he therapist asks how I feel, and I tell her, dismembered. I do not know where the pieces have been discarded. Even if I did, how would I begin to put them back together?
All the king’s horses and all the king’s men…
For days in my head, this rhyme.
It all started with The Metamorphosis.
You were sitting in the back office of your store, Meir, chain-smoking at seven in the morning, waiting for me to take photos for a magazine. The editor had told me little about you except for your name, Asher Fromm, and titles: tie designer, owner. Despite the bell’s jangle, you hadn’t heard me come in. You always say you noticed my hair first. You say it billowed and rolled like a cloud down my back, and then you coat my neck with kisses. I stood in front of the bookshelf at the entrance, intrigued by your attempt at cleverness or culture. A large plant leaf obscured half of the top shelves, and books with torn spines were stacked beneath chairs. It was a men’s clothing boutique, not a bookstore, and you’d written WORDS FOR EVERY MAN on a cut piece of chalkboard that hung from twine on a tack. I picked up The Metamorphosis, opened it, and put the pages to my nose, inhaled.
“What are you doing?”
“I like to get acquainted with a space before prodding its intimate corners with a lens.” I removed the book from my nose, leafed through the pages. I had yet to look at you. “It’s not the fifties, but a certain amount of modesty and manners still goes a long way.”
I put down the book, plucked another from the shelf, and ran my fingers along the spine. Music played. Guitars and drums.
“Your store is gorgeous. The classic novels are a nice touch. It’s like a tailored rock star, a hipster, and a member of the Nation of Islam walk into a bar—and read Hemingway.”
“God, you’re strange.”
I turned, glimpsed your face.
“It bodes well for me.”
“I’m Jewish, though, not Muslim. So it would be more like ‘a tailored rockstar, a hipster, and a Jew walk into a bar.’”
“I’m Black, Haitian, Japanese. So now that we’ve got our census information out of the way, where would you like to start?”
“I like you.” You smiled.
The feathered scar on your jaw was my favorite.
In a few months we would be married. Stand before a judge. Me in black combat boots and a white minidress, and you in a trim burgundy floral print suit. We linked arms and held hands. Repeat after me, the judge said, and we repeated. Recited vows as somewhat strangers, then family. I could hardly bring my tongue to curl around the word family, project it. So why do I consider it now? Why do I consider my parents and sisters? Our baby, dead before birth? Now as the world bears down on Black bodies (another man killed), and I am tired. Now that I’ve had enough.
You read aloud to me on the couch, squinting through glasses at the words by the dim stutter of candlelight. The power was out, a storm, and our apartment glowed gold with swaying flames on the shelves, with sprawling plants and piccolo, and on the hearth near the leaning stack of found paintings and frames. The moon was high, clear. The steady sheet of rain had thinned. You read from your favorite book: A Sport and a Pastime. The dropout bathes the French girl. His prick goes into her, and he discovers the world. My legs were draped across your lap and you stroked my shin and knee. I was on my back, the linen of my robe pulled open. Exposed. A patch of dark grew tangled between my legs. I turned and saw myself in the mirror of that leaning stack, my face splattered with freckles, and turned back to you. “I’ll read,” I said, and thumbed through the pages. I responded with raised hips, pauses between words, to your fingers inside me, your mouth.
This is pre-miscarriage when we insisted on late nights and liquor and displays of whatever the hell we wanted. Like the first time Meir made a coveted list in a national magazine, and damn if you couldn’t stop touching me; hands hovering and gliding inside my coat, and along the thin cotton of my dress as we hurried to a dinner party, thirty minutes late. You are the punctual one, but that night our lateness was your fault. You insisted on lathering every bend of vertebrae and my skin in your scent. At the party, I had gone to the bathroom and when I came out you were drinking and laughing with a friend on the fire escape. An entrepreneur friend from college who wanted to invest in your business so you could open a second store. The night, beautiful and crisp, ushered a breeze into the party. I said hello, held your elbow, and pressed my lips to your cool ear. “We have to go. I’m spotting,” and later I delivered a pulpy plum-sized sac on our bathroom floor. We put it in a glass jar as instructed and took it to the hospital. You handed the jar to the doctor and said, “Here’s our baby.” You didn’t open a second store after that. We said we’d wait for life to be normal again but failed to say what that meant.
“I never thought I wanted children,” I say to the therapist.
“Why is that?”
The sac on the bathroom floor, on those tiny black-and-white square tiles and under the pipe bending down from the sink. I see it. My insides on the outside, like looking at my muscle. I’d squatted there, gripping that pipe, and when I felt the sac release, I kicked it away with my bare foot.
I tap my finger against the leather of the couch. “Did you hear? The guy they shot in the parking lot of a grocery store yesterday, the one getting into his car or something, he died this morning in the hospital.”
Her cheeks are flushed and pinker than I remember in her photo online. Her dark chest is large, and the buttons across it strain with each inhale as she waits.
“I hurt people with my selfishness,” I say.
“How so?”
I laugh. “It’s still pretty early in our relationship, let’s pace ourselves.”
“Ah, silly me.” She smiles, tapping her forehead with her fingertips. “All that ‘the truth shall set you free’ bullshit can’t be rushed.”
I make a Neanderthal sound, somewhere between a grunt and a laugh, grinning. How dare she build rapport with me? Sneaky little therapist.
The truth is, the moment I first saw you dance wild with arms darting, hair flopping in your laughing face, I knew I wanted a clone of that uninhibited joy to grow inside me. I had decided against having children years ago, right after the abortion. This was before I knew you, but then after I knew you, I started to change my mind. Yes. I could be a mother. Yes, I’d changed my mind. Could my malfunctioning body and the reality of this American nightmare change it back?
“My husband loves me, but my blood rejects me.”
“Can you elaborate?”
“They die. Or willingly let me go.”
“You’re referring to your family’s car crash? Your parents and younger sister.”
“And the baby. And my other sister. My own body. It doesn’t want a baby, and nobody can tell me why. Why doesn’t it want to have a baby?”
“Do you want to have a baby?”
“Yes. But I am afraid.”
“What are you afraid of? ...
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