My husband is a god, many headed.
Because he has multiple women, he may have multiple aspects.
I want the same thing.
So I have practiced myself by writing to him, although we live together. I have somehow assembled some words that, when seen through a glass screen, might look something like it could begin to be somebody. Now that I can read over what I might be, I think I know which parts are me and which belong to my husband’s other women. I have become, perhaps, almost one complete person who could, perhaps, have a conversation.
And if I were to use these words to write to my husband while he, simultaneously, communicated with his other women, or while I communicated with other men, would the words we said to each other lose meaning, or would this render what he says to them just more of what he says to me, and what I say to them just more of what I say to him?
Are there only two sides of the glass to be on? And if I were able to skip over to the other side, would the view back look like old vinyl, his women, their voices trapped on a flat plane, damaged, heard underwater?
I think all this while standing in the doorway of our house, looking out into the garden at my husband stripping paint from the shed.
I say to him, “Are you having a good strip?”
And he ignores my lame joke, so I say,
“How’s it going?”
And he says, “Fine.”
And I say, “Can I get you a coffee?”
And he says, “Yes.
Thanks.”
CLAUSTROPHOBIA
MINUS 1 YEAR
In the house of women, everyone is losing it.
First my daughter’s piano teacher. Then my mother.
Then her cleaner.
There’s something about our uncontrol, no men to watch over us.
What if it never stops?
MINUS 4 YEARS
The air, both inside and outside my mother’s house, smells of fried meat. There is nothing we can do to get rid of it.
My mother returns to the kitchen, feels herself extend backwards into her house. “The yogurts,” she says. “Someone has stacked them.
Who has eaten one?” she says, to me, as though I should know — for, after her, am I not the woman here?
“Did you not grate any cheese at all?” she says to the empty grater, which is so clean. The grater does not answer. She means me. She had left the kitchen to me, while shopping, and I have made lunch for my brothers’ wives and their daughters.
My mother says, “We can have dinner for lunch, or dinner for dinner. What would you like?” If I eat dinner now, I won’t have to eat it later. But I might. I must stop eating. But will I ever dare eat enough to want to stop? From the side I begin to look boxlike: a shelf of breasts, lifted by some contraption, then — down! — a waterfall. Since I’ve been here, I eat more, stealing spoons of cream, olives from the fridge, though she has so much and gives it freely. And I drink, though no one notices the evenings spent furious with alcohol. I buy the wine, that’s not her department. She doesn’t see how quick the bright ring creeps down the bottle. A pop of a cork the answer: dinner for lunch it is. Meanwhile, she is swearing because something has gone wrong with the soup, like it was life. And death.
My mother tidies the food away into her son’s wife and their children, her long years’ job of loading things into people. While my daughter cheerfully kicks me under the table, my mother helps my third brother’s daughter to concentrate on what is in front of her, to stop concentrating on anything that is not in front of her, until there is only what is in front of her, and then there is not.
“It’s nice,” my mother says.
The girl says, “It doesn’t taste nice.”
“There’s lots more in there,” she says to my second sister-in-law’s first child, who hands back her milk.
She means drink up. Nothing means what she says.
“It’ll go to waste.”
I, meanwhile, cannot drink, my nose filled up with something. I can’t drink but I can’t breathe in either. Something rushes in to fill the gaps before the air.
My mother brings the cake out of the tin, measures it, knife hovering, turns to me.
“Would he like a larger slice?”
“Mom, I am not married anymore.”
My mother takes off her wedding ring to do the washing up. She does not take her apron off to eat. She washes; I dry. It occurs to me that I would perform this task so much better if I were not here while performing it. My mother, washing beside me, perhaps feels the same. The washing up liquid smells of sweeties. It tells me that it is ginger and peach. It smells of something we should still be eating. This seems wrong: it should smell of something after, whatever it is that comes after. The dishwasher crunches like someone larruped in some half-hearted S&M session. The time spent cleaning up outweighs the time consuming. Then there is the cooking, the shopping …
My mother likes to keep things in. I prefer the feeling I have when the full fridge is relieved. I am anxious that we eat every bit (perhaps not the preserves, the condiments) before restocking. When called on by my mother to cook for her guests (which I am called-upon to do as, after her, am I not the woman here?), I am anxious to redistribute — especially — food I know diners have previously rejected: leftovers, anomalous items: boiled carrots, a spoonful of hot sauce, a single tinned apricot. I do this by introducing them into stews, pâtés, and other dishes. These additions are not in the original recipes and sometimes they ruin a meal, though in ways the eaters can scarcely identify.
I am aware that I spoil things mostly for the sake of geometry.
“A vegetable marrow,” my mother says, already, “for supper? Would you like it roasted and stuffed with nuts?” This is not a question.
I am a vegetarian; there is only ever one choice.
There is no answer to this, none expected. There is no “no.”
But I am glad enough to be here, in the clean house where there is always the smell of food, in the midst of someone else’s. Home is a rehearsal, by which I mean a repetition like in French: both what’s behind the curtain and in front of it, a cherry cake studded with the same surprise on repeat. It confirms itself; it must confirm itself.
MINUS 3 YEARS
Returning, the house is still full of useful things she does not use: an antique hairbrush (that hair in it is probably Grandma’s). What have we bought her, we, her children, her grandchildren? She has no more use for most things, but she likes the presents’ outsides and, momentarily, what is inside.
There she is (the picture of my mother, young): what’s to fault her? Me without the wide nose, without the unwieldy female fat. When I lived with her, I was fat, both times: as a teen, and then later. That way, she knew I could not move.
Upstairs my mother has hundreds of outfits. She has bought some new for the occasion. But will she wear them?
“You should wear what you want, Mom.”
“It’s different if you have to go out with him saying ‘that old thing again.’”
My father’s pills are on his bedside table. Round, brown, shiny. At first I think: a jar of chocolate buttons, delicious in their sugar shells. I eat a square of chocolate just to keep from feeling hungry later. Here even for a weekend, I am getting fatter. I can feel it in my legs.