I need you to go home, she tells me. I need you to turn toward your apartment and I’ll get in the car and meet you there. She’s hours from me. She says my name again. Her voice, I later learn, is thick with weed as well as all her worry, all her sad and sorry. Then, I think she has so much power, but later I will see all the ways she feels almost completely at the mercy of the wants and needs of other people just like me. I’m so happy that night, though, to have finally found a way to make her come to me.
She talks and cries and I hear her muffled voice and then another person. I hear her start her car, but I stand still. In my memory, she comes to the bridge, but I’m not sure this is what happens. In my memory, she saves me that night; that night I think maybe everything will be okay. It’s only the next morning that I see them, out front of our house while she sleeps in my bed and I sit on the roof: my parents, harried, exhausted, rushing out of a cab and coming up our front-porch steps.
Bitch, I say, beneath my breath, as I watch them ring the bell, as I hear her rustle, as I climb in through my window, knowing then that I am absolutely by myself.
* * *
Why the fuck, my mother will say later; they will walk me, both of them, to the university offices and tell them I am a danger to myself and must be monitored more closely. The university will balk and want to kick me out, but my parents will not agree to this and my mom will threaten various things, citing statutes that might be made up, and then the university will decree I see a therapist three days a week instead. I will be on probation and they will try sometimes, my parents, they will call and tell me to take care of myself and ask me about class. They will feel both wholly overwhelmed and scared. It will have been years, by then, of me being more than they can handle. They will have tried therapists and so many different medications. They will have tried yelling at me, begging; none of it will work. Sometimes, when my mother is too tired and she gets a bill from the therapist, she will call and yell at me and ask me why I can’t just suck it up and be better. What did we ever do? she’ll ask me. Why the fuck, she’ll say, do I have to pay someone to talk to you?
I’ll drive one day in the car with my father, going somewhere, the second time they come up to see me after she has called them, and he will look so revolted by the fact that I am crying. I think now: he must have been so scared. Stop it, he’ll say, over and over, but I won’t stop it. He’ll reach his hand up to my face as if he might stop the tears from coming and he will breathe in once, too tired to have hold any longer of whatever patience he might have had before this. He will slap me, once and hard, across the face.
And then Sasha in the background. They’ve always been nice to her. We’re young and she was scared. When she thinks “parent” she thinks a different thing than what they are. She writes me email after email and for a while, I like the feel of not responding. I like her asking, begging, saying that she’s sorry, until I can’t stand it any longer, not having her to talk to, until she’s desperate, until the man she’s been courting all semester has fucked one of her roommates and she’s begun to disassemble, until we’re galvanized, alone again together against every other thing.
4
I SLEEP PAST my first alarm and then my second. At 5:40, my husband reaches for me and asks if I’m going to go run. This annoys me, though I can’t say why it annoys me. He tries to pull me to him but I roll closer to the wall, my back toward him, and he climbs out of bed. The coffee grinder whirs and I close my eyes again. At 6:40, which is ten minutes before I am supposed to leave for work, he calls to me from the kitchen. He’s making breakfast and packing the children’s lunches.
You getting up? he says.
I skip my shower, skip my breakfast.
He pours me coffee in the mug I bring on the subway each day and I hug and kiss both children as they unfurl themselves from their small beds. When I’m halfway down the stairs the two-year-old comes running out of the apartment.
Mommy, she says.
I give her one more hug.
Don’t leave.
Josslyn comes out of her apartment and she picks her up.
* * *
On the train, I check Sasha’s Facebook for an announcement about her baby. I check every other day, mostly knowing it won’t change. I’m not friends with her husband on Facebook. We’ve never met, and when I go to his page it’s only his picture and some posts from years ago. It’s possible his settings make it so there are all sorts of pictures to which I simply don’t have access. The ultrasound or maybe of the baby, newly welcomed, the bump, her perfect cheeks fleshed out.
* * *
In a meeting about SAT preparation, I think about setting up a profile just to see whatever I don’t have access to. He looks trusting. I could pretend to be from wherever he says he’s from. I try to remember what she looked like pregnant the first time. Both my girls were over nine pounds. When I was pregnant, I was so large people pointed at me on the street.
* * *
With the four-year-old, the ultrasound tech told me thirty-three weeks in that I did not have enough amniotic fluid. Our OB was out of town, so—on my phone, on the sidewalk on Fifty-ninth Street and Eighth Avenue—I googled what the cause and consequence of this might be.
Could be the baby has no brain or an esophageal malfunction, said the internet. Could be everything is fine. I tried to call my husband but he was working. I scrolled through my phone trying to think who else I might call. Not my mother, not my New York friends, who were still new and had never been pregnant, who all still thought I was sane then. Not Sasha.
Instead, I sat on Eighth Avenue somewhere below Fifty-ninth Street, leaning up against a fire hydrant, massive belly bulging, and I cried. I held the base of my stomach with both my hands and people stared at me and I stared back at them until it started to get dark and I walked home.
* * *
I mostly walk now. Week after week, I just keep leaving in the afternoon and no one seems to notice I’m not there. I go to the coffee shop and read. Dorothy West, The Living is Easy; Gerald Murnane, The Plains; Mariama Bâ, So Long a Letter; Svetlana Alexievich, Secondhand Time. I walk to the bookstore closest to the coffee shop, my favorite bookstore in the city, small with dark wood floors and two well-curated tables, chosen, specially, by the owner, who is a small, curly-haired man who is often behind the counter, who I see sometimes in other parts of the city and I smile at him, though I’m sure that he can never place my face. I linger, flipping through first pages, knowing that I can’t afford to buy another novel, that there is no extra twenty dollars in our account. I get books from the library, order used books online for work and charge it to the high school, but then I walk past this shop and find myself inside it, attracted to the thrill of passing the book across the counter. Books are my specific version of consumption; it’s the consumption that I walk inside this store to perform. I want to not be someone who says no all the time to every impulse. I want to not make every choice because it is my only choice. This is a stupid, wasteful way to do this, but I do it—the smell inside the store, the people lingering around me—to play briefly at not caring. I pass a book across the counter that I might not ever read: a biography of an artist I love that costs more than twenty dollars, a paperback of translated Scandinavian fiction that I’ve read bits of for a month. I leave the shop disgusted and embarrassed, stuff the book in my bag, crumple the receipt. I will dispose of it before I get home, evidence of all the ways I am still a spoiled rich kid, as if my husband will not also see the charge on our account and choose to quietly ignore it or to point to it at our monthly tracking of expenses and I will nod, hot-faced, and look down at my lap.