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I left my sick baby (Maggie) with my sick mother (Mary) and went to a party and that's how I met the carpenter. We were on a loveseat and he was like a puppy you could very much imagine him suddenly ripping the armrest with his teeth, or peeing on the floor. An acquaintance kept giving me warning looks, but I could see for myself that he was not a good idea. He was talking about a problem he and some friends had at a nightclub recently, and how he'd taken off his sock and put all his change into it, put his boot back on, and then, in the melee outside, swung it up against the biggest foe's head. He encouraged me to try some of our host's cocaine. I said okay. I wasn't breastfeeding, since Maggie was born without a functioning epiglottis and couldn't swallow anything. She ate special formula pumped through a "g-tube" inserted directly into her stomach. I'd never done coke before, and it tasted like the color lavender trickling down my throat. I smiled really hard, I couldn't stop. The carpenter scratched his hand in my direction with great ferocity, like maybe he wanted to put his scent on me by way of scraped off skin cells. He wore hair grease in his dyed black hair and was younger than me. When he was ejected from the party for being rude to the hostess, I followed him. I'd heard that men couldn't come on cocaine, but he did four times. He ran his nails inside my thighs and spanked me, and then he fed his belt out the loops of his tossed-off pants and hit me with it. I'd toyed with the idea of S/M, as had almost everyone who came into adolescence in the late eighties, but my boyfriends were human beings like me. My boyfriends were good ideas. They would never hit someone in the head with a coin sock during a fight, nor would they hit a lover in a way that truly hurt. So I had no idea that pain actually feels really good, feels better than feeling good. Under the belt's arcs and whizzes and bites, I was able to relax for the first time in about a year. For the first time since Maggie was born, I didn't feel guilty for having better luck than her, for not being in pain while she was, for not being able to take her pain away and bear it myself. I also just plain liked it. The carpenter looked at me with such concentration, like he was creating me. I looked down and there were red welts all over my legs with tiny drops of blood. I was shaking and happy.
I'd been having morbid thoughts for almost a year now even before Maggie was born. (I knew something was wrong, even though the sonogram had come back normal.) I'd wonder stuff like: What if I was a singer and I only had one hit and a crazed fan handcuffed me to the bed and made me listen to it over and over while he raped me? Or: What if I were to lose an arm how would I drive? It takes two hands to make a sharp turn, one hand over the other. No doubt I'd get in another accident and lose my remaining arm. Then how would I defend myself against mosquitoes or muggers? Now that I felt physical pain and maybe the cocaine helped those thoughts disappeared. I didn't feel helpless at all. I felt like I'd leapt into karma and fixed things a little bit for my daughter. "Dang, girl, you're crazy," the carpenter said (presumably because I was bleeding and I couldn't stop smiling) and he fell asleep.
I didn't know if I ever wanted to see him again. Maybe that one time was all I needed. I gingerly stepped into my Betsy Johnson black silk pants (marked down from $180 to $20 because it was past season they weren't warm enough for October) and let myself out without leaving my phone number. I don't think the carpenter knew my name. He'd told me his, but I couldn't remember it. He was Southern.
Though my mother's apartment was only a couple minutes away, she often slept on my couch. My mother used to be 5'3", but she'd lost four inches along the way. Her face was the color of sand, and close to the consistency of sand too. Even while snoozing, her long, thin eyebrows reached to join each other in accusation. Or maybe it was sadness. I normally wasn't careful about keeping the door closed when I showered or changed, but the day after the carpenter, I locked it. I stood on a chair to examine my whole body in the foggy mirror. Pale with strawberry blonde hair. Small features, small breasts. Naked, I'm like white furniture in a white room nothing to focus on. But now there were blue flowers and criss-crossed welts with black crust. I thought I looked so beautiful. I allowed myself to remember the way the carpenter had looked at me, and I had to sit down.
A car door had gone through my mother's stomach earlier in the summer. Surgeons removed thirteen feet of intestines and gave her a colostomy bag. I hadn't gotten along with my mother since about 1983 maybe we didn't even like each other. My feelings about Maggie were the opposite: I felt about her the way my cat feels about a fly cleaning its wings. I looked at my baby and the rest of the room and anyone in it would fade. I took in every movement, each small part. How her nostrils looked like commas, not periods. Of course I didn't want to eat Maggie, but I don't think my cat thinks about that when she's watching the fly either not until it happens. Despite my differing relationships with my mother and Maggie, and despite the two months between their surgeries, the waiting felt like one wait. Nervousness is the same as love excitement. It separates your organs. Your stomach hovers about one inch from your body. It's crawling with ants or eyelashes or rolling gravel. In the hospital waiting room, watching the other families' worried faces, seeing pain and changed lives and knowing that behind those automatic doors death is leap-frogging, hitting some beds and not others, you feel thrillingly, guiltily, alive. You squash the feeling down and try to extinguish it before anyone sees. It's electric in the place your stomach used to be.
I pushed Maggie in her stroller to therapy three times a week. We slept in the same bed she had sinus problems and if her head wasn't constantly propped up on pillows, she'd cough all night long. It was easier to sleep with her and keep re-propping her. People told me that by the time she was five, I wouldn't even remember these days. She'd be running around and happy. But now the thought of her ever being a regular human being seemed impossible. She was more like an attacker in a nightmare: relentless, following my every move with her eyes (like I followed hers). In fact, it was more like she was the cat and I the fly. I loved her, but not because I chose to. I didn't know her she wasn't knowable. One can't very well develop a personality while struggling for air, and that was most of Maggie's day.
I saw him on the street. I don't know why people say their knees "buckle" it felt like mine got unbuckled, and there was nothing holding my calves to the rest of my body. "Hey," he said. We went back to his place, and he told me to make myself comfortable while he went down into the basement to put some laundry into the dryer. I walked around touching his things . . . stereo, skull candle, a Bobby Sherman lunchbox. He came up behind me and snapped handcuffs on me, behind my back, and said: "Don't say a word." I was wearing an angora sweater, and he lifted his shirt so he could nuzzle it with his chest. He pushed me into the futon that was his bedroom, and his stomach pushed the cuffs into my wrists and back until my hands and lower back were tingling; it gave me the oddest sensation of being ice cream.
After it was over, he slipped a videotape in. "This is my favorite show," he said, and slumped next to me on the couch, not watching the TV, his arm loose around my shoulders. It was Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, a short-lived show from the early eighties. It was great. Big trees. You could almost taste the air. Everyone's teeth were so clean looking, you wanted to lick them. "I have a kid," I said.
"That's cool," he answered without opening his eyes. "I love kids."
to try some of our host's cocaine. I said okay. I wasn't breastfeeding, since Maggie was born without a functioning epiglottis and couldn't swallow anything. She ate special formula pumped through a "g-tube" inserted directly into her stomach. I'd never done coke before, and it tasted like the color lavender trickling down my throat. I smiled really hard, I couldn't stop. The carpenter scratched his hand in my direction with great ferocity, like maybe he wanted to put his scent on me by way of scraped off skin cells. He wore hair grease in his dyed black hair and was younger than me. When he was ejected from the party for being rude to the hostess, I followed him. I'd heard that men couldn't come on cocaine, but he did four times. He ran his nails inside my thighs and spanked me, and then he fed his belt out the loops of his tossed-off pants and hit me with it. I'd toyed with the idea of S/M, as had almost everyone who came into adolescence in the late eighties, but my boyfriends were human beings like me. My boyfriends were good ideas. They would never hit someone in the head with a coin sock during a fight, nor would they hit a lover in a way that truly hurt. So I had no idea that pain actually feels really good, feels better than feeling good. Under the belt's arcs and whizzes and bites, I was able to relax for the first time in about a year. For the first time since Maggie was born, I didn't feel guilty for having better luck than her, for not being in pain while she was, for not being able to take her pain away and bear it myself. I also just plain liked it. The carpenter looked at me with such concentration, like he was creating me. I looked down and there were red welts all over my legs with tiny drops of blood. I was shaking and happy.
would fade. I took in every movement, each small part. How her nostrils looked like commas, not periods. Of course I didn't want to eat Maggie, but I don't think my cat thinks about that when she's watching the fly either not until it happens. Despite my differing relationships with my mother and Maggie, and despite the two months between their surgeries, the waiting felt like one wait. Nervousness is the same as love excitement. It separates your organs. Your stomach hovers about one inch from your body. It's crawling with ants or eyelashes or rolling gravel. In the hospital waiting room, watching the other families' worried faces, seeing pain and changed lives and knowing that behind those automatic doors death is leap-frogging, hitting some beds and not others, you feel thrillingly, guiltily, alive. You squash the feeling down and try to extinguish it before anyone sees. It's electric in the place your stomach used to be.
, featuring curious yet marvelous infusions of cucumber and rose petal.
