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The Mourning Essay

November 13, 2023

Ghosts are supposed to be translucent, ephemeral. Mine are opaque, and permanent. Like the humidity on the Gulf Coast, ever present and palpable. If I could take a knife and cut a path through it, I would; I have tried. I’ve surgically removed myself, carving out limbs at a time until now, almost a decade removed, again, from living in Biloxi, I feel that mostly I am whole and present in the DC suburbs in which I live. It takes a long time, piecing oneself back together. After the traumatic death of a brother. After the rape and sexual assault from a friend. After heartbreak and disappointment and the wiping away of future plans. When I think of Mississippi, I think of pain and heartache. I think also of ignorance and backwardness and tremendous poverty. Of the final home of the first and last president of the confederacy. This monument to racism that stands and collects money, celebrating a history that is mistold, still. That flies not just one but hundreds of confederate flags, every day in 2022, and I am filled with dread. And yet for the sake of my children, and perhaps also for myself, this summer once again I find myself planning a trip back to the place where everything truly terrible in my life has happened. Because if I truly want to heal, I need to remember where I came from and how far I’ve come, and I want my kids to know more of the world than the haven their father and I have tried to create for them in suburbia. Because there is also beauty there, in Biloxi. Time moves slower and life is simpler. The Gulf beckons and pulls and reminds me of the possibilities in that murky water where the river meets the sound and the dolphins and stingrays play. And a day on the water in any kind of boat can heal almost anything. And so we go, every summer, and the ghosts and the mist envelope me and mine again.

But first, a memory.

The cool, dry air on my skin, driving my white mustang convertible, top down, through the hills and valleys of Northern California, the vineyards rolling past in waves of color, the smell of manure and compost and dreams permeating the air around me. The warmth of the sun and the endless possibilities in the open clean air of a California morning. That morning, so long ago, when California-me still believed it was possible to shake off my hometown. It was 7:30 AM on January 12, 2006, and I was on my way to work at Napa High School when my friend Shelly Barq called from Biloxi. She was thousands of miles away and three hours ahead of me in time. This morning in Napa, like every morning, the sky above was a brilliant blue punctuated with hot air balloons. The beauty of this adopted home astounded me daily. I loved that I needed a sweater in the mornings and could wear shorts in the afternoon. I loved the hills and valleys, the river and the endless cerulean sky. The gourmet coffee shops and grocery stores and boutiques I couldn’t afford. In every possible way Napa was the opposite of where I had grown up in hurricane country. There was never even a cloud in the sky, not one.

“Is your brother ok?” Shelly asked.

I had no idea what she was talking about. My morning had consisted of an argument with my fiance, Jeff, and then a hasty exit to my car. He would be driving to Santa Rosa this morning to work at his mother’s office (supposedly) and then staying late afterward to play with his band—that part, at least, I could believe. That is all he did, really, pretend to be a rock star and smoke pot. The rockstar bit is part of what attracted me to him in the first place. There is nothing more romantic than sitting under the stars with someone who is playing the guitar and crooning a love song while staring into your eyes.

“Call your mom,” Shelly said, and I hung up with her and called home expecting my mother to tell me that my youngest brother Josh had perhaps broken his leg in a car accident.

“Pull over and park the car,” Mom said.

It was 9:30 AM her time, and 7:30 in Napa. Impatient and because I was almost to school, I told her I was parked even as I continued to drive.

“Your brother has been killed,” she said. “He passed away.” Stunned, I coasted into my parking space. I couldn’t understand what she was saying.

A memory.

Running laps at the park by our house. The oppressive heat and stings of mosquito bites. A desire to show off. Josh wanted to get into better shape for baseball, and he asked me to train him to run faster. I ran behind him and in front of him. I sang motivational songs, He was out of breath after 50 yards. His dark brown hair and little belly, the way he trudged rather than jogged. His body had never been the same after his surgery. When he was 10 he’d been diagnosed with Ewing’s Sarcoma, and after a round of chemotherapy he’d had surgery to remove the tumor in his leg, and a surgeon had spliced the bones there together with another bone from his pelvis. He was a survivor; he was a fighter. That day at the running track though, he gave up after 2 laps, and I teased him endlessly.

Not possible that he was killed, that he had “passed away.” Passing away implies some sort of gentle crossing, and there is nothing gentle about being crushed by an 18 wheel truck. He and seven of his friends had been driving back from a party about an hour north from our hometown, and in the back country roads of Wiggins, Mississippi, in dense fog and after too many drinks, they had gotten lost. Chris Rutland, the driver, did a 3 point turn in the middle of the highway, and in the 3 AM fog, his truck had been struck by an 18-wheeler going probably 80 miles an hour. Josh and five of his friends had been killed instantly.

How could he be dead? Why him? Had I not also been to a million parties in remote locations and driven with a driver who’d also had too much to drink? I don’t think I’m alone in this, when we are young, we are stupid. Most of us are pretty lucky and survive those mistakes. Josh and his friends didn’t. But I had just seen Josh when I was there for Christmas break. We had last talked a few days before, when I called to see if he’d yet gotten over the cold he had while I was visiting. I was feeling sniffly and wondering if I should visit the doctor for some antibiotics, or if it was, in fact, just a cold. He had told me he was fine. He is fine. No other option was plausible. Because if my little brother was dead, what did that make me?

Memories.

He was 6 and I was 11, and I was the only one he trusted to pull his loose tooth. I was his protector, his “Gigi” when he couldn’t yet say Angie properly. His little arms around me when he’d had a nightmare and needed someone to hold him while he fell back asleep. The smell of Dove soap and toothpaste and the slight fear that he might pick his nose and put the boogers under the covers.

While home that Christmas, I had brought Jeff with me to meet my family. It had been a disaster. Jeff Fitzgerald did not in any way mesh with my southern Mississippi past and present. He had threatened at one point to walk to the airport and leave early because he couldn’t stand the… what exactly? I’m not sure. Now I think what he couldn’t fathom was the intimacy. This is what scares me too, now, at 42, when I think about visiting my parents and Bryan, my remaining brother, in Biloxi. I’ve successfully cocooned myself in suburbia, a thousand miles away, and I don’t want to open my heart back up to that place where it can be hurt again by those who knew me before. There used to be a closeness between my brothers, parents and me. There was no escaping it if I wanted to. Even as a 22 year old adult visiting with Jeff that winter, the strict curfews and rules were still in place because, according to my dad, “when you are under my roof you are under my rules.” I don’t think Jeff had any of this growing up; certainly there didn’t seem to be any structure in his life, any comprehension of the importance of honesty and even sobriety. That I came from a place where people couldn’t buy wine at the grocery store or liquor (or wine) on Sundays seemed unfathomable to him. That for one week only, he wouldn’t be able to begin his mornings with his customary glass of wine or token joint was unbearable to him. I see that now. I didn’t then. I was still enthralled by the easy orgasms that came when he was next to me and the sweet embrace of the ever flowing wine and sunshine in California. One night in Biloxi for Christmas break, we had played Trivial Pursuit. Jeff was impressed with Joshua’s ability to get every single question on the sports cards correct. I think that was the only real interaction between them. Jeff preferred my brother Bryan, I think, because he was closer to us in age, but also because Bryan shared Jeff’s love for cannabis.

So that morning in Napa, when I called Jeff to tell him he needed to turn back around and meet me at our apartment, the first question he asked after I screamed that my brother was dead was, “Which one?” This question maddened me. Did it matter? Of course it mattered, but to me at the time it seemed more proof that this man child I’d been dumb enough to saddle myself to seemed to think that question was relevant.

“It’s Josh,” I said. “Come home.”

Another night over Christmas vacation I had been sitting downstairs when, from upstairs, had come a burst of music. “I’m all out of love, I’m so lost without you, I know you were right believing for so long, I’m all out of love, what am I without you? I can’t be too late to say that I was so wrong.” Air Supply. Really? This was the song my brother was playing to pump himself up to go out for the evening? It tickled me. Who was the person he imagined when he listened to that song? I hollered up at him with the torment that comes from a big sister’s love, and the song was immediately changed. He must have loved someone, had someone who thought she might be the one, someone with whom he shared intimacies and kisses and dreams. Her dreams, like mine, were shattered that day. But my dreams were already cracked.

While in Biloxi for winter break I went with a friend to try on wedding dresses. I was standing in DeeDees Dress shop on the little stage reserved for brides, surrounded by mirrors. The lights were shining on me like spotlights and I was glorious. The dress was beautiful, with just the right amounts of lace, charmeuse, satin and chiffon. It was off the shoulder and in it, I was the princess bride I’d always dreamed of. But looking in the mirror in that dress I realized I was more excited about the dress than the man I’d be walking down the aisle to marry. In that moment, I knew I wouldn’t marry Jeff. But it took months before I was able to tell him that, compounded by the pain from Josh’s death and the desire to do anything but think of how I’d failed my family by continuing to exist when Josh was no longer here. It seemed I existed in the world so I could make my parents’ life better. I had to make it right, but how could I? There was no bringing him back. This was the first time I had ever encountered such a loss where there was truly nothing that could be done to fix it. There was just a hole, and nothing could fill it up. But I tried.

Back in Napa, in my townhouse on Silverado drive, I tried to fill it with every glass of wine I could afford. Drowning in alcohol and hoping for oblivion. When I was Josh’s age I had driven drunk or ridden drunk more times than I could count. How could I have survived when he didn’t? Not only him, but his five best friends also perished in that wreck. Why had I always been so lucky? There seemed to be two ways only to solve this problem: drink myself into oblivion or move back to Mississippi and be there for my parents.

A memory.

Plunging into a murky pond where an alligator lived on a dare. Swimming to the other side faster than I’d ever swam before or since because I’m not scared, I’m just as cool as the guys, my brothers will see that I am someone to look up to. Dreams of alligators chasing me and them, and always grabbing Joshua just in time to save him, or waking up in a cold sweat and never knowing if I made it in time. He was my responsibility, Mom always said. You are the oldest. Summer heat and play outside with your brothers, and I don’t care that Josh is 5 years younger than you, he needs to come too and you are in charge of keeping him safe. But I couldn’t keep him safe this time. I was in California, and he died. I didn’t protect him. I wasn’t the daughter or sister I was supposed to be.

The funeral and touching his skin. It was loose and cold and buoyant, even, like the cold bread roll sitting on the table with all the casseroles left by people who bring food to people who can’t eat. Eating means living, and I felt dead. The night before the funeral, Bryan and I were in Josh’s room, sifting through his things, and I found a letter to him from my mom. You are my favorite, she had written to him. Of my children, you are the strongest and the best and the closest to my heart. Another blow. Not only is my brother dead, but my mom loved him more than me, and I now had physical proof. Flying back to California and back to Jeff. His arms around me and feeling sickened at the idea of fucking him now. Every touch reminded me of Joshua’s corpse. And so the only thing that really was keeping us together, ended too.

And when the school year was over, I pieced what was left of myself together. A burden had landed on my soul, and it would be years before I would be able to pull myself out from under it. Back in Biloxi, I sank even further into a depression that existed because of the death of my brother, yes, but also because I was trying to recreate a home for myself in a place that I had once promised myself that I’d never return to. For as early as I can remember, I always knew that I needed to leave Mississippi. The pressure of humidity in the air was a weight on my soul.

A memory.

July, 2006. Telling a new someone that my brother had just died, and the realization in his eyes when he discerned that my brother was one of those kids he read about in the paper. Warm arms around me and a soft, “I’m sorry.” That summer was heat and salt and sand and losing myself in everything and everyone so there would never be time to think. Trying coke for the first time just to feel alive. To remind myself that I was still alive even if Josh wasn’t. The weight of guilt and sadness and humidity. Jumping on the trampoline at 3 in the morning, sleeping in someone else’s bed and waking up to salty air and more heat and the open breeze on the Silver Dollar or anyone’s boat who’d let me ride out to the barrier islands with them. Anywhere to pretend for a minute that I wasn’t landlocked in Mississippi, again.

I got a job teaching at a local high school, and tried to forget the dreams I’d had for myself. Tried to forget everything, really. My grief at losing my brother. After a series of dead end hook ups and brief relationships centered around men with access to boats, I bought my own sailboat. Nevermind that I didn’t actually know how to sail. I’d spent years on boats, but always ones with motors and someone else in the captain’s seat. Still, I was taking charge of my life. If I was going to be stuck in my hometown, I was going to explore the best parts of it. I needed space from the oppressive love of my parents, from not knowing who I was anymore, and I looked everywhere but within, hoping that in the air off the coast my confined soul might fly free for a while. Later that year I met the man who would become my husband. Like me, he had called BIloxi home, but he also knew he was destined to settle elsewhere,which is what we eventually did, several years later.

Maybe that is it. I got out of Mississippi. And Josh never can. He died there, and they buried him a mile from where we grew up. He will forever be 21, stuck in the pictures my parents have posted all over the house. His face bloated from freshman 15, never able to grow into the man he might have become.

A memory.

September, 2005, just three months before Josh died. A flight from Sacramento into Jackson, Mississippi. Biloxi destroyed by Hurricane Katrina. All of the landmarks of my youth, wiped away in an instant. Watching events unfold from Napa was like listening to a friend tortured in the next room and not being able to do anything or even know what was happening. On CNN and every channel only New Orleans and levees and FEMA. I was at school the morning the storm hit, and Bryan had refused to evacuate. When you grow up around hurricanes, as long as you live on land above the flood zone and your walls are made of brick, you learn early that you don’t need to evacuate. And yet my parents who had never lived anywhere other than the Hurricane zone of the Gulf Coast, who had never in my lifetime left for a storm, had fled north. Josh was at college in north Mississippi, and so Bryan was the only one in my nuclear family in the danger zone. I was on the phone with him that morning and he was having a party with friends. Drinking and smoking and claiming his territory in his newly purchased home.

“Holy shit, my shed just flew by,” he said, and the phone lost service. I wasn’t able to reestablish service with him or anyone in my family for three days. All lines were down. But they were all ok, in the end. Until of course, they weren’t. So when Josh picked me up from the airport in Jackson, Mississippi, a week after the storm hit, as we drove down to the coast I marveled at how everything had changed. Landmarks I’d always known didn’t exist anymore.

“Shut up,” he said, “you can’t even see anything, it’s dark.” He was right, of course, but I wanted to make up for not being there when the storm hit. And the landscape had changed. Nothing would ever be the same. It had felt like a betrayal, watching from afar and then really only watching how the storm affected New Orleans. The media coverage skipped over Mississippi entirely, even though the eye of the storm had passed over the Mississipp Gulf Coast, not Louisiana. So I gathered tree limbs like crazy, sweeping and raking and busting my ass to help get my parents’ house and my grandmother’s house ready again for habitation, and I wheedeled my littlest brother, Josh, for not hustling enough to help. Working in my grandmother’s yard, he kept disappearing inside to do anything but manual labor, and I told him he needed to quit being lazy and get his hands dirty.“ He wasn’t the perfect person that my parents remember. He was just a boy. Sometimes lazy, sometimes stupid, sometimes selfish, just like anyone. He didn’t hustle enough. Or maybe I hustle too much. How can you be angry with a ghost? I guess I’m not angry with him but with my parents for loving that imperfect ghost more than me.

And here I am now, fifteen years later, fussing at my own son, Josh, for not hustling enough in the morning before school. For not picking up after himself. For not being the perfect version of a son I envisioned when I thought having him might somehow fill the hole that came to being when Josh died.

A memory.

A cemetery with a view of the Gulf of Mexico. Flat, sandy, ground filled with other brothers and sons, mothers and daughters, the bones and ashes of other dreams that died with the bodies buried in the earth. Sitting there on the massive stone bench on the meticulously maintained ground on the 5 plots my parents bought so we “could all be buried together,” surrounded by the stone angels and trinkets and his picture there, in the tombstone, staring at me. A promise to remember. To live a life worth living. To make up for his death, somehow.

“So you became a mother not because you wanted to, but because you felt you had to,” my therapist said many years later. I guess that’s true, and maybe why I clash so much with my now eleven-year-old son. Part of me thought that by bringing another Josh into this world I could somehow fill the hole created by the loss of my brother Josh. What a terrible burden to put on a small child, and now, years after that realization, I understand part of the anger I have for my parents. I left Napa to try to heal them. I made another Josh. And I’m still not good enough. My dead brother will always be better than me, because in their minds, he exists as the most perfect version of himself. The man he might have been is so much better than the person he was. In their minds, he will always be potential. I will never be good enough because I’m still alive. And I project that failure onto my sweet son, Josh. He is never good enough either because no one is. And maybe that is ok.

So I’ll take my children to visit their grandparents, and I’ll smile, because as hard as losing a brother is, losing a child must be a million times harder. Together we will wade into the Gulf, feeling the soft sand beneath our feet and between our toes and the warm water all around us. We’ll climb onto Poppy’s boat and sit next to my mother and smile, and maybe this time the water will cleanse me of the guilt and the ghosts and the sorrow. I’ll close my eyes and think of that other Josh who died long ago, and remember him singing Air Supply, in the bathroom. And when my son asks Poppy to put on some ridiculous pop song, I’ll smile again and tell Poppy to turn it up.

Angie Taggart is a high school English teacher who is more often grading papers than writing her own. She has been published in The Vanguard. We are thrilled to publish her work and look forward to reading more from Angie. She can be found on Twitter at @angtagwrites.

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Wondering what to read next?

We are huge fans of messy stories. Uncomfortable stories. Stories of imperfection.

Life isn’t easy and in this gem of a book, Amy Ferris takes us on a tender and fierce journey with this collection of stories that gives us real answers to tough questions. This is a fantastic follow-up to Ferris’ Marrying George Clooney: Confessions of a Midlife Crisis and we are all in!

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Guest Posts, postpartum depression

What Wraps Itself Around

November 5, 2023

A rare moment of solitude: the baby is napping, the oldest child is at school, the four-year-old is watching cartoons. You turn the water up as hot as you can and step into the shower. Close your eyes and lean your head back. Let the steady stream pummel into the thick layer of your anxiety. A layer so thick it feels like a crust.

You are lathering up when the bathroom door is swung open. In his tinny voice, your son announces that he needs to go potty.

“So go,” you bark, resentful of the intrusion. A few moments later, he whines, “Pull up my pants, Mama, pull up my pants, Ma-MA!”

You breathe in the steam, your mouth stretched tight while you try to ignore his insistent demands, as well as the small voice in your head reminding you that you always pull up his pants whenever he asks.

I don’t care, you say to the voice. He knows how to do it, and is one uninterrupted shower too fucking much to ask for?

His whining increases in volume and urgency.

Just pull up his pants, the voice says. It’ll take all of two seconds and then he’ll go back to watching TV. What’s your problem?

Immediately you bristle. Your problem? What is your problem?

This. Everything. All of it.

Especially that hard something lodged in your chest that is making you feel like you do. Unable to stop the anger as the whining voice of your child whom you love beyond words pierces you, drills into you, leaving a dark hole inside.

“Mamaaaaaa, pull up my paaaaaaaaants!”

The small voice in your head is stunned into silence as out of the hole something ugly erupts, and you thrust the shower curtain aside and stomp out of the tub, swearing, water and soap dripping all over the floor, and with your soaking wet hands you grab your son’s pants and yank them so hard you think you lift him off his feet just a little, and he cries harder but all you can do is yell that now he can go back to watching T.V.

You step back into the shower. You hear sniffling. Footsteps retreating. The drone of the bathroom fan.

In the tub you collapse and curl into yourself, and as the hot water flows over your back, you recall the fear on your son’s tear-stained face and you weep.

Was it after the shower incident that I googled the symptoms of postpartum depression? Perhaps. That spring, the days were mashed into each other like leftover Play-doh, with their endless procession of dirty dishes and laundry, school papers and diapers, the rhythmic whine of the breast pump and never enough sleep. The kids’ needs were unraveling me, pulling at the loose threads of whoever it was that I used to be. I was sucked dry. Stretched completely thin.

I’d been yelling a lot. Each time I did I felt shitty but there was something about it that felt like release, like the sensation of cigarette smoke entering lungs, acrid and burning yet somehow so satisfying. Once, I exploded at my eight-year-old son during breakfast, sounding like something straight out of The Exorcist. Seeing his wide eyes I forced myself to laugh about the whole thing, brush it off. Yes, it’s hilarious, seeing mommy lose control in this way. I should just stab myself in the eye because I don’t deserve these beautiful children. (Intrusive thoughts, as I learned, were a symptom of postpartum depression.)

This was not the mother I was supposed to be. These feelings, the yelling—none of it was anywhere in the blueprints for motherhood I’d had in my heart since childhood.

Yet there I was. Feral. A wild animal cornered.

Call your therapist, the small voice inside of me whispers. I scoff. What can she tell me that I don’t know already? That first I need to take care of myself so then I can do a better job of nurturing everyone else? I know this. I know I should go to bed early, drink more water, eat healthier foods, begin an exercise routine. I even have an elliptical machine down in the basement, bought off of Craigslist after my second pregnancy but used maybe five times, so what’s my excuse? Time? There is never enough of it. Or maybe I’m just terrible at organizing it. In the morning I want to sleep as long as I can so I’m rested at least, but if I don’t get up before the kids then forget having breakfast for at least an hour, never mind being able to take a shit on my own schedule instead of holding it in because that’s when the baby is crying and needs me.

See? Obviously you can’t figure it out. Call your therapist.

What, so she can diagnose me with postpartum depression and put me on meds? I don’t want to pump my body full of pills. I can deal on my own with whatever this is. Besides, it’s not like I can’t get out of bed. It’s not like the kids are dirty and hungry, neglected. I feed them good meals, for the most part, fruits and veggies at each, and make sure they have a consistent bedtime routine. I hug them each day and tell them I love them; we read books and play games and we laugh, even on the bad days.

And it’s not like I can’t bond with the baby or have thoughts of harming my children. (Unless you count the urge to spank my son when he’s having a tantrum and flailing his body about like he’s doing the Limbo.) Of course our children are safe with me, I assure my husband after telling him what I suspect I may be struggling with. I would never intentionally harm them. (But I do wonder what pushes some women over the edge. I’m secretly terrified that I have an edge, too.) So I’ve been extra irritable lately. So I’ve been yelling. What parent doesn’t? This is nothing, I’m fine. I just miss having fun. I miss laughing—really laughing.

So go see a comedy show. You’ve got an answer for everything, don’t you?

Maybe you should tell one of your best friends.

And I almost do. We’re on the phone, talking about husbands and children and plans to meet up for a much-needed drink, and the words are right there, in my throat—I think I might have postpartum depression—but I know if I speak them out loud I’ll burst into tears, come unglued.

That spring, my husband’s friend, with whom he’d grown up together in the same village in Poland, invited us to Chicago for his fortieth birthday. I’m not sure why it didn’t even occur to me to put my husband on a plane by himself, to tell him to go, have a good time, enjoy the weekend alone. Instead, we packed up the baby, the kids, the breast pump and diapers, the jars of baby food and the playpen; we packed up the whole minivan and from the East Coast we drove to America’s heartland.

I thought a change in routine might help me.

Only now, three years later, do I understand what I was actually doing, going along on such a trip in that precarious state: I was trying to prove, once again, to myself and the world, that I was an excellent mother. See? Look at this heroic thing I am doing, driving halfway across the country while children whine and cry in the back, climbing over the bags to thrust my breast into the baby’s mouth as the armrest digs into my ribs and the mini-van speeds down the highway.

The trip, of course, did not help my depression.

On the third or fourth day of vacation, you and your husband take the children to the Willis Tower in downtown Chicago. The wait for the elevator to the observation floor is over an hour. The four-year-old keeps running around, trying to unhook the velvet ropes keeping everyone corralled in the line. The baby, strapped onto your chest in the carrier, begins stirring, and you begin doing the mom bounce. Knees bending, hips swaying, hand on the baby’s back. Not yet, not yet, please don’t wake up just quite yet.

A thrumming begins in your hollowed out core and spreads through the rest of your body, right underneath your skin, pulsing. Time grinds to a halt. You want to scream. How did you get here? Where’s the picture-perfect family vacation which somewhere, sometime, had been promised? By whom or what you cannot say. All you know is that you feel cheated. Betrayed. The inside of your brain feels like a roiling anthill.

Later, alone in the bathroom, you lock yourself in the stall. But still you can hear them, your family out in the hall, the kids pestering your husband for more coins to put in that machine which presses your penny flat and leaves it with an imprint of the skyscraper, or maybe of the cow that purportedly started the Great Chicago Fire of 1871. The arguing and yelling and crying shoots in underneath the closed bathroom door, assaulting you, drilling into you, and you lean against the stall, your shoulders heaving, tears flowing down and wetting your shirt, because you want to be somewhere else, anywhere else, you want to jump out of your very own skin and maybe even be someone else, like the type of mom who would never scream at her kids because she’d know some lame song off the top of her head which would help them behave. What if you walk out of this building and disappear into the crowd? What if you just…go? Steal quickly away?

The thought grips you, wraps itself around you, making you cry even harder.

Deep down I knew I wouldn’t actually leave my children, not then, not ever. But the very fact that I’d even allowed the thought to enter my head gutted me. Because what kind of a mother thinks such horrible thoughts?

Somehow, I pulled myself together and made it through the rest of that day, just as I’d been doing for the past several weeks. Getting through. Barely.

But what I didn’t, or couldn’t, admit to myself in that bathroom stall in Chicago was this: The thought of leaving made me cry harder partly because of how alluring it was, yet at the same time, how impossible. How utterly, achingly impossible. Like seeing a sliver of blue sky through the bars on a prison window.

On the way home from Chicago, we stay at an Airbnb on Lake Erie to break up the drive. We’ve been away from home for almost a week and our children, especially our four-year-old, are reaching their limit. Even now, first thing in the morning, as I let the door of the cottage fall closed behind me, their voices arguing over whose turn it is to pick a Netflix show chase me down the deck steps. The baby will probably be up from his nap soon, cranky because he’s teething and most likely sick of having to wake up in a new place every couple of days. I shake off the guilt and half-walk, half-run down the sidewalk. I’m sure my husband will somehow survive.

The sidewalk leads me past a few other cottages, and the bluish-gray water of Lake Erie in the distance beckons me. But as I near the beach, I hear a loud rumbling and grinding, followed by short beeps every few seconds. So much for a peaceful walk, I think, as I step onto the sand and see a Bobcat skid steer backing up and then noisily plowing ahead, its claw picking up large pieces of driftwood in what appears to be an effort to clean up the beach of debris. (Either that, or someone is planning some pretty big bonfires tonight.) I stop in my tracks, and my first thought is that my four-year-old would absolutely love to see this.

My spunky, wild middle child, who is obsessed with construction vehicles. Who sleeps in excavator pajamas and loader bed sheets, and drinks his morning milk from a mug with pictures of dump trucks and skid steers and backhoes. (Yes, I too know all the names now.) Who plays with his collection of tiny yellow machines in the sandbox, the bathtub, the grass, who exclaims and with eyes shining points through the car window whenever he spots any kind of construction vehicle out on the road.

I really should run back to the cottage to get him. This, for him, would be better than Christmas and Halloween and Easter combined.

But then I think back to our attempt to take a family walk on the beach the previous evening: my son digging like a dog and getting sand all over us, throwing rocks every which way, running around and constantly getting too close to the edge of the pier. To be fair, he had just spent eight hours in the car. But knowing that didn’t make it any easier.

I’m sure he’ll have plenty of opportunities to see a Bobcat in action. This is my morning. And god knows how much I need it.

I take two steps forward. Just then, the claw of the Bobcat picks up more wood and starts beeping as it backs up again, heaving its haul onto one of the piles. Without a second thought, I turn on my heel and rush back to the cottage. Screw it.

I burst in the front door, grinning widely.

“Sweetheart, come look! There’s a Bobcat on the beach!”

His whole face lights up and he jumps off the couch, abandoning the Netflix show he’d been dying to watch just five minutes ago.

We walk down to the beach hand in hand. As soon as the Bobcat comes into view, my son freezes, completely in awe. I crouch down next to him and gaze at his small face, his beautiful face, and I take several deep breaths, drinking him in—the way his eyes sparkle and his nose crinkles, his little white teeth peeking through his smile, his sandy brown hair tousled and falling into his eyes, and everything else slips away for a short while—memories of the tantrums and whining, his neediness, my anger. I’m here in this moment with my child. And seeing his pure, unfiltered excitement, his childish delight, does not feel like a compromise. It does not feel like putting my needs last once again. This, for me, feels like a gift.

The two of us spend the whole hour on the beach together, watching the Bobcat at first but then playing, exploring. A twisted piece of driftwood becomes my son’s excavator, of course, and I sit on some concrete steps and watch him playing, smiling at his creativity. We skip stones and find shells, we chase each other by the water’s edge, we discover a fort someone else built with the driftwood.

Not long after we returned from Chicago, I made an appointment to get a prescription for anti-depressants. I ended up not taking them, although in retrospect, I know I probably should have. Back then, though, you see, I was still tethered to the idea of perfection. Deep down, I ached to be the heroic mother, the myth, the legend, the one who could prove that you could indeed do it all. Figuring things out on my own and pulling myself up by the bootstraps was part of the trap of that myth.

Seven months later, the onset of the pandemic would strip me of whatever notions I may still have possessed that such a thing was feasible, or healthy, or even desirable. And of course, the pandemic would exacerbate the struggles of mothering three little humans, especially since it hit just when I felt like I was finally climbing out of the clutches of that postpartum depression. Fantasies about leaving would flit through my mind every so often—this time no longer so shocking. Because by that point, I knew they were simply a part of the landscape of motherhood.

On that spring morning, as we walked from the beach back to the cottage, my son’s little hand snuggled in mine, I found myself fully present for the first time in weeks. Later that day, challenging moments would come, I knew; I’d get angry again, yell, want to vanish. But right then, my frayed soul felt completely, utterly soothed. The time we’d spent together had been a balm.

And I realized how much I needed those kinds of moments, too. In that space which had become so hard to navigate during that difficult spring, that space of yelling and crying and my own guilt and fear, this was exactly what I needed: a small moment of joy with my child. I knew I needed to laugh more often with my kids, find ways to enjoy being with them, not to prove anything to anyone, but simply for my own sake. For theirs.

And so as we walked back to the cottage, both of us happy, content, I decided I would try to catch these small moments of quiet joy from now on, moments in which I’d learn to forgive myself. I would learn to sink into those moments, wrap them around me like a warm, weighted blanket—even if just for a bit.

Magda Bartkowska was born in Gdańsk, Poland and raised in western Massachusetts. Her writing has been published in Barnstorm Journal and The Tishman Review, among others, and most recently, one of her essays shortlisted in the Sonora Review Rage Essay Contest. Currently, she is working on a coming-of-age novel exploring how identity is pieced together at the intersection of immigration and girlhood, in a world that attempts to tame the wild out of girls. You can find Magda on Twitter @MagdaBart8 and at www.magdalenabartkowska.com.

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Guest Posts, memories

Ramble On

November 3, 2023

Robert Plant was desire and fantasy. The quintessential rock god. Enrobed in snug jeans, his lean frame, gyrating hips jutting, shirt unbuttoned, tousled blond curls flashing as he strutted and commanded the stage. His keening, semi-orgasmic moans and melodies awakened something primal in me. And Jimmy’s galloping, rolling, guitar licks commanding my hips to move. Led Zeppelin was the soundtrack of my becoming. It kindled a fire in me that begged to be tended.

At the starting gate of my teens, I left every midnight showing of the concert movie Song Remains the Same at the Vogue Theatre only to return to my lonely room. I stared at the ceiling, wondering what it would be like for someone to sing for me, to dance for me. Even though Robert performed for legions of fans at enormous public arenas, I imagined this sacred bond between us, an inside secret only we shared. At the end of the night, to have someone croon to me mournfully, magically, majestically, to be cradled in loving arms, head resting on a strapping bare chest, my man’s tender caress stroking my hair, my cheeks, tracing the line of my lips.

I wanted a Whole Lotta Love. Way down inside I needed it.

The creek behind my house smelled of earth and moss. I took my journal and climbed to a rock that jutted out over the water, my throne. I day-dreamed of a boy who would come along and see me on my cliffside perch, see my infinite coolness and fall instantly in love. He would demand to read my musings. I would demure, then hand over my dog-eared notebook. He would declare me a genius, and we would read the poems and entries, and talk about what they meant, talk about life, talk about dreams and desires, just talk, and maybe kiss a little, but gently.

I wasn’t sure I was worthy of something so magical. What I had known so far of love was secret and sinister, and made me feel desperate. I knew more than I should have about the needs of men, and I was already damaged goods. Somehow, I wasn’t meant to have anything so pure. Sex was my calling card. Men wanted my body and I wanted affection, and to belong to someone.

Being used and discarded was the price of admission. Mockery. Mortification. Shame. I didn’t understand how I already knew so much about what men wanted, and why I was vilified for pleasing, bringing pleasure. I kept hoping that someone would look beyond the blow job and see me, just see me and care.

Dudley was my first real boyfriend, a drummer, humble, humorous and unflappable. He was a much nicer guy than I deserved. My reputation preceded me He cared for me and defended me when others told him, who? Not her, man. She’ll do you wrong. Haven’t you heard her nickname, man?

But Dudley was most unconventional, a rare teenager who was a self-possessed, independent thinker and cared not at all what anyone else thought. He liked my fire, liked my weirdness, liked how my eagerness to embrace life made me act too bold, laugh too loud. He would write me sweet love notes, and I could feel his caring words warm me. He borrowed the words and I could hear Robert Plant’s soft voice singing to me as I read the poetry.

There were parties at the Pit, a crater-like fire hole where we built bonfires. It was a good 15-minute walk of bush-whacking deep in the woods behind the old fire station, virtually impossible to navigate after dark. If you had not been shown the way, or if you got too high or drunk, you would get lost. I knew this first hand.

Its seclusion guaranteed that, for a handful of us, the Pit was ours. Away from adult admonishments, we were free and invincible and open to our own goofiness. Dudley was my muse and my man. We had painted rocks with hearts and flowers and skulls and crossbones and decorated the perimeter of the pit and made pentagrams with sticks, pretending like it would scare intruders away. We took Ouija boards and played by firelight, trying to scare each other. We drank and drugged and our dramas played out — guys fought, and sometimes girls fought, and there were breakups every weekend.

There at the Pit, I listened to Led Zeppelin tell me the story of me in all the shades I was becoming —in brash, pulsing, empowering beats; in lacy, lyrical whispers of songs, in audacious, winking satires about plainspoken men and women with no regrets, in mournful my- woman done- me- wrong blues, and twangy, mystical folk, and complex story-songs with lyrics I dissected endlessly. Comfort and pain and seduction. Sublime. And I danced, a one-woman whirlwind of buttocks and breasts and flying hair. Of course, it couldn’t last.

Glenn King was the name of my doom. To this day, I can never hear the song Tempted by the Fruit of Another without thinking of him. One of my best friend’s brothers, he was older by about four years. GQ handsome, his wavy dark hair, sexy green eyes and arrogant smirk exactly the bad boy recipe I couldn’t resist. Mostly, he didn’t give me the time of day as his little sister’s friend, but I had a serious crush on him One night after significant amounts of Boone’s Farm Strawberry Hill and half a Quaalude from my friend’s mom’s prescription, a bunch of us played spin the bottle in a neighborhood basement and the bottle spun to me and he kissed me, and then we kissed some more. I awoke from my reverie and bolted from the game, but it was too late. I tried to pretend it didn’t happen but there were too many “friends” there to witness my betrayal and Dudley found out. He was a laid-back guy but he had a code and I had broken it. I wept and begged and cajoled, told him Glenn meant nothing to me, but it was done. It would not be the last time my impulsiveness got me into trouble. I now knew I was exactly the girl everyone said I was. The one boy who had seen through my image, my artifice, who saw my value was gone. Now, it didn’t matter anymore and I punished myself with self-destruction. I was back to the smart, socially awkward too-loud, inept girl who was the butt of jokes. Nights behind Rose Bowl bowling alley with joints and pills and wine to sweep away the snorts of laughter, the names, the rejection.

In freshman year of high school, in Mr. Paul’s Biology class, I traded my sister’s hand-me-down fringed leather poncho to Maria Niemann for her Led Zeppelin III album. I wonder what happened to Maria. We had bonded in our pariah-ness and our love of Zep and all things hippie. She wore combat boots with her uniform skirt. In sophomore year, she ran away from her abusive home – and school – with her biker boyfriend And I imagine her, wild brown hair and the fringes of the jacket dancing through the open window of a VW van adorned with Grateful Dead stickers. She is free but a little scared. In her tough girl shell, she is laughing and drinking anyway. When I talk to old school friends about her, they don’t remember her at all, as if she only existed in my mind.

I have successfully lived long enough to forgive myself for the things I did looking to belong, looking for love. I can cringe and laugh and marvel at the sweet girl, that rebel. I hope she is still way down inside me somewhere.

Holly Hinson is a writer and communications professional from Louisville, KY. Her poetry has been published in Louisville’s Literary Leo and in the literary anthology Calliope, and her journalism in the Louisville Courier-Journal, Business First, New Albany Tribune and Jewish Community Newspaper. She received an honorable mention for her essay Red Balloon in the 2016 Big Brick Review Essay Contest. Her website and blog is available at hollyhinson.com.

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Guest Posts, Relationships

The Blue Sponge

October 30, 2023

I inherited a blue sink-side sponge and the chore of washing up at the age of 15, when my mother left my father to live in an apartment on the other side of town.

It wasn’t an especially laborious job—we had a dishwasher. But some pans needed extra help. Caked-on macaroni and cheese. Chicken and dumplings. High-calorie Southern comfort foods prepared by a woman my father hired. The kind of food my mother never allowed. We were all watching her weight, and mine.

Besides being ineffectual for scrubbing, the blue sponge squicked me out. Bits of food clung to it, penetrating its pores. I tried to get it clean, but fragments remained. There it sat, by the side of the sink, mocking my incompetence.

This wasn’t my only incompetence. I sensed early on my mother always had one foot out the door, stunned by the reality of marriage and two toddlers at the age of 20. An overindulged child-woman ill-prepared to care for anyone but herself, and barely even that.

I did everything I could to make her stay. I made no demands. I super-sensed her needs and moods. Allowed her the spotlight—her need to be special. But she left anyway, and an uneasy silence prevailed as my father, brother and I rebuilt lives to fill her absence.

Really, when I looked forward to my future, my kitchen incompetence wasn’t that big a deal. I never planned to be a typical suburban homemaker. If I imagined any future at all, it was that of the caricature of the reclusive spinster living with seven dogs.

I never wanted children. The level of certainty was 99.9%. I couldn’t bear the idea of continuing the cycle of damage to a child the way I was damaged—not maliciously, but through ignorance and the self-centeredness that comes from a parent’s stunted emotional development.

One day I was in Baby Gap buying a shower gift. I was 38. I glided from display table to hanging rack, enchanted by the tiny garments. One-piece things I later learned were called onesies. Little pants with ingenious snaps down the inside of the legs. Tiny matching skullcaps with tufted knots on top, all in the softest cotton knits. I selected the most adorable outfit, presented it at the checkout, and began to cry.

I wouldn’t say I set a conscious intention to find a husband and make a child, but I believe I unconsciously shifted in that direction. I had devoted years of therapy with the goal of becoming more functional, more whole. Maybe some part of me was beginning to think it was possible.

I met my future husband, Michael, walking our dogs at St. Mary’s-by-the-Sea along Black Rock Harbor in Bridgeport, Connecticut. I had seen him before, walking with a woman and pushing a two-year-old in a stroller. I found out later they were his sister-in-law and nephew.

After we dated for a while, I confessed my lack of desire to have children, but he didn’t seem to care—or maybe he thought I’d change my mind.

When I was 39, Michael and I returned home from a whirlwind trip to Arkansas—for Thanksgiving dinner and an introduction to my family—and then a three-hour drive south to visit an old childhood friend and her husband.

My friend and I discussed my childbearing ambivalence.

“He’s wonderful!” she gushed, basing her statement on his interactions with her own children. “He’ll help you.”

She spoke from the view of the already-initiated parent, who knows that rearing children often means you just step up and put one foot in front of the other. That there’s no magic involved—only duty…and love. My desire finally overpowered my fears. I decided to believe her.

On our flight back to Connecticut, Michael and I discussed getting busy ASAP because at our age, we realized it might take a while. We conceived the night we got back.

Around Christmas, after taking three pregnancy tests, all positive, I called my father with the happy news.

“Call me back when you’re married.” He slammed down the phone.

Stung by my father’s reaction, I felt compelled to contact my mother even though we had long been estranged and spoke only infrequently. When she heard the news, I was surprised to see that her excitement paralleled my own. This was the encouragement I needed to resume contact. We started phoning regularly. She was the first witness to my first trimester morning sickness when she called one evening and Michael reported that I was throwing up dinner and couldn’t take the call.

When Ian was a newborn, she came to visit during the torrential rains from Tropical Storm Floyd. She cooked and washed dishes and did laundry and let me nap while I recuperated from my c-section and tried to pump milk out of breasts scarred from breast reduction surgery. I knew in advance I would likely have trouble, because of the surgery, but I wanted to try anyway.

When Ian was nearly two, he and I took a road trip to visit her in Virginia Beach. One night I knelt in front of the bathtub, laughing with Ian as I watched him splash with his toys. I turned, feeling her presence in the doorway, watching us.

“You’re a good mother,” she said.

I immediately understood this was her way of saying she knew she hadn’t been. Of apologizing. Making amends. I grabbed onto it. I knew it was a gift not many get.

A year later, I was again in her Virginia Beach apartment, this time without Ian. I had come to say goodbye, a job that needed all my attention. I was in the small kitchen with my sister-in-law, Sam. Sam had nursed her sister through cancer and her eventual death. She knew what to do.

Another blue sponge sat by the sink.

“Lord, look at this raggedy old thing”. She picked it up and laughed at its bedraggled appearance.

I said, “It’s probably the same one we had when she lived at home with us.”

We dissolved into a giddy laughter that skirted the edge of hysteria, fueled by our lack of sleep from 3 a.m. alarms, set to rouse us to administer pain medication.

I felt a twinge of guilt, laughing at the expense of my mother, who was dying in the next room.

I had never seen anyone dying of cancer. Witnessed its brutality. But what surprised me was seeing her courage in coping with it all. On the way to chemo, stopping the car so she could get out and vomit by the side of the road. And then promptly after chemo, nausea somehow abated, indulged her yen for chocolate milkshakes, which she never permitted herself before she became sick. The once vain woman I’d known refused a wig for her bare head, but instead haunted the hat aisle in Target. She tried on silly hats, inspected her reflection in the mirror, and laughed.

After she died, I went through her possessions. The ones not in the will. The everyday objects that reveal the essence of a person.

In a brown crocodile handbag, I found a series of green butterfly-shaped cards with notes on each. I realized she must have used these cards to tell her story—her Al-Anon story.

Long-timers in 12-Step groups share their stories aloud in agonizing detail. It is a way of admitting and accepting responsibility for one’s own shortcomings and failures, describing one’s road to recovery, and sharing a sense of hope as an act of service to others in all stages of recovery.

Some of her notes were cryptic—”clues Craziness of alcoholism checkbook” –but some I could extrapolate the meaning. She had left my father for another man, Mike, who became her second husband. An alcoholic grifter who initially gave her the attention she craved and never got from my father, a workaholic driven to build financial security designed to protect him and his family from the privations he experienced as a child in the Depression.

Another butterfly card read “unable to keep a job”. Once Mike blew through her inheritance, he left her. She had reached her proverbial “bottom” and found redemption through Al-Anon. Just as I used psychotherapy to make myself whole, she used the 12-Step framework. No matter how it’s done, I know it takes courage. And I admired her for that.

I had always told others that my mother and I were nothing alike, but in truth, we were more so than I ever realized.

Except in our regard for the blue sponge.

Benay Yaffe grew up in Arkansas and got her B.A. in psychology from the University of Tulsa in Oklahoma, and her M.A. in Marriage and Family Therapy from Fairfield University in Connecticut. Benay was a freelance reporter and photographer for Newtown Patch in 2010 but she believes the other jobs she’s had over the years (children’s tennis instructor, metal sorter, psychiatric technician and HMO customer service rep) were equally valuable in her path to becoming a writer. She lives in Newtown, Connecticut, with her husband, two dogs and two cats. She is a new empty nester, and her son appreciates that she limits herself to one phone call and two texts a week.

*****

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Guest Posts, Fiction

Human Resources

October 27, 2023

Every time Cassie grumbled about her supervisor Miranda, she remembered the flight they shared on the way home from Las Vegas. The plane was full and Cassie squeezed between the man with a comb-over and her boss, a woman 15 years her senior with a perpetual squint, as if every interaction was an inspection of fine print.

And it was. It had been two years since Miranda took the helm of the hospital’s fundraising team and she still didn’t understand that Cassie hyphenated her last name. It didn’t matter, though, because in Miranda’s eyes, Cassie wasn’t a mother, a friend or a philanthropist; she was Communications Specialist, Classification II. A vessel for words that Miranda had to approve, one by one.

Except, perhaps, on that flight home. It was mid-afternoon and Miranda had insisted they leave the conference early. She navigated airport traffic in her rental car and spent 10 minutes on speakerphone with her administrative coordinator Janet.

“Just explain to Southwest that we need to get back for that donor dinner,” Miranda said as they weaved through the line of Ubers outside Harry Reid International Airport.

“The reservation is at 5,” said Janet through the speakers.

“Exactly.” Miranda leaned forward onto the car horn, startling Cassie. “Those assholes think they are the center of the universe.” She pointed at a sedan in front of them, where a bellhop was helping an elderly couple lift their bags from the trunk.

“Miranda?” Cassie asked. It had taken time, but she had learned to perfect her tone. Inquisitive, curious, non-threatening, with a feminine lilt. “It’s nearly 3 o’clock.”

Her boss pushed her sunglasses onto her forehead and faced Cassie. “That’s why we need the earlier plane.”

Cassie considered pointing out that the flight would take an hour, plus they’d need to budget time for security and boarding. Instead, she took a cue from Janet, whose nails they could hear clicking on her keyboard through the phone.

“Booked you on a flight at 4,” Janet said. “Emailed you the details.”

Miranda pulled forward into the spot vacated by the couple and smiled. “You are the very best, you know, Jan?”

Cassie winced. Janet, never one to mince words, had never liked that nickname. To her credit, she didn’t correct Miranda, perhaps because nobody did. “Fly safe,” she said instead.

Cassie followed Miranda through the airport, both of them dragging wheeled carry-ons. It helped that Miranda’s neon conference badge had flipped over her shoulder, making the small woman easier to find amidst a crowd of high school volleyball girls and the occasional hung-over bachelor party. Cassie held her breath when they reached the security line, which looped in a circle around the baggage claim. Unfazed, Miranda reached for Cassie’s bag and marched them to the very front of the line.

“This is why we pay extra for the security pass,” Miranda said, pulling a card out of her wallet. She either didn’t notice the men and women scowling at them from their places in line or didn’t care.

They made it to the gate with five minutes to spare. Cassie leaned over a drinking fountain, taking big gulps of water to make up for their airport sprint. Maybe Miranda learned to run in heels in her fancy MBA program. She wore a smart business suit with matching gray blazer and didn’t so much as glisten with sweat, while Cassie had already removed her sweatshirt and was fanning herself with a conference brochure that read “Tell stories that matter.”

That was why Cassie worked in fundraising: It was a way to put not one but two creative writing degrees to good use. That, and the allure of the infamous “golden handcuffs”—a solid pension plan and affordable healthcare, two qualities that she, as the mother of a kid with asthma, could not live without.

They had been at the conference two days, and despite being separated by thousands of other nonprofit fundraisers and administrators on other sides of echoey auditoriums, the whole trip had been claustrophobic. The conference had been Cassie’s idea, prompted by a discussion in their weekly one-on-one about professional development opportunities. She was surprised when Miranda approved her request, only to have her hopes dashed when she realized that her boss had bought not one but two conference passes.

“I love a good conference,” Miranda had said. “We’ll get in some good networking, chat up the keynote speaker, take advantage of the open bar…”

“And learn something?” Cassie asked.

“That’s what I was going to say!” Miranda smiled. “I knew there was a reason I hired you.”

And yet Miranda had not hired her. Had she forgotten that? Cassie pre-dated Miranda by three years—at least a decade in nonprofit time. Miranda had not hired Cassie and Cassie had most definitely not hired Miranda. Miranda had been “appointed” by a committee of executives after the previous associate vice president left under mysterious circumstances. This would have taken Cassie by surprise had she not worked in the industry long enough to understand when her opinion didn’t matter.

She followed Miranda down the narrow aisle to their row, where the man with the comb-over had already fallen asleep.

“I don’t do center seats,” Miranda said, gesturing for Cassie to squeeze past her.

Cassie acquiesced, bowing her head as she squeezed her tall frame into the seat. Miranda, meanwhile, waited for the man behind her to offer to lift her carry-on into the overhead compartment.

“Thank you,” she said, offering a pearly-white smile and placing one hand on her chest. Her signature move.

At long last, they were seated. Cassie was conscious of her elbows. God forbid they rub actual shoulders on this trip. Miranda scrolled through her email, oblivious to the way Cassie fidgeted in reaction to every swipe or click.

Cassie leaned back in her chair, closing her eyes with the hopeful thought that maybe if she pretended to sleep she’d be spared an hour of conversation. And then she heard it: A long, uninterrupted baby’s wail. Her eyes shot open, pulse quickening as she saw a man two rows up burping an infant in a green and blue checked onesie. Her anatomy betrayed her, a vise clamping over her heart as she took in those rosy cheeks, quivering as the little boy cried. Without meaning to, one hand fled to her breasts, suddenly tender. The baby looked to be about two months old.

Her son would have been that age.

Had things gone differently, she would be at home on leave, strolling him through the rose garden or bringing him to Mommy and Me music classes while Patrick took their daughter to soccer camp. She wouldn’t be chasing anybody through the Las Vegas airport. Yes, the miscarriage was months ago, but something about that mournful baby’s cry made her chest swell with phantom milk. Before she realized what was happening, tears were dripping down her cheeks and landing in fat drops on her clasped hands.

Without looking up, Miranda laid one hand over hers.

That was it. That was the moment.

Mortified, Cassie withdrew her hot hand from Miranda’s touch and rushed to rub the tears off her cheeks, but the floodgates had opened. The more she scrubbed, the harder they fell, especially when the baby’s cry climbed in pitch.

“Sorry,” Cassie coughed, one hand over her face. “I don’t know what came over me.”

Miranda clicked send on an email and looked at her. “I lost a child too, you know.”

Cassie was quiet. Flight attendants made their circuits of the airplane, checking to see that everyone was buckled in. The lights overhead turned off.

“I wasn’t as far along as you were,” Miranda continued. “But loss is loss. And it’s real.”

Cassie kept her eyes straight ahead. Maybe if she focused on the little boy’s face, she’d see that he was real and the one inside her was no longer. The thought made the lump in her throat larger.

“I—I thought I’d be over it by now,” she said, looking away from the baby, who seemed to have calmed down.

“You don’t get over it.” Miranda’s jaw was set. “Time passes. Other things happen. But there’s no getting over or past the loss of a child.”

Cassie took a risk and looked at her. Who was this woman?

“My daughter keeps asking where her brother went,” she said. “What am I supposed to say?”

Miranda shrugged. “He’s with her.”

Somehow, this felt right. Cassie leaned back, this time letting her eyelids close.

Cassie didn’t wake until the airplane touched down an hour later. She was startled to see Miranda attempting to extricate her Coach bag from the overhead compartment. Her thin arms wobbled for a moment before she stood on her tiptoes and pulled the bag down with a flourish, all the while her mouth didn’t stop moving.

“Now is it the Il Fornaio on North 8th or is it the one on Market?”

Cassie blinked, recognizing the blaze of the bluetooth in Miranda’s ear. She stood up in a rush, banging her forehead on the overhead light. Her boss was already striding down the aisle, calves flexing in nude pumps. Miranda didn’t notice that she’d dropped her conference badge, which lay face-up on the airplane floor, glowing chartreuse amidst a sea of arms and legs reaching for backpacks, purses and carry-ons. Cassie unearthed her messenger bag from its place beneath the seat in front of her and edged out of the row.

“This yours?” The man with the baby held the badge out to her. The boy had pink cheeks and long eyelashes that he was struggling to prop open. Cassie felt her throat catch.

“Thanks.” She reached for the badge, clutching it in her sweaty palms until the man and his son had eased their way down the aisle to the airplane cabin. She let other passengers slip in front of her as she tore the badge up into small, ragged pieces.

Julia Halprin Jackson’s work is forthcoming or has appeared in Mayday Magazine, Okay Donkey Mag, Cutleaf, West Branch Wired, Oracle Fine Arts Review, Fourteen Hills, California Northern and elsewhere. A graduate of UC Davis’ master’s in creative writing program and alumna of Bread Loaf Writers Conference, Mendocino Coast Writers Conference and the Tomales Bay Writers Workshops, Julia is the co-founder and publicity director of Play On Words, San Jose’s collaborative literary performance series, and a 2021-2023 Lighthouse Book Projecteer. See more of Julia’s work here.

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Guest Posts, Family

A Fridge Photo and a Texas Tradition

October 24, 2023

As blueberry season ends, here’s what I’ve learned about legacy, tradition, and fake-family.

I took a video of my daughter yesterday. In it, she’s crouched under the branches of a blueberry bush. July marks the end of blueberry season in Texas, and my daughter is taking full advantage. Her plump face hovers over a bushel basket and she’s popping fresh berries into her mouth, one after the other, with the fervor of a ravenous woodland creature. But that’s what two-year-old’s do; they find something they love and indulge with abandon. Plus, they like snacks.

The record-breaking East Texas heat seeps through the lens and I’m sweating again just watching her. Behind my daughter, her fake-cousins each swing their own basket and root through the bushes in the shadow of their mom, Courtney. Out of frame, their baby sister rides on dad’s shoulders. She bounces, her head bobbing up and down as the two walk the well-worn rows of Blueberry Hill Farm.

I’m hot and miserable, but Courtney’s kids keep picking blueberries (and my kid keeps eating them). It’s tradition. I’m not a kid anymore, so after capturing the memory on camera, I retreat to the corrugated tin shop at the edge of the farm where they sell blueberry lemonade, blueberry donuts, blueberry ice cream, and queso fresco (sans blueberries). This is Texas, after all. The proprietor tells me the just-baked blueberry-zucchini bread is her favorite. I buy a loaf for the drive back to Dallas. Like my daughter, I like a good snack.

Back at the house, Country’s parents have a photo on their fridge—one that’s been there for 25 years. I’ve never paid it much attention, but like the quirks of a roommate or spouse, I’ve grown to know it without even trying. It’s a photo of us—me and my siblings, Courtney and hers—on a hot summer day under the East Texas sun.

My brother stands on one side of the photo in an oversized, early 90’s t-shirt. I’m next to him, holding onto my little sister. She’s in a blue checkered bucket hat and overalls. Courtney’s oldest brother carries the littlest. His grip is slipping; the pink, plump baby threatens to slide from his brother’s grasp, but the boys are smiling in the oblivious way little boys do. Courtney is last in line and wears a shy smile. She was always the quiet one. We squint in the blazing sunlight, our backs against the unruly bushes of Blueberry Hill Farm. Off-camera, our bushel baskets present a paltry offering of fresh-picked berries.

Courtney’s not the quiet one anymore. As an adult, she can befriend a tree. And more miraculous, she seems to always have the emotional energy for fresh befriending. After my daughter was born, it felt like I only had just enough heart to hold me and mine inside it. Courtney doesn’t feel that way. Three kids later and her heart is still open to all. She’ll overshare with the cashier at the gas station and chat up the vendor at the farmer’s market. She’ll spill her life story to fellow berry-pickers at Blueberry Hill Farm, and she’ll get theirs in return.

Courtney is self-assured. She has a presumptive confidence that says, “Of course you want to hear my story. Why wouldn’t you?” Like my daughter when she shows me the berries she’s picked. “You want to see this, don’t you? Of course, you do.” It’s the faith of a child, an earnest faith in vulnerability, in friendship. She always extends the invitation.

Courtney and her family, they’re our fake-cousins. We don’t share a family tree, but Courtney and her brothers can be found in every one of my birthday party pictures. Their little voices can be heard in the background of home videos from my childhood. Her parents are in my parents’ wedding album, and their faces grace our Christmas tree every year in the form of homemade photo ornaments. They’re our adverse possession family.

When Courtney was in labor with her first child, I gave my boss 10 minutes’ notice, then left the office and drove to Houston. Courtney and I hadn’t been spending much time together then. But that’s how it is with fake-cousins sometimes. You grow up, you grow apart. But you show up—graduations, bachelorette parties, weddings, funerals. You don’t talk in months, but you leave work with 10 minutes’ notice and drive through the night for the birth of their kids.

I hadn’t been to a hospital in years. I remember seeing Courtney reclined on an oversized hospital bed, swollen from preeclampsia. Even then, when she was told of her son’s complications, his rare syndrome, surrounded by wires and screens and strangers, she opened herself up to the nurses as casually as if reclining at her favorite coffee shop with an old friend. At the time, I was concerned she was disassociating from the trauma, but now I see how she—with all her flaws and gifts—was so perfectly meant for this little boy. When I gave birth to my daughter years later at the height of the COVID pandemic, I remembered Courtney’s self-assuredness, her confidence. And I realized just how miraculous it was.

Before leaving yesterday, I stopped by the fridge for a glimpse of that photo—the one of us when we were kids at Blueberry Hill Farm. It was stuck to the fridge in the same acrylic frame, in the same spot, for 25 years. After a quick look, I grabbed yet another bottle of sunscreen, then helped load our crew in the car—the third generation of blueberry pickers.

We got the blueberries, the blueberry-zucchini bread, some videos, and a fresh sunburn. But we also got a new fridge photo. Maybe the picture we took yesterday will be the one my daughter grows up with, the one that’ll stick to the fridge for the next 25 years, the one she glimpses just before she loads her crew in the car to go blueberry picking with their fake-cousins.

Having kids is like that. You can’t help but see the world through the lens of legacy. When that first photo was taken, my parents stood where I stand now. And the way I feel when I look at my daughter—it’s a well-worn row that my own parents walked. And still walk. It’s strange to realize that we may only understand how loved we are through the lens of loving someone else. Miraculous, even.

Courtney’s three kids took up most of the photo frame this year. We still only have one, though not for lack of trying. (And the one, the ravenous woodland creature, keeps us plenty busy). Conversations with fertility specialists, the endless stream of suggestions, the overwhelming weight of uncertainty. It’s miserable. I wish I were self-assured, presumptively confident. I wish for the faith of a child.

As I write this, I’m enjoying the last of the blueberry-zucchini bread. It’s fluffy but decadent. There’s a gooey zing from the blueberries, all sunk to the bottom. Baked and caramelized, they add a jammy-ness to the otherwise light bread. But I prefer my blueberries like my daughter does—fresh from the bushel basket.

I scroll through yesterday’s videos and photos, and I see the legacy grow. I see bushel baskets heaped high with blueberries and more empty bottles of sunscreen. And maybe next year or the year after, there will be more kids in the photo—more pink, plump babies. We’ll dress them in bucket hats and overalls and line them up in front of the unruly bushes. We’ll buy more acrylic frames and make room on the fridge.

I don’t know who will be in those photos, or whose faces will show up on our Christmas tree in the years to come, but I know that we’ll be back. We’ll be back to walk the well-worn rows of Blueberry Hill Farm in the record-breaking Texas heat. We’ll be back because Courtney will extend the invitation, as she always does. And her family—they’re our family. Our fake-cousins.

I’m confident we’ll be back, presumptively so. It’s a Texas tradition, after all.

A marketing professional for over a decade, Sarah has experience in media, the creative arts, and writing for brands. Whatever she works on—from talking points to television commercials—she works through the lens of narrative. She is constantly urging her clients and peers to consider: What’s the story? Who’s the protagonist? How does it end?

Sarah has an MBA from the University of Texas at Austin McCombs School of Business. She lives in Dallas with her husband and two young daughters — a toddler, and a (new) baby.

***

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Guest Posts, Mental Health

Suicide with a Side of Pasta

October 21, 2023

CW: suicide, attempted suicide

The psychiatric clinic just on the outskirts of Paris was very posh: a restored sixteenth century stone exterior that reminded me of the relais—country houses—that aristocratic families built when they wanted to get away from the monarch’s court. The clinic’s lobby and dining rooms were beautifully appointed with expensive furnishings. My psychiatrist had recommended I stay there for a couple of weeks to receive treatment for my worsening depression.

I had one of the largest patient rooms. A bedroom big enough to waltz in, with the northern light coming from the floor-to-ceiling windows. Private bath. Embroidered bell-pull if I needed anything from the staff. The shrinks came to talk with me once a day. I lied to them about how bad I was feeling, not wanting to admit what an idiot I was for still living with Michael. I only wanted to get back to the Paris apartment to make sure Michael wasn’t sleeping with men in our bed. After everything that had happened, I knew I shouldn’t give a damn, but I did. My real therapy was painting.

I pulled up a dressing table to the window where I began an illumination of St. Francis taming the wolf. I was thinking of the medal I’d given Michael on our trip to Assisi, the one he said the mugger had stolen, another one of his lies. What was I trying to work out? Did I want to replace the lost medal with my artwork? Or could it be that I wanted to be like St. Francis, using love to tame the wild wolf, to domesticate my roaming husband and lure him back to my home and heart. St. Francis was Michael’s favorite saint, and though I couldn’t replace the medal, I thought an illumination would show my love for him. Anything to bring back the version of the man I still loved so much. Unsure of what I hoped to achieve, I started drawing it anyway.

I knew I didn’t want to be alone. So, I called a friend. “Beth, I’m in a psych clinic in Paris. Can you possibly come be with me?” I asked. “The doctors are dismissing me this weekend. I gotta get out of here.”

I so needed to be with a friend who knew both Michael and me. Beth had stayed with us many times in Paris. I’d told her of Michael’s affairs with young men, prostitutes who only wanted his money—my money that my parents had put aside and left to provide a secure future for me and my husband. She knew how devastated I was. We talked several times a week, and I poured out my outrage and grief to her.

“Of course, I’ll come. Matter of fact, I can stay for a week.” she told me. “How are you coping? How long have you been in this clinic?”

“Not doing too well. Michael hasn’t been to see me,” I said, trying not to cry. “He hasn’t even called. I’ve been here over two weeks—I gotta go home.”

“Stay put till I get there,” she said. “I’ll book a hotel near your apartment and you can stay with me. Before I come get you from the clinic, I’ll go by your place and see what’s up with Michael.”

***

“Have you been outside today?” Beth asked, hugging me when she got to my room. Her long blonde hair brushed my cheek. “Gorgeous weather, but cool. C’mon—you need some sunshine.”

I passively allowed her to swaddle me in blankets. There was a large terrace at the clinic where patients and visitors could view the Paris skyline, the Eiffel Tower, and Sacre Coeur. Better digs than my apartment, whose view was nil. It was “sous-sol,” meaning it was between the ground floor and the basement. It had originally been a coal cellar. From the clinic’s terrace I saw flowering trees, tulips below bursting from their winter solstice. Peace. Tranquility. New life. Maybe even hope.

“Did you go by the apartment?” I asked her. “Did you see Michael?”

Beth looked down, couldn’t meet my eyes. “Yeah. Apparently, he just woke up. He met me at the door with only a sheet tied around him,” she said. “The floor was a mess of other sheets, rumpled clothes, liquor bottles, and used condoms. We saw them at the same time. He looked at me defiantly.”

Beth said to Michael, “I thought you told Diane you wouldn’t be sleeping with men anymore.”

He said to her, “I never said that. I told her I wanted to stay married to her. Beth, I love Diane. But she’ll have to accept my new lifestyle.”

Then she turned to me, and asked kindly, “Are you okay with that? How d’you feel about going back there?”

“I’m not okay with that,” I said wearily. She was standing in front of me, leaning on the terrace bannister, and partially blocking my view of the Eiffel Tower.

“What’re you gonna do about it?” she asked. “How can you stop him?”

“I dunno yet,” I said.

“You wanna divorce him?” she asked. “Or at least, a separation?”

“Sure, I’ve thought about it,” I said, looking down at my hands, wringing the corner of a blanket. “But where would I go?”

“Why the fuck should you go anywhere?” she cried, defending me. “Boot his sorry, cheating ass out the door!”

“I can’t.” I felt defeated. “I keep thinking I can make our marriage work, if I can just hang in there,” I persisted. “I don’t want to live without him.”

“But you can live without him,” she said. “You’re so much stronger than you think you are.”

I had issued an ultimatum to Michael during one of our counseling sessions. “If you continue to have these affairs, it’s over.” He only shrugged, as if to say, “What are you gonna do about it if I do?” I was coming to terms with the fact that I had no boundaries and Michael knew it too.

A week or so later, we had tickets to a piano concert in Paris. Michael was especially complimentary of my appearance that evening, declaring his oft-repeated remark about how proud it made him feel to be with me. Each of these compliments boosted my ego, my belief that he loved me, that perhaps things could and would change.

“My god, you look stunning tonight!” he said.

Even though it was considered bourgeois to “dress” for concerts, operas, art openings, we had always loved dressing up, and saw no reason to quit just because it was the current Paris fashion to wear jeans everywhere. I’d taken great care with my makeup, even putting a shimmery stroke of highlighter on my cheeks and collarbones. I wore a sheer, gold and silver embroidered, navy silk tunic over a navy tank top and leggings. I did look stunning!

In the taxi, he casually mentioned that he was going to Cologne for his boyfriend Voss’s twentieth birthday party. “I’ll be gone for the weekend, but I’ll be back on Monday,” he said.

I knew who Voss was—I’d seen his picture. He was Jordanian. Michael had rhapsodized about him more than once, often in the same sentence when he’d gushed about Tristan, his lover in Canada. My whole body stiffened, but I finally managed to say, “No, you’re not going. You can’t keep doing this to me!”

“Oh Diane, stop with the drama.” He looked out the taxi window, bored, but not upset. “I told Voss I’d be there—he’s counting on me.”

I asked the driver to stop. “Enjoy the concert,” I said to Michael. Getting out, slamming the door, I hailed another cab to take me home.

***

Our apartment was blessedly still, peaceful. I felt a sense of incredible relief wash over me like a cool breeze. The sense of stiffly and stoically holding it together was gone. I was alone and it felt so delicious and sweet, and it didn’t hurt that the spring Paris night smelled of lilacs.

I filled a large pot with salted water for pasta and turned on the gas burner, remembering nostalgically, when we were renovating the kitchen, how I’d stood my ground on getting a gas, rather than an electric stovetop. Michael loved my cooking.

“No one who cooks worth a damn,” I said, “cooks with electricity. You can’t control the temperature or the timing!”

“It’s gonna be way too expensive,” he argued. “Our building’s not fitted out for gas.”

“So, we’ll be the only ones who have it,” I said.

“I can’t justify the expense,” he said.

I played my last card. “Fine,” I said, “then we’ll eat all our meals out—I’m not cooking on electricity anymore.”

“Okay, okay. I give,” he said, throwing up his hands. “But you better crank out some pretty amazing dinners.”

***

As the water heated to boiling, I went through the hall closet and bathroom pantries grabbing every anti-depressant, every prescription painkiller and sleeping medication I could find. I also picked up Michael’s prescription meds. Had to make more than one trip in order to get them all. Bringing them to the kitchen, I spread them out on the granite countertop. There were a lot. I added fresh fettuccini to the boiling water.

Filling a large water glass, I calmly took every pill.

I’d accomplished everything I wanted to do, and what I hadn’t done wasn’t all that important. Our parents were dead. The Michael I had married was forever lost to me. My son Andrew was settled in his own happy life with his wife and kids. Sure, he’d miss me; the boys were little—they’d forget me soon enough, and I wouldn’t be a burden to anyone.

It was a quiet, rational decision: my wonderful fairy tale marriage had turned into a Stephen King horror film, and I didn’t know how to escape from it. I was numb. I felt no self-pity, no thought of punishing Michael. I just wanted out and could see no other way. I didn’t write a suicide note—didn’t feel the need for melodrama.

By the time I’d taken all the pills, the pasta was ready to drain and season with cold-pressed virgin olive oil. I even added freshly chopped Italian parsley, expensive sea salt, and ground white, black and pink peppercorns. If this is gonna be the last thing I eat, it should be good.

I had done my research well—had googled “how to suicide” and discovered that unless pills were taken on a full stomach, they would likely be thrown up. I wanted to be sure I was successful.

Thinking I had time to die gracefully, I enjoyed my pasta, and didn’t rush to throw away the empty pill bottles. I was eating my last mouthful, feeling rather smug that I had pulled this off, when I heard the front door open. Just as Michael came in, I passed out on the kitchen floor.

I vaguely remember the EMTs cutting open the front of my fabulous, expensive Ralph Lauren tunic, thinking, please don’t ruin it! and being carried to the ambulance, but nothing more until I woke up from a coma four days later in the ICU. “No,” the nurse said when I asked. “Your husband hasn’t been here to see you.”

***

“The cops came to arrest and question me!” Michael fumed when he picked me up at the hospital. “They wanted to know what I’d had to do with your attempted suicide. Can you believe that? I was at the police station for nine fucking hours!”

“Sorry,” I mumbled, even though I had nothing to apologize for. “Why would they do that?” At this point, my sympathy for his arrest was about as real as his sympathy for my suicide attempt.

“They thought maybe I’d poisoned you, or urged you to take all those pills,” he said. “They even asked me if money was involved.”

“So, what’d you tell them?” I asked, not really caring, and still groggy from the meds they’d given me before I left the ICU. I just wanted to sleep again.

He shrugged. “I told them I loved you even though I was gay, and would never want you dead,” he said. “The first thing I did after I got back home was to call Andrew and all our friends in the States.”

“To tell them I’d failed at suicide?”

“That, and to let them know I was gay again,” he said, “even though I wanted to stay married. Funny, no one seemed surprised.”

“What’d Andrew say?” I asked.

“Said he’d figured I might be gay—had thought so for a year or two ‘cause I wasn’t paying as much attention to you as I had before,” he said. “How I was always going off without you. He was really cold to me when I told him about the police crap.”

Maybe that’s because you seem a lot more upset about being questioned by the police than the fact that I almost died, I thought. You narcissistic, self-centered little shit.

“Did he ask how I was doing?” I ventured.

“Yeah,” Michael said. “I told him you were out of the woods, that he didn’t need to come to Paris. Maybe you oughta call him—let him know you’re okay.”

But I’m not, I thought. I tried to kill myself and you don’t even give a damn.

***

My suicide attempt left me feeling like my blood was icy; my heart a dull beating rock. I felt so cold and alone. Michael was no help to me. He was drinking himself into a stupor on a regular basis. I picked up the phone and called David, Michael’s alcohol therapist.

“David, please,” I said, “I just got out of the hospital from a suicide attempt. And I don’t know who else to turn to.”

“Are you okay?” he asked.

“Alive, but still really traumatized,” I said.

“I don’t usually work with the non-alcoholic partner in a relationship,” he said, “but because the alcoholic Michael is so closely linked to your own trauma, I’ll take you on as a client.”

My dead heart leapt a bit. Was there some life left in me? Some spark that Michael had not extinguished with his constant cheating, indifference, and boozy nights of horror?

I felt hopelessly stuck, doomed to stay in a sham of a marriage that was making both of us utterly miserable. Why? Because I had convinced myself that I couldn’t live without him. But that deeply flawed thinking had gotten us where we were: Michael had once tried to kill himself because, being gay, he couldn’t see himself in a straight marriage for the rest of his life. And I had tried killing myself because I couldn’t live in a marriage where my husband was having gay affairs.

Nothing I had done to try to fix our broken marriage had worked. Michael had decided he was “gay again,” but the truth was he had always been gay. Instead of trying to get him to give up his lovers and struggling to make him love me the way I needed to be loved, it occurred to me that maybe I should try to love myself, to save myself.

When I finally decided to change my life, everything changed. The smell of the air, the feel of my jacket, tight around my body. Food tasted better. The sun was warmer. The wind windier. Everything had new power. This is what happens when a co-dependent person separates from the source of their dependency. Of course, I felt scared, but there was this intoxicating freedom moving inside me, overshadowing the fear. I sprouted wings and new legs. I had ideas, I was full of life itself; all my old life had been sucked out of me. I felt, again, alive.

***

I called Andrew to tell him I was leaving Michael. There was silence on the crackly line and then he gave a sigh.

“Mom, I’m glad you’re divorcing him—just wish you’d made the decision a year ago. I love Pops,” he went on, “but you’ll be so much better off without him.”

“But I’ve never lived completely by myself,” I said. “The very thought of it scares me. I’m not sure of what I’ll do, or where I’ll live.”

“Mom, remember the last line in Mame? ‘Life is a banquet, and most poor bastards are starving to death.’ ”

“I remember,” I said, laughing through my tears.

“Well, keep repeating it to yourself. You’ve got the whole rest of your life to live and enjoy,” he said. “You survived your side of pasta, but Mom, you haven’t even gotten to the cheese course in this banquet!”

Diane Calvert is a medieval-style artist, a memoir writer, and she has recently begun a new “career” as a stand-up comic. From September to June she writes and does comedy in New York City. She spends summers in Noyers-sur-Serein, a tiny village in the back pocket of rural France where she creates medieval illuminations. She has had commissions from The Rare Book School in North Carolina, and has lectured at the Sorbonne in Paris on medieval art.

Her publishing credits include Angel et Démons dans la Littérature du Moyen Âge (Presses de L’Université de Paris-Sorbonne,) Mon Coeur Qui est Maître de Moi (Editions Alternatives,) and Tournaments Illuminated (Society for Creative Anachronism)

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This is not your typical divorce memoir.

Elizabeth Crane’s marriage is ending after fifteen years. While the marriage wasn’t perfect, her husband’s announcement that it is over leaves her reeling, and this gem of a book is the result. Written with fierce grace, her book tells the story of the marriage, the beginning and the end, and gives the reader a glimpse into what comes next for Crane.

“Reading about another person’s pain should not be this enjoyable, but Crane’s writing, full of wit and charm, makes it so.”
—Kirkus (starred review)

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Statement on Black Lives Matter and support for social change

Guest Posts, motherhood

On the Couch

October 19, 2023

I was on the couch, enjoying a good book for once. It was summer. The pandemic was sort of over, and I wasn’t working without childcare, at least, as I’d been the last two years, and so sanity was hovering closer to the line of normal than usual, if you didn’t read the news.

We were in a heat wave. I basked in AC splendor, on the couch, and for most of the time I could forget about the impending electric bill—the cost of electric had gone up drastically this year and we hadn’t yet used our AC for a billing cycle, and who knew what to expect? Or the rats that had stationed themselves under our porch, probably due to the city’s construction. But also (and I don’t admit this to too many people) maybe due to our habit last winter of throwing Fuzzy’s bunny poops out the back door, one by one, when he’d mark his territory on the door mat?

I was enjoying a good book for once, on the couch. Ralph was snoring beside me, an eighty-pound heating pad, who occasionally transformed into a barking, nipping hot mess when anyone entered our home—including everyone he knew and didn’t know—eliciting extended family members to mutter, “I think he’s gotten worse.” George, a former children’s therapy dog, was elegantly splayed on her dog bed beside the gas fireplace, looking timeless, I told myself, even though, at thirteen, her clock was ticking.

I could never live without George. I could probably live without Ralph.

I was enjoying that great book, anyway, for some time, with my animal friends, in my lovely home that I was considering putting on the market, even though we’d have nowhere to go—because: rats. (I love this home, actually; I’ll never leave.

Unless I have to. Or want to.)

Such a good book, but after two hours passed, and Leo had been home from his run for one hour, the calm became too eerie, so I told Leo he could finally go upstairs and shower. He’d been drenched in sweat at first but it was now dried, and he was standing in the kitchen looking at videos on TikTok, I assumed, and smelling like onion salad, for sure. Now that he was shirtless, I wondered where he’d placed the shirt.

“It’s okay to wake them,” I said, releasing him of his purgatory, which would close the door to my splendor.

“Are you sure?”

“They’ll never sleep tonight if you don’t.” I felt low-blood-sugar suddenly. I kept my eyes on my book as he whiffed by.

Behind two glass doors before me the rabbit was nibbling on a stick of hay in his room—I mean the playroom that he’d overpowered—as though it were a cigar.

Leo descended the staircase minutes later without having showered. He had two hot muffins in tow: one, five years old and sweaty-cheeked with curly hair flinging itself free of a braid; she was bare-foot and leaning on the banister. The other, red and puffy, two years old, was in his arms.

“We,” the five-year-old said, proudly, “were in the attic! We were,” but her face changed as she watched my face, which must have been moving on its own without my telling it to, and so did her tone, “having an…adventure?”

In our attic—which is separated from the five-year-old by another room and a door that is suctioned shut by a long shard of insulation foam—is glassy-breaky-stuff, a giant air conditioner with lots of tubes that looks like the inspiration for the next Stranger Things villain, and worst of all two windows that curiously peer toward the yard and the road, and whose sufficiency I’ve still never tested. Anxiety surged, as it’s wont to do.

During my moment of rest, my children could have fallen out the windows.

My sanity equals my dead children.

I wasn’t even resting that much.

The book dropped. I examined my children. I interrogated the one who talked well: “How are you feeling? Did you touch the AC? Did you touch the windows? Are you okay? Are you too hot? Were you ever afraid you couldn’t get out?” I said some of these questions out loud until I forced myself to let the others leak out more gradually.

Leo said, “They were just calmly sitting there reading.”

“Wow,” I said.

