Luster(48)

“What?”

“You have a month, and then I want you out,” she says, and then she turns the radio on, and it is a song that we listen to often in the morgue, but there is no recognition on her face. When I get out and watch her drive away, her truck is still making that sound. Inside, Eric and Akila are playing Mario Kart. It is unsurprising that he chooses to be Mario and can’t stay on Rainbow Road. As he benefits not at all from Mario Kart’s affirmative action and disappears into the dark, I look over at him and I think about the American Library Association certification I found next to his insurance card. I think about the way he looked on the bathroom floor, his open mouth and soft genitals and the veins underneath his pale Lutheran skin, and as a computer-generated Peach and Luigi roll through Moo Moo Farm, I think of how keenly I’ve been wrong. I think of all the gods I have made out of feeble men. I go to my room and get stuck in a Wikipedia hole about religion on Tatooine. I finish my costume and sit in the dark in my metal bikini, and in the morning I stumble to the bathroom and take the pregnancy test. I am inclined to pray, but on principle, I don’t. God is not for women. He is for the fruit. He makes you want and he makes you wicked, and while you sleep, he plants a seed in your womb that will be born just to die.





8


On the morning of Comic Con, Eric comes in from a run and says that the neighbor’s dog has been shot. The block is inundated with police. The old woman stands in the street with an upturned doghouse in her arms, and an officer tries to wrestle it away. Beyond them, the dog is covered with a sheet. I watch from my window, and the top of Rebecca’s head is briefly visible as she steps outside to retrieve the paper. When I go downstairs, she is removing the sections she doesn’t want to read—politics, sports, the horoscope. I take the horoscope and there is a conjunction between Venus and Mars that only the East Coast can see. Outside, a garbage truck tries to maneuver around the police. A harried garbageman dismounts and an officer tells him that he cannot collect the trash today.



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Rebecca smoothes a crease from the entertainment section. A starlet is dead. A starlet is breastfeeding on the beach. Her mouth is open and her eyes are closed. Since she asked me to leave, moments come when I think there will be some final, significant word that passes between us, but there is nothing. I want to tell her that I have been painting. I have not made any headway in finding a job or a place to stay, but something is happening on my canvas, whatever soft, human calculus makes a thing alive, gives a painted eye roots and retina and makes it look like it can see. I stay up with a secondhand edition of Human Anatomy for Artists, and I start with the cranial bones and keep going until I make it to the teeth. Of course, it isn’t the same. I watch her drive off to work, and I think of the damp end of our shared cigarette, of the tiny morgue shower stall and her dainty feet below the curtain, of her bone saw, a discontinued edition designed specifically for a woman’s hand. I wake up from a dream where she is trying to put a lung into a jar that is too small, and all day everything smells pickled, though this is probably just the turpentine. I look at cheap studios in Newark and Bensonhurst, but I only have enough money for two months. I only have enough money for a month and an abortion, though on this I go back and forth. I feel unlike myself, spry and nocturnal and inclined to believe that this pregnancy is part of the reason my paintings are any good. Because I can’t sleep knowing what is happening inside my body, and when I don’t sleep, I paint. I have never been so tired. I have never been so prolific. What if I make the appointment and they ask if I’ve done it before? What if I am a woman who has to do this twice?



* * *



I go to my room and put on the iron bikini and secure the chain around my neck. I look at my stomach in the mirror and feel like there is something inside me already trying to make its way out. Though it is the size of a lentil, I feel a monstrous new level of abdominal antagonism that I cannot solve with ginger root. Rebecca comes into my room with Windex and newspaper. She is half in, half out of her costume, one eye heavily shadowed. Since she asked me to leave, Rebecca lets herself into my room more frequently. Never during the moments I’d like. Acrid, early-morning hours when I haven’t yet brushed my teeth. I leave my paintings out, hoping she will see, but she doesn’t say anything. Now she comes into the bathroom and begins to clean the mirror. She is careful not to meet my eyes.



* * *



I think I could have this baby out of spite. My parents made me on purpose and look what happened. Spite is more sustainable. It gives you something to prove, and what better way to prove yourself than through a child, my personal failure amended by such heroic child-rearing that my kid recognizes patterns even before his skull has fused. A genius child born out of a functional grudge who will accompany me to Eric’s funeral, where Rebecca will be shriveled and veiled. When I begin to braid my hair, she watches me, and I try to remain aloof, but I am a little preoccupied with the memory of my first abortion, which I don’t think about regularly and occasionally even forget until I open Twitter and have a run-in with a Young Republican. I was sixteen. I could not have been a mother. The women in my family maybe should not have been mothers. This is not so much a judgment as a fact. They were dying inside their own bodies, and now all these dead components are my inheritance.



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