suffering: you are exactly the same after as before. Only more so.
Jack told me not to have feelings about my feelings, advised me to write her a letter and bring it to her gravesite in Queens, tell her all the things I wished I could say.
Sorry you’re dead, Mom, I love you the best I could come up with, and a lie.
We decide not to “do” Thanksgiving this year. A relief.
Last year we drove down to the city with Walker in the brand-new offgassing car seat. My incision was still giving me trouble. I was still moving like a ninety-five-year-old. We arrived to find Sheryl and my father and cousin Erica and whoever else doting on the turkey, bobbing and weaving around it like it was made of eternal fucking light, barely able to pull themselves away long enough to greet us. The turkey, the turkey, look at the turkey! Sue me: I’d imagined them making a little fuss over the baby . They’re real into their juiced-up carcasses, my father and Sheryl. It gets them incredibly excited, ministering to a dead animal.
There are no pictures of me or my mother in that apartment, by the way. Not a one. There’s Sheryl’s mother’s mother in a late nineteenth-century Russian portrait, Sheryl’s mother as kid, Sheryl’s parents’ wedding, Sheryl as sorority president. There are the sons as grade-schoolers, sons and wives on respective wedding days, grandchildren in studio portraits. There’s Norman and Sheryl on a group tour, Norman and Sheryl on another group tour, Norman and Sheryl on yet another group tour.
They had made us a salad and a bowl of overcooked greens ( for the vegetarians! ) as though it were a proud meal to offer a post-op nursing mother. Of course they added turkey juice to the stuffing, so I ate the bread and salad and over-sautéed greens and this awful pie one of Sheryl’s sons brought from FoodLand. You would not believe the crap Sheryl’s greasy sons and their wives call food. The waxy, genetically engineered fruits, the processed shit, the corn syrup dextrose canola preservative crap they call food. That they’re not all dead is testimony to general good genes, I guess.
I mostly sat on the couch and nursed, as one nurses and nurses and nurses a newborn. Paul brought me a plate, kept asking if I was okay. At one point Sheryl tried to drape a blanket over me.
Later one of Sheryl’s grandkids came over and stood right next to me. She was about six, watching with great interest.
What’s he doing? she whispered, peering intently at the baby’s tiny working mouth.
He’s drinking milk , I whispered back. There was still time for her. She stood stock-still for another moment, then ran over to her mother.
THAT BABY’S DRINKING MILK FROM HER BOOBIE , she stage-whispered, eyes wide. The room burst into laughter.
Yeah , her mother whined in that hellish fake voice people use to bullshit to their kids, you didn’t do that, did you, Hayden?
Hayden said she guessed not.
My next visitor over on the couch was Erica. Walker had fallen asleep and released my swollen, still-wet nipple, which I hadn’t yet bothered to put away. The face Erica made, you’d think she was looking at a steaming fresh defecation. I pulled the cloth diaper out from under my shirt, where it had been stemming the leak from my other boob, and hooked the nursing bra all up again without waking the sleeping kid, proud of myself for having recently mastered this kick-ass series of moves. As proud as I’ve ever been of anything, come right down to it.
Erica sat there with that face like she was about to puke, or masturbate, or both. She was blind to the baby—the endlessly fascinating curve of his forehead, his astonishingly perfect nostrils and fingernails and eyelashes. Holding him in your arms reframed all things. How painfully obvious it was that men, with their secret societies and weapons stockpiles, could know little of life. Elsewhere in the room were heated discussions about football and politics and a new sci-fi movie
Jack told me not to have feelings about my feelings, advised me to write her a letter and bring it to her gravesite in Queens, tell her all the things I wished I could say.
Sorry you’re dead, Mom, I love you the best I could come up with, and a lie.
We decide not to “do” Thanksgiving this year. A relief.
Last year we drove down to the city with Walker in the brand-new offgassing car seat. My incision was still giving me trouble. I was still moