No One Is Talking About This (36)
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Her sister painstakingly composing a letter to her senator, striking out all the phrases that looked like red meat. She wrote:
always tried to be a good citizen
ate healthy food and exercised
doctors assured us that nothing we did could have caused this
no idea when I can return to work
our insurance could drop us at any moment, due to the astronomical cost
she is the light of our lives
Asking finally, “Do you think it’s too political?”
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Was the baby American? If she was, was it because this was the dust that had raised her particles, was it because she was impossibly ambitious in a land of impossible ambition, or was it because this was the country that had so steadfastly refused to care for her?
The letter to the senator—begging for help, a night nurse, a day nurse, a do-over, full reproductive rights for all women, an overhaul of the entire healthcare system, a new timeline, anything, anything, everything, everything—the letter to the senator was never mailed. How could it be, when their whole clock was full of the child?
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“I can do something for her,” she tried to explain to her husband, when he asked why she kept flying back to Ohio on those rickety $98 flights that had recently been exposed as dangerous by Nightline. “A minute means something to her, more than it means to us. We don’t know how long she has—I can give them to her, I can give her my minutes.” Then, almost angrily, “What was I doing with them before?”
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And something about the rawness of life with the baby was like the rawness of travel, the way it laid you open to the clear blue nerves. You were the five senses pouring down an unknown street; you were the slap of your shoes and hot paper of your palms, streaming past statues of regional Madonnas. The indelibility of a certain thrift shop in Helsinki, the smell of foreign decades in the lining of one leather coat. The loop of “Desert Island Disk” in a certain coffee shop in Cleveland, where the owner warned her not to have a second detoxifying charcoal latte because it would “flush the pills out of her system and get her pregnant.” The bridges of other cities, where she would watch their drab green rivers buoy up their rainbow-necked ducks, where she would drink espresso until there was a free and frightening exchange between her and the day—she was open, flung open, anything could rush in.
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She returned to her sister’s house for the holidays. She wrestled the eighteen-pound turkey into the oven and then ran back to the couch to check the monitors. She basted it with bubbled cupfuls of white wine and then ran back to the couch to exchange the turkey’s weight for the baby’s. She arranged sprigs of thyme and slices of pear in champagne flutes for something called an Autumn Cocktail—she would create a holiday atmosphere or die trying! Finally, as the sun was setting, they all sat down to eat with the baby beside them, and they looked at the flowers in the center of the table, and they looked at her green grass and marigold numbers, heart rate, oxygen, and they thought of something called abundance.
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Ben Franklin turkey myth: He didn’t champion turkeys as nation’s symbol. He used turkeys in electricity experiments
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The ideal thing to watch as you held a baby having an hour-long seizure was the Hallmark Channel, which had just begun to roll out its holiday programming. The plot of a Hallmark movie, invariably, was City Bitch Learns to Kiss a Truck . . . on Christmas. The city bitches were exactly thirty-seven years old. Their eyes were wide with christ coke. And at the end, they were so happy to be finally taught their lesson, happy to stay in the hometowns forever, with family.
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“Touch me!” the baby demanded at all times. “Touch me, I am in the dark!”
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There was a robot in her sister’s house that listened to them 24/7, filing their conversations away carefully in case they all murdered each other at some point. Those headlong months of words would be locked in a vault for eternity, sobbing on and on, what will we do, what are we to do, underpinned everywhere with the baby’s breathing and the blips of her machines, occasionally brightened by her sister throwing out little interrogations of the quotidian like, Alexa, how tall is Kevin Hart?
Alexa, play classical music!
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This time last year they had been at The Nutcracker, and in bed that night she closed her eyes and the ballet was still dancing itself. The ballerina was caught again and again by safe rough hands. The score filled the air like a pillow fight, but above it was the sound of toe boxes on the boards, that ugly human thump that refined the spectacle to a beauty past all bearing, so that the man in front of her broke down entirely and shouted out, “BRAVA!” Perhaps this is the afterlife, she thought, the eyes close but the ballet keeps dancing, the bodies that are the ballet still spin, as great snowy trees are lowered from the ceiling to the earth.