for Deb

Portal is a video game
where you wield a gun that shoots 
holes. One you go into, one you come
out of, each end delicately placed on the wall,
facing one another in Escherian drama.
In this portal, Mommy is a robot,
and the robot puts you through hell. But let's
not talk tech. In life, disparate points
may also be connected. See: leading group fitness
classes back when my body could
hold my bottomless desire for pain; and ten
years later, seated on the floor of a “dungeon”
in a nondescript New Jersey Holiday Inn,
wrapped in the arms of the woman who’s
just lavished bruises upon my ass and thighs.
But Nat, you're burying the lede.
This poem is really about “Dark Horse,” Katy
Perry’s 2013 “witchy and dark” pop hit, the video
where she, uh . . . pretends to be Egyptian?
Yeah, that song. The one to which I pushed eager
bodies into cardio panic long ago.
It was an up-tempo remix, to be clear on this.
When I taught that track, I thought I would die. 
Not dying was my fantasy of resistance: in
discipline, I'd avoid coming to harm.
And yet—long since harmed—it’s 2025 and I hear 
“Dark Horse” in the dungeon, where someone's getting 
fucked near a portable speaker. It's the 
slower radio version, but the song is the same: 
near-blackout gasping, ankles shot, shorts damp 
with piss from tuck jumps, alive in the hell
I once gave myself. And now I’m living in delicious
hell gifted to me by someone else. 
This is not a game: I want
you to hurt me. Tell me I'm good, yes, 
a good little boy—no robot. Let me be abased by
longing. And when “Dark Horse” plays again, take me
back through the hole. Be the one 
who makes me feel it.

The Ninety-Two Dollar Snail

for Brigitte

Standing in a gift shop you tell me the cost
of the snail in U.S. dollars instead 
of Canadian, arguing it’s less than initially supposed.
The purchase may be worth it—and yet
this all feels like too much
desire. When I say that, what do you see?
Maybe the Nova Scotian 
cafe we dined in days before, where I did agree 
to buy a grab bag of “treasure” and unpack 
its broken contents. The reveal: a chipped mug 
holding rainwater bracing 
as the maritime air 
       I thought at first too cold
too cold to feel is how I’ve felt for so long, after all
I thought I’d forever be an icy geometry 
who releases light refracted ’til it hides its hungry
source in clever ways.
Yet on this northern soil, studied designs
demand we cut up the rules of previous prototypes,
collage out something else: sunrise over
Prince Edward Island, puddles following
       a brief storm. And muses:
one who wears the perfect feather earrings. Another 
bearing throttled passion whose tunes I recognize. 
If I had to describe it, I’d say my life’s been
a solo journaling game where I struggle to record
hurt before its bittersweet splendor is sacrificed 
on the altar of new distractions—
in this case, a felted snail who undermines all rationality
by being too sweet, too 
soft, and though I’ve desired 
such transport before, this is the first time you
have stood by my side in view of the object in question
saying yes
there is a cost and I appreciate that it’s high
but also I understand why 
you want this and I think
              		   you can have it. You 
   		      		         can have it.

The post The Delicious Hell of a New Jersey Sex Dungeon appeared first on Electric Literature.

Longtime readers of this column will be unsurprised to hear that the first quality I look for in a restaurant is not that restaurant’s willingness to accommodate an infant in arms. Such an attribute is not, after all, the marker of elegance, excellence, taste, or invention, all of which my devoted readers will recognize as my areas of primary interest. I believe that food and eating can be artful—indeed, can be art—and it is with this belief in mind that I approach each of my reviews. Families of course deserve helpful criticism of child-friendly establishments, but such readers more fruitfully seek guidance elsewhere. So has it always been.

But my friends, sometimes life finds a critic with no babysitter and a looming deadline, and in such cases the critic is grateful to be able to keep her reservation.

I entered Au Naturel on a night of constant drizzle, ducking in from the wet street to a womb-like space lit only with vintage lamps on an eclectic series of tables. Au Naturel—or Oh No as many have come to call it—uses their scant square footage to maximum advantage, with a variety of seating areas, including an archipelago of two-tops skidding off the bar and a single long table running riverine down the hallway. The atmosphere is meant to be cheeky and fluid, but still I was uncertain whether the other diners would appreciate my unannounced guest: a three-month old baby asleep in his car seat. This being my first assignment since his birth, I was not intending to bring him along, but circumstances conspired to find my husband out of town and my sitter canceling at the last minute, leaving me with no alternative than to pack up my small, slumbering companion. Incidentally, I appreciate the well-wishes we have received and am happy to say we are all in great health.

The host approached the baby’s makeshift cradle with a look of trepidation, and like any new parent, I held back a wince. There was a pause, in which the host regarded Nigel with curiosity and incomprehension, a failure of categorization and context I too well understood. But then he smiled. 

While certain diners will not take it as a positive sign that the restaurant moved so quickly to make space for Nigel, perhaps they’ll rest easier knowing that I was seated at a booth in the very back corner, in a small enclave near the kitchen door. The table afforded me privacy for nursing or distracting the baby, and kept any noise away from the other patrons. Neither the host nor my waiter raised so much as an eyebrow in complaint. Although I never make reservations under my own name, I can’t rule out the idea that they recognized me and acted generously as a result of my position, but no matter the reason, the swift decency with which my needs as a mother were met frankly brought tears to my eyes. It had been a cold, anxious cab ride to the restaurant, and I will not soon forget the warmth that swept me to my high-backed booth. 

Nonetheless, I endeavored not to let this color my views of the food.

Oh No, a joint venture of chef John Scott and the naturalist Laura Ashbury, is an evolving concept. The menu rarely repeats an item from one night to the next, though certain famous dishes appear just frequently enough for eager diners to seek out multiple bookings in pursuit of a specific experience. Both the fluctuation and the repetition are by design. As I scarcely need tell you, my devoted readers, Oh No seeks to replicate, through its food, the experience of existing in the natural world. That doesn’t mean anything so mundane as farm-to-table feasts: for a large stuck pig with an apple in its maw, please look to the numerous quotidian establishments still chugging away in the fashion of the early twenty-tens. 

Here, the natural world has seasons. The natural world has wind whistling across the surface of a pond. The natural world contains predators and prey in balance with one another. All these must be felt when dining at Au Naturel. This is not me being poetic: the preceding sentences are printed on the restaurant’s nightly menus. 

I was prepared for two possibilities. First, that the food would be high-concept esoteric drivel. A John Cage tone poem squeezed into edible drag. 

Second, that the thinking would be sound, but too physical for my tastes. All flavor and no presentation. Brute force cuts of meat. 

The décor did not do much to set my mind at ease in this regard, because though pleasing, there was little subtlety to its warm wood and fireplace, the low lighting that seemed to hint of your grandmother next door in a rocking chair. Whispering hush. But once I pushed Nigel’s car seat up against the wall and burrowed into my booth, there was no chance I would be leaving before eating every dish placed in front of me. The value of heavy sleep is not to be disregarded by any new parent. Nor is the possibility of looking at that tender place where one’s identity used to sit, and watching with held breath to see whether it might be growing back. 

I never thought I would have a child, to be quite honest. I believed I would pursue the passions of my intellect and creativity, define the tastes of a generation and achieve a greater understanding of flavor’s architecture. I thought I would write columns, win awards, garner power. Insofar as my work involved food, my life involved the human body, but it was never food meant to nourish the body alone that held my interest. 

I thought for many years that to have a child would mean to diminish myself, to debase my own existence beneath the necessity of caring for another person. Not that I thought such care was an unworthy pursuit, it just wasn’t mine. 

But I have been surprised by the level of delight I feel in my son. That his needs in fact overwrite my own at times—the lack of sleep necessitated by his nocturnal infancy, the backaches that I don’t even realize are developing when I cradle him against my chest, the agonizingly precise way he holds my attention for hours on end—does not cheapen my wonder at realizing such a complete specimen was born from my own body. I touch his ribcage beneath his soft chest and think, You are whole. You are mine. Readers, yes: I eat for two. And with every mouthful I am newly aware of why we engage our physical senses. 

Enter Oh No. The buzz around this restaurant built during the months of my pregnancy, and for some time I let it slide beneath my attention, because I knew that to do the place justice I would need to eat without restriction. The menus at Oh No are not printed or released in advance, and a pregnant woman can’t risk being served sea urchin, fresh-cut tuna, or frankly the appropriate amount of wine. A restaurant vaunted for its re-creation of untouched landscapes may realistically be assumed to offer raw foods, including meat. And so I continually implied that Oh No had not yet reached the level of acclaim to merit my regard, while also ensuring that my editors didn’t give the assignment to anyone else. This became trickier once Scott and Ashbury won a James Beard award in my eighth month, but I persevered.  

Now, however, I was prepared. Now was my time. The transition of food into breastmilk may be miraculously direct, but there are still more stopgaps between Point A and Point B than when the child is a part of your body. Furthermore I was hungry for what they were serving: the world on a plate. Hungrier, perhaps, than I had ever been.  

I had booked a late seating by design, as the plan was always that my baby would be asleep during the meal, although he was supposed to be home in his crib, where we had lately transitioned him out of the bassinet. I was ready and eager, excited to return to my work and exercise the loose muscle of my mind. In the three months since Nigel was born, I have read the occasional book, and spent enough time on social media that my colleagues still view me as being “in touch.” But I have not given sustained attention to any project of my own. That my son’s birth has increased the power and poignancy of the ideas I want to communicate does not, unfortunately, contradict the fact that I have less time in which to communicate them.  

Thoughts come to me now, and if I don’t jot them down immediately they dissipate. There is difficulty in holding the thread of a complex and evolving idea—the beginning might be gone before I reach the end. There is a way in which this feels like death, when I compare it to my old life. Of course it’s not: it’s just exhaustion and distraction, both of which can be overcome with time, effort, and a judicious helping hand. But still, I feel it. I had no idea how undistracted I used to be. Even pregnant, in a constant hormonal haze, my mind was relatively clear and focused, and time unfurled in a steady fashion, like ribbon unspooling from a roll. Never before had I experienced entire days vanishing with no trace, no content. When we first got home from the hospital I would lie down in the bed and start to shiver uncontrollably as my body chemistry evened erratically out, breasts throbbing from phantom nursing even when the baby was elsewhere. 

For the first time in my life, food was a necessity, and not a pleasure. We ate peanut butter crackers. Take-out burritos. Meals selected less for their flavor profile than for their ability to be hefted in one hand. My greatest culinary joy was the Baby-Eat-Mommy, Mommy-Eat-Baby game, in which I would nibble on Nigel’s face with the softest of lips and he in turn would bite my cheeks, bite my nose, bite my chin, as hard as he could with his pink wet gums. His mouth ever-abundant and perfectly satisfactory.

Or almost perfect. There was, it turned out, still a part of my brain that remembered other kinds of eating. A yearning, gnawing recollection that I had not always been the one on the plate. 

So I pitched a review. This review, in fact. A visit to the natural world, the expansive world beyond my doorstep. My editor asked if I was really ready to go back to work, and I assured him that I was. 

We are here on Earth to celebrate the experience of being here on Earth: a tautology. But also true. When we dance, when we eat, when we crack open an egg or stir cream into coffee, we are alive with our own vitality, our very being-ness. The energy which tells us how to get up in the morning, and why in god’s name we might reproduce. Because it tastes good. Because it feels good. Because it’s fun.

But being reminded that we are alive necessarily means being reminded of the alternative: death, and more than that, whatever comes after death, in our absence. The lack of self, the lack of everything. The fact you can’t uncrack an egg.

Oh No was founded in part because John Scott and Laura Ashbury felt the urgency of this emptiness not only on a personal level but also as a kind of global project. It is their aim to use food to remind us of the rich and varied life on the planet—indeed to let us experience the breadth of that life—even as biodiversity is in a freefall of decay. To bring the death drive and the need for survival together into precarious balance. A laudable idea, but in a restaurant, it has to work on the plate. 

On the night of my visit to Oh No, I ordered the tasting menu, which was organized by location—the first few dishes being oceanic, as befits the cradle of all life. You likely know that I am suspicious of style, and how it so often comes at the expense of substance, but a first course is always a doorway, which must be stepped through before judging the room. So, the ocean. I received a glass sphere in which a jellyfish, pureed and reconstituted, was suspended in a foam of seawater. The presentation could be viewed from any angle so you might approach it with the boundless geometry of a fellow sea creature; the foam and the jelly were then to be swallowed in one mouthful which revealed an undertone of brine shrimp, giving one the sensation of being a baleen whale. Giving the impression of the sea, seething around one’s body, rushing through one’s teeth. I found the flavor refreshing, the textures layered, the surprise of the shrimp just enough to make me wonder what else was rushing towards me in the dark. 

The next dish refined the locational specificity of the ocean, with a penguin liver served on a slab of Antarctic ice. Rare and bloody in appearance, the liver had been marinated in something light and citrus-adjacent: ordinarily I would have guessed yuzu, but no such fruit is to be found on the last continent, and I was informed that the flavor comes from a combination of seaweed and lichen, crushed into a red wine reduction. The thickened wine was also poured over the liver as a sauce, spreading across the ice like a murder victim’s blood in a police procedural. All this was served with chilled Aquavit, taken as a shot before swallowing the liver in order to lower one’s body temperature from within. Does this really give one the feeling of being a dismembered penguin? Or perhaps of being the leopard seal who tore the penguin’s liver free? It certainly gave me a chill, so perhaps the true goal is to share the experience of the ice on which the penguin’s blood will freeze, as it floats above the great aquamarine undersea. Perhaps.

At this point I was amused but unconvinced, a posture so familiar I almost wanted to wrap it around me and run out the door. Finishing off the last of the liver, I began composing a review in my head that was pleasant, encouraging, lukewarm. One that asked what I felt were the important questions—namely whether the food at Oh No was actually expressing a complex understanding of various ecosystems, or if it was just a very clever camouflage, a pretty but meaningless onomatopoeia of the tongue. Perhaps before my baby was born, I would have filed that review, in fact, slapping the restaurant on the wrist for stunt cooking, and then moving on with my life. But despite my best intentions of impartiality, I couldn’t stop thinking about the host. How he leaned so kindly over my child, and with a nod of the head, welcomed him into their version of the world. So I stayed.

And since I did, I should mention that the jellyfish was served with a crisp New Zealand white, which, while a bit insipid, dried the palate sufficiently to bring forth the oceanic purity of the dish.

When Nigel was born, I understood for the first time why fairy tales all claim that magic comes at a cost. In pregnancy and childbirth, the cost is visceral, as is the benefit. You definitely get something, and you definitely trade something. 

In the first few weeks of my son’s life I sat in the same position on the couch for hours out of every day, with my feet propped up on a table laden with blankets: our ersatz ottoman. I had never before considered that we ought to have an ottoman at all, that the angle of my knees would ever be static for long enough that it might matter. I used to sit at my desk, twitching around as I wrote; I used to stand at the kitchen counter mincing garlic and wiping it with one finger off the knife. When I lay on the couch, I would spread across it lengthwise, or perch at the edge for conversation, or—forgive me—nestle inwards far enough to create the possibility of sex. I would watch movies. During which I would get up and go to the bathroom, or pour myself a finger of scotch. Never was I so still as I now needed to be with little, wrinkled Nigel, just seven and a half pounds with eyebrow hair so light that it was invisible. He was in all ways so small he seemed on the edge of disappearing. And yet so forceful, so needful. He could not be ignored. I did not sleep more than four hours a night. I felt milk come into my breasts so they ached at the armpit and tingled behind the areola like needles were being pushed out from within. My knees got sore.

Is this the trade? It isn’t. The pain, the exhaustion, is not the thing. You see, in those early weeks I spent hours scrolling through my phone, looking at and liking pictures of my friends on vacation all over the globe. Eating ceviche in Madrid. Lolling on blankets in front of a fireplace in a Vermont cabin. Popping their heads out of the water at an Australian beach, and dredging themselves onto shore for a cold beer and a bag of exotic chips. Each of them somehow managing to be in a place I’d often wanted to go: Japan, walking through a series of red gates by a temple. The Outer Hebrides of Scotland, wrapped in wool. Standing beneath a blue and orange wall in Mexico City, sipping a raspado thick with mango and cream. I thumbed through these photographs with a pathological furor, but the fact is that I did not want to be where they were. I wanted to be exactly where I was, and to know the wide world was still out there.

Meanwhile Nigel slept with his face pressed against my neck, his cheeks fattening in direct conjunction with the growing adroitness of his mouth on my breast. What I had lost was the desire, so potent at every previous point, that my body should be for my use only. I shed the part of me that only cared about my own forward momentum. Though in fact my life’s trajectory felt clearer than ever. He knew how to eat and I knew how to give. I was happy to be still, for a time, because ahead of me lay every day of my and Nigel’s life together, multiple and various and impossible to predict.

I still looked at the photographs, but in the way we peruse our memories of the dead. With a fondness that almost rises to the level of yearning, but must, by its very nature, be released like a puff of smoke.

After water came air.

This being my first step forward back into my existence as a thinking creature, a living mind, I was easily charmed by the simplicity of the menu’s layout. Water. Air. My brain, so recently scooped out, clung to the clarity of shared concepts, as if I might be served a triangle and a circle, floating in the sky, and then be asked to name them. The delight consisting in the fact that I could. 

Naturally Oh No’s food was more complicated than that, but in another way, it wasn’t. I can easily tell you what I ate. The question is, can I tell you why?

The next course began with tiny grasshoppers flash fried and coated in crushed salt and herbs: sage, parsley, chamomile. These were brought to the table and then tossed in a hot metal bowl to pop like corn, and the effect was one of brushing insects away from one’s face in a grassy field in late summer, stepping on small plants with a careless shoe. Or of being that cloud of insects, one among a throng, pinging off one another’s reckless limbs. I watched Nigel twitch in his sleep while I ate; I licked the salt concoction off my fingers, as the atmosphere at Oh No is not especially decorous, and it fit with the overall picnicking sensation of the dish. Stretching on a blanket. Yawning. The pleasures of the flesh.

Following the grasshoppers was perhaps the silliest dish of the night, a light lemon soup evaporated into the form of a cloud and brought to the table in a glass tube to be huffed through a straw. Besides the obvious unintentional nod to smoking cheap dorm room marijuana, this worked better than it had any right to, hitting my tongue like a droplet of water warmed by a yellow sun. I would have preferred to simply eat the soup, if only to see how the chef might have garnished it, but as molecular gastronomy goes, the cloud was quite effective. And they do mean to have an effect.

There are many ways to prepare a meal with natural ingredients, but that isn’t the project of Au Naturel. They don’t care to teach the uninitiated that nopales are made from prickly pear cactuses, or that a flower can be used in a salad for a pop of color and a bit of surprise. They are looking to convey, through food, the way it feels to exist in certain places, certain forms. Each course and plate is transportive in the manner of art, because it appeals not just to the body or mind but to the spirit, in a kind of synthesis or synesthesia. 

Parenthood is this way too. A project of transformation, ready or not. From the moment you become aware of the child in your body, you are imagining their future life, trying to picture the arrangement of their face and who they’ll take after; what they’ll look and smell like, how they’ll sound. It’s all theoretical, but you make choices—endless choices—trying to produce a happier theory. And in the process, a change occurs, not to the child, but to you. 

My question as I ate was this: can a restaurant truly achieve this trembling precipice, simply by complicating the form of a soup? Wherein freedom is achieved through freedom discarded? Individuality junked in favor of collectivity? Self lost to the other? Ashbury and Scott claim that the premise of Oh No is that self is not lost in the other, but widened. And well. This is not a terrible premise. I’m just not sure that it’s theirs.

At this point you might be hoping I’ll get to the point: is Oh No worth the price of admission, or not? So let’s get this out of the way: for a tasting menu with wine pairings you can anticipate paying at least five hundred dollars per person, though the restaurant does not adhere to a specific price point, given the variability of their food. Expect to pay market price, though I have not heard of a single diner’s bill exceeding six hundred and fifty dollars, which included after-dinner cocktails and a small encore plate. 

I didn’t stay that long. 

By the time we wound to the end of Air, the clock had struck twelve and I was beginning to turn into a pumpkin, which is an idiom almost stupidly suited to Oh No’s concept—food, bodies, transmutation—but never mind. In the time honored tradition of the sleep deprived, I was desperate to stay up later, and also determined to finish my review with the greatest possible command of the establishment. I asked the waiter to bring me a cognac to help settle my stomach before the next plate, and he said that in fact it was strange I should request this, since the next dish was brandied. It was, he said, the coup de grâce of the evening, and in fact one of the staff favorite dishes among those who had been lucky enough to try it. He promised to bring me a cognac of his personal recommendation to accompany the food, and then he disappeared behind the bar.

Are you wondering, as I did at this moment—sitting back in my quiet booth and feeling the beginnings of a comfortably full stomach—how a restaurant like Au Naturel acquired a moniker as dour as Oh No? 

There are multiple theories about this. Some people say it’s because the food is skirting the edge of conservation and exploitation: that to acquire a night’s worth of ice from Antarctica specifically to watch it melt is not the same as mourning the loss of the ice shelf or the attendant rise in sea level. Some say it’s due to an early reviewer’s assertion that there’s nothing naturel about the cooking, and others suggest that when John Scott and Laura Ashbury realized they’d talked themselves into opening a restaurant, Oh no is naturally what they exclaimed. 

Any of these stories might contain the truth, and we can never be sure, but this at least was my experience. The waiter brought my snifter of cognac, a very nice ten-year Planat, and then returned with a tray covered with a linen napkin, which he brandished at me until I took it. Beneath the cloth was a dish which contained a thin layer of liquid and a creature I understood, after some scrutinizing, to be a hummingbird prepared in the manner of an ortolan. 

The waiter indicated with one hand at my head. “The cloth,” he said.

If you aren’t familiar, an ortolan is a songbird that is force-fed with savory grain, and then consumed in its entirety after being drowned in Armagnac. Ah, what a way to go, some diners have been known to say, though those who eat these birds also cover their faces with veils—either to treat their sinuses to an infusion of hot liquored steam, or else to hide their shame from God, depending on your interpretation. 

The hummingbird, my waiter explained, had been fed exclusively from honeysuckle and bleeding heart flowers, and kept for the maximum possible time from flying, as the bird’s rapid wingbeats generally expend its caloric intake almost faster than the bird can consume. The bird is given a final meal of sugar water before being plunged in Armagnac, and then boiled alive. It was served to me, at Oh No, as dessert. 

Can you imagine what I whispered next?

I am not an unadventurous eater. If I was, I would fail at my profession. In fact, I would never have sought this profession at all. It is my pleasure to eat whatever is served to me and judge the meal on its aims and merits, outside any Western ethical system which forbids, for example, the consumption of horse or dog or any other such pet. I have eaten and enjoyed shark’s fin soup, and a thousand year egg, and a slice of my own sauteed placenta, which was served to me by my midwife and was nicely seasoned but too tough and gamey for my personal taste. 

The hummingbird was elegant, minuscule; the notion was that I would pick it up with a spoon. And without hesitation, I did. I draped the cloth over my head and hunched over the bowl, and I put that marvelous small thing in my mouth and I bit through its bones to the sweet pocket of liquid within, which exploded on my tongue the way a berry bursts its skin. 

The steam was heady; it cleared my sinuses and replaced my doubts and fears and regrets with a brief sugary high, and the desire for more. 

If I were to eat this every day, I imagined, I would understand what it felt like to hover in the air suspended on currents of warmth and navigate by the vicissitudes of gravitational waves. All at once the entire evening’s menu washed back over me, with similar effect. If only I were to eat the sea, the ice, the summer, the sky, every hour then I would never lose anything I wanted, and the world would never die. Not as long as I lived. 

I wanted to tell the waiter about my revelation—I wanted to tell everyone. For instance, you. But I pulled back the veil across my face, and immediately saw, not God, but Nigel, who had woken quietly and was sitting in his car seat, chewing on his hands. He smiled at me. An enormous smile of welcome and bliss, with which he now greets me every morning because—or so I tell myself, and assume—he has missed me in the night, almost as much as I miss him. And I realized that in my moment of perfect completion, I had forgotten him. I had left him alone.

Magic, I will remind you, comes at a cost. It always does.

After paying my bill I ordered a car and I took Nigel home. The lights were out, and I only turned on the smallest, lowest lamps as I brought my son to his bedroom and settled in to feed him. There was a bottle in the fridge that I had pumped earlier in the day, knowing I would be drinking too much alcohol to nurse him after I ate, but instead of preparing it I lifted my shirt and brought him to my breast, as we both prefer. His eyes briefly opened and considered me, as his mouth pursed around my areola in a perfect embouchure of hunger.

I gave birth to Nigel via caesarean section, my body splayed out on a table and paralyzed below the breasts. The room, cold. My legs immobile, my arms restrained on either side. A knife moving into my flesh and subcutaneous fat; no pain, but a sensation of rocking, pushing, squelch—for which the surgeons used the catchall term “pressure”—as my uterus was pulled out of my torso so the baby could be removed. Then the organ was shoved back in. In any other place or time, all of this—my bright white awareness, my frigid alarm—would have constituted horror. When in fact, it was one of the most beautiful rooms of my life. One of the great moments.

I remember shaking, laughing with the anesthesiologist who was perched at my shoulder. And I remember a hard crash. The anesthesiologist’s look of shock as the blood drained from my head—to somewhere. The bright room getting brighter, like iridescent milk, all the machine sounds suddenly stopping as I felt a heft and a lift. Something leaving my body, but not the baby; something leaving my body and that thing was me. Hovering up and above for just long enough to see the surgeon peel the uterine scrim away from Nigel’s face before I dropped back in with an intake of breath, to the anesthesiologist’s relieved expression. I came back, but I was different. I will never be who I was before. 

Here is my final thought about Au Naturel, which offers excellent value for the money, and has created an atmosphere of comfort and intimacy that is truly conducive to the culinary exploration offered by its kitchen each night. Five stars for cuisine, and ambience, and service; indeed if I could offer more than five stars for service, I would. I remain grateful to the staff who helped me rest my son quietly in the corner, recognizing perhaps that he too is part of this life and this world, and a worthy guest of their establishment. Or perhaps just being kind.

But having experienced at least one small sliver of Oh No’s menu and their thinking, I cannot help but feel the two are irrevocably at odds. The work of a naturalist like Laura Ashbury is to study the various forms of life outside our own and to believe they can be, through our intervention, understood and sustained; while the work of a chef is to make something to eat. Of course there is nothing ignoble about eating: it nurtures body and mind, and has been my life’s work. But thinking and living, thinking and dying, none of these are quite the same.

I listened to Nigel suck and swallow, listened to his satisfied sounds, and occasionally wiped a bubble of milk off his lower lip when the stream came too fast for him to handle. The milk he consumed was mine, was me: to make it, my body liquifies the calcium from my very bones. Given that he eats such a meal every few hours, there is an argument to be made that I too will never die, as the idea of me will live in him, and we will both be thus sustained. 

The evidence does not support it. But what would? 

The post A New Mother Hungry for the World on Her Plate appeared first on Electric Literature.

Tell me a story, he said. A happy one. Your stories are always so sad. 

It’s what I’m good at. Besides, it’s hard to write a happy story, I said. But I’ll try. What kind of story?

One with fairies, he said, after thinking for a moment. The kind with wings. I already know too many stories about the other kind.

We were in bed, with only our toes touching. We weren’t looking at each other but instead were gazing out the window overlooking the front yard. We had argued earlier and weren’t really mad anymore, but we were still trying to figure out how to make up. 

The fight had started when his sister asked him to take his mother to the doctor, even though his sister doesn’t work and has plenty of free time. I had merely said he shouldn’t always be so willing to help, because he got taken advantage of. I don’t know why we were fighting, but for some reason I thought it was important to get him to admit he couldn’t stop doing it, even though I liked that he was always so giving. And he felt it was important to insist he could always refuse to help if he wanted, even though he never would. Such is the stupid way that even people who love each other communicate sometimes.

Do you know about the martini fairy? I asked.

That sounds more like that other kind of fairy, he said.

The martini fairy is a wonderful fairy. He’s the wittiest fairy. The most charming. Often in a tuxedo or white dinner jacket. He lives in our front garden, between the dogwood and the pink azalea, beneath that floppy lavender. He likes to lean against a mushroom, smoking a blade of grass, chatting with the gin-and-tonic fairy and the Manhattan fairy. And his nights with the champagne fairy are always special, but he thinks the pinot noir fairy is pretentious. He is suspicious of the white burgundy fairy and barely tolerates the beer fairy. And he loves staying up until dawn, swinging in a hammock made of spiderwebs, listening to the whiskey fairy unwind tales of lost love and forgotten empires. 

Sounds like a lot of lushes in fairyland, he said.

Don’t interrupt. One night he was drinking a Pelligrino and looking sad and the Limoncello fairy, the most sensitive of all the fairies, asked what was wrong. And the martini fairy said they had run out of olives. They only had lemon twists and pearl onions. So the other fairies fanned out to search for olives in trash cans and dumpsters but all they found were black and kalamata olives, which clearly wouldn’t do. Some fairies tried to sneak into a pixies’ bar, but pixies are fairy-phobic and refused to share their olives. 

He turned towards me now with a look of concern.

The Limoncello fairy came over and gave the martini fairy a hug. The Vermouth fairy, who understood the martini fairy in ways that no one else could, offered words of consolation, but the martini fairy would not be consoled. He felt suddenly incomplete. And, in truth, his white dinner jacket had started to wrinkle and the air of sophistication that always clung to him was beginning to evaporate.

I stopped there and looked out the window.  

That’s as far as I got, I said. His foot moved away from mine.

That’s not a happy story, he said. The martini fairy needs his olives.

Unfortunately there aren’t any and all the fairy liquor stores are closed, I said. The only way to make it a happy story is for someone to get the martini fairy some olives.

You’re only stopping there to prove a point, he said. I shrugged. 

He looked at me, clearly irritated, and shook his head.

You suck, he said. I shrugged again.

He pulled the blankets off and got up, leaving a small indentation in the mattress. I heard the refrigerator in the kitchen downstairs open and close. Then I looked out the window to see him walking barefoot across the damp grass, shivering in his boxer shorts and ragged t-shirt, holding a toothpick with three green olives speared on it. He squatted and slipped the toothpick gently underneath the lavender. 

It’s a happy story now, he said, when he came upstairs.

Because of you, I said.

The post True Love With Three Olives and a Twist appeared first on Electric Literature.

We heard about Monica Logue going missing same as everyone else. It was in the Gazette and I’d know the editor, Deirdre, very well since she comes into the shop the odd time buying flowers for her mammy’s grave. It’s all anyone’s been talking about. You’d think having a world-famous celebrity in town would be the biggest news going, but it turns out her not being in town at all trumps it handy. I reckon she’s taking a bit of time out from the stress of it all and you’d imagine those Hollywood types have their own demons with the drink and drugs although sometimes you see them going into rehab and they’re on some chat show going on about how they were drinking a bottle of wine a night and you think they’ve hardly touched the sides of what we get up to. Sure there’s nuns in Derry drink more than these fluthers and no one bats an eyelid. Most of my teachers were half cut in class, I’d swear it, but I guess it’s different everywhere. Maybe she got a look at Waterloo Street on a Friday night and realised she’d landed in Sodom and Gomorrah and fucked off back to the Hollywood Hills in pure shock.

It’ll all work out in the end. I hope it does because I think she’s marvellous. Me and Paul binged Blackfinch when it was on streaming and I couldn’t believe she was going to be in this thing. You’d almost not mind that it was an American and not someone from here if it’s someone of her talent and stature, and sure it’d mean more eyes on it and Paul was happy about it too because he’s had a glad eye for her since the nineties although he’d never say it but I’ve seen him reading every word printed.

Some of the stories you hear, though. I’ve heard the same as everyone else, that she needed to dry out or she was kidnapped by Provos who’d run out of horses to hold hostage. Some saying she was murdered by Diarmuid himself seeing as he’s the last one saw her alive, and isn’t that always what they say in cop shows before they put the screws on the school caretaker or the weirdo uncle. Few days ago, everyone and their mammy had seen her. Eileen says she was out buying buns in the bakery the day before yesterday which would hardly be the behaviour of someone about to skip town, but I’d trust her as soon as I’d trust an MP, I mean, a greater gossip than Eileen Downey never put her arm through a coat, and I don’t think she means to lie but she gets ideas in her head and lets them run away with her and you wouldn’t say a word to her if you were in your right mind, I mean you wouldn’t tell her the time.

You would get to worrying though all the same. There’s a lot of ways people can go, sure there was a wain on our estate God help us was run over by an ambulance, and another a few years before who fell in the river after a frisbee although they said that wee boy was troubled, never so far to say as he was suicidal only that it was worth mentioning just that about him, that he was “troubled” which seemed to be saying the same thing.

There’s a monument for mental health near where he drowned on the Foyle Road, it’s at the start of the bridge with a few steps reaching out into the river. I always liked it and I don’t often like the monuments but I like that one. They had to cordon it off since people were throwing themselves off it which I said was one way to spread suicide awareness anyway. Next thing there’ll be a wee plinth with a length of rope and a bottle of pills, there yous are, lads, help yourselves.

There’s the other one, the Hands Across the Divide, over by where Tillie’s used to be, it’s two lads reaching out for one another. It’s good because it could be about the Troubles or it could be about mental health or the environment or gays. They’re not touching, the hands, but they’re trying to touch and I reckon that’s the point. It’s all about awareness.

More people have died from suicide since the Good Friday Agreement than were killed in all the fighting before it, I hear people saying that a lot. Father McLaughlin used to say it in mass before collection. Now the details of how fixing the church’s roof was going to help teen suicides was never made clear to me but, that aside, everyone would nod at this fact like it was wile wise. I always wondered how it was that everyone’s killing themselves now when things are better, when no one was back in the day. I read a pamphlet that says a thousand more people died by suicide than murder even during the Troubles, so is that better or worse than now? If it’s better, then it seems a weird thing to go on about, and if it’s worse, then maybe the Troubles were better for people’s mental health than everyone lets on, gave them something else to worry about. But you can’t say things like that these days. Everyone just wants to move past it.

The whole place has gone mad with Hollywood arriving, talking about our wee town having its moment in the spotlight and how it’ll give a boost to the economy like Thrones did for Belfast, as if they needed it anyway. In my own personal view it’s a great thing altogether. Very good for getting the story out there—and if there’s jobs in it, all the better.

That’s one thing I think about a lot is jobs, it’s terrible the amount of unemployment that’s around and then you look at some of the people who do have jobs and you wonder how it even happened. Our Patricia’s Turlough minds the cars in the leisure centre up in Pennyburn and I always think how did he even get the job. He’s too good for it, you see, the great struggling actor! And now he’s given Patricia the bug, but sure it’s good to have a passion. It would just be nice to see some passion in the job he actually has, is all I’m saying, face like thunder while he’s raising the barriers and you’d feel bad even parking your car, like you’re taking food from his mouth. Before they started courting, I used to think he must have been born in the centre, swaddled in a kitbag, raised by the lifeguards and handed a work pass. He doesn’t even sweep the floors or hand out swimming caps or anything, I’ve never even seen him indoors, and I always used to joke he probably has a wee pullout bed and a stove to make his tea ’cos he just sits in his wee booth minding the cars all day and the face on him you’d think he was before a firing squad. That to me is a shame to be honest because there’s plenty would do that job and do it with a smile on their face.

But then I suppose my big thing, and as long as I live I will always return to it, is the handicapped, who I think have a terrible time of it already, and could do with a leg-up—or a wheel-up as the case may be. It’s every day I see some eejit collecting trolleys or serving drinks and looking like the world’s not done them any favours and when I see people like that I think: do you know what, that’d be a great job for a wee handicapped person. There are degrees of handicapped but I think it’s something we need to look into if the powers-that-be would give it a moment’s thought. When you do see wee handicaps in jobs they seem happy with it, they’re thankful for the opportunity, and sure if there’s a bit of a fuss learning them the ropes well it can’t be worse than some of the gombeens I see washing cars and doing dishes and not knowing how lucky they are. There was one used to work in Duffy’s making the teas and he was a credit to his disability, always smiling, and if he made a wee mistake he apologised and everything was fine. Except one time I was in there with Eileen Downey and she had a face on her the whole time like she was being served by a chimpanzee and I had to have a word with her and tell her she was being unkind even if he did get a few things wrong. She was put out to put it mildly because he gave her the wrong drink and me the wrong sandwich but I wasn’t complaining and I don’t need Eileen Downey to do that on my behalf, I’m loud enough on my own thank you very much, but the final straw for her was when he touched her biscuit when it nearly fell off her saucer as he was handing it to her and she picked it up with the tiniest tips of her two fingers as if it was polluted, as if he’d pulled it out of his arse in front of her, and what does she do but ask for another one. He was wile confused so I had to step in and tell him, slowly and at loud volume, that everything was fine and I nearly kicked her under the chair, I tell you she went down in my estimation there and then. She said the biscuit was half broke and I said it’ll all end up in the same place once it’s down ye and in any case a kind word never broke anyone’s mouth, Eileen Downey and then she said her Joe was after getting into gambling debts and she wouldn’t have minded if it was the football or the dogs but it was a wee mobile game that had girls with their tits out which I thought was strange that it made the difference to her but I did feel bad then because sometimes people are going through things and you don’t even know and it’s all about having empathy at the end of the day. We got that meal for free anyway because the wee fella forgot to come back with the cheque so it all worked out.

As for the telly, our Patricia thinks she’s hired already. If there’s one good thing about her and Turlough, and I’ll be honest, he’s a nice young man when he smiles a bit, God knows she could do a lot worse, it’s that they raise each other up when it comes to the acting. She’s in with the drama troupe and already sees her name in lights, and with Hollywood coming to town it’s very exciting altogether. Paul says I’m convinced she’s going to get Monica’s part and would I steal the poor woman’s grave as quick, but I paid him no mind because there’s going to be hundreds of parts for young girls even in the crowd scenes, and optimism is a choice, I tell him, why not support your child to the hilt, there’s enough disappointments in life without presuming them in advance. For the big parts I’d find myself a bit more realistic on that score since part of me thinks sure they’ll probably just get wee English girls in and make them do accents like they always do, but I don’t say that except to our Paul and he says the same. I just tell him to make sure he doesn’t say it out loud because then we’d never hear the end of it from Patricia, who’s very sensitive about these things.

Honest to God, you can hardly breathe around her. Twice last week he dropped the ball complimenting her friends, and in fairness he can be useless about these things but she laid the whole trap out for him, you’d forget how devious teenagers are if you didn’t have one under your roof, it’s demons they are. The whole lot of them are convinced they’re made for showbiz, so it was all Kylie wants to be a model and Anna wants to be on TV and he just said yeah they’d be good at it all right and I knew then he’d suffer for that, it was as if he’d scalded her with acid, Jesus Christ, it was like he’d killed her dead. The competition between those girls! Good luck ever working out who’s friends with who and what does be going on with any of them. When they were wains it was all about dance moves and hairstyles and now it’s about who’s got the best arse and the biggest lips and this from girls of seventeen years of age. I pity poor Paul for it because he can’t put a foot right. In my view Patricia is as gorgeous as any of her friends—certainly Kylie, God love the girl but she hasn’t a feature. I said to Paul that Kylie would have better luck as a crash-test dummy than a supermodel and we had a good laugh at that, God forgive us, but then I told him don’t you be saying that to Patricia either, for the love of Jesus, we’d never hear the end of it.

What’s true and I don’t care one jot if I’m biased is that if the casting people are on the lookout for local talent they couldn’t do better than Patricia. She played Aladdin—the boy part—in the panto last year and even without the makeup, which they rightly banned for sensitivity reasons after that whole to-do last year, I swear you’d have thought she was a wee Arab boy. She even got the part over Terri Harkin’s youngest, Alex, who’s a wee they-them, so I was particularly pleased, even though I fully support her visibility and God love them they need awareness too, sure it’s the modern day and you need to be kind, but Patricia just has the goods, and I know I’m her mother but that girl has the goods.

The latest now is they’re casting, and the producers were very pleased with her tape and want to see her for a whole host of parts. The house is elated to say the least and the only sad part, I thought, was that she and Kylie got a look-in but Anna didn’t, but it turns out Patricia has taken against Anna for some reason so it hasn’t made a dent in her happiness, to be honest she might even be happier that Anna didn’t get her dream which is nice for her in a way. I’ve given up worrying about anything else, sure they’ll be thick as thieves again by tomorrow and anything you say, for or against any one of them, can and will be used against you in the court of Patricia McDaid.

Of course, now she’s decided her best bet is to know all about what it was like in the bad old days and particularly how it was for young girls, and all of a sudden I’m flavour of the month because I’m so ancient she thinks I can give her all the information she wants. She talks to me like I’m the last survivor of the Titanic, like she’s only just realised that she was living this whole time with a relic from the Ulster Museum, like anything I’ve ever done has actually mattered. And the things she’s asking, my God do they teach these kids anything at all. I mean this morning she was asking me how we got to school, as if we were dodging bullets the whole trip, and Paul couldn’t help himself then telling her we went to bed on a heap of sandbags and wrapped our Christmas presents with barbed wire and she writing it all down like a thick, we had to laugh. But then she takes me aside and says it’s all about recording history through drama and using art to tell stories and you’d think she was on the couch with Paddy Kielty talking about the struggle of her craft. So there we were in the front room for an hour going over the whole thing and she with the pencil in her hand taking notes, asking me if I’d ever been bombed or shot and me having to tell her my life story stuck without anything to say because I couldn’t believe she was interested in any of it.

And there’s me trying to explain what the army checkpoints looked like or how a bomb site smelled, almost as if I was telling her what the world was like before mobile phones or those times when she was a wain when she and her brother would ask us if we lived around the dinosaurs or when exactly it was that the world stopped being in black and white. And then she’s asking about the killings and what happened to this one and that one and thon, and by the end of it I have her pencil in my hand drawing protest routes and the whole time she’s at me about atrocities and massacres and I don’t know why but the way she’s saying it like she’s someone on the news, or an English person, like she’s a tourist or some fella from the UN on a fact-finding mission, and it all had me grabbing the tissues wondering how it could be she didn’t know, how my whole life I’ve tried to stop her from hearing any of it as if I was trying to protect her and not be like some of the other people round here who’d boil the ear off you never giving over about every last thing that happened, as if they and they alone were God’s one true perfect martyr and we didn’t every one of us go through the same thing.

And wouldn’t you know it, eventually she had me talking about Jamie Devenney, both of us blubbering on the couch and me stroking her hair and remembering when she was just a funny bold wee girl fretting about monsters under her bed and now it’s me worrying about the monsters out there she’ll be set free to encounter.

I wouldn’t say I get emotional about any of it at all nowadays, I’d say my philosophy is I leave the past in the past and there were people who had it worse, God knows, but there was something about remembering what happened to Jamie and the way she didn’t even know his name, she read it from her notes like she’s seen it in a book, and she says is he one of the fellas on the wall and I say aye, one of the fellas on the wall and I say but he was a beautiful boy, you know and tell her all about how the whole neighbourhood were mad after him and she says you wouldn’t know it from the picture. I told her sure that was a whole story on its own. Sad as everyone was when he got shot, I said, there was more uproar when that mural came up and everyone saw Jamie who was our wee pop star, our wee dreamboat, looking like a bank manager or a bus driver, not that there’s anything wrong with people in those professions but he was movie-star good-looking so he was.

And I meant all this to be funny because by this point my tears needed drying, but it came out angry and I found the whole thing wrong somehow, like this wasn’t a story or a page in a book or a scene for some innocent child to be play-acting, this was a thing that had happened, these were people. Patricia God love her was studying all this and wondering what to make of her lovesick heart-broke mammy snotting into a bog roll and trying to get my words out, and I wondered there and then if awareness is all it’s cracked up to be if you can’t tell the whole story, but there’s no way the whole story could ever be told, and every film I ever seen about any place or any war was probably filled with stuff the people from there would hate, things they couldn’t stand, and is this what we’re making for ourselves, a rod for our own backs, a great big heap of shite to raise a bit of awareness of what, of my life of my people.

The thought of that boy and that I’d seen him at a dance two nights before and always felt that maybe there was something there to keep an eye on between me and him, not some deep spiritual connection don’t get me wrong but a wee throw of the eye, a sense that we had a story to tell between us sometime if the time ever came, but all that was thrown away and forgotten about because some cunt soldier shot him in the head in front of the whole street, and now I see him up on that wall every day, just another fading mural like that one down the road of Sinead Bradley’s brother and a couple others but I never knew them quite so well, and there’s one wee fella who has one on the far side of the estate whose name I always forget and I feel the worst for him because it’s been too long now and I can hardly go round asking.

The post Our Wee Town’s Violent History Is Having Its Hollywood Moment appeared first on Electric Literature.

I was there in the cheap seats when the man with Boston 
on his back tackled the giant bug. A shaded skyline that enfolded 
 
his shoulders, revealed when he frenzied his shirt over his head 
after Nathan Horton scored in the second—the Ontarian 
 
dispatching the puck so absolutely the net was compelled 
to take it in. As if to make something belong, you hack hard as you can. 
 
From the terrace level I cheered too—not for the goal but to make 
myself known. Displaced New Englanders never stop needing 

to tell you where they’re from. The bug was from Tampa—a woman 
named Kelly in a 10-foot foam exoskeleton who silly-stringed a man 
 
when his team was down and away from home. So fervent for a city 
he needled it under his skin. As security walked him out, he spiked 
 
a finger in her face—not Kelly’s but the bug’s, with the unwatching 
eyes—and snarled as the crowd cheered his ejection. Hockey 
 
gets violent. Players brawl. The refs allow it, the us-and-them-ing, 
and we take it for camaraderie: the refs, and the fans, and even me, 
 
indifferent to the game but not the need. Even Kelly, though it cost her 
the job. Now she lives in Chicago, custom-crafting mascot costumes 

designed to ride light on one's frame, and all machine washable.
Horton eventually got traded to Toronto, never leaving
 
the injured list, but I hope Canada consoled him. The Bruins took 
their loss and headed north, same as we would later that year, 

in a U-Haul heavy with everything. The tattooed man lives forever 
in a video online. In my memory, I’m right across the aisle, close enough 

to hear him scream Stanley Cup into the bug’s meshed mouth. 
But I’ve watched the clip a dozen times and I’m nowhere to be found.

Self-Portrait with Vermont Forge’s Heirloom Weeder

that I bought online one night, unable to sleep
and again intent on wresting order 
from the mess. On uprooting 
clover—even the four-leaf. I don’t believe 

in luck, maybe because I’ve mostly had it. I do 
believe in knuckling down. 
Yesterday, I potted the sprouted pit of a stone 
fruit I pulled from the compost. 

I’ll overwinter it in the basement 
where I can fret about its chances every time
I run on the treadmill. 
Exercise is supposed to be good for sleep. 

And lavender, though I cut mine back 
too hard and it’s not pulling 
through. I wish the garden gave me more
time to make good. Five months if I’m lucky—

not that luck exists. Episcopalians 
have prayers for the Natural Order, 
praising the God who fills all living things 
with plenteousness 

and I consider my plenty and if I’d make a good
Episcopalian and what else might be available
at Vermont Forge, 
what other instruments they make 

that could help me. Because in order
to endure, clover can’t be anything
but persistent—
like the faithful, reciting the words of St. Francis, 

who is said to have left his garden
wild at the edges and who begged of his God: 
Make me an instrument 
of peace.

The post The Fragile Pride of the Displaced New Englander appeared first on Electric Literature.

Yuchen sat in the back of the taxi as it turned onto Chang’an Avenue. Seventeen years ago, she had biked to high school on this ten-lane boulevard every day. So, so wide, she thought then. It had made her feel small.

She rolled down her window and let the breeze carry her hair into a frenzy. Tiananmen Square dark on the left, Tiananmen Tower lit up on the right. Chairman Mao’s Mona Lisa smile had looked benign to Yuchen as a child, the look of a gentle grandfather, but now the portrait seemed menacing, as if it could, any second, turn into a scowl. There were many situations in which Yuchen couldn’t be sure if or how she had changed, but in this moment, she was confident that neither Tiananmen Square nor Chairman Mao’s painted face had been altered; it was that she was no longer as Chinese as she used to be. But what did she mean by Chinese? It was a categorical adjective one would only use from the outside looking in: This was Chinese, that was not so Chinese. There was no such distinction from the inside. Perhaps that was what Yuchen meant: not less Chinese (how could she be less Chinese if she was, immutably, Chinese?), but outside Chinese.

Spring was Beijing’s shortest season and Yuchen favored it for its transience. The heat and humidity were timid in the air. Something smelled nostalgic. Was it possible that the air was scented with the past because she was headed to see old friends? After two IVF cycles, Yuchen no longer trusted her emotions, but analyzed them in therapy-speak and hormonal mumbo jumbo. She craned her neck out the window, getting a stronger whiff of the fragrance.

Guniang, don’t stick your head out, the taxi driver said into the rearview mirror.

No one had called her guniang in a long time. The gendered form of address was respectful but familiar, not infantilizing, not remotely flirtatious in this context, a state of relating that was missing in English, in which most of her present life unfolded.

She did as she was told. When she was growing up, Beijing taxi drivers were infamous for regarding themselves as all-knowing. Maybe he would know the air’s peculiar ingredients.

Do you smell that, shifu? Something floral?

The taxi driver loved yulan flowers. A Beijing native, he had spent his childhood in hutongs not far from Tiananmen, and when the hutongs were demolished, his family moved to the South Fourth Ring Road, where yulan trees did not grow. He knew that the ones on Chang’an Avenue blossomed first every spring, followed by those in the Summer Palace, then in the Sculpture Park on the west side, and Buddhist temples in the surrounding mountains. He, and most municipal taxi drivers, took pride in their hometown, the great capital of their great country.

See those white flowers by the redbrick walls? the taxi driver said. That’s yulan.

Yulan, of course. Yuchen closed her eyes to focus on the subtle aroma. It swirled in her nose, continued toward her brain—Yuchen did know this smell, this flower, but she couldn’t remember from when or where, her familiarity with it completely strange.

You’re not from Beijing, are you? the taxi driver said, interrupting her reverie.

Sure I am, Yuchen said, defending herself in an exaggerated Beijing accent, opening her eyes eagerly. I just haven’t been back in a few years.

Before she left China at eighteen, Yuchen had thought her Beijing accent equaled standard Mandarin, until she realized that her college friends from southern China couldn’t understand her excessively rhotic vowels and the way she liaised words together like she was speaking French. Over the years, she took care to tone it down, straightening her tongue and enunciating every character. Now Yuchen spoke both her mother tongue, Mandarin, and her second language, English, with no particular geographical association—so blandly she bored herself.

I couldn’t tell from your accent but I hear it now, the taxi driver said with a chuckle. Where do you live these days?

United States.

Where in the US? New York? Los Angeles?

Seattle.

I know Seattle! Sleepless in Seattle! And that Tang Wei movie—Beijing Meets Seattle. What do you do in Seattle?

I’m a photographer.

Like for weddings?

Yuchen debated the answer. She could lie and say yes, or she could throw a rock into the lake and see how it would ripple.

For art. I’m an artist.

You make art!

The taxi driver nodded, glancing into the rearview mirror with a newfound sense of intrigue. He thought his artist passenger looked old enough to be married, or even to be a mother. His own daughter was thirty-one; her son would turn two next month. He knew that artist types might lead unconventional lives, but he thought he could do a good deed for her parents.

You have kids?

No.

Married though?

Yuchen nodded. She averted her eyes from the reflection of the taxi driver’s scrutinizing look and feigned contemplation of whatever was outside the window. They turned off Chang’an Avenue. A brief silence that Yuchen wished would last.

You look my daughter’s age, the taxi driver continued. It’s better for women to have kids while young.

Yuchen offered no response, hoping if she neither agreed nor disagreed, their conversation would end here.

Your husband is us Chinese or a laowai?

He is American, but his parents emigrated from Hangzhou years ago.

So he speaks Chinese?

He can understand some.

That must be difficult for your parents. You are an only child, too, right?

Yuchen told him that she was born in 1987. The taxi driver said, with sincerity, that he would never let his only daughter marry a foreigner, lamenting again how inconvenient it must be for Yuchen’s parents. Yuchen tried a smile.

So which one do you like better: the US or China? the taxi driver asked.

It always came down to the same ultimatum. Yuchen used to attempt an honest answer, which varied depending on current affairs, context, or mood. But by now she had learned that there was only one correct answer.

Has to be our own country, she said. No doubt about it.

Yuchen followed a lanky boy through the KTV’s maze of hallways. He walked ungracefully, as if his limbs were trying to break free from his oddly formal uniform: a white dress shirt, a black waistcoat, and a maroon bow tie. He walked so fast, almost running, and Yuchen imagined that the boy hurried everywhere and still fell behind all the time. She wanted to tell him that he could slow down, she was not in a rush, but she stayed quiet and quickened her steps. Anything she said might make the boy feel worse, adding to the things he already thought he was doing wrong in life.

Before Yuchen realized that they had arrived at Room C10, the boy was already pushing the door open. First the music, a melancholy Faye Wong song, then the collective exclamation from her old friends, whose faces she hadn’t seen in so long that she couldn’t immediately remember their names. Some were standing up, one walking toward her. In an instant, memories of countless karaoke parties during their high school years coalesced into reality, washing over her like an ocean wave crashing onto the shore, unstoppable. She turned around to thank the boy, but he already had his back to her, whispering into his earpiece, hurrying away.

Yuchen—we were just talking about you! Xiaohan, a short woman with a fashionable bob, swung her arm around Yuchen, leading her into the room.

What were you saying behind my back? Yuchen teased.

Without a word, the crowd on the couch parted to make space for her in the center. She looked around the room—he was not here. Thanks to the atmospheric lighting, no one noticed that Yuchen’s eyes had just dimmed. In a way, she was relieved. As much as she wished to see him tonight—who wouldn’t be curious to find out how your first love had turned out?—she had also been nervous about the possibility, at the thought of how she might be reflected in his eyes.

We were saying that you were the class flower! All the boys had a crush on you, Xiaohan said.

Even at thirty-six, Xiaohan could register her body’s involuntary response when Yuchen was in the same room: Her insides twisted and twinged, a tangle of jealousy and admiration. She knew objectively that as an adult, Yuchen no longer stood out, not in any way that mattered: She wasn’t the richest or the most famous, her face was not the fairest or the smoothest, her edges were rounded, her husband was not particularly handsome in her pictures, and she remained the only woman in this room who was not yet a mother. Was Yuchen possibly infertile? She herself was a mother of two and she loved her kids most days. But look at the way everyone shifted places just so Yuchen could sit right in the middle, despite her arriving late—what Yuchen was to the people in this room was never going to change. The same was true for all of them. To be who they had been to each other, even for a few hours, was the essence of these high school reunions.

Someone asked Yuchen whether she wanted whiskey or beer.

I’m not drinking tonight, Yuchen answered. Just tea, please.

Are you preparing for pregnancy? Xiaohan asked.

Yuchen hesitated. She couldn’t manage any follow-up questions if she answered honestly, that yes, she had come home at her mother’s request to undergo a Chinese medicine fertility treatment; and yes, she had had two miscarriages, which made her feel like a failure, even though her husband had been kind and she knew her femininity wasn’t defined by motherhood; and yes, she was trying for pregnancy even though she was not sure if she wanted children at all.

No, Yuchen said. Alcohol gives me headaches. Getting old, you know.

Yuchen is an artist, Xiaohan, not a housewife like you! another classmate said.

In Xiaohan’s opinion, an artist was a glorified housewife anyway; art was not real work. Xiaohan wedged in next to Yuchen, keeping her mouth shut.

Housewife is the hardest job in the world, Yuchen said, giving Xiaohan’s shoulder a gentle squeeze. Xiaohan, thanks for inviting me. I haven’t seen you guys in forever.

Did you come for work this time? Xiaohan asked.

Both her Chinese and American friends often questioned the purpose of her trips to Beijing, as though the logic of an adult life could not accommodate such a sentimental luxury as simply going home.

I haven’t seen my family in a while, Yuchen answered. But maybe I’ll do some work, too, while I’m here.

An artist’s life is so free! Xiaohan exclaimed. When will you show your work in Beijing? Give us an opportunity to show up for you.

I’m working on a project about the idea of borders and border-crossing, not only geographical but in the most expansive sense, even including trespassing, but Chinese galleries are very cautious these days—I’m not sure if they would be interested.

Easier to blame the system for the lack of interest, Xiaohan thought. She’d seen Yuchen’s WeChat posts about her exhibitions abroad. From the name of the venue to her photos, everything seemed intentionally obscure, just like the way she was speaking now, what with the idea of borders and trespassing.

Well, just don’t forget your old classmates when you have a homecoming show, Xiaohan said.

Yuchen felt relieved when the intro to Xiaohan’s song started playing. She knew that Xiaohan’s interest did not lie in her work but in finding a fathomable way to measure its success. The truth was that she hadn’t been able to focus on creating anything in a while. The doubt and frustration from those cold and costly procedures spread surreptitiously inside her like a virus. When she could not contain those feelings any longer, they spilled out of her body, into the air she breathed, infecting everything she touched—her furniture, her camera, her husband.

Once the initial attention to her waned, Yuchen participated in the conversation as much as she could. The women talked about men, children, gossip, and anti-aging skin care, while the men talked about everything else. No one talked about politics. Yuchen used to be interested in how these friends, some of whom had never left China, thought about what she could only watch from across the ocean. She worried that her idea of home was becoming imaginary, skewed by Western media, drifting away from reality. On occasions like tonight, she used to try to find out what was actually going on in China, but she had stopped bothering since a few trips ago. The Chinese news was so censored that most people didn’t even know what she knew. Or if they did, they didn’t care—what was actually going on in China was exactly this: regular people drinking, singing, having a great time, without giving a shit about what the outside world fixated on. In her friends, she saw what her life could have been if she had never left: Though stress-filled and never satisfied, they lived in a comfortable, insulated cocoon where the idea of unadulterated happiness, though small and evanescent, was easily attainable—eating at a favorite restaurant, getting drunk with old friends, or singing that one special song at karaoke. The China she would have lived in and the China she watched from afar existed simultaneously. Only she was outside of both.

Yuchen’s karaoke go to finally came on, her favorite Karen Mok. A friend handed her the mic. She hadn’t heard or even thought of the song for years, but its lyrics poured out of her lips without her looking at the prompter. Instead, her eyes were drawn to the singer’s face in the music video. While Yuchen aged in front of the screen, Karen Mok stayed twenty-seven. It was as if years had gone by in a second, while time also stood still. In 1999, the year the song was released, Karen Mok hadn’t yet known that she would end up marrying her first love, whom she met at seventeen, the age when Yuchen, too, first loved a boy. Unbeknownst to the boy then, Yuchen had already decided to attend an American college, not understanding that she could never truly return again. After the murmuring verse came the melodic chorus, a ballad that everyone swayed their bodies to, joining in to sing, opening and closing their mouths in unison. Yuchen heard her own voice disappearing into the group. For a moment she was seventeen once more, the class flower who safely, effortlessly, belonged.

As she walked back from the bathroom, Yuchen saw the boy who guided her earlier in the hallway, marching around the corner and coming to a stop in front of Room C10. He put his hand on the doorknob and turned around, searching for his lost guest with an impatient frown. His bow tie was now loose and crooked, and Yuchen thought she would help him fix it if she could ever get a word in with him, but she forgot all about his bow tie when she realized who the boy was waiting for.

It was difficult to say if she saw Lichuan first or the other way around. She was already replaying this moment in her head, like Wong Kar-Wai in In the Mood for Love, repeating and varying the sequence of Maggie Cheung and Tony Leung, pacing to the rhythm of pensive beats and a crying violin, making their way toward each other in cramped alleys and narrow pathways. As Lichuan approached the boy, Yuchen watched herself walking toward Lichuan at the speed of sixty frames per second as if for an eternity. Lichuan’s hand replaced the boy’s and held the door to Room C10 closed. He said something to the boy and the boy turned away in haste, tightening his bow tie as he ran past Yuchen without noticing her.

But this wasn’t a movie, and Yuchen hadn’t rehearsed what to say in this scene. As much as she was curious to see Lichuan tonight, a part of her knew that perhaps it was better not to spoil their memory of each other. She wouldn’t mind if he remembered her always as the confident, careless, colorful seventeen-year-old, and not who she was today, a person she could barely describe. Before she could stop herself, her arms opened, reaching toward him for an embrace. Her head landed on his shoulder, lightly. He smelled faintly like the boy she had loved but also completely unrecognizable. There was a pause before Lichuan put his arms around her, hugging her meekly, like she was a fragile plant. She awkwardly patted him on the back and stepped away, standing just a centimeter closer than her usual friendly remove.

Guess that’s how people greet each other in the US? Lichuan spoke first, amused.

I wasn’t thinking, Yuchen said, laughing at herself. We hug every one, like people you meet for the first time. It’s pretty weird. Well, not we—Americans do. A lot of hugging.

I’m glad you didn’t end up in France—I’m not doing that double-kiss stuff.

They shared another laugh. Lichuan’s features looked individually familiar, but unfamiliar when put together. Yuchen wondered if he was thinking the same about her.

Should we go in? he suggested.

Yuchen didn’t want to.

How do you think everyone will react if we walk in together? she asked.

I only came tonight because Xiaohan said you were coming, Lichuan said.

You think she was trying to set us up?

You’re still married, no?

Yuchen waited a beat too long before answering.

I am. You? Seeing anyone?

Neither of them posted frequently on social media. Without having seen a wedding photo or marriage certificate, Yuchen assumed Lichuan was, at least, not yet legally bound.

Xiaohan did try to set me up with someone, he said. Nice of her.

How did it go?

I’m pretty sure the woman was allergic to me.

What happened to us? Every girl in this room probably had a crush on you in high school. Yuchen counted in her head. Three of them I know for a fact.

Everyone at that age just liked who everyone else did, Lichuan said. Noticing the change in Yuchen’s expression, he revised, You and I were different, I think.

Everyone at that age thought they were different, Yuchen said.

Lichuan was quiet for a moment. Yuchen couldn’t tell what he was thinking, but she liked the way he was looking at her, so she welcomed his gaze, wishing he could read her mind.

How about we ditch this reunion? Lichuan finally proposed.

As if answering a magic spell, the door to Room C10 opened from the inside. Xiaohan materialized within the frame, startling them both.

Here you are, Yuchen! Xiaohan cheered. I was going to look for you but I see that someone else found you first.

She held the door agape, inviting Yuchen and Lichuan to cross the threshold together. As they made their entrance, someone whistled, and Yuchen thought she saw the roots of Lichuan’s ears turning rosy.

The night ended at half past midnight, when half the group was inappropriately hammered, and the other half barely able to chaperone their friends to their respective partners, who would help their spouses into the apartment with complaints but care for them all the same. Ten years ago, these old friends would have continued on to a nightclub on Workers’ Stadium West Road. Even five years ago, they’d feast at a twenty-four-hour barbecue restaurant or clear their heads at a teahouse by discussing matters they could only speak of in the darkest hours of the night. Miserably sober, Yuchen took charge of typing everyone’s addresses into their car service apps. As she shoved slurring friends into back seats, she imagined them, like the ghosts in a Pac-Man game, dispersing in all directions within Beijing’s six thousand square miles.

After a series of long, soul-baring, yet restrained and occasionally maudlin goodbyes, Lichuan and Yuchen were finally left on their own, standing side by side in a warm pool of street light. Beyond meeting the adult Lichuan, Yuchen hadn’t imagined the night any further, how they might spend the slow and mercurial hours between the previous day and the next, a period that was usually expended in dreams and didn’t require any planning. Neither of them was the person the other had once known, nor could they neatly fit into each other’s current life. What she wanted from him she did not know. But having him close made Yuchen smile, which she rarely did these days. The night was permissive, much less unforgiving than the daylight that was, surely and shortly, to come.

Yuchen started walking, and Lichuan followed. The street leading to the Third Ring Road was empty apart from cars occasionally whooshing by, clouds passing over, and trees and buildings quietly standing. They walked without aim but each step felt deliberate. 轧马路 (pressing the road), Yuchen thought of the Chinese idiom that meant walking without a destination in mind, as if the walk’s sole purpose were to iron out the sidewalk’s unevenness, to undo, to press against time. Years ago, pressing the road had been their favorite activity as young lovers, which allowed them privacy at no cost. Now it felt almost unnatural not to hold hands. Yuchen tucked hers into the pockets of her trench coat.

You said that you came to see me tonight. Why? she asked.

I wanted to see who you’ve grown to be.

Here I am. What do you think?

All night I was wondering if you’d be the same person if you’d stayed like the rest of us.

I’ve wondered that, too. But do I really seem that different?

In video games, you have multiple choices at any given juncture. You pick one, follow it through, but you can always go back to the same point and try another path.

Do you always get to a different ending, though?

Not always.

When did you get into game design?

At my first job after college. What does your husband do?

He’s a curator. For a small art museum.

What is a curator?

As Yuchen explained, she kept using English words, mostly nouns, whose Chinese translations, which she added for Lichuan’s sake, sounded nothing like what she meant. The more she talked about the world that she and her husband orbited, the farther away it felt from where she stood in this moment. She had felt the same way when she tried to explain to her husband what her childhood was like: the pressure-cooker school system, the mandatory political education, the forbidden teenage dating scene. She diligently translated herself back and forth, but the truest things about her always fell through the cracks. Lichuan nodded along, apologizing for his ignorance about all this art stuff.

What kind of photos do you take? he asked.

Yuchen trusted that Lichuan, unlike Xiaohan, asked out of genuine curiosity, but it was a question she never knew how to answer and that thus always annoyed her. How does an artist articulate or summarize their art when it is the very creation that fills the void of the inarticulable, the unsummarizable? One’s art is always changing, too, evolving with time, its maker, and the world. She considered telling Lichuan every project she’d ever done since grad school and every one of her inspirations and aspirations for the future. If only they had all the time in the world.

In art school, I chose photography because I found the space between what is objectively perceivable and what is not so fascinating. How one sees and is seen, Yuchen said. I was working on a project about border-crossing and trespassing, but I haven’t been able to make anything since we started IVF.

Isn’t there a lot of border-crossing and trespassing—so to speak—happening during the process of IVF?

Yuchen contemplated Lichuan’s question while he waited patiently, looking ahead at the freeway in the distance.

Right, we have borders within, Yuchen said, finally. And trespassing can happen there, too.

Trespassing can also be visible and invisible, Lichuan said. Like what you were saying.

You’ve always been a very good listener.

Your life must be good, Lichuan said, after a moment. Good enough for you two to want kids.

You don’t?

Did you see that video where a Shanghainese guy said, We are the last generation? It might sound extreme to say we shouldn’t have kids, but I could see his point.

My husband wants kids. I’m more ambivalent, but I think I’d be happy to have his kids. Our kids, Yuchen corrected herself. Is that un-feminist of me?

I think it means that you love him, Lichuan said. And that’s a good thing, no? Feminist or not.

In the American context, the theories and identity labels Yuchen constantly navigated tired and, in many cases, confused her. It was not that she doubted them; it was that she believed in them so firmly that she was unable to admit her own feelings, unable to stop performing for herself and others, unable to reconcile her own life with what she believed to be true. In front of Lichuan, she felt that she could strip off her costume and step out of that theater. To him, her feelings didn’t have to be right or wrong. They were just feelings.

With silence, she answered him in the affirmative. The quiet between them was delicate but comfortable—comforting. They carried it gingerly as they pressed another stretch of the street. At the end of the block sat the freeway bridge, which, as they approached, loomed larger and larger in an extraterrestrial way, and Yuchen felt so wonderfully small, that she was a small human with small problems.

When they reached the intersection, Yuchen followed Lichuan into a convenience store, where Lichuan remembered her favorite ice cream flavor and she picked out his favorite cigarettes. The soda they had both loved had been discontinued, and they spent five minutes comparing and discussing which drink in the fridge would have the most similar taste.

After they exited the convenience store, the cashier, who worked a much more demanding job during the day, roused himself from the sleepiness that shrouded the register. He watched Yuchen and Lichuan sit down on the curb outside, Lichuan smoking Jiaozi, Yuchen scooping rum-flavored Baxy, then swapping. He noticed a shy distance between them and deduced that they were only early in what would soon be an ardent and enduring romance, which had yet to come by in his own twenty-four years of loving and unloving. They shared things that made them happy, glanced at each other when the other wasn’t paying attention, and periodically laughed without being self-conscious of the unflattering shapes their faces contorted into. The young cashier wished to love and be loved as such. He kept observing Yuchen and Lichuan, standing in the loneliness of an empty store, until the next customer came through the automatic door, the chime dinging, startling him as though the light in the cinema had been switched on in the middle of a movie.

The next morning, Yuchen opened her eyes to blinding sunlight. She sat up and caught herself in the mirror on the opposite wall. She didn’t recognize the room or the side of her body. The reflection looked like a painting—yes, that Edward Hopper she first saw at the old Whitney, in which a lady in pink sits in bed, facing a luminous window. She had admired how the bright patches made the shadows appear darker by contrast, which was the case for what she was seeing in Lichuan’s mirror now, the curtains carelessly drawn, leaving an opening of unwavering light on her. She pointed her phone at the mirror and took a photo. Zooming in on the picture, she noticed Lichuan’s sleeping face in the corner of the mirror. Yuchen repositioned herself to crop him out, and took a few more shots.

His bedroom smelled like fabric softener and the dust in Beijing’s air. On the modest bedside couch, a closed-eyed Lichuan turned onto his side, his hands touching in front of his chest as if for a prayer. Yuchen tiptoed away from the bed and crouched down next to him. She pressed the shutter to take close-ups of his stubbled chin, his fingers curling toward his heart, his legs hugging a checkered blanket, and his feet, exposed and pressing into each other for warmth. She hovered her hand above his hair and traced its shape in the air, remembering last night, the embrace they lingered in, neither of them speaking, standing in the middle of this room, which had been dark but was now disquietingly bright, the night on the cusp of seeing a new day. In each other’s arms, a wordless exchange took place. Together they had pondered the many things they could have done, and concluded that they needed none of it to spoil what they already had. Yuchen couldn’t exactly recollect who let go of whom first, who made the bed, and how she ended up sleeping in Lichuan’s faded Abbey Road t-shirt.

She did remember that when she wasn’t able to fall asleep right away, she listened to the silence intently, searching for clues of Lichuan’s breaths growing slower and heavier, rising and falling like ocean waves. The Sound of Waves—the name of a Yukio Mishima novel came to her. Yuchen had read it at the age when she and Lichuan would have done anything to spend a night consumed by their desires. She remembered being baffled by the climactic scene in the book, in which the man and the woman, who were deeply in love, chose not to consummate their relationship despite having the opportunity. Lying in Lichuan’s bed without him, Yuchen felt that, nearly two decades later, she, too, could begin to swim toward that expanse beyond physical union, toward that uncharted territory, uncertain of what waited for her on the other shore.

Her phone rang and she hurried out to the hallway to answer.

Hey, baby, she said in English. It’s fine. I’m up already.

She paused to listen. When she turned around, Lichuan was standing by the bedroom door.

Yeah, my mom is taking me to the acupuncturist today, she said into the phone.

Yuchen looked at Lichuan and looked away, turning her back to him.

Which spicy sauce? she said. Oh, it’s in a ziplock bag, probably somewhere toward the back of the fridge.

She could hear glass jars knocking against each other and imagined her husband at their kitchen counter, attempting to solve the puzzle created by her absence.

I have to go get ready, she said. Okay, love you, too. Bye, Harry.

Yuchen turned around, demure despite not wanting to be. She faced Lichuan like an actor at an audition, awaiting the verdict from the director.

Your husband’s name is Harry, Lichuan said.

Yes. Have I never said his name before?

Love you—Lichuan echoed, and then switched back to Mandarin—is so much easier to say in English. We never say it like that in Chinese.

But there are many more ways to mean it without saying those exact words. Think ancient poetry.

When you talk in English, you sound so . . . He paused to look for words. So grown-up.

They stood opposite each other in the narrow space between the bedroom and the living room, a transitional corridor that was neither here nor there. The light from the bedroom backlit a halo around Lichuan. He was right, Yuchen thought. English was the language of her adulthood, just as the US was the country she had only known as a grown-up. She had left who she used to be where it belonged, in Beijing, in her mother tongue, with her first love, her high school friends. But which one of her was with Lichuan now? Whoever she would become, why couldn’t she carry that old self, whom Lichuan had generously returned to her, forward? In the days and nights that had yet to pass through her, in the words that were yet to be spoken, she was free—free to choose, free to fail, free to no longer be who she was supposed to be.

I saw these yulan flowers on Chang’an Avenue yesterday. Do you remember them from somewhere? she asked.

Yulan . . . there are a lot of them in Beijing.

Lichuan walked to the bedroom window and cracked it open. A gust of air caressed his hair. Yuchen followed him back into the sun. Lichuan faced her suddenly.

Yes, our high school’s little garden had yulan flowers, he said. We used to sit there after a day of classes.

Yuchen’s lost memory resurfaced. Lichuan didn’t know that before they were together, Yuchen had often sat in the garden alone. She had liked it the most in the winter, when she felt that the bare branches and dry soil waited faithfully for Earth to travel closer to the sun again. When she sat there, she felt that she was waiting with them. At that age, she had thought she had endless hours to wait, waste. Every day was endless, time was endless.

I really like the smell of them, Yuchen said. It softens me somehow.

I think you said the exact same thing when we were seventeen.

On the cab ride home, Chang’an Avenue looked different in the cloudless morning. Without the lights that contoured the architecture in the night, Tiananmen Square, formidably huge and meticulously surveilled, displayed the kind of human power that should have only belonged to nature. Landmarks were made to withstand time, an atemporal creation, the opposite of the living. Yuchen opened the window like she had the night before. When the wind grazed her face, she felt a pulsing at the center of her forehead, where Lichuan had kissed her before they said goodbye. As she rubbed the spot with her fingertips, she saw the yulan flowers again, blooming against the redbrick walls. She couldn’t smell them across the sprawling boulevard, only the unpleasant odor of car exhaust.

Shifu, can we stop for a second?

The taxi driver glanced at Yuchen in the rearview mirror, alarmed.

Are you kidding me? Guniang, this is Chang’an Avenue, he said dismissively in his Beijing accent. Can’t park here.

What about the side street? Just around the corner.

The taxi driver sighed, signaling for a right turn.

Just half a minute, I promise, Yuchen said.

Right after making the turn, the taxi driver stepped on the brake. As she bolted out of the car, Yuchen heard the driver scolding her, irritated, telling her to make it quick. She ran in the direction they came from, unmade the turn back onto Chang’an Avenue, and kept running until she reached the edge of the yulan trees.

She stepped under the branches as if before a threshold. The flowers shielded the sun overhead, the white petals trembling like the wings of idling butterflies. She had run here on an impulse, but now that she was so close to the flowers, she didn’t know what else she was to do. Yuchen took a long breath, inhaling a distant memory. For as long as yulan’s fragrance stayed within her, she was seventeen and thirty-six at the same time, her heart spacious enough for both Harry and Lichuan, and she, dissolving like water, in flux between being Chinese and outside Chinese. She exhaled. At the beginning of the next inhale, she started walking.

Halfway back to the taxi, Yuchen made an abrupt U-turn. Despite the taxi driver yelling behind her, she started running again. When she returned to the yulan trees, she first looked around and instantly identified a few plain clothes police officers. She waited until no one was watching. Then Yuchen rose onto the balls of her feet, extended her arms upward as if reaching for a hug, and broke the tip of a branch that split into two flowers. Holding it close to her in one hand and covering it with the other, she hurried back to the taxi.

In the car, she repeated a string of apologetic and grateful expressions.

No need, guniang, the taxi driver said. It’s not like I would leave without being paid first.

Yuchen smiled, appreciating the taxi driver’s candor. She looked at the stolen yulan flowers in her lap, raised them to her nose, sniffed, and put them back down, then looked at them some more, twisting the branch, brushing the petals. When she had done enough looking, she moved her eyes to the outside, her people, her city, beginning another day. Today she was one of them, participating in their cycle of living.

While Yuchen gazed outward, the yulan flowers remained looking at her. Among all the people they had greeted on Chang’an Avenue, Yuchen was the first to claim them, but they had chosen her as much as she them. They had recognized the longing in her eyes when she had bared herself in the shade they created. Knowing that leaving with Yuchen would cut short their already brief lives, and that they would meet their end far from where they were born, they accepted, nonetheless, Yuchen’s intimate invitation to a fleeting union. As they traveled down Chang’an Avenue for the first time, they became her, as she became them, the border between them disintegrating, and, slowly, disappearing.

The post Her Life in Seattle Doesn’t Translate to Beijing appeared first on Electric Literature.

She is the hairiest girl in North America. This is why he sold all his belongings, hitched five rides on five different vehicles with wheels, and arrived at her doorstep with a speech so polished she couldn’t think of a way to say no. She cleared out the corner of her closet that usually housed her striped scarf collection—a perfectly sized nook for the curled-up body of a full-grown man and his loom. He sleeps there, during the few hours of night when she is stillest, but mostly he stands beside her, his fingers poised for collection. 

In the morning, she rolls out of bed like a tumbleweed. She crouches in front of her floor-length mirror. He crouches behind her. She sprays down all the hair on her body, then begins to lay it back into place. He opens the front pocket of his button-up coat, which he fills with the hairs that fall as she grooms herself. She uses a brush—the kind for horses—to perfect the aerodynamic look that she has been told “suits her figure well.” When she is done, he scrapes and bends the brush until a flat pancake of hair drops onto his lap. Excited, he adds it to his pocket. 

At the coffee shop, he sucks the foam rosetta off the top of her latte. She doesn’t like the texture. He loves the art. She swallows one strand of hair. It curls around her tonsil. Before she can cough it up, he reaches two elegant fingers down her throat, extracts it, shakes off the wetness, and adds it to his pocket. 

All day at work and on the bus and between being at work and being on the bus, she plays with her hair. She stretches and twirls the curls growing from her scalp. Scratches at the fuzz on her kneecaps. Twists the strands hanging from her armpit. All day at her work and on the bus and between her being at work and being on the bus, he catches and collects and then arranges the hairs in his pockets. Long hairs for the inseam, thick ones for the waistband, fine for the hem. 

In the evening, after she showers, he slips his fingers down the drain to dislodge a clump of hair left behind. He has a tool to reach where his fingers cannot, and he operates it deftly, maneuvering it down the pipe, then activating its pincers. The drain belches then swallows the water formerly trapped by the clump. He meticulously rinses the soap from every strand, before sorting them into the piles next to his loom. 

She brushes and blow-dries. He catches. She settles into bed. He collects the hairs that drift into the air as she tosses and turns. When her body finally gives into sleep, he retires to his nook, and takes inventory. Before he rests, he glances up at all the skirts hanging above him. A constellation of inspiration. 

They continue like this for months. 

Three weeks after he has left her and one day after Easter, she walks to CVS for discounted candy. As she is choosing between peanut butter bunnies and marshmallow eggs, she glances down and sees it. She smiles knowingly and repeats to herself the first words he ever spoke to her: “I am going to be the first man to wear a hair skirt on the cover of Vogue, and I need your help.”

Stem of Thorns

At fourteen, my body grew its disagreement from the inside out. When I had finally convinced myself it wouldn’t happen, a stem of thorns lurched from my belly, shivered when it felt the cool air settle around it, then curled its long arm down my leg and rooted there. My father shrieked and wailed and blamed himself and kicked me out of the house. It’s not because I don’t love you, it’s just that, well, you know, your younger siblings . . . he broke off and got real quiet. Then caved: Steve said it could be contagious. Steve was just a man. He was not an expert. 

On Facebook, I found three others, and we all moved into an apartment together. The apartment had big windows that made the whole place smell like warmth. I got a job as a figure model for an artist who sold her drawings to people who were fascinated by my unique look. She made lots of money. I made just enough to pay rent. With the help of my roommates, I learned how to prune myself and photosynthesize and ignore my father’s phone calls. By spring, all of my limbs were in bloom. 

On Sundays, when most of the world took the day off to pray or pretend to pray or watch their children play baseball, we gathered. In what we called The Garden, for obvious reasons, we picked and squished each other’s aphids and exchanged pollen and gossiped about our bosses. 

Most often, we were left alone in The Garden. We had one place, and they had all the others. 

But one week, as I was bending toward the sun, I heard footsteps, then silence, then the sound of air being sucked and compressed through a pair of nostrils. You smell so . . . floral. The torso of the woman behind me was hinged at a ninety-degree angle from the hips, her nose stationed at the entrance of one of my buds, inhibiting my epinasty.

She didn’t say hello. 

I turned to face her, and the wind blew her hair toward me. She smelled like wet denim. I just love the look of it, like, see, she ran her hand down her arm’s smooth skin-casing, We’re so much less interesting. I half nodded, half shook my head, unsure how to respond or otherwise react. She took it as a sign to keep talking. Oh, my mother would just hate you. She opened her fists toward me and then scrunched them back shut, like one would do to make a baby giggle. I let out an uncomfortable grunt-laugh. She’s always going on about your smell and how much of an intrusion it is. She claims it gives her headaches, says that’s the first step to . . . catching it. 

Certain her mother had never been close enough for a smell-induced headache, I made a face that said, That’s crazy, that must be really hard for you, which was the response she wanted. 

She plucked a flower from my arm and tucked it into her hair. 

The flower died by the time she got home, or fell on the way, but the story of her day of experimentation lasted her for years.

The post Hairballs Are My Love Language appeared first on Electric Literature.

Everybody on my father’s side had assimilated in what I’d call the cultural sense: they’d stopped talking Jewish. My father and his progenitors, they put away their deep borough accents, buried their surety of doom, their wryness and their rye. It wasn’t a rejection of god or the Torah, neither of which held any sway, but about not sounding like the kind of person certain other people don’t like. Only the prepubescent Hasids knew to stop me with their lulav and etrog. I could’ve rebuked them, could’ve told them my face in fact belonged mostly to my Protestant mother. But I secretly loved their knowing. 

My daughter did too. Unlike me, though, it wasn’t a secret. 

Bunny, at seven, dressed every day like she was auditioning for Fiddler on the Roof, mixing orange plaid dresses with woolen tights the color of lichen and the ancient pilling cardigans of a babushka. Bunny sometimes wrapped her hair in one of the old silk scarves I’d inherited from my grandmother, Bunny’s thick dark bangs and both ears sticking out the sides, making her look bedraggled and forlorn, one that was both feral and matronly, a suffering sort of girl from another time. When the boys with their payot asked us if we were Jewish, she didn’t lie the way I did; she said, louder than seemed wise, “Yes!” 

On a Thursday, in the small kitchen of our Park Slope apartment, she produced a first-grade worksheet from the bottom of her backpack.

“Bunny, I can’t read this.” Bunny drew on everything, including her own skin, the tops of her hands, and her homework. She’d obscured the directive and questions with a long potato face, arched eyebrows, flat black line of a mouth, and swirling hypnotized eyes. It didn’t seem to matter to her that the artistry was unremarkable; it didn’t seem to be about that.

“I’m the one who has to read it,” she said, snatching the paper from me and squinting at it. “Interview an elder relative. There are eight questions. Who can I talk to?” 

“Grandma Shelly is an elder relative.” 

Bunny shook her head. “She’s not old.”  

Point taken. Nat’s mother dyed her long hair red and got up and down from the floor faster than I did. 

“There has to be someone better.”

Like a whorl of reflux from a forgotten meal, up rose my great aunt Lillian, my grandmother’s sister-in-law. Unassimilated, openly judgmental, Socialist, divorced. As bold in her unpleasantness as my own child was about wanting to have been born in another time.   

“How old is she?” Bunny demanded.  

I calculated. “Over ninety.”  

Bunny stood reverently still. “Have I ever met her?” 

I shook my head. In fact, I hadn’t really talked to Lillian in two decades. As family lore demanded, I remembered Aunt Lillian as monstrous. Until I brought her up to Bunny, I’d forgotten that I also remembered her fondly—during my childhood visits, she always seemed pleased to see me, interested in whatever words I could eke out, and remarked on certain promising things about me (“Sadie, you have the posture of Philippe Petit”)—at which point the Lillian in my mind began to sway between an unfiltered pariah and a wry, intelligent old lady who could see right through me. This amorphous hovering, like one of those haunted Halloween portraits that turn the living into skeletons or zombies when seen from certain angles, was perhaps even more frightening. I suddenly regretted suggesting a visit to someone who probably had every right to loathe me as much as my family did her. 

“Was she in the Holocaust?” 

Bunny had recently become intrigued by the Holocaust, had just last week asked a stooped old man in line at the grocery store if he’d been in it. 

I shook my head. “You know what, though? I think she could be losing it, mentally. Who knows if she could even answer any of your questions?” 

Bunny ignored me. “Is she nice?” 

“No,” I said, scooping crumbs and an apple core from the bowels of Bunny’s backpack and dropping them into the compost. “She’s pretty mean.”  

“That’s OK,” Bunny said quickly. “I can handle it.” 

Already, our hypothetical visit had turned into a dare.

“Don’t we have a birthday party this weekend?” 

“We have to go see her, Mom. 

I should’ve just said no. I wanted to. But arguing with Bunny always depleted me, which was why I mostly did what my husband did, and avoided it. 

Those dark discerning eyes blinked curtly up at me, waiting for my acquiescence. If we were really going to do this, however, to see this woman my parents wouldn’t see, this woman who didn’t really like my parents either, we would need to bring some buffers. 

“And Milt can’t come,” Bunny declared.

I closed my eyes. “Your brother is three. Where’s he going to go?” 

“Just leave him with Daddy,” she pressed.  

Daddy. Everyone liked Nat; he was warm and relaxed and deeply tolerant, for practical reasons (he worked in real estate). My mother would joke that I must’ve had a perfect childhood because I’d married someone so much like my own father. And I would joke that she was right. (In reality, Nat was much harder for me to talk to than my dad, and, yet, much softer with the children, quicker to solve their problems, to break a rule if it meant they’d be happy, a practice that had become the family way.)  

Aunt Lillian might not have censored herself in front of me beginning back when I was Bunny’s age, but she was unlikely to do her worst in front of easy, charming Nat.  

“If we go, Daddy’s coming. And so’s Milt,” I said as I washed my crumby fingers. “But you should know Aunt Lillian isn’t, she isn’t like your grandparents. At all.”  

“OK. How?”  

“Well. She’s not a fan of what Israel is…is doing.” 

Bunny looked at me. “Neither are you.” 

“Right. But I don’t yell about it.” 

“Grandma doesn’t yell about it.” 

“Well, Grandma sent money to the Israeli army. Aunt Lillian would yell at her for that, if Grandma was on my side of the family.” 

I waited for Bunny to say something. “I’m not saying she’s wrong to yell. Maybe I should yell more.” 

Bunny looked absently past me. 

“Mommy,” she said quietly, her soft palm on my arm, “will she like me?”  

I covered her hand with mine. We were on different pages. As usual. “I don’t know.”  

Bunny nodded, her upper lip rising gravely. “I’m a lot.”  

I was the one who’d told her she could be a lot. But I’d done it less in horror than in wonder. Last year, in kindergarten, Bunny insisted on carrying two large tote bags filled with dress-up clothes and her favorite books to school every day. She said she needed them. Her teacher told me she’d rarely open the bags, but if another student so much as peeked at them, Bunny would instantly panic, sobbing quietly but unabatedly. This teacher was the gentle kind and always shuttled Bunny to the quiet corner, along with the bags, to recover from the affront. 

This year, the totes and the meltdowns had been replaced by three separate reports of Bunny calling the same two girls sheep for copying all of each other’s classwork and, at the conclusion of her rants, spitting on the ground next to their shoes. 

“They lie for each other, Mommy! They lie.”  

 Her conviction exasperated me, but I made a point of telling her the opposite. And I wasn’t lying. Exasperated or not, I really was in awe of her.  

“So is she,” I admitted. “Which is maybe why we should just call her instead of visiting—”

“Actually, I don’t care if she likes me,” she announced. “Please let’s go. Before she dies. We have to go before she’s dead!” 

On the drive down the Belt, I explained to everyone about my great aunt Lillian’s estrangement from our family.  

Lillian had delivered an impromptu speech at the Bar Mitzvah of her grandson, my cousin Weston, twenty years back, in a sun-drenched Humanistic Northern California synagogue with more windows than walls. In what had sounded to me at the time like jest, she’d called her ex-husband, my Great Uncle Julius—a former union organizer turned highly paid public speaker and consultant—a sellout, a capitalist, a traitor. He’d traded the ethos of her kind of socialism, the kind that required unending struggle, for what she considered an excess of comfort and security. This was how my parents put it to me anyway. She’d called Julius as much before, of course, but never in front of so many non-Jews (Weston’s father was Chinese and an atheist). 

In the ensuing years, I learned from my parents that Lillian’s daughter—my father’s first cousin—had blamed her mother for her father’s headaches, for his ulcerous guilt, but also for the incessant unstitching of her own self-worth. Lillian made her question herself and now she couldn’t stop. After the party that evening, Lillian’s daughter followed in the example of her long-suffering father and went on strike. They stopped speaking to her. My father and the rest of the cousins, company men all, did the same. 

At the Bar Mitzvah, I remember the wobbly buzz—nauseating and electric—that I got in my stomach at Lillian’s performance, her exacting tone, and the way my whole extended family went immediately on edge, some stiff, some stiffly smiling, and others, like sweet, pubescent Weston, dopey next to her in his baggy suit, opening his mouth wide and then quickly covering it in an attempt not to laugh.  

Great Aunt Lillian was so angry. 

But she was also not speaking nonsense. 

I remember her saying, in front of everyone, that she could not abide her own kin taking so much more than their fair share. I remember her looking right at her ex-husband and saying, “What happened to you, honey? What happened?” 

Occasionally, I’d wonder if it would be me who’d bridge the gap, call her up, make a visit, make amends. 

It wasn’t. Well, it hadn’t been.     

Lillian lived in a limestone apartment building in Gravesend. She’d been kind but terse over the phone, suggesting we come any day that suited us, that she had nothing on the calendar anymore. 

“Does she look like Grandma?” Bunny asked. 

“Kind of,” I told her. “She’s little. Always wears red lipstick. Oh my god, why are we doing this?” 

Bunny groaned and Milt shouted, “I don’t know!” 

I felt Nat’s calloused fingers on my earlobe. I bristled at the contact, shaken from my anxious clench, and then relished it. Nat glanced at the speedometer as I barreled past Staten Island’s humble skyline across the water because going faster might make this all be over sooner. 

“You think she’s renovated since you last visited?” mused Nat. “These longtime owners, they die and then they sell for less than they could because nobody’s touched it for forty years. It’s a shame.”  

“She rents, Nat.” 

He looked at me aghast. “A renter? OK. Got it. Forty years renting.” He whistled, seemed to consider the dark flat New York Bay outside his window as he did the math before looking down at his phone. 

“What are you going to ask her, Bun?” I asked. How my aunt could not be even a little charmed by this odd child, I couldn’t imagine. Through the rearview mirror, I watched Bunny’s eyelids drop to keep me out of whatever she was planning. 

“You’ll see.” 

I imagined my own questions: Were you ever in a bread line? Did you go by yourself to the March on Washington and what kind of shoes did you wear? What did you mean when you asked Uncle Julius what happened to him? Do you ever wonder what happened to me? 

There were so many parking spots outside her building, I worried we’d missed a city evacuation. 

“Here we are!” I called out brightly. 

We rode the birdcage elevator up and turned down a dim hallway at whose eerie end stood the object of our visit. 

“And here I am! Ta-da!” Lillian leaned against the doorjamb in a red silk shirt and black slacks.

I’d last seen her, from afar, at my grandmother’s funeral, fifteen years ago. Her skin had been olive then, her bob bottle-dye black, smudged at the hairline. It was a shock to see her now, hair completely white and jaggedly orbiting a face once severe, now mottled as a gratin, her small body bent across the shoulders in a resolute way. She smelled like bottled lily and orange juice. 

I nudged my resistant brood forward. 

“Hello,” I sang, but Milt seemed to recognize something in my tremolo. At three, he was as tiny as Bunny was tall, as silly as she was defiant and stern. Not so silly then, though, as he wrapped himself around my thigh, which itself was wrapped in black tights, his untended fingernails digging in. I felt my pantyhose rip just below my butt. 

Only pausing for a second, I continued on, my flannel dress, tight on top, swung loose over my hips, keeping the tear hidden.

Her eyes were like lights flashing as she blinked up at me. It was impossible to tell, because she’d not yet spoken, not yet smiled, how she felt about us, whether she was pleased we’d at last arrived or dismayed we’d gone through with it.

“Hello, my darling,” she purred at last, that nasal, wizened cat voice tossing itself over me like a fur coat. Three of her teeth were missing, one near the front, the other two, in back, creating airless open tunnels. She reached out to hug me, one of her fat gold earrings cold against my neck. “Sadie.” 

“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry,” I said, my eyes going blurry. 

“Take your shoes off, doll,” she said, letting go of me roughly, as though it was I who was holding on too tight. 

The children hurried in behind her, Nat guiding them with a hand on each shoulder. 

“And you must be Nat,” she said to him. 

Nat looked behind him and then at her. “I guess I must. Wonderful to meet you, Lillian. You’re a legend. According to Sadie.” 

Lillian seemed pleased to hear it, her mouth twitching. 

“Well, look at this bootlicker you got here, Sadie.”  

Nat chuckled.  

Lillian took our bland bouquet of coats and carried them down a hallway and out of sight.

Her place was just as I remembered: the bulky gold and brown brocade sofa flanking the wall beside us where I’d been photographed asleep against my mother’s arm, and above it, a window just as wide, its beige doctor’s office blinds half open. On the smooth white horseshoe coffee table were cut glass bowls filled with the peanut M&Ms, pistachios in their shells, and plastic-wrapped sesame candy that’d drawn a molar out of my mouth when I was in fifth grade. Opposite the sofa, to our right, sat the low black lacquered credenza my cousins and I got screamed at for smudging, a bulky television on top, its screen wiped clean. 

A matching black China cabinet swathed the entire far wall, inside of which were all of Lillian’s Hummels. My grandmother had had them too, and though I’d never once touched them, I’d badly wanted to. They weren’t quite dolls to me, but tiny emotive creatures contained in porcelain. Lillian had maidens, mostly, in various states of reverie, and a bespectacled pharmacist, a gaunt rosy-cheeked rabbi, a blonde boy holding a blob of balloons in primary colors. It was the rabbi I’d coveted, so tired had I grown of my blithe yellow-haired dolls with their shiny dresses and empty eyes. Mightn’t he change our games in some deep, unknowable way, say vaguely important things like my great uncle, maybe, or snipe cleverly like Lillian herself, but I didn’t have the guts to ask to hold him in my own hands, was afraid I’d seem weird. This? She’d have wrinkled her nose at me. Him you want?

On the highest shelf, a shelf I’d never been tall enough to see before, was a black and white photograph, the only photo in the cabinet. It was Lillian at Bunny’s age, sitting primly between her father, a narrow-faced bald man, and mother, a somber woman with dark hair piled on the top of her head, a woman who was probably the age I was now. 

When Lillian returned, Bunny pushed her brother aside.

“Hi, Aunt Lillian. I’m Bunny. Your great-great niece.” 

“Me too!” sang Milt. 

“Oh my god, Sadie.” Lillian let her mouth hang open as she stared at Milt.

“The eyelashes! That chin, oh my god. Do you see it? Is it just me? This child is gorgeous. He’s Julius. He’s a tiny Julius.”  

I summoned Julius’s gleaming hairless head, the black hairs wafting out of his ears, the curl of his upper lip. “Oh. Yeah.”  

Lillian looked at me, aghast. “No one’s ever told you that?” 

I stroked the orange paisley scarf wrapped around Bunny’s dark hair. “No,” I said, stupidly. For a moment, we all waited for her to say who Bunny looked like.

Lillian bent at the waist and leaned close to my expectant daughter. “My darling. You know, looks aren’t everything.” 

I gasped. I closed my eyes a second; I didn’t want to look down to see what this had done to Bunny and for good reason; when I opened them, I saw her little chin flat against her chest, eyes on the floor. She was trying very hard not to cry. 

There was a sob. Bunny was crying into her hands. 

“Oh look what I did!” Lillian smacked her lips and shook her head. “Listen, as I’ve always said,” Lillian continued, waving one bony blue-veined finger at me, “never trust anyone with a simple nose.”

She had always said that. And I’d listened. I’d lived it, unable to take seriously every milquetoast idiot with a nose of no consequence. The aphorism had sounded profound to me as a child, as though it were truthful enough to root out the bad from the good, but now that she’d just called Bunny plain to her face, I felt only angry and embarrassed, embarrassed I’d crossed the threshold at all. 

Bunny, recovered but splotchy-cheeked, dropped to her knees beside the coffee table and began pecking at the sweets.  

“Explain this bigotry?” called large-nosed Nat as he stacked the bagels and lox we’d brought onto the dining table. Nat’s parents, like mine, were mixed, but his paternal side was Protestant, and it was his Scottish father’s face he’d inherited. By the time I learned his last name, the day after we met at our mutual friend’s wedding, I’d already made assumptions about his schnoz and how much character it had afforded him. 

“Oh, it’s a joke!” Lillian laughed. “Can you not take one?” 

I ought to have ignored her and announced to the room how beautiful Bunny was. But I waited a moment too long.  

“You can’t trust people who’ve not had to suffer. I’m complimenting you, Nat!” 

Bunny was, of course, listening, her eyes darting between us, her head perfectly still, mouth closed as she whittled a peanut M&M down for parts. 

Lillian stood up, as fast as my mother-in-law. “Well, what’ve you brought me?” Peering at the table, she turned back. “Egg?” 

“Bunny loves an egg bagel,” I said. 

“Sadie, she got your mother’s goyim genes.” 

I got red and deflected. “You know my mother would never touch a carb.”     

When I was around ten and at my urging, my Presbyterian mother told me what we would do if it was ever too dangerous to be Jewish again. She lay beside me in my twin bed and made a list. Though I hadn’t the chutzpah to argue with her, I didn’t want what she was offering: her old last name, a bedroom at my uncle’s house in New Hampshire, church every Sunday. I imagined instead that I’d remain myself, outwitting everybody and surviving. 

Last month, Bunny asked me what we were supposed to do now about the people who were being taken from their homes, the immigrants, the new Jews, as she’d heard me call them once at home. I told her I had no idea, save for phone calls and protests. We had no spare room. I had no brother in New Hampshire. And anyway, they couldn’t hide in plain sight like I could’ve. Like I still can. 

Bunny marched toward the table with her folder. “Can I start?”    

“Just a second, doll,” Lillian said, on her heel. She slid into a seat, her narrow wisp of a body poking out from her chair like a tulip on the verge of a droop.  

Lillian’s round table was set with gold-rimmed melamine plates, pink and green patterned china cups and saucers, and white paper napkins folded into triangles. She’d folded them neatly, in preparation for us. In addition to our goyim bagels, we’d brought cream cheese and whitefish salad and nearly a pound of lox. From her own refrigerator, Lillian had set out three cans of Diet Cel-Ray, a tub of whipped butter, a jar of capers, and a plum tomato. 

Nat had one knee bent into the couch, surveying the street. “It’s interesting, Lillian,” he called to her without turning around. “You’re at the end of the hallway here but you don’t get a corner view. Does anybody? Some people must’ve combined two units, no?” 

She shook her head as she plucked a halved bagel from the bunch and dropped it with a smack on her plate. “Not allowed here. Every unit is the same.” 

I smiled. “That’s wonderful.” 

“Is it?” Lillian cocked her head at me. “I wouldn’t mind a corner view. Nat, maybe you can convince the authorities? Tell them you’re a professional!”  

He seemed to be considering this, even though it was clearly a joke. “You should live as well as you can for as long as you can.” 

This, Lillian ignored, reaching for the cream cheese.  

“Come eat,” I told Nat.  

Milt dropped a handful of M&Ms on his plate. 

“Not before dinner,” I said.   

My son reached to gather the collar of my dress in both hands, one button popping off its thread and plunking against the table with a sound only I heard. “Yes,” he whispered. I smiled, in thrall to his defiance. How could I not?   

“Let’s start with a bagel,” Nat said, sitting down beside him.   

Milt screamed. 

“Quiet!” Bunny commanded. “I’m about to start my interview!”  

Lillian spread her cream cheese slowly, forking the glistening lox and setting it on her bagel like a toupee, and on that, a tomato cap festooned with capers.

“Can she…” I looked at my Aunt Lillian, who nodded as she chewed.  

“What’s your full name?” Bunny held her folder open with one wavering hand. 

“Lillian Hanna Faust.” She pronounced her middle name, a name I’d never known was hers, the Yiddish way: HAH-nuh. 

“What year were you born?” 

“1931.” 

This whole thing could’ve been done over the phone. Why had I bent to Bunny? Why hadn’t we just sent Lillian these questions in a letter? I was sweating. When Bunny got to the last of her questions, we’d still be on the first halves of our bagels and then what would we talk about? 

“Where were you born?” 

“The Brownsville and East New York Hospital.” 

Bunny’s pen stopped moving part of the way through the word brown. 

“And that’s gone now, right?” I was stalling, giving her time to catch up. 

“Do you want me to write it?” Lillian offered Bunny with surprising tenderness, ignoring me. 

“She has to write it,” I said.   

Lillian made a face like I’d slapped her. “It’s not her fault I gave her half the alphabet.” 

“What did Bunny get?” Milt asked. 

“A joke,” Lillian said. 

“I want a joke!” 

“He can’t have a joke. It’s my interview!” Bunny cried. “I’m writing as fast as I can! They say I have to write it so, so, I’m writing it!” 

I watched as she mangled the letters, pressing down so hard, her pencil tip broke.

“I didn’t bring a sharpener,” she mumbled, her chest rising higher and the plates in her face looking like they might unbind themselves. 

I found a pen in my purse and handed it to her. She pushed it away.

“Have you eaten your bagel yet, Bun?” I asked, though I knew she hadn’t. 

“I wouldn’t blame you,” Lillian breathed into Bunny’s ear. “These bagels are absurd.” 

“She’s an absurd girl,” I said, though it didn’t come out in the silly way I wanted; it sounded dismissive. Cruel, even. To make up for my mistake, I placed my hand on Bunny’s and a seam tore below my left arm. 

“I never asked for these bagels,” Bunny said quietly. “You just think I like them because I ate them once.” 

This wasn’t true but I didn’t want to embarrass her (or myself) any more than I already had. 

“When you’re distracted,” I reminded Bunny, “you sometimes forget to eat. And when you don’t eat, you get upset.” 

“When I get a lecture, I get upset,” Lillian said out the side of her mouth. 

“And when you get upset,” I continued, ignoring Lillian, although, in a way, I was speaking to her too, “it’s hard to know…what to do to help.” 

Lillian sized me up from across the table.   

“Not to get off topic here,” Nat said, “but can I ask how well you get along with your neighbors?” 

“You may and we get along fine. I don’t speak to them and they don’t speak to me,” Lillian said. She gestured toward Bunny. “Does she know Jewish?”  

Yiddish, she meant. She meant also for me to perhaps not know what she meant, to have to ask, and I was relieved that I didn’t have to, that I did know, that she couldn’t take me for a fool, or for someone like my mother. 

I finished my glass of water and poured myself a Cel-ray. “Who would teach her?” 

Bunny raised her writing hand, pen tip pointing at the ceiling fan. Her bagel had a bite out of now. I hadn’t even seen her take it.  “How am I related to you?” Bunny asked. 

Lillian stood up and shuffled away from us. She hauled a folding stepladder from the front closet, tucking the whole of it inside, and climbing on. Nat ran over and put his hands out lest she topple. Her slacks made meditative shushing sounds I could hear from the table. 

“Can I do that for you, Lillian?” 

“You cannot!” she said, all but her stockinged calves out of view. 

Bunny waited silently, refusing to look at me, while Milt ducked away, for, I knew, more M&Ms, as Lillian reemerged with a thick red leather-bound album. 

She pushed her plate aside and opened to the first page. “I was married to him.”  

There was young Julius, his sharp chin, full cheeks, those mournful eyes. 

Bunny eyed her brother. “He does look like Milt.” 

Milt beamed and scrambled over to Lillian, who, without so much as a groan, lifted him into her lap. 

“Nice looking guy,” Nat said, peering at the photo from across the table. 

“He was!” Lillian snapped. “Nice, polite. He looked how he was.” 

“Nice people aren’t necessarily easy to be married to,” I said.  

“We’re not?” Nat opened his mouth in mock alarm. 

I rolled my eyes, smiled for my great aunt. “Aren’t I the nice one?” It was a joke and an aspiration. 

Nat patted my cheek and reached into his pocket for his phone, on which I could see a call from a colleague, silenced after some consideration. I felt my face get hot very fast. It wasn’t the tenderness I was responding to but the condescension. We both knew how much everybody liked him and we both knew how hard I worked to be liked. Just yesterday morning, at the park where I’d brought the kids early, Nat showed up a half hour later to cheers from three or four other fathers, and mothers, too, hovering around the play structure. I’d brought donuts, but it was Nat they were most pleased to see. 

Nat noticed all the effort I made to be liked: the times I brought cookies or pizza (or laughed loudly at somebody’s not-so-funny joke), and the times I was easygoing with the kids, letting them stay up late, resolving their arguments without yelling at either one. Nat noticed and he loved it; he told me so. But sometimes I wondered what he would tell me if I didn’t try so hard. Sometimes it was all I thought about. 

Lillian’s eyes flicked from me to Nat for a second, unreadable, then she seemed to drop away, inside herself again.     

“Julius was a doll,” Lillian said. “A hypocrite, but he was easy to come home to, he was an easy man.” 

“So what happened?” I asked. “Nobody got divorced back then, right?” 

“Not nobody! I drove him out of his mind. I questioned him, I doubted him, I told him he wasn’t interesting enough for me and so he said adieu!” 

No one could insult her worse than she could insult herself.  

“Adieu?” Milt peered up at her. “Is that a bad word?”

“It means goodbye,” muttered Bunny as she wrote.  

Lillian afforded Bunny no extra points for her knowledge, instead smoothing Milt’s hair with her manicured fingers, a stillness on her face I couldn’t read.

None of us spoke. 

Our master of ceremonies continued transcribing Lillian’s words, penmanship jagged but clear. Milt had slid off Lillian’s lap and gone under the table. Also under the table were Nat’s hands tapping a message into his phone, too busy with weekend work for another attempt at enticing my aunt to do an impossible apartment upgrade. Milt drifted into the living room, unburdening us. 

“He wanted to take care of me,” Lillian explained in a softer voice. “He wanted to give me things.”  

I nodded. 

“He said when I first met him that I was the smartest girl he’d ever known. Which wasn’t true, no student was I, but I loved hearing it. We’d gone to see The Valley of Decision with Gregory Peck and I think Julius thought of me like the maid, the sweet girl, the loyal girl, the good listener, you understand? I liked that version of me too except she didn’t exist. He wanted me to say it was alright the way he wanted more for himself than the fellows he was negotiating for and I didn’t think it was. He didn’t want to talk about big ideas with me, he wanted to talk logistics, all the time, the plans, the deals, the numbers. He wanted me to be here,” Lillian said, extending a flattened palm out in the air half a foot lower than her shoulder, “his little soldier. Am I making it plain? Every time I opened my mouth, he’d brace himself. At dinner, at breakfast, in bed. He’d flinch! At his own wife! Do you flinch at her, Nat?” 

Nat stuck his phone into his pocket after a moment. He had not heard her, didn’t know if he ought to say yes or no. 

“Sorry,” he mouthed to me. “Closing got delayed and the seller is pissed.” 

Lillian tried again. “Do you mind when she argues with you, Nat?” 

I took a slow breath, and then another, waiting for him to answer. “She doesn’t argue with me. We don’t argue with each other.”   

Nat rubbed his thumb along the webbing between my fingers. With his thumb, he was telling me that we were not like Lillian and Julius. And we weren’t. I didn’t argue with him, not out loud. 

When Milt was six weeks old, I slipped into a frayed, weepy pocket during which it was hard to wash my hair, hard to wear anything but soft pants and a very old pair of dirty sneakers. Nat, without telling me, hired a woman, a night nurse, to stay at our apartment every night for two weeks and get Milt to sleep. It was very generous of him and, I conceded, a relief to put Bunny to bed without Milt in my arms, but it cost more money than we had and it wasn’t what I wanted. I didn’t want it at all. So, every night, I’d agree with Nat about what a boon Teresa the nurse was, and then I’d roll over and cry quietly until I passed out, waking to a wet nightgown, that violent reminder to pump. Things were better now. Nat thought he’d made them better. And I took medicine for the crying. 

“That’s a shame,” Lillian murmured. 

The air here felt slippery and dangerous, like if we inhaled deeply enough, maybe someone might start arguing. Maybe even me. 

“Tell me about your family growing up,” Bunny read from her paper. 

“I had two little brothers who I loved, the baby especially. My mother was very bright and quiet and then she got sick.” Lillian pointed to her head. “In her brain. My father was not so bright and always angry. He worked for a tailor. My mother should have gone to college, I think. She read the newspaper every day. Start to finish.” 

Bunny wrote all of this down, carefully. Lillian let her and began to eat, relishing one bite, then another, as we sat in silence until I saw Milt dancing in the corner of my eye. 

I nudged Nat with my elbow and he looked up from his phone. “Can you…take him?” 

“Where’s the bathroom?” Nat asked brightly. 

Lillian dropped her bagel and stood up very quickly. “Of course. Let me show you.” Like a cat, she slipped into the hallway, which fed into, ostensibly, the bedrooms and bathroom. “Come, Milt! Come, Nat! I’m going to show you the bathroom!” she sang loudly. 

I patted the parts of my dress that had undone themselves. It was an old dress, one I’d worn before kids, before breastfeeding, before Nat, even. I’d gotten it second-hand and worn it to a holiday party where someone had told me I looked like a character in Mad Men. The dress was finished now. Why I’d worn it today, I wasn’t sure.   

Lillian returned but did not sit. She hovered with two hands on the table and flicked her chin toward her grand-niece. She must’ve felt that her lipstick had been lost on the lox because she pressed her mouth together in an effort to remake it. “Next!” 

“Can you tell me something about our family that I might not know?” Bunny asked.  

From the bathroom came Milt’s screams, Nat’s resonant murmuring. I didn’t want to abandon Nat to the meltdown, but I wanted to know what Lillian was going to say. My longing felt at that moment like a day’s worth of unmet hunger, like that Yom Kippur fast I’d only once done as a teenager to test my devotion, my Jewishness, just in case I might one day need to up the ante, though I was yet to be asked, not by Nat, not by anyone. I stayed in my dining chair, my eyes darting toward the hallway, hovering meekly between my progeny. 

Lillian took a sip of her cold coffee. “Well, did you know that my children won’t speak to me?”

Bunny shook her head. “Why?” 

“They think I’m a monster.” 

Bunny looked up at me then back at her. “You’re not a monster,” she said firmly.

“I might be,” Lillian snapped. “I was a difficult wife, a difficult mother. I’m a difficult person. I wanted everybody in my family to understand things as I did. And they didn’t. They don’t.” Her lips like worms had begun to wriggle across her face with something she seemed to want to contain.  

Her bitterness was not a shock, but the emotion under it was. 

“It’s not so much fun being the bitch,” Aunt Lillian said. We didn’t curse in our house, and I could see Bunny’s eyes widen at the word.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m sorry they shut you out. That we did.”  

Aunt Lillian raised her eyebrows. 

Bunny interrupted again, heroically, speaking over some detritus in her throat. 

“What’s your favorite snack?” she asked. 

Good god. We’d dropped into the miscellaneous portion now. 

Lillian held her hands up and scoffed. “Nuts?” 

Bunny wrote the word slowly, slower than any answer so far.   

“OK. Nuts. Now last question. What’s something hard about your life that you don’t really mind?”  

“That’s your own question too, right?” I asked her. I was impressed, and I wanted them both to know. 

Bunny nodded. “The original was do you have a pet.” 

Lillian snorted. 

“What’s something hard about your life that you don’t really mind?” I asked Bunny.

I knew the answer. She was going to say Milt, her brother Milt, whose screams had at last abated. If I listened through the silence, I could hear water running. It was having a brother, a brother I’d foisted on her, that was hard but that she didn’t really mind. She wished he’d never been born but she couldn’t help loving him a little bit too. 

Bunny lowered her head and spoke to the table.  

“You,” she said.  

I stared at her. What remained of my dress’s seams pressed into my hot skin. I looked down at my hands. 

“Me?” I chirped. “I’m the hard thing about your life?” 

“She doesn’t mind!” Lillian shouted. “That’s good news!”  

I kept my face as unmoving as I could so my cheeks wouldn’t get wet. “Why am I the hard thing?” 

The enveloping softness of the carpet under my feet was not a comfort then, so I pressed harder against it.  

In a small voice, she said, “You’re not brave. But it’s OK.” 

I was woozy, blood gathering across my collarbone, I could feel it tingling, my tongue solidifying, stomach humming and hollowed out. I kept my eyes open even though I didn’t want to.  

“What exactly are you talking about?”  

Bunny would not look at me. She shrugged. “You pretend. Like now, you’re acting like you’re not that mad. But you are.” 

I saw my aunt’s mouth contort. She was pretending, too. 

“So, being brave is, is getting mad?” 

“For you, it is,” Lillian spat quietly.

“Hell of a bathroom you got there! Did that clawfoot tub come with the place?” Milton and Nat returned together in lockstep.  

“I pooped,” Milton declared with grim pride.  

“Not in the tub!” Nat clarified.  

“Shut up!” Bunny bellowed at both of them.  

“You shut up!” I shouted, as angry as I felt, pretending nothing, the outside of me reflecting my insides so exactly, I felt like my skin had fallen off. 

“Sadie,” said Nat.  

“Don’t yell just to prove yourself to her,” Aunt Lillian muttered, peering up at me, her brown eyes catching the light and shining. “Or to me.” 

“Sorry. I’m sorry, Mommy. I’m really sorry,” Bunny mumbled, shaking her head wildly. She’d dropped deep down into her throne of a dining seat, her nubby blue smock dress folding in on itself and over her. 

I shook my head, crying breathlessly and stupidly in front of them all. I wasn’t sure what the right thing to say was and to whom. What I usually said, what I usually did, was what neither my aunt nor my daughter wanted from me, so I said what I’d have rather kept to myself. “Yeah. I do pretend. So I don’t hurt people’s feelings. Like…” I gestured at Lillian.      

At this, Lillian made a grunt as loud as a clap, chastening whatever courage I’d just mustered. 

I wiped my nose with my ruined dress. “Thank you so much for having us.”  

Nat had begun clearing the table. “The coffee was wonderful.”  

“It wasn’t.” Lillian gazed at him and then at me. “You’re running away from the fight. Tell her she’s wrong. She’s a kid. She doesn’t know what she’s saying.”  

But Bunny did know. She knew more than most kids her age ought to know. Bunny was right. 

I shook my head at my great aunt, watching Nat gather three wobbly Cel-Rays. “You told me not to impress you. Now you tell me to fight. What do you want?”

“Honey, you don’t need to be embarrassed,” said Lillian, without a thread of the tenderness she had used to speak to Bunny. 

I stacked the plates, my sleeve catching in the cream cheese. “Bunny talks like that when she’s tired.” 

“I’m not tired,” Bunny said, her earlier penitence undone. 

“Should we leave the bagels?” Nat asked Lillian. 

“Please don’t.” 

Lillian reached across the table to me and encircled my arm with her cool hand. “You’ll never be like me, Sadie. No matter what you do.” Her consonants were crisp, brutal. She was holding onto me tightly. “You follow the rules. You’re nice. Just like your uncle.” 

Tumescent with shame, I nodded dumbly. Lillian’s eyebrows were arched. She did not look like my grandmother. She looked like Bunny’s drawing. And also, maybe, Bunny. 

“Take it as a compliment,” Aunt Lillian demanded.  

I tucked my hair behind my ear, the busted stitching of my dress exposing my soaked armpits like strings stretched over a guitar’s sound hole, and told Lillian goodnight. 

In the car, Milt had fallen asleep, the porcelain of his stolen Hummel (the rabbi, my rabbi!) like a watchful glowing moon in his arms. 

Bunny remained alert. She’d held my hand all the way to our parking spot and when I wordlessly buckled her into her car seat, she’d said, over and over, “I’m bad, I’m bad, I’m bad,” to which I’d shaken my head furiously as Nat thundered, uncharacteristically, “Nobody thinks that, Bunny!” 

Now, in the back, Bunny seemed to have forgiven herself and me as she gazed ahead. 

“Aunt Lillian never answered your last question.” I was picking at a wound that hadn’t even scabbed.  

Red and white orbs of tail lights and highway lights guided us north toward home. Beside Nat shone the blackness of Gravesend Bay and just beyond, the Verrazano, regal in its nighttime banner of electrics. 

“I hate it about me too,” I told Bunny without turning around. “That I’m not brave.” 

“I don’t,” Nat murmured. 

“I know you don’t,” I said sharply. 

“Isn’t it brave to be sorry? You’re always sorry.” He turned his head sideways and smiled at me with no teeth. “She’s not.” 

I didn’t know if he meant Lillian or Bunny, Bunny who listened quietly to us as she gripped her car seat’s armrests, her defiant heart pinned in with five straps to prevent disaster. He meant it as a compliment. But he didn’t know I wasn’t sorry half the times I claimed to be.     

“Maybe,” I said because Bunny was right: I didn’t want to fight. 

“The hard thing in Lillian’s life that she doesn’t really mind is herself,” said Nat. “Your great great-aunt is the hard thing. Write that, Bunny.” 

He sounded so proud of himself. 

How could I tell him he was wrong? I didn’t know what the hard thing was that Lillian didn’t mind, but I knew she could hardly bear herself. I could hardly bear myself sometimes. That was what made us both brave.  

Bunny stared at me in the rearview mirror, as still and silent as the bridge outside our window. 

“I think she’s asleep with her eyes open,” Nat whispered. 

I nodded and stared at the road ahead. She was asleep with her eyes open. She had been for a while. 

It was too hot now and, as Nat drove, I tried to shuck my coat off from below my seatbelt but it was too bulky. I had to unbuckle. As the car’s alarm rang, I shrugged my arms free. Ignoring Nat’s concerned glances, I slipped my fingers under the torn armpit of my tattered dress and wrenched the sleeve clean off. 

“Sadie. You have to buckle.” 

I leaned my bare shoulder against the window. “I know,” I said as the alarm dinged and dinged. “I will.” 

The post A Visit to Our Meanest Relative Can Only End in Tears appeared first on Electric Literature.

The man who’s called me out to pick his lock is lying. He doesn’t live there. I know this, because it’s my apartment.

When I received the message, my first reaction was shock. Not a stomach-churning kind of shock—like when Sarah decided to up and leave after ten years of marriage and told me with nothing but a text—but more a feeling of surprise. That of everyone in this damn city they could steal from, they’d choose me.

I thought about calling the police, but left the number undialed. I guess a part of me was curious. Everything’s already so fucked, I wanted to prod it a bit more just to see what would happen. So now I’m on my way to help a man break into my own home.

When I arrive, he’s sitting on the worn corridor carpet, staring at the ceiling. He’s in his late twenties, wearing tight jeans, a baggy tee featuring a band I’ve never heard of, and an old beanie. He’s a little jittery—understandable, given that he’s about to commit a felony—but all things considered he’s holding it together. It’s a look not so different from that of most of my customers. I used to enjoy watching their concern melt into relief whenever I teased their door open. I’d smile as they stepped over the threshold, arms outstretched as though hugging an old friend. That’s how I used to feel getting home, too. These days, I shuffle Metropolis-like through my front door, past wedding photos, past the jacket that Sarah used to say suited me, past the boomerang from our trip to Australia that we swore we’d learn how to throw. Everything’s preserved, like Pompeii after Vesuvius erupted—except in this case it was Sarah blowing up my life.

The man flashes a fake ID bearing my name. “I appreciate you coming out so quickly,” he says with as much confidence as he can muster.

I stare at him for a moment, pondering my next move. Confronting him’s still an option, of course. There’s no room in those drainpipe jeans of his for a weapon, and I’m sure a combination of old man strength and primal rage would see me through. But the same morbid curiosity that brought me here keeps dragging me along for the ride.

So instead, I sit there, picking the lock with the quiet professionalism I’d give any other customer. After a few minutes, the door springs open.

I wait in the van as he loads his car with my shit: the widescreen TV Sarah and I used to snuggle up in front of; the record player she bought me for my thirtieth; the food processor that’s been collecting dust for a year.

As the man drives away into the night, I step inside. Everything’s gone: not just the expensive stuff, but the small things too. Liquor, coasters, even the damn boomerang. And for the first time in forever, I can breathe a little more easily.

The post Nothing Says Closure Like Being Robbed appeared first on Electric Literature.

I was a small child, my head the height of theirs, when I noticed the black parts of their eyes were shaped like shoeboxes. But I didn’t know then that their rectangular pupils are adaptive. Goats take their meals on savannas or other wide-open spaces that leave them vulnerable to predators and the beating sun. Horizontal pupils let in less light from above and allow a wide field of vision.

Living with five Nubians—four does and a buck—I witness how nimbly they manage difficult terrain and remain vigilant at the same time. Because a misstep can be fatal.

The does greet me this morning by nibbling my flannel shirt, which I imagine tastes of woodsmoke and chicken broth. The barn smells of sweet-sharp hay, of pine dust, a wisp of ammonia that lets me know the straw bedding needs to be changed. It’s the heart of winter, and I pull the girls close.

The does are two months pregnant, so I’ve stopped milking to allow the young mamas to build their strength and keep their vitamins, which they’ll need to give birth to healthy kids come April.

A lot of people choose not to freshen does in their first fall, but I was impatient to grow my herd, to get a revenue stream going to stabilize the farm, and Judy said that as long as the girls were good sized and healthy, they’d be fine to breed. I’m thrilled every time I look at this burgeoning pack of curious females.

Yet it’s my first time as a goat midwife. Can I really manage the upcoming births on my own? We have no money to hire a helper or to call the vet if something goes wrong.

At least I have Judy on speed dial.

Opening the chicken coop, I let the birds loose and empty a bin of kale stems and squash rinds as an enticement to venture farther afield. Few eggs to collect this time of year, when the days are so short. The birds are healthy but they look horrendous, the runts and weaklings’ backs picked clean of feathers. Their bare pimpled skin shames me, even though my father’s hens looked the same, no matter what he did. “Lucy,” he’d tell me, “there you see the meaning of pecking order.”

I’d planned a lot of indoor projects for the winter milking break, but that was before Michael lost our money and we needed immediate income. So today, instead of YouTubing a toilet fix, I’ll be testing the endurance of my gluteal muscles, sitting on my flat butt at the Edin General Store.

I hear Michael calling me as soon as I take my boots off downstairs. He’s perched on the side of the bed, eyes a faded brown, head bald, just a few stray tufts to the side. A birdlike Roman nose that anchors his still-handsome face.

He tells me he wants to go for a ride in the new snow. He gestures out the window at the thick layer smothering the fields. We look together at the boot prints I’ve made between the house and the barn. “You’ve already been out in it,” he says. “Now it’s my turn.”

Not only does he want to see the snow, but there are library books being held for him, and a bacon and egg sandwich at Franco’s with his name on it. “Let’s go out for breakfast, bella. I’ll read you the obituaries. You love the life stories.”

Of course I do, and I love it when he reads to me, but we don’t have enough time for an outing. I offer to run out and pick up the books and the sandwich.

But no. He wants to get out of the house. His voice is both firm and pleading.

Changing his own socks into thicker woolens and wedging shoes onto his swollen feet can stretch to a quarter hour. Then getting his arms into each sleeve of a parka, plus scarf and hat. The driveway has been plowed but there’s still a slick of ice, and I shiver just thinking about leading him across it to reach the passenger door, then holding the full weight of his seventy-nine-year-old, six-foot frame to transfer him into the depths of the car seat.

I don’t want him to feel a burden, and I don’t want to pity him, so I tell him simply that we don’t have time. I’m due soon at the store.

This does not sit well. Michael’s forehead reddens and the corners of his mouth press down. He repeats his desire for an egg sandwich.

In case what he really wants is to be doted on, I say, “Why don’t you come into the kitchen, I’ll fry you eggs and toast, and you can admire the snow from there. See if there are any deer in the back field.”

“You’re just being selfish,” he mutters.

I pause, startled. These short, angry flares are new and I’m not yet used to them. They’ve arrived in the wake of the giant loss Michael incurred, which has thrown me back into the vexed center of my parents’ financial strain. We always had enough, but there was no fat in the budget, and Mom and Dad never once took a vacation longer than a three-day weekend, or pricier than an unelectrified lakeside bungalow. I have, it seems to me today, simply given up city comforts for the quaintly beautiful privations of the country.

I shower quickly, warmed by the hot water if dismayed by the rusting tub. I emerge with a soothing voice and suggest to my husband that I put on a movie. Make popcorn. We have a complete library of Gilbert and Sullivan and he chooses The Pirates of Penzance. “Watch with me, bella,” he says invitingly. He pats the couch cushion next to him. Removes his glasses and rubs his eyes as if to better appreciate me. Smiles. His bad mood has apparently already vanished, as quickly as our savings account dropped to zero. But I cannot stay. I have too much to do.

How do I manage my anger and despair? Well, that’s why a woman has a barn.

Because I’m late—flustered by the regrettable exchange with Michael, then by trying to settle him down in front of the TV and set aside something for his early dinner, labeling the container with masking tape that says eat me—Shruti is behind the counter at Edin General, where I should be, ringing up two Slim Jims, a string of lotto tickets, and three packs of Camel Lights. I’m sweating, my scarf trailing to the floor to the extent that I step on it and nearly choke myself.

“I can see how it’s going,” Shruti says, pointing to my pink face and hair matted across my brow. She takes the scarf, the hat, and my jacket, putting each in its cubby or hook to the side of the counter. As always, she looks immaculate and yet perfectly casual in her jeans and clean sneakers and brown and cream cardigan with coconut shell buttons. The color combination makes me think of Felicia, my favorite doe, and for a moment I long to be back in the barn surrounded by lop ears and so many beating hearts.

“Tough morning?” Shruti asks with concern.

If I say anything about the murky state of my husband’s mind, or the dire straits of our financial situation, I’ll cry myself a river. A nod is all I can manage.

Shruti tries another tack. “Did you see the game last night?” She is a Celtics superfan, having become hooked on the NBA through trying to bond with her son, now an assistant professor at one of the nearby colleges. “If he doesn’t give us grandchildren in five years, we’re going to sue him,” she joked recently. Shruti is dying to attend a Celtics game in person, though when I ask her why she hasn’t looked for tickets, she shrugs sheepishly and says her son is too busy to go with her. Apparently, Hari, her husband, does not share her passion.

“Sorry, hon. Missed it,” I say.

She tells me “our” team lost to Philadelphia 89–80. “Kyrie didn’t play,” which I guess explains everything.

Glumly thinking about her team’s loss, Shruti gives me a last look of concern, then leaves for the back room, where she has calls to make.

I open the cash register to the hand-worn scent of bills and coins and ink from leaky pens. The ding and thrust of the jaw opening and closing has the satisfying feel of childhood toys.

Shruti has given me the exalted title of associate manager to justify paying me ten dollars above minimum wage plus a small bonus at the end of the year. In addition to staffing the register, I help with inventory, checkout, writing and proofreading announcements and advertisements. Shruti and Hari hired me in part for my deep roots in the community, even though I explained that I’d been away so long, my contacts were limited to my parents’ now elderly friends and those from high school who never left. “Those are precisely the people we want to attract,” Shruti assured me.

“How much is this, and how do you eat it?” A lanky, dark-haired boy with bangs in his eyes holds up a package of Shruti’s frozen samosas. They are delicious, as good as Michael and I have eaten in any restaurant. I tell the kid what they are and how to reheat them in the oven so they get nice and crispy. A package of six is ten dollars, but because I want him to try them, I give it to him for five bucks and plan to slip the other five from my wallet into the register once he leaves.

“They go well with beer,” I say. “Try that IPA in the blue can; it’s from a brewery just on the other side of the river.”

“Yeah, I’ve heard of it,” he says, and shrugs. “Okay.”

I pack everything up and take his card. Then I hold out the chutneys, mint and tamarind, displaying them in the palm of my hand like precious stones. I explain they’re like salsa, a dipping sauce. “Come back and let me know if you like them.”

As much as I love Shruti, I often find the store disquieting, not only because I see people I used to know, or should know, or no longer want to know, but because I can be interrupted at any moment. That’s what makes retail the pits, as my mother used to say. It’s hard to believe that I worked for twenty years in a field where all you do is talk to people. I always found PR spiritually effortful, but I thought that’s just what a real job was. To make real money, you had to escape the provinces and do things you didn’t want to do.

I’m relieved when the doorbell sounds the young man’s exit. My eyes mindlessly follow him to his car waiting on the road’s shoulder, engine running.

Just then, the door to the house across the street opens, and a tall, well-shaped woman in stylish thick-heeled boots rushes down the stairs to the street.

My breath catches. I lean closer and jut my nose into the windowpane.

Then I rush to the back room, where Shruti is on the computer. “The woman across the street in the old Masonic Lodge. Do you know her?”

My friend peers at me over her computer glasses. “Alexandra Stevens? Just a little. I met her on the sidewalk last week. Why?”

“We went to high school together.”

“Were you friends?”

“Very close, for a time. Do you know why she’s here?”

Shruti looks at me curiously, a sly smile playing on her lips. “I guess she couldn’t stay away, like you.”

I shake my head. Back then, Sandy didn’t have a country bone in her body. That was part of what drew me to her.

I want to rush out and hug her. To share the shock of being back in Edin as adults. But I’m also hesitant. I’d always assumed Sandy left the way she did because she couldn’t stand to stick around our dumpy town anymore. And that included dumpy me. I look down at my wrinkled, untucked shirt and my dirty boots. Well, she wouldn’t be surprised at Lucy in the present day.

I return to the counter and watch out the window as Sandy fishes for her keys. I’m crouching. I don’t want her to see me. When I think of it through Sandy’s eyes, I’m embarrassed to be working at the store. More than once, living in New York over the years, I thought, If only Sandy could see me. She never did, and after all our teenaged talk about getting out of this place, it looks as if I’ve never left.

What’s she doing back, and what would she think of me now? I also can’t help but wonder if she’s sorry.

It was, at first, a triumphant return.

I quit Columbia’s PR office, and Michael retired from the university’s Classics Department. We planned to subsist on his 403(b) and our joint savings, while he enjoyed the writing life and I took over my father’s farm.

What a wonderful idea this was!

My husband was seventy-seven, and I was thirty years younger. We thought we had ten good years ahead of us. Michael was healthy, still walked all over the city, and his mother had lived to ninety-five. We still had sex most Saturday mornings. He’d never been self-conscious of our age difference. I wasn’t embarrassed, but I did notice the way people looked at us, wondering if we were a couple or father and daughter.

Five years before our move, during a stretch of intense craving that felt like the kind women describe when they want a baby, I suddenly wanted to keep goats and make my own yogurt and cheese. My father, thrilled, swiftly began a persuasion campaign. He was waiting for his heart to give out, and he told me bluntly that he’d die easier knowing the land would continue as a farm. He lived in fear of our family’s acres morphing into suburban sprawl. I was the only one left to save them. My mother was long dead, and my sister had left Edin at fourteen for boarding school and now lived contentedly in Westchester County.

Dad always said our land was more than a source of income. It was a landmark in town, referred to by our family name, the Richard Farm, and he’d been generous in allowing a local organization to build a section of trail across one corner of the back field that connected to a longer walking route through the conservation area. Dad wanted people to enjoy the farm’s bounty, whether by walking across it or eating what we raised.

Columbia gave me an unpaid leave, and I interned with Judy Martin at Birchbark Dairy in the Berkshires, two hours west of Edin. I’d called her after discovering her ash-covered, aged goat cheese at Murray’s.

Farming, that summer, was an urge I suddenly couldn’t ignore. And having reached my forties, I felt more entitled to follow such urges than I did when I was young.

Judy, who wore her hair in two gray braids, a whimsical daisy or dandelion woven in, would wake us before dawn and carry strong black tea with milk and honey in a thermos to the barn. After three hours of milking, feeding, and making the rounds, we’d return to the kitchen and eat hard-boiled eggs. Judy didn’t talk much until she’d eaten. If she thought I needed to witness something, she’d whistle like a whippoorwill and point. Those largely silent mornings of companionable labor were often my favorite parts of the day. Feeling a part of a natural rhythm and relishing the glowing sunrise on my cheeks.

Michael visited once during my months apprenticing with Judy, but for the most part he fell back into his urban bachelor routine of movies on Tuesdays and chess on Fridays. Cooking for a friend on Saturdays. In truth, that was still his routine after we married, except I didn’t play chess, and his social circle expanded slightly to include friends of mine from college and the office, women who were mystified by the age of my romantic partner but did their best to be supportive.

At Birchbark, I went to bed with earth under my nails and the smell of milk in my nose. I slept like the newly born.

At the end of the summer, I didn’t want to leave. I didn’t want to go back to city life. But I did, stuffing disappointment under my blazer each morning. I tried to imagine a way I could ease Dad’s worries about encroaching development and satisfy my own new craving for space, for the heady scent of summer soil, for raising bleating baby goats. Would my urban husband go for it?

He would. Michael still adored his graduate students and paternally advising them, but he’d grown distant from the undergrads and tired of his own performance in the lecture hall. I’m ready for the next adventure, he told me. A little house in the country in which to write his slim, popular Roman histories.

I took Michael to the farmhouse deck and spread my arms at the vision I had been nurturing for the better part of a decade. Behind us were the house, twenty acres of vegetables, and the country road. In front of us unfurled another twenty acres of relatively flat field, but then the land sloped upward into uneven hills, forested along the top ridge. You could see these hills from the road. Bikers and drivers often paused in the spring to photograph the flowering meadows and, in the fall, the brightly burning leaves.

Michael shook his head in wonder, the look that I was going for. The one that came across his face when he stood inside the Pantheon, no matter how many times he’d peered up into its dome. “Carina come una foto.”

These fields are more than a pretty picture to me, though. They’re a source of profound nourishment.

We decided to move to Edin, provided I agreed to first spend six months in Rome, the city he’d eagerly shared with me over the years.

When I told Dad that I’d take over his farm, I felt like the prodigal daughter. A grin an acre wide spread across his face.

“I never gave up on you,” he said. “No matter all your years away.” Then he cautioned me, “But you really have to do it. Work the land, I mean. That’s the only way to keep the tax breaks. Otherwise the property taxes and the upkeep will eat you out of house and home.” He died a year later, fully at peace, he assured me. My sister Sue was perfectly happy to leave the farm in my eager hands.

Of course I would farm it. I just needed to start small and learn along the way. At that point, Michael and I had plenty of savings to keep us going until the land turned a profit.

Our parallel visions of country cultivation and literary productivity worked according to plan our first year back in Edin, as Michael typed away on his Olivetti and I planted my first garden in thirty years. The harvest went smoothly, and I reopened the farm stand at the corner of the front field. I made a plan for our hundred and one acres. Built a rudimentary milking parlor and cheese room to get my state inspection. I wanted to start out all organic for the dairy, but the price of organic feed shocked me into making that a goal for a few years down the line.

After Judy’s does kidded last spring, I took home two mamas, Nana and Brie, and Nana’s two doelings, Bora-Bora and Felicia. Also a proven buck, Derek Jeter (Judy is a Yankees fan). I handled the kids from the get-go to accustom them to my voice and smell. It was love at first sight.

Also in April, I deducted the cost of every purchased animal and pound of feed and, in exchange for the near evaporation of my property taxes, swore to the government—as Dad had done—that I would not develop the land for ten years.

Slow and steady, I’d build my dairy, consulting with Judy along the way.

And then six months ago, the whirlwind summer harvest underway, as we were dripping in tomatoes and melons and everything green, something curious occurred. When I went into the bank to apply for a home equity loan to replace our leaking roof and invest in more animals and equipment, I discovered a craterous hole in our savings.

Had we been swindled? I raced home to ask my husband what he knew.

As he explained, his eyes expanded, the pupils widening into larger and larger circles. A look I’d seen before. Sudden, extravagant purchases used to appear in our apartment from time to time: a top-flight Vitamix, tickets for a last-minute flight to San Francisco. Many of these luxuries on the border of affordability I was guilty of enjoying. Neither of us grew up with money, and we relished the finer things. His excuse was always some discount or time-limited window (truffles enjoy such a short harvest season!). In this case, he had “loaned” the money to Alfie Romano, a beloved former grad student, Italian-American like Michael. Alfie had always been special. He’d dined at our apartment nearly every Friday for five years. Michael had been devastated when Alfie quit the program, but I had seen that the young man was not cut out for the slow pace of academia. He was a thrill seeker with great ideas but poor execution. Unfortunately, Michael had never been able to recognize his brilliant student’s flaws. So when Alfie launched his machine translation company and exhausted his first and second rounds of funding, he’d come to Michael as a last-ditch effort. “I couldn’t bear to tell him no,” my generous husband said, his long face pulled down into sadness. “Besides,” he said brightly, “it can’t fail. We’ve gotten in on the ground floor!”

“There’s no ‘we’ here,” I said, still in shock. “What were you thinking, doing this without talking to me?”

“We’ll be fine,” Michael said. “We’ll get it back and then some.”

“When?” I reminded him about the leaking roof, the sagging barn. The dairy enterprise that lay dormant, waiting for funds to expand. My whole reason for moving back to Edin.

“Soon, my dear. Be patient. Genius takes time.”

I was furious. A hole gaped in the pit of my stomach. How would we manage?

But I also saw something terrifying in that moment. The flippancy of his answer told me that Michael had not thought through Alfie’s plan. When I asked him questions, he was evasive when normally he’d have exuberantly dived into the details. Something had clouded his judgment. Had Alfie pulled a fast one? Or was the problem internal to my husband?

Genius might take its sweet time, but I didn’t have to wait long for the results of Alfie’s venture. Michael woke up one morning three months ago, took a phone call in his office (my sister Sue’s old bedroom), and reported that Alfie’s business had failed. “It is no more,” is the way he put it.

There would be no return on investment. Nor a return of our investment. The ground floor had fallen through.

Yet Michael seemed to show no real understanding of the bind this placed us in. “I’m in my last years, I don’t need much. I’ll eat like a bird,” he said. Was that a serene smile on his face? Why did he show no remorse?

I called Judy in a cold panic.

“Good thing you’re freshening the does,” she said matter-of-factly. “Now you’ll have something to sell.”

I heard voices in the background. “You have company?” I asked. “I don’t want to keep you.”

“One of those silly talk shows,” she said in the same even tone.

I was too concerned with my own predicament to ask what she was doing inside at noon on a Saturday at the height of breeding season.

During my internship, I had asked a lot of questions. Usually, they were about the goats. But one morning, standing in the hayfield, Judy about to mount the tractor, the July sun shining down from high above, I asked if she ever got lonely; her closest neighbor lived two miles down a dirt road.

“Sometimes, at Christmas, I wish someone would roast me a goose,” she said, half smiling. “Big, luscious meals are for sharing. Of course, I have Brad, but he likes to travel with his friends and I’m not the hosting kind of mother, so I try not to put pressure on him.” She looked at me with eyebrows raised, wondering if I understood.

I did. Possibly I was so drawn to Judy because my mother died when I was in college; that would be the psychoanalytical interpretation. Except Judy wasn’t maternal in a classically nurturing way. She was about the transfer of information and valuing every living being’s special properties.

“So yes, I do get lonely for conversation. For sharing milestones. But the day to day . . .” She shook her head. “Nah. I have an abundance of life to keep me company.”

God, I admired her in that moment. I never again doubted her solitary contentment. I can do this on my own, I said to myself after hanging up. Just like Judy.

When I arrive home from the store, Michael is already asleep. I change into my barn clothes. A frigid sleet is from the sky.

But the does’ comically droopy ears lift my spirits. As I feed them, I admire Brie’s rich chocolate brown coat. She’s the most aloof of the four. Nana’s face is beige and white, and she’s still protective of her daughters, Felicia and Bora-Bora. Felicia has a wispy black beard and rubs her head against the side of my thigh affectionately. She’s my favorite, for the way she tilts her head when I speak to her, as if ardently listening.

All four paw the floor and bang impatiently against the slats that separate them from the feed trough.“I’m on it,” I tell them. I pour fresh water, noting with satisfaction the success of my low-budget solution to keep the water from freezing: a plastic bottle filled with saltwater floating on the surface, bobbing just enough to break up any ice. Someday I’d like to heat the goats’ drinking water in winter, to lessen the shock to their systems, but right now the extra electricity is beyond our budget.

I haven’t eaten since lunch but it’s been a long day. I chomp a wedge of Judy’s alpine-style cheese, call that supper, and get into bed.

Some hours later I’m awakened by a crash. Followed by a weak cry.

Michael is tipped over the sofa, his white T-shirt gleaming under a sliver of moonlight. Bare legs like plucked drumsticks.

He must have heard me come into the living room because he says, his voice muffled by the cushions, “I can’t move.”

My heart speeds up as I race toward him, nearly tripping on the coffee table. “What happened?”

“Lavatory,” he says. Where he was headed. “Carpet.” The shag that tripped him.

“Does anything hurt?”

Together we bend his knees so his lower legs are flat on the floor and he is able to wrestle his arms underneath him and push his torso up so he’s in a kneeling position. He’s sweating lightly and I feel his heat. Not once in the past few months have we been naked together, touching like we used to. He clasps his hands into a mock prayerful position. “Like the good Catholic I am.”

Please, God, let this not be the first of many. That is my useless supplication.

I get him up on his feet and walk gingerly to the bathroom. I wait while he waits—“Damn prostate”—and then support him as he walks back to bed, a noticeable wobble in his step.

“Do you need anything checked out? Sure nothing hurts?”

“I fell into the sofa, bella,” he says testily. “Not the bookcase. I’m fine.”

Despite his protests, I sit with him while he settles himself and falls back asleep.

And then I get to work. I turn on all the lights and pull on thick gloves, gather a pair of pliers and a large, sharp X-Acto. The first incision is tough, exhilarating work. I cut another strip and another, moving furniture as I go. With pliers I pull up the staples and then tug on the golden shag. Decades-old dust rises and I cough, remember a mask Dad kept in the pantry, and fit that on.

As I yank and pull with all my strength, I think about Sandy, the glimpse of her out the store window. An unnamable emotion rises within me. Am I still mad at her for leaving the way she did?

We were besties for all of high school—as soon as Sandy moved here from suburban Connecticut before the start of our freshman year and we both went out for soccer. We loved each other; I feel sure of that. We were always hanging our arms over each other’s shoulders, wrapping them around waists, sleeping with legs intertwined. This felt natural and normal, but sometimes we were made to think it wasn’t. Some guy would say, “Why don’t you two make out already?” But that didn’t bother us. It was strange that I was closer to Sandy than I was to my sister Sue, and for a while I think my parents felt bad about the contrast, but they liked Sandy so much, she was soon part of the family.

Summer after senior year I was working for Dad on the farm, which Sandy thought a bad idea. “Scoop ice cream with me,” she said. “All you’ve ever done is farm. Employers want to see a diversity of experience.” Something she’d read in the newspaper or heard from our drippy guidance counselor. She’d convinced the owner of the ice cream stand to give her the title of manager because she thought that would help her get better internships in college. But Dad counted on me, and I liked being outside. I didn’t want to sweat inside some tiny shack, even with Sandy by my side.

The plan that final day had been for me to ride my bike to The Big Dipper, then we’d put my bike on the back of her car and drive out to the lake. The previous night had been normal, cozy; we’d gotten tipsy on my father’s beer after swimming in the river all afternoon. Sandy fell asleep in my bed. The next day I rode the fifteen mountainous miles to the shack. But when I got there, her boss said she’d never shown up. Nor did she after I waited for her all afternoon, the boss finally taking pity on me and giving me a milkshake, an order gone wrong.

Too embarrassed to call my parents, and knowing they were busy anyway, I rode all the way back home, up and down the fierce hills, crying most of the way.

I called Sandy’s house, and her mother told me she’d left early for college. “She didn’t tell you?” Mrs. Stevens sounded surprised. “Guess that explains her bitchy mood.”

Sandy wrote one rambling, apologetic letter to me at Barnard once classes had started. I wrote back, holding my anger and pretending I understood that she was just “super anxious to get a job and settle in before Sept.” I asked if she’d be home for Thanksgiving, but I never heard from her again.

“Girls this age,” my mother said, shaking her head. “I know I was one, but I’ll never understand them. I can’t believe Sandy, our Sandy, would be so rude and heartless. Try not to take it too hard, chicken.”

Mom tried her best, but how do you get over such heart- break at eighteen?

I labor, sweating heavily, until the ghostly pre-dawn hours. Tomorrow I’ll call the plumber and fix up the back bathroom so my beloved no longer has to traverse the living room to pee in the middle of the night. Should have done that months ago. But months ago that haunted look didn’t flicker in Michael’s eyes. A look I mistook, at first, for guilt over throwing away our savings, but now I wonder if there isn’t something else going on. Something we both have chosen to ignore.

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