral. I avoid her as best I can, though I hear her all around the house: doing dishes, Pilates, and some involved activity with a power drill. In my effort to be sensitive to where she is, I find that she is an extremely noisy person. I can’t say whether this is for my benefit, but even on the other side of the house the noise feels indirectly violent, her predilection for walking on her heels and shouting yes! to her Insanity DVD well within the realm of plausible deniability, but intimidating nonetheless. So I keep mostly to the guest room and scan through jobs. I look at availabilities in the city, but even if I was granted an interview, I have no idea where I’d be commuting from. I browse StreetEasy, and every neighborhood in my price range is lousy with sexual predators. Just as an experiment, I see what comes up if I keep my search within Jersey. I check the commute from the house to a small textbook publisher in Hoboken, and it is a straight shot. I imagine what it might be like to ride exclusively on NJ Transit, which has significantly less feces than the G. I read through requirements for entry-level jobs that are not requirements so much as requests that the applicant have “a good sense of humor” and basic tech literacy for 41K a year. I tweak my résumé, omit coordinator from my title, and revise my role as more author-facing. I stress my editorial involvement, though the author of the Flounder series stopped calling me when I made him a mixtape.



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I pull up our email chain and find the mixtape. I sent it at 1:43 a.m., after the author wrote to tell me that squid have doughnut-shaped brains. I look at the track list and wonder where I went wrong. The esophagus passes through a central hole in the brain. If they overeat, they risk brain damage. I wonder if I was too earnest, if I relied too heavily on Mazzy Star. I stop applying for jobs and look for a reputable camgirl site, though I have some trouble linking my PayPal and the traffic is low. I sit in front of the camera in my bra for half an hour and only get one patron. Mostly he just reads the paper, but then he folds it up and sends a message through the chat that says kill yourself, nigger bitch. I log off and think about the clown nose. I look outside and Akila and Rebecca are in the garden wearing wide-brimmed hats. They are kneeling in front of a single tomato, and for a moment, they look completely alike, the plant the center of their silent communion. Then Akila takes off a glove and cradles the tomato in the palm of her hand. They turn to each other and laugh. I try to figure out what was funny, but I can’t, so I go to the master bathroom and look through the cabinets, and inside everything is generic and mostly expired except for the narcotics. I take two Percocet and save a fentanyl patch for later. The bottles all bear Rebecca’s name, though the triazolam is the only one with her middle name, which turns out to be Moon. Underneath the sink, there is an old-school douche bag that is warm to the touch. There is a modest purple vibrator with three speeds, cotton balls, hydrogen peroxide, hair dye, and black nail polish. I take the nail polish. I can’t imagine her painting her nails, but I can imagine her on the bathroom tile, prepping the douche with Vaseline. When I imagine it, she is indifferent, her vagina defying all etymology, not a pussy or a twat but an abstract violence, like a Rorschach or a xenomorph. For me, I’ve had little choice. The moment I left Clay’s house, my vagina was a cunt.



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I go to the window and make sure they’re still out in the garden. I take a few pictures of them and delete the ones with too much sun. I do a sweep under the bed. There are board games and unopened bags of soft, red clay. There is a battered version of Sorry, a Boggle with a cracked dome, and a sleek chessboard with a compartment for pieces. Inside, there are two queens and a pouch of tulip seeds. It seems strange that these would be kept under the bed, strange that they would have board games at all. Everything is too ordinary, too sweet. I can’t imagine Rebecca suspending her disbelief long enough to move a piece, I can’t imagine Akila tolerating the cheer of her father, and yet there they are outside in the garden, laughing with each other. My mother was not a woman who laughed. She didn’t laugh because (1) she could see that everyone who heard it was unpleasantly surprised and (2) after we moved upstate, nothing was funny. She told stories about the home economics courses they offered in rehab, about how they gave her a succulent shaped like a hand and taught her a different way to pack a suitcase. These stories were not humorless. She smiled when she talked about the holding cell in Harlem, about the plainclothes police officers who sat outside her apartment in unmarked cars. She told me that cowboys could be women, could be black. She watched multicamera sitcoms exclusively, left the TV on low during the night so that my dreams became elastic and improvisational, primed to make sense of the canned laughter always in the air. She was disappointed to find I had inherited her ugly, glottal laugh, and encouraged me to hold it behind my hand.

We went to church and clapped softly to an instrumental of “He Lives.” We wore plain, shapeless clothes and washed each other’s feet. At a more relaxed, secular church a mile down the road, the pastor gave the sermon from his drum kit. In our church, my mother tried to befriend scared vegetarian women who smelled the city and turned their heads. The sun went down and the TV turned on. We went to Waldenbooks and my mother bought my weekly sketchbook. She stood in Self-Help with her hand in her hair. At home, she put on “Dancing Queen” over the TV. Underneath ABBA, Suzanne Somers emerged from the shower as John Ritter placated the landlord with his floppy wrists. My mother danced and waxed poetic about 1977, the year she was seventeen. She lay on the floor and said, It’s all boring when I’m not high, the ceiling fan turning in her eyes.