by
Miranda July
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“Mama?” Sam ran around the house; the scooter rolled on the kitchen floor above my head. My heart shattered at the sound of their little voice. Whatever I had been doing to minimize this pain abruptly ended—I was desperate to see my child. But I couldn’t move. I was immobile, stricken. The transition was simply not possible for me. Someone got a glass of water from the faucet. The toilet was flushed, loud in the pipes. Harris called out my name. Sam shouted, Where’s my big spoon? They knew I was home, but where was I? How much longer could I stay down here without it being hard to explain? Not much longer. I was crouched between my suitcases and a mini trampoline on its side. I wasn’t dead, but I was too much a soul. I had weighted things too heavily in the direction of music and poetry, and my spirit, thusly animated, had come to think of itself as a full person. It did not understand how misshapen it was. Now they were looking in the backyard for me. Other people knew how to merge things; I was forever running back and forth between opposites, never in any one place.
“These people always think they really know you,” Harris said, ripping off a piece of Friday’s waffle and putting it in his mouth. “They can’t separate the actual person from the work.”
I was suddenly overwhelmed with the urge to slap him, hard. The real me is in my work. Any fan of my work knows me better than you do. But whose fault was that? I hunched over my crossed arms.
“Now, what makes you think about him less?”
There were really only degrees of more, but I tried to think of what was the opposite of looking him up.
“Maybe your work?” Jordi suggested.
“What work?”
Our eyes met; she looked quietly terrified for me. Obviously a person like me, like us, could only find salvation in her work.
“Cleaning. Maybe when I clean I think about him a tiny bit less.”
“Perfect,” said Jordi, “and think how nice your house will look!"
“Are you crying?”
I hadn’t even realized.
“Their plight is very moving to me,” I said, quickly pulling myself together. “A business . . . struggling to keep up with the technology . . . online booking.”
Harris, no idiot, didn’t say anything to that. I let out a sigh and shut my eyes.
“I’m just wiped out from my drive. Exhausted.”
“Sometimes it’s hard to come back,” he said slowly. “Really hard.”
Did he know? On some level? Maybe he did. Maybe he was about to confess something and then I would confess and this would be the start of us finally breaking through. Unfortunate timing, since I wasn’t in the mood to break through right now. But I might feel differently in the moment, the way people who suddenly accept Jesus Christ into their heart were like, Jesus who? just seconds before being born again. I sat up, bracing myself. He was finding the words.
“When I get home from Olympic”—Olympic was a recording studio in London—“it always takes me a couple days to readjust.”
“Yeah,” I said, waiting for the confession.
“To get back into the swing of things.”
“Right.”
“But then I do.”
Oh. No confession. He was saying there were limits to how long one could mope around and apparently he did it the right amount.
:(
On the way home Sam raced ahead of us through the grass, stopping abruptly in the picnic area.
“Call me,” Sam said. “What’s that mean?”
I looked up with horror.
“It means Call me,” said Harris. “Someone wants someone to call them.”
“But why is it on a chair?”
I shrugged, like God only knows.
“Is it free?”
“Well, it might belong to someone who put it here—”
“It’s kind of cool,” Harris said, plopping down in the chair. “Maybe we should grab it. For the backyard.”
I cocked my head: Really?
“What?” he said. “You love stuff like this.” Sam sat on his lap.
I didn’t say anything. It was hard for me to gauge the translucency of the situation. How obvious was it that this was the chair my lover used to step on to climb into my window? That I—I, Mama—had painted CALL ME?
“We can put it under the linden tree,” I said.
i like the way this is written
“Just be glad you can still feel it. I feel a little . . . numb now. Dead down there.” I wondered if she was making it sound worse than it really was. Sometimes I did that to compensate for people’s lack of imagination. But I had plenty of imagination so maybe I should take all of this down a notch. “There’s no hormonal drive now so it all becomes mental,” she continued. “I have to create a narrative that makes it possible, otherwise it starts to feel like rape.”
This was new for her? I’d always had to get out ahead of sex, dig an inclined trough so it could flow easily downhill. Being walloped, pounded by lust was very recent. Very. I told Mary about body- versus mind-rooted arousal. “It sounds like you used to be body-rooted.”
“Oh, definitely,” she said, laughing, “but I don’t even recognize that person now, my old lustful self. I can’t imagine doing the things I did.”
I was far outside of Monrovia when I started walking back to the motel. As I came down to Earth I wondered if I’d misunderstood the fork in the road Mary had been talking about. I’d thought the two paths were:
sex with Davey vs. a life of bitterness and regret
But maybe the road split between:
a life spent longing vs. a life that was continually surprising
like this night had been. While I didn’t have the narcotic high Davey gave me, there was another kind of elation and it was, among other things, weirder. I felt untethered from my age and femininity and thus swimming in great new swaths of freedom and time. One might shift again and again like this, through intimacies, and not outpace oldness exactly, but match its weirdness, its flagrant specificity, with one’s own.
I lay on my bed with wide-open eyes, shivering but somehow unable to get under the covers. I could hear the murmur of Harris’s voice on the phone; he was telling someone what had just happened. I imagined getting up right now, slipping out the front door and finding that all the women in the neighborhood were also leaving their houses. We were all running to the same field, a place we hadn’t discussed but implicitly knew we would meet in when the tipping point tipped. We ran like horses, but we weren’t horses, so after the initial hugs there wasn’t anything to do there in the grass. Everyone started checking their phones to see if their partners were calling and they weren’t. Not yet. We hadn’t been gone long enough. Soon it was just a million women waiting for their mates to call, to be needed, and then to fall into panic and guilt, to be torn, which was our primary state. Start the revolution here, now, in this field? Or drive home and slip back into the fold, use the electric toothbrush, feel grim and trapped? Of course there was no decision to make because we were all already home, not in a field. There was no collective tipping point. Most of us wouldn’t do anything very different, ever. Our yearning and quiet rage would be suppressed and seep into our children and they would hate this about us enough to do it a new way. That was how most change happened, not within one lifetime but between generations. If you really wanted to change you had to believe that you were both yourself and your baby; you had to let yourself be completely reborn within one life. Of course the danger was in risking everything, destroying everything, for nothing. As I had done tonight.
When I didn’t pack my bag for Monrovia on Wednesday morning (why would I go?), Sam and Harris both seemed disappointed. Sam wanted another pizza night and Harris wanted a break from our silent, relentless war. Fair enough. As I drove I suddenly realized these nights apart were probably the first steps toward divorce. Divorce, of course. I gasped alone in the car. I had truly believed we would break through at some point. I could still imagine the older versions of us, laughing fondly about something the other one always did.
I tried to watch a TV show everyone was talking about, but all the references to sex and marriage and infidelity made me weep and that’s what the show was about. I almost wished for an FMH flashback just to be taken out of the present, even for a second. The NICU was hell, but we were together in it, it was part of our long history. Even if I started a new, more open relationship immediately after the divorce and stayed with that person for fifteen years, it wouldn’t be the same stretch of life. Coming into ourselves as parents and adults—none of that would happen with anyone else. If there was anything meaningful about aging, it was tunneling backward in time together, holding memories as a couple so they made a kind of safe basket in a rough and arbitrary world—not just for Sam but for us.