Luster(45)
* * *
At home, we create a flank of fire with red and yellow tulle. Akila drapes it over her shoulders and shreds newspaper for the papier-maché. Eric brings up some vinyl and we shape the horns to “Dancing Queen,” though we are deep into ABBA’s lesser-known songs by the time we fashion the breastplate from foam. After the hot glue dries, we go outside and spray-paint it silver. Akila shows me her archive of comic books, and aside from a few that I am not allowed to touch, I am free to browse. They vary in condition and age—thin newsprint issues with ads for milk and Tekken, Girlfrenzy! issues that skew more female, and incidentally a little more butch, older issues openly courting Generation X, between the ads for Gap and Gushers the grungy, long-haired Gothamite that is Bruce Wayne’s son, a coked-up twentysomething cramped by his dad’s Depression-era style.
* * *
Eric and I make more mistakes. Most notably the first (and last) time Eric calls me baby, which happens as he is trying to direct my attention to the mail, and which I can see he immediately wants to take back, because it feels preposterous, and because, we realize a moment later, Rebecca is in the room. The next day, we meet for lunch at a Wyndham in Teaneck and I arrive back at the house and find Rebecca crouched in the garden with her trowel. She picks through the fennel and lavender with her hands and inspects her palms. She says it was meant to be a butterfly garden, but this season a few things have gone wrong. The flowers came up pollen-poor and the population of natural predators was high. Curious deer. Beetles and spiders waiting in the daisies for painted ladies and red admirals. Hummingbirds deterred by sterile lilies. Now the garden is full of weeds and exoskeletons. Rebecca takes her trowel and starts prying out the weeds. I ask if she wants any help, and she says that she is fine. Her T-shirt is damp, yellow in the pits. She talks to herself, calls it opportunistic growth. She goes in with her shears and starts trimming around the lavender, but by the time she gets to the river mint, she is pulling it all up with her hands.
“I feel like I am the only one who hears that dog,” she says, and it is only after she mentions it that I hear the baying. “We bred them like that. We made them needy and physically unfit. They used to be wolves. Now there are pugs with asthma.”
“I never understood the appeal. Of pugs.”
“I saw your paintings,” she says, reaching for the peat moss. She has kindly kept her back turned, but still my lunch, the room service, is rising into my mouth.
“Which ones?”
“All of them,” she says, and naturally I can only think of the most damning ones, paintings I went to great lengths to hide. Paintings that are reconnaissance, that are longing, and disproportionately of her. Somehow, I also wish I had been there, to see her when she saw herself in them.
“What did you think?” I ask, and she looks over her shoulder, her face flushed and mean. I can’t tell if she is looking at me or the neighbor’s dog.
“I think they need work.”
* * *
When everyone is asleep, I look through the paintings and hate myself. I do my best to avoid Rebecca, which is easy as she has all but disappeared. Veterans from the Silent Generation have been dying en masse, and when she is not at work she is asleep. I find myself listening for the sounds of her coming home. Then as I am working on another failed self-portrait I realize I am late. I check my menstruation app and scroll until I find the last little red teardrop, logged sixty-two days before, under which I have entered a short note—the news is terrible today. Wish I was a man. Need more gesso and ultramarine. So I go to my closet, collect a few wire hangers, and sort out the clothes I have been keeping on the floor. I clean my palette with my fingernails and arrange the dried acrylic into a color wheel that turns out to be dominated by incremental iterations of blue. I lie in bed and wonder how women don’t feel it, the exact moment their bodies begin to create.
* * *
The next week, Rebecca insists I attend Akila’s belt ceremony and makes no mention of the paintings. When I get in the car, Eric looks at me as if it were my idea. At the ceremony, he calls me Edith and sits as far away as he can. Akila does not receive her belt. Fifteen steps in, she forgets her form and excuses herself from the mat. Rebecca ushers me over to that one black instructor and introduces me as a friend of the family. Of course, we have already met. We have already noticed each other and engaged in the light telepathy necessary in rooms like these, acknowledging that here we are, being careful and softly black. Despite the somewhat offensive ulterior motive of Rebecca’s introduction, Robert indulges her and we have a tepid conversation about making plans that neither of us means. At home, Akila is upset. The costume is finished, and while its components were exciting when they were separate and theoretical, on the body it doesn’t work. She looks at herself in the mirror and her smile falls. She looks at Eric, whose investment she is not insensitive to, and she pays a few half-hearted compliments, though her embarrassment is palpable, as is ours. We can’t be sure if it is shoddy craftsmanship, or the sobering reality of what a costume like this might reasonably look like on a body that is not itself a cartoon.
“It’s fine,” Akila says, but in the days that follow, it doesn’t feel fine, the probiotics and polyethylene glycol doing nothing for my perpetually irritated bowels, though the chronic constipation is eased somewhat by my inability to keep anything down. I resume Call of Duty and introduce that Dutch kid to some friendly fire. I go to the store and buy a few pregnancy tests. I mow some grass and when I see that old white woman watching me through her blinds again, I walk up to her window and look her right in the eye until I realize the lawn mower is veering into the street.