The Break(35)
The doors open again on Fourteenth Street. Passengers push out, and an orange plastic seat becomes open, so I take it. My legs are sticky against it. I close my eyes and think of my mom holding the garden hose in her delicate grip and watering mums while the other parents looked on. They always watched her. And they seemed so lost and tired compared to her. Sometimes the other moms would wander over, sipping mugs that had things like forty-ish! on them, and they’d ask my mother about the bake sale at school or about her flower boxes or about the weather. They just wanted to be near her and hear her talk, and I didn’t judge them because I understood perfectly what that felt like. And my mom didn’t seem to judge them, either, or if she did she never said anything to me or any of her friends. She didn’t have many friends, which took me a while to notice. She was social in the middle of a group, but she never took it to the next level, never invited anyone over for coffee. She could be friendly only for short bouts of time; otherwise it exhausted her. She read; she did Jane Fonda; she drank SlimFast; and when she felt up to it she worked the desk at my dad’s auto body shop and photoshopped the stuff they hung on the wall. Bathroom this way! Pay before you leave! My dad was once a professional race car driver—there are pictures of him up in the shop, photos my mom framed and hung. She loved him back then: the thrill of him, who he was when he was performing in that way, at the top of his sex appeal, winning everything. I know that’s a strange thing to say about my parents. But I can feel it like an undertow; anyone could figure it out if they bothered to get to know either of them. Then, when my mom was pregnant with my older brother, Jed, my dad got hurt and couldn’t race anymore. He started drinking way too much, and by the time he got sober he’d already pissed and gambled away a lot of their savings. Then they had me, and I’m not sure my mom has ever forgiven Jed and me for tethering her to my dad like a noose.
I love my father so much it hurts my brain to think of it.
The doors open at Delancey Street and I’m out of the train again. I’m through the turnstiles and I’m on the stairs; I’m a phoenix rising into the steamy air of New York City, breathing like I’ve been born anew, on my way to the ramshackle home I’m trying to build here and fighting for scraps of the life I want.
On my way to Sean.
FIFTEEN
Rowan. Thursday morning. November 10th.
The birth?” I ask, squirming against the cushions on Sylvie’s sleek settee. I’m trying to get comfortable, but I can’t. “You need to take Lila’s snowsuit off,” I say to Gabe.
“Won’t she wake up?” he asks me. A clock on the wall ticks so loudly I can count the beats. The clock seems an odd choice for a psychologist’s office, but maybe it’s me: lately all my senses are on fire. Motherhood has struck me like a tuning fork, and now the world feels electric; all the things I used to hear, touch, and taste were so bland compared with this.
“Maybe,” I say with a shrug, like I’m a casual mom and not a terrified one. “But that’s better than her getting too hot.”
Sylvie glances from me to Gabe. I wonder what she thinks when she looks at him. Does she find him sexy? Most women do. He’s got the right mix of dark and artistic combined with a powerful current that feels a lot like desire. When that desire is directed at you, you melt. Or at least, I did. I knew the moment he wrapped his arms around me and took me to bed I’d forget anyone else I’d ever been with. Being his wife has meant many things, and one of them is this: I’m always ready for him. I’ve never once turned him down. My body reacts to him in a way that doesn’t feel normal given the number of years we’ve been together. I could leave him if I had to—I don’t know what that must mean about us—but I’d never find someone who I want the way I want him.
“I’d like you to take me through what you remember about giving birth,” Sylvie says. She’s perched forward on her chair, looking less relaxed than I thought she’d be. “Anything you can think of,” she’s saying, “and you can start with sights and smells and sounds and we’ll work into it.”
“I was just thinking about how heightened all my senses feel since Lila got here,” I say carefully.
“You’re wired to protect Lila from the bear approaching your cave at night,” Sylvie says. She swipes a delicate curl behind her ear and crosses her legs. “All of that is built deep into our limbic systems.”
Are you a mother, too? I want to ask. Instead I study her face as though the answer’s written there, but she mistakes the way I’m looking at her for confusion. Her speech is slower when she says, “When I say limbic systems, I’m referring to the part of our brain that’s wired for taking care of our young, and for fight or flight.”
I smile weakly; I obviously know what a limbic system is. Gabe is nodding along to Sylvie, which I find ironic because he’d roll his eyes if I said something like that to explain my anxiety.
“I know what a limbic system is,” I say, and it comes out snottier than I mean it to. “Hippocampus, amygdala . . . the places for forming and cataloguing and attaching emotional content to memories, ironically,” I go on. I’m sort of trying to make a joke, but mostly wanting her to know I’m not a total amateur at this therapy thing; I’ve been trying to get my brain under control for more than half my life. I was only sixteen when I had my first dark spell, the time my mom dropped me off at sleepaway theater camp deep in the Adirondacks armed with bug spray and my diary when I should have packed condoms. I bunked with two Jessicas who fought over our eighteen-year-old assistant director, and three weeks in, when they found out I was the one he was sleeping with, they mutinied. The rest of camp was agony, especially when the guy found some other girl to strip down and press against a tree. But it wasn’t his rejection that hurt the most; it was the quicksilver change in the girls—the way they loved me at first and how fast they turned. From love to hate. It’s common enough, isn’t it? There were knives in the air between us every time I climbed into my bunk at night, and when we changed out of our pajamas in the morning, their eyes furtively swept my body as if they were trying to see what I had that they didn’t. It was like they were trying to picture what I’d done with him. And it hit me in the gut: the aching realization I’d given away my virginity and any chance at friendships all in one shot. But maybe the Jessicas weren’t to be trusted, anyway. Not worth your time, my mother told me when I arrived back home a teary mess, my period late. You’ll find your people, she kept saying as I cried during the car ride back to New Jersey. Eventually I did find my people, but as a teenager it was too hard for me to sense which women were the good ones—friendship was too nuanced for me to really understand back then. When I started bleeding a month late I knew deep down it wasn’t my period, a gush of blood too powerful to be anything other than what it really was. I imagined my summer washing away: the rabid jealousy of the Jessicas, the starlit nights beneath the cover of trees with the guy’s hands all over my body, and even the time I had four beers and peed my bed and was too mortified to tell anyone, so I had to furiously wash my sheets in the sink. I was too much of a child to handle any of it, and it pushed me into my first dark place. It didn’t lift until I joined a swim team that winter and made new friends.