“They had also gotten out our old wedding vases” (enter: glassy-breaky-stuff).

“It’s okay to go up there,” I said to my five-year-old, “with a grownup. There are lots of sharp things up there. Do you have any splinters?”

It is my job to worry—I think—to protect them from danger.

“I don’t think so?” said my five-year-old, whose sense of adventure was, perhaps, being overshadowed by my sense of impending doom.

It is my job to be free and joyful—I think—to keep them alive.

“Let’s go up there again sometime, all together,” I said, smiling. “I’m glad you had fun. You’re not in trouble. We’ll do it safely next time.”

Her expression suggested suspicion.

The littler one said, “I’m poopin’, Mama.”

I knew she was done pooping, and that she just had not yet mastered the use of past-tense, but I was tired, so I said, “Are you still poopin’?”

“Da,” she said, which meant yes. Which just meant she didn’t want me to change her. Which was fine with me.

That bought some more time on the couch. Leo went up to shower and the two girls and I sat on the couch and read the books they had found up there. I sat in the middle; their hot bodies warming me, so odious and sweet. A clean diaper and packet of wipes was nearby on the coffee table, a warning that this moment would never last, which made it all the purer. Their curly hair touching my chin.

George hadn’t moved from her slumber; she had entered a new stage of her life called don’t-give-a-fuck, of which I was jealous, even if it meant that attitude grew stronger, it seemed, the closer you got to dying. Maybe that was a consolation prize for it all being over some day—or a preview of the freedom yet to be.

I gave so many fucks.

I read a book about a hippo becoming friends with an ancient tortoise, which is totally against all reptilian instincts, and I nearly cried. My children were still close, and their sweat reminded me of the summer we inhabited, and the shower running upstairs hoped for Leo’s own relief, and the milkweed blooming outside kept the butterflies close, and the rabbit splayed out on his side in his room, his soft belly sighing, meant he was happy, so I was happy, and my children’s small hairs were sticking up from the cool of the AC on their backs and arms, and the sun streaming through the window made my littlest interrupt the reading multiple times to say, “I see sun, Mama,” and as I imagined their soft bodies pushed through the window glass of the attic, and landing with a thud, on the hard ground, forever, I had to imagine holding them tightly to me—I couldn’t squeeze them for real, as the older one, in becoming herself, was known to elbow me away.

Marni Berger holds an MFA in writing from Columbia University and a BA in Human Ecology from College of the Atlantic. Marni’s short story “Hurricane” appeared in The Carolina Quarterly 2020 summer issue and her short story “Edge of the Road with Lydia Jones” was nominated for a Pushcart Prize (Matador Review). Her short story “Waterside” appeared in Issue 96 of Glimmer Train.

Marni’s work has also appeared at Motherwell, Barnstorm, The Manifest-Station, The Common, The Days of Yore, The Millions, Lotus-Eater, COG Magazine, The Critical Flame, Drunk Monkeys, Wilderness House Literary Review, and Fringe Magazine. She has been a finalist or received honorable mention in nine Glimmer Train contests and one New Millennium Writings contest. Marni’s novel-in-progress, Love Will Make You Invincible, is a dark comedy about a mother and her precocious tween, who, refusing to believe his long-lost father has committed suicide, instead becomes convinced that his father is a citizen of a secret underwater village. Marni lives in Portland, Maine.

She has taught writing at Columbia University and Manhattanville College. She currently teaches writing at University of Southern Maine.

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Guest Posts, Abortion

What’s at Stake? Abortion Restrictions and Choice

October 16, 2023

Will Maternal Morbidity and Mortality Rise in the Near Future?

When I was seventeen, I left my school, walked to Planned Parenthood a few blocks away and after discussing all my options, left with a safe and inexpensive method of birth control. I walked back to school confident that I would not add my story to the many accounts of Delfen Contraceptive Foam pregnancies. Babies spawned by the mighty sperm that swam bravely through the toxic sea, resulting in the victorious zygote. My classmates and I were not of the abstinence-only crowd. Our school had a copy of Our Bodies Ourselves. Many of us has our own copies.

More than a decade later, I worked every-other Saturday at the same Planned Parenthood while my husband stayed home with our two-year-old. Most Saturday mornings there were protesters on the sidewalk. Sometimes they would say vile things or spit at us as they tried to block our path, knowing nothing about why these women were coming to Planned Parenthood. Not caring about their stories, but feeling great compassion for the clump of cells hidden in their uteri, protesters would attempt to dissuade women from entering the building, offering their prayers and their alternatives. Fueled by righteous indignation, the protesters were willing to fight for the rights of the unborn but not for the women who would bear them.

There are more than a hundred documented ways to induce an unsafe abortion. Methods are categorized by route of administration.

In the category of Taken by mouth: turpentine, bleach, acid, laundry bluing, anti-malarial drugs.

In the time I worked at Planned Parenthood, I never met a woman who wanted an abortion. This is just not something one wants. But I did meet women who needed an abortion. Shall I tell you their stories? Will you care?

Do you want to know about the 40-year-old who lived in her car with her young son and needed money for food? The man said he’d pay her extra if he didn’t have to use a condom. She decided to risk it. There were many others, but not a single death. Not one of those women left with a punctured uterus or bowel or an untreated infection that would leave them sweating and damaged.

There were the high-school girls who drove to Planned Parenthood with a trusted friend in nice cars their parents bought them. They had manicured nails and good haircuts and they cried like babies. I suspect they carry this still, this thing they can never talk about. This This act of desperation, this truth buried because no one must ever know. But the procedure was clean, and safe and they are alive now and taking their own daughters to their doctors for access to responsible, safe birth control paid for by their health insurance. Should the contraceptives fail, these girls will not need to swallow bleach. They can pay for the right to own their bodies.

Still, desperate women, facing the financial burdens and social stigma of unintended pregnancy will continue to risk their lives by undergoing unsafe abortions.

In the category of Foreign Bodies inserted in the Cervix: stick, wire, knitting needle, coat hanger, bicycle spoke, chicken bone, ballpoint pen.

I resigned from Planned Parenthood when my second pregnancy became apparent. I thought it would be cruel to wear maternity clothes there. But also, I quit to protect myself from the feeling I might have, already protective of the cells growing and replicating inside me. Already in love with who those cells would become.

Many of us who are pro-choice like to think we’re different from those women who seek abortions. I often hear such condescending statements as, “I could never have an abortion but I think it’s up to the woman to decide.”

Can you really say that? That you could never have an abortion? Have you ever been raped by an uncle, a brother, a father, five frat boys at a party? Have you ever been told that the baby you planned, the one for whom you’ve converted your home office to a nursery, bought tiny socks and t-shirts, poured over books of baby names, has a genetic anomaly with no chance of survival? Or that your pregnancy will put your life at risk, possibly orphan your two other children? Have you ever thought that under certain circumstances you might consider an abortion? Did you ever think that no matter your reason, that decision might not be yours to make?

In the category of Enemas: Soap, hot oil, laundry detergent, vinegar, coffee.

Beginning in 1973, following the Supreme Court’s decision to legalize abortion, researchers demonstrated a dramatic decline in the number of deaths related to illegal abortion.

When denied access to safe abortion, women and adolescent girls with unwanted pregnancies will, as they always have, resort to unsafe, illegal means to terminate the pregnancy.

There is no way to tell how many girls and women died of sepsis, shaking with fever, afraid to tell of what they’d done. Or how many suicides resulted from failure to abort. A fact sheet published in September 2020 by the World Health Organization (WHO) lists barriers to accessing safe abortion as restrictive laws, high cost, poor availability of services, stigma, and unnecessary mandatory waiting periods. That fact sheet tells us that estimates from 2010 to 2014 showed that around 45% of all abortions were unsafe and that almost all of these unsafe abortions took place in developing countries. Here in America with access to safe abortion, we had no need for bicycle spokes or chicken bones.

Texas lawmakers smiled and made heart symbols with their hands as they signed what they call the Fetal Heartbeat Law. Legislation that will put the lives of girls and women, whose hearts also beat, in danger. Texas took us back to a dark time in history as governors in a half-dozen other states, emboldened by the inaction of the Supreme Court, nodded their approval and planned their next move.

Today, we’ve returned to 1972. We may be on a path to align our maternal morbidity and mortality statistics with those of Africa and Asia as we deny women access to safe, legal abortion.

Eileen Vorbach Collins is an RN and award-winning essayist. She has been both a client and employee of Planned Parenthood. She’s glad she’s old, but is very worried about the health and safety of girls and women. Eileen’s work has been published in SFWP, Barren Magazine, The Columbia Journal and a number of other literary magazines as well as Shondaland, Next Avenue and the NYT Tiny Love Stories.

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Guest Posts, Fiction

The Same Country

October 14, 2023

My best friend Kate gathers my thick brown hair into a ponytail and shakes it gleefully. “I’ve been waiting a hundred years for this day! You sure?”

“Positive.” I haven’t done more than trim my hair since my mother died six years ago. But now it’s time for it to go. The wavy bulk, the split ends—all of it must go. I’m sitting under a bald lightbulb in the chilly, unfinished basement of my fiancé’s South Side bungalow. I watch in the mirror as Kate straps on her hairdresser’s holster. Her tiger-print pouch holds scissors, combs, sheers, a razor, and complicated clippers.

“You’re the only one I’d trust to do this,” I say. “But not at Sassoon.” I just can’t waltz into her Gold Coast salon with all those contrast-heavy Nagel prints of Joan Collins and sultry, red-lipped brunettes. I don’t want a bunch of fussy hairdressers giving me the side-eye for my French braid.

Kate pulls a comb from her pocket. “What about Bobby?”

“That’s why we have to hurry!”

“He’s going to freak.”

“Maybe not. And, it’s going to be a big change. I can understand…”

“Does he come straight home after market close?” she asks.

“It’s Monday, so he might come straight home.”

“We’ve got a couple hours,” she says. I close my eyes, not wanting to think or worry about Bobby’s reaction, and what this radical hair change will mean to him, or how it might manage to offend him. But I’ve made up my mind. I need a change.

“Let me make a braid. You can save it,” Kate says.

“For him?”

“For you.” Kate digs the comb into my scalp and divides it into three thick plaits. The comb hurts, but I can take it. She binds it with a hair tie, then starts to braid, mildly painful tugs at my temples. “Have you got anymore shit from people about the holiday party?”

“No. And at least I don’t have to see anybody until after winter break.”

“They’ll get over it.”

“I dunno,” I say. “They thrive on gossip.”

“Bunch of pretentious assholes.”

I won’t defend my fellow grad students because their pretentiousness is the one topic on which Kate and Bobby agree. But I want to be accepted by my art-school cohort more than my best friend and fiancé could understand. The photos I’ve shown this first semester of my MFA haven’t been great. It’s hard enough to be judged on my art, but I’m also judged for being twenty-four and already bound to a twenty-seven-year-old stockbroker who acts like he’s forty. Everybody else in the program is so free—making out, staying out, clubbing. At the holiday party, Bobby fulfilled all their expectations, by being an arrogant jackass. He argued about the inflated art market with my professor, Peter. Kate might be right that my program mates are pretentious, but Bobby didn’t need to be so ruthlessly rational about the long-shot nature of what we’re all trying to do: be artists. Is it so farfetched to imagine making a living this way?

Kate’s scissors catch the light from the dangling bulb as she opens them. “Ready?”

“As I’ll ever be.”

“I swear this is going to look awesome.”

It’s not easy to cut through my thick hair, but Kate has the strongest hands of any woman I know. She saws through the hair and hands me the heavy dark braid. I drop it in the hammock of my skirt and close my knees to hide it.

“You down with the Annie Lennox look?” Kate asks.

“I think so.” Annie Lennox has a bleached-blond crewcut. Sweet dreams are made of this. Princesses have long hair, braids that touch the floor. I think of Rapunzel trapped in a castle. I think of Samson, and I hope that Kate’s right, that cutting off my hair will have the opposite effect: I will gain power by losing it. She thinks this is all about changing my style, getting edgier. She doesn’t know about Peter’s cutting remarks during critique about apple-cheeked Midwestern girls in overalls and braids. Even a pixie cut won’t work. I need something drastic, something not docile: a crewcut. I want walk into the photo studio looking like totally different person next semester. Maybe I’ll feel that way too.

I’ve tried to act tough in class, but I’m not a great actress. I can’t stay in character. I slip back into being nice again, because—because of the Midwest. That’s how they all see me. The first week of class, L.A. Vivian said, “You look so apple-cheeked today, Maggie.” I was wearing Clinique blush. I must have put on too much. Now they sometimes call me the Michigan Apple, even though I’m from Chicago. She said my photos of garbage cans in alleys reminded her of “after-school specials” about poverty. That my photos pothole puddles, cyclone fences overtaken by weeds in vacant lots would make great calendars. Once Vivian Clark says you’re on that boring Urban Decay bandwagon, or the Peter says your work is “poverty tourism,” then there’s nothing you can do. Nobody takes your side. Your work gets worse because of it. Even I couldn’t find the rosy spin.

Kate’s scissors whiz around my head, cutting as close to the scalp as she can. She pulls out her electric shaver and runs it up my neck. The razor buzzes, it whirs, it’s the sound of my father shaving. It’s a masculine song in my ears. I start to believe in it.

The razor moves over the slight bump on my head, a spot that’s always been sensitive. I once fell backward onto manhole cover. Every time the tine of a comb or the foil heads of Kate’s razor touch that spot, I remember the summer day, sitting on a neighbor’s lawn, when a neighbor boy playfully pushed me backward, and my head bounced off the metal. The grass was so high, we hadn’t seen the sewer cover. A lump popped up and never completely went away. But what has lingered most in my mind is Joey’s remorse, how sorry he felt, and how sweet his apologies seemed, coming from a boy.

Kate moves over to the cement utility sink, and I touch my hair, feel the soft bristles. My spine shivers with the chill. I’m colder without all that hair on my neck. I open my knees and warm my hands under the braid, cradling this weighty manifestation of my past. Would I dare to do this if my mother were still alive? I look over as Kate attaches a rinsing hose to the tap, then tests the temperature with her index finger. She blows into a pair of rubber gloves and slips them on. She pours a packet of powder into a steel bowl, adding water, and whipping it with a boxy brush. I love watching her. She looks so professional, even if she is wearing a blue flannel, ripped jeans, and leather motorcycle boots. Her own short hair is Flock-of-Seagulls long on top, with a spot of blue at the temple. She skipped college and went straight to beauty school after high school, and she’s worked her way up to Sassoon. She’s a coveted, always booked hairdresser, and she makes so much cash she doesn’t need to work for months at a stretch, which supports her great passion: backpacking in far-flung locales. She’s heading to Thailand in April to meet up with an Irish girl she met in India. She’s in love.

She wags the peroxide brush at me. “You sure you don’t want to stick with your natural hair color? This isn’t going to tickle.”

“Positive.”

Kate dips the brush in the paste and starts to layer on the peroxide, and at first, it’s cool, but then it starts to really tingle and burn. This burning feels like an initiation, and when I grit my teeth with the pain of it, Kate says,“You’ll live.”

In my neighborhood, we goad each other on with these phrases: You’ll live. It won’t kill ya. It’s a question of degree. Take any difficult situation. If it won’t kill ya, then you’ll get over it.

Kate carefully stretches a shower cap over my burning head, and then sets a timer for 40 minutes. While we wait, she pops a cassette of X’s More Fun in the New World in my boombox. The opening riffs get me off the stool, makes me cock my head pigeon style. Kate turns it up louder, so I can’t hear the shower cap crinkling in my ears anymore. We thrash around the basement, dancing, playing air bass. We dance with no inhibitions, mirroring each other’s hackneyed and comical pirouettes, and when one of us settles into serious oneness with the music, the other lifts an arm, training an invisible spotlight on the other, nodding in head-thrashing approval. When we sing, “We’re having much more fun!” I feel like we’re shouting at all our enemies. To the tune of an aggressive, exhilarating punk backbeat, we mix all the dance moves from two decades of friendship: the monkey, the nose-dive, the twist, the bump. Kate jabs a finger at the low ceiling, punk John Travolta-style, and comes back with cobwebs threaded between her fingers. She shakes them off, laughing, then grabs my hand and we do a rockabilly jitterbug, spinning each other across the concrete. We’re panting by the end of the “Breathless,” so we raid the basement fridge and chug a couple of Bobby’s Michelobs. We use her hairbrushes as microphones to serenade each other. “I must not think bad thoughts!” We shimmy to the floor, we do bad ballet moves till we’re spent, till the timer ding-ding-dings.

She leads me to the sink, and I lean back in a swivel office chair so my neck rests on the cold lip of the sink. The warm water feels wonderful, as she rinses away the peroxide. Water drips into my mouth and it tastes like metal. I arise from the cement basin a clown, my brown hair now Ronald McDonald orange.

“What the—”

“Don’t worry. This is actually the ‘Sweet Dreams’ color. You need the ‘Here Comes the Rain Again’ color.”

“I don’t have the bone structure to pull off orange hair,” I say.

“Nobody does.”

“You do,” I say. Because Kate is a 5-foot-9 knockout lesbian who came out to me a couple years ago. With all she’s had to deal with, growing up where we do, you’d think I’d have the guts to tell her what’s really been happening in grad school. It’s not that I don’t trust her. I’m just not ready to admit some things, even to myself. Behind Peter’s put-downs, I sense something else—like he’s cutting me down and coming on to me too. Which I really don’t get. I’ve caught him many times glancing at my engagement ring, the 2-carat cathedral solitaire that Bobby had chosen himself.

Kate wheels me back to the center of the room, and I cradle my braid, as she layers on the peroxide. It doesn’t hurt as much, but still I wince when she brushes that tender spot, and I’m not reminded of the freckles on remorseful Joey’s cheeks; no, I’m remembering the clank of my head against the manhole cover.

“Hurting?” Kate asks.

“Beer helps.” Yet the initial buzz is dwindling into a queasy fatigue, and a glance at the clock fills me with familiar dread. It’s after four, and Bobby might be home in twenty minutes and if not, then he won’t be home for hours. For once, I’m hoping that he goes out drinking with his trader buddies.

After we rinse out the final coat of peroxide, Kate towel-dries my hair and then works in a cool, silky toner. “This will make it more lemony.”

She guides me toward the mirror, and I stare at my face. The stark hip hair is a stranger’s. My ears stand out like two washed pieces of marble. My brown eyes look huge against the lemony-white hair.

“Do I look like an alien?”

“Like a foxy alien, baby!” Kate says.

A car door slams in the driveway. Bobby’s home. Kate and I lock eyes. We both get quiet, the only sound the tumble of towels in the dryer. His dryer. I count the empty beer bottles, wanting to toss them quick, but we hear the squeak of his Ferragamo wingtips coming down the basement steps before we have a chance to prepare. Kate grabs her fancy scissors and holds up her hands, showing her weapon. She rolls her eyes, cementing our regression to rebellious kids, with Bobby cast as the Grown-up, the established, hetero male, the college grad, the captain of industry. It’s a force we’ve always rebelled against, and Kate still can’t quite understand how I fell for Bobby two years ago. Kate’s never spoken against him expressly, while he’s always seen her, my friend who I’ve known since birth, as a threat.

As he comes into the basement, I’m flooded with both dread and a strong desire to melt against his gray suit jacket, to get ahead of his response. My fiancé is 6” 2’, lean as a greyhound, with pearl-grey eyes and straight brown hair. The only way Bobby can reach a state of light-heartedness is if he’s high as a kite or having sex, which means the bedroom is the only place where I can win. Bobby’s very sensitive, but others don’t get it, they don’t see what I see in him. Though sometimes I wonder what the difference is between sensitivity and touchiness. Where do you draw the line?

He sets a pile of mail down on top of a table. “Somebody’s parked in the driveway! What the hell, Maggie? What’d you—What’d she do to your hair?”

“Don’t blame Kate,” I said.

“How’s it going, Bobby?” Kate throws back her shoulders and shakes a Camel out of her pack.

“Jesus H. Christ. You look like a dyke, Maggie.”

Kate snorts,. “Nice, Bobby.” She places the cigarette between her lips, freeing her hands so she can zip up her leather jacket. “Look, Mags, I gotta split. Call me tomorrow.”

“Sorry, Kate. He didn’t mean it that way.”

“What do I care?” Bobby throws up his hands, dropping his head and stooping in the exasperated gesture of the Misunderstood Man. “It’s your hair!”

“It sure is, Mags.” Kate says, as she heads toward the stairs. “And hold on to that braid. Maybe I can reattach it for your wedding.”

Bobby starts collecting the beer bottles and putting them in a can by the sink. After I hear the door shut behind Kate, I turn to him, wrapping my fingers around his wrist. “I can dye it dark again if that’s what you really want,” I say.

“I can’t picture a wedding veil on that hair. Are you planning to wear a tux, too?”

“Our wedding day is two years away.”

“You’ll need white combat boots,” he says.

Upstairs in the guest room closet is a shoe rack full of pumps in in every shade—black, red, navy, even powder blue. When we met, Bobby said all my funky flats looked like waffle irons. I was blown away when he took me shopping and spent hundreds on new pumps. “I don’t want to even think about a wedding till I’m done with grad school.”

“And maybe we can both have best men!” he says. “Or Kate can be your Man of Honor.”

“Shut up. She’s not even butch. She’s a total femme.”

“She’s a total femme!” he mocks me. “She’s in love with you.”

“That’s so stupid it’s not even insulting. She’s my best friend.”

“How do you know for sure though?”

“I know for sure because I know for sure.”

“You’re so naïve. It’s like those assholes in your program. You’re so much better than them. You can’t see the truth. They’re a bunch of wannabes.”

“There’s a huge difference between Kate and them.”

“I’m just trying to help you. Remember what I said. You have to check people’s passports. You can’t just let anyone invade your borders.”

“Kate and I are from the same country.”

“Maybe. But she’s moved to a whole other continent.” He twirls his finger by his temple.

“She’s moved to Lincoln Park. To get away from all the racist bigots around here.”

“So you’d rather be with all the fruits, nuts, and flakes around Wrigley?”

“I’m fine on the South Side. I like our neighborhood.”

“I’ve got my eye on a bigger house,” he says. “With a coach house. So you can have a studio.”

“Really?” I immediately picture a yellow clapboard coach house with a pitched-roof and rectangular skylights. I’d have a shelf for all my cameras, light stands, light modifiers and reflectors. Maybe some backdrops too. I see vertical files filled with slides, and I can almost smell the vinegar tang of the developing fluids I’ll have in the basement dark room. “When did you start looking? You didn’t tell me.”

“Just put the word out to Tommy Costa. He’s doing real estate now. The Bozo franchise thing didn’t work so hot, surprise surprise. But we’d probably need tenants in a coach house to cover the mortgage the first couple of years.”

“I knew there had to be a catch.”

“What do you want from me, Maggie? I’m already paying—”

“My tuition. I know. I know.”

“Well, you and Kate act like I’m some overbearing ogre. I’m doing my best here.”

“I know you are.” I walk over and hug him, draping my arms around his neck. His hands reach for my waist, and he pulls me close. His tight embrace always seems to swallow me, as I’m a good six inches shorter than he is. My mouth pressed to the itchy wool of his suit jacket, I say, “I know” again. I know how far he’s come. His mother always expected the most from him—valedictorian, captain of the football team, yet it was never enough. To others in the neighborhood, she’d brag about “Her Bobby,” but at home, with him, she could hold a three-day’s grudge if he forgot to take out the garbage. Ignoring a ten-year-old for two or three days demands a particular talent. People in the neighborhood didn’t know that she’d been caught stealing a can of tuna when Bobby was five. She had planted the can in the back pocket of his pants, but a cashier noticed it and asked him to put it on the checkout belt. But his mother made a production out of it, scolding him and insisting that the cashier call the manager. Bobby stood shamefaced, unable to tuck his face into his mother’s lap, as the manager scolded him, while his mother opened up her wallet to show all the dollars she had, more than enough to pay for a pitiful can of Chicken of the Sea.

“What do you want to do for dinner?” he asks. “Should I order a ‘za?”

“Yeah. I’ll clean up down here.”

He heads up the stairs, and I grab a broom from the utility closet. His basement’s layout is exactly like the house I grew up in, where my dad still lives, alone. I knew Bobby only from a distance back in high school. It wasn’t till I was a junior at DePaul that our worlds overlapped. His pursuit of me was swift; he outflanked his rivals with traditionally romantic maneuvers that he dubbed “pitching woo”: chocolates, roses, Anaïs Anaïs eau de toilette. He ascribes to the dyad of Maggie-and-Bobby as some kind of holy force, but I don’t really need a creed to stay committed in the same way he does. If you read his love letters you’d think that we were engaged in an endless crusade against a cruel world, especially the meddling forces of most of my friends. He uses phrases like “true love,” which, I’ve noticed recently that X calls “The Devil’s chokehold.”

I sweep the stray hairs into a pile on the cement floor, then pick up the braid from the top of the washing machine. Wrapping it like a stole around my neck cuts the draft of cold air that wafts down my damp collar. I touch my head, and the bristles tickle my fingertips. Rubbing the soft fur on the back of my neck feels like petting a hamster backwards, a happy comfort that I wish Bobby could experience. What’s the big deal, anyway? It’s just hair. As my mother used to say, “It’ll grow back.” That’s the tack I should take with Bobby. He gets in a funk about stuff like this, and he needs me to lighten the mood. That’s how we work best. Isn’t that what love means? Your bad point, my good point. Puzzle pieces that fit together? It’s perfectly natural, I think, for a glimmer of pity to underpin one’s love.

Eileen Favorite’s first novel, The Heroines (Scribner, 2008), has been translated into six languages. Her essays, poems, and stories have appeared in many publications, including, The Toast, Triquarterly, The Chicago Tribune, The Rumpus, Diagram, and others. Her essay, “On Aerial Views,” was a Notable Essay in the Best American Essays 2020. Eileen was named a 2021 Illinois Arts Council Awardee for nonfiction. She teaches teach writing and literature classes at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. her TEDx Talk, “Love the Art, Hate the Artist” is available at eileenfavorite.com.

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