She’s not okay, she whispered to my husband.
Is she seeing someone? she asked. She, who had never believed in seeing someone up till now.
I had been seeing someone, but I’d stopped when she was born.
Maybe she shouldn’t be alone with her, she said, while I stood outside the kitchen and listened. I had not taken leave from school because then I would have lost my health insurance. I strapped her to me and nursed her in an office between classes as I continued to try to read and write and think.
My mother said, She has a history.
She’s fine, my husband said. She’s tired.
She needs to just give her a bottle, she said.
I cannot, he said, tell her what to do.
I walked out of the apartment, shaking. I left the baby. My breasts ached all of the time and leaked through my shirt. I had my keys and phone and I called Sasha and she answered though we hadn’t spoken, then, in years. I think maybe I figured that she wouldn’t answer but she answered.
It’s so much, I said to her without preamble. She knew we had a baby. She’d been on the mass email announcement. I hadn’t known how to tell her about it besides that.
I don’t, I said. Sash.
I knew as soon as she picked up I had no right to ask.
Breathe, she said.
My mom’s here, I said.
Oof.
We laughed.
What if she takes her? I said.
She’s yours, she said. She can’t take her.
Both of us were quiet a long time then. I thought about the baby still not with her, the baby that she birthed but never had.
How did you … I started.
You’re fine, she said. She would not, had never talked about it to me. You are going to be fine, she said.
I said her name and she said mine and I stood on the street with cars passing and people looking at me. I had no bra on and milk fell down into my waistband and my belly button and the skin below my abdomen still smarted from where they’d cut me open, just like they’d cut her open, days before.
Go home, she said.
I did.
* * *
You ever heard of the dive reflex? she says.
I shake my head. We’re close now to our apartment and we pass the bar where I sat with Ifeoma, our laundromat.
It’s biological, she says. She makes a face and I smile at her. There was a point when she’d bring up biology, when we were in high school and she loved biology and I loved books, and I’d yell at her to stop because I thought science made no sense.
It’s a physiological response to immersion, she says. Do you know what the homeostatic reflexes are?
I shake my head.
It’s the body’s basic impulse to maintain homeostasis in response to stimuli, she says.
I only half know what she’s saying, but I love the look and sound of her now, confident all of a sudden. I try not to bring my face too close to hers.
The body understands it’s underwater, and it responds by redistributing oxygen to the most vital organs, the heart and brain, until it’s able to come up for air again. There are sensory receptors in the nose that initiate the reflex when they fill with water, so then the body can stay under for longer than it should were we immersed without this.
She’s broken free of my arm now and we’re standing on a corner by our apartment and cars and people pass and I listen and she talks.
After, she says. In med school. I was so mad at you then. But when I learned about this, I thought about you, about both of us. We were underwater. There was only so much oxygen.
* * *
When we get back to the apartment, I ask her to show me pictures of the baby, and she shows me.
She takes her phone out.
I scroll through all the various squished-faced candids.
She watches me.
I smile at the tiny, shriveled thing.
She’s beautiful, I say, which is not right, but close enough, and she nods and stares at her over my shoulder.
She starts crying and I pull her head onto my lap like she used to do a thousand years ago for me.
Go home, Sash, I say.
Her hair falls across my legs and I watch her a long time and we stay quiet.
She sits up and goes to wash her face and I give her my computer and we call her husband and we find her a flight.
THE DAY SHE leaves, my husband goes uptown to a new job and it rains, so we stay inside and the girls watch TV and draw and paint. They get in a fight over who gets to use the purple paintbrush and both of them start crying, but then the four-year-old finds another purple paintbrush and starts painting again but the two-year-old still can’t stop.
Just breathe, baby, I say to her.
I try to nurse her but she pushes me away and just keeps crying, her body hot, her face bright red.
Sometimes, I say, it helps to put your feelings other places. I tell her that her sister puts her feelings into drawing, that I put them into running miles and miles.
She looks at me. She’s hardly formed at all and trying to comprehend this thing that I just made up to calm her down. She holds her hand up to her head, then looks back at me, still crying. But Mommy, she says, revving up again and sounding desperate, I can’t reach my hand into my head to get the feelings out.
8
THE WEEK AFTER school ends, my husband’s parents drive down to take the children for a week and I am weightless. Our apartment’s still and quiet, empty. They take them nine hours up to northern Maine and I stand in their room every night and think about how I might drive up and bring them back.
* * *
My husband’s uptown job has been extended through the week, and my friend who is quadrilingual gifts me with a week of unlimited yoga while the children are away. I go to my first class after my run early in the morning. I’ve installed a free-trial running app on my phone, and each morning a woman’s voice tells me how many miles to run and how fast and I take comfort in her deciding all this for me in advance. The rest of the day I wander around the city. At a restaurant, I go to use the bathroom. I went yesterday and the waiters were so nice and the space so clean—the soap smelled like lemons in a way that had me touching my hands up to my face all day—and so I decide today to go again. A man sitting at the bar reading the paper, who was also, yesterday, sitting at the bar reading the paper, stops me as I walk through the main room.
I see your trick, he says.
I’m sorry? I say.
I’ve just showered from my run and I’m wearing a loose summer dress and a cardigan and flip-flops. I have a small tote bag filled with books.
What trick, I say.
You came here yesterday, he says. These bathrooms are for customers. You’re not.
I’m sorry, I say, embarrassed, but also angry; also, the way he looks at and talks to me, I want to run back home and go to bed.
You can use it, he says. But don’t come back.
I use his bathroom and wash my hands with the delicious-smelling soap and on the way out I don’t look at him. I take the train back to Brooklyn and wait in a poorly air-conditioned coffee shop until the next yoga class. I get there early and lie a long time quietly on the mat.
* * *
I meet a friend who is a member at the Whitney to see a preview of a show that I can’t see alone because they don’t take my university IDs. I’ve read about this artist, and though I’ve never seen his work in person, I’ve thought about him, about what I read about his life and work, his death, for years. The first exhibit, once my friend has shown the man at the entrance proof that he’s a member, is pictures, photographs in black and white of people in different parts of New York City, wearing a mask of Rimbaud’s face over their own. The artist wanted to be a writer, says one of the captions. He had in common with Rimbaud his queerness, an impulse toward activism, a belief in the power and the strangeness of words when they are twisted and reconfigured to new ends.