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.
I think of all the ways that books have failed me, all the ways they’re less than what I thought, but it’s still the language that I like the best in the show. I find the colors of the paintings almost painfully off-putting; the attempts at beauty, large flowers on blue-and-green canvas, I find grotesque. But the language that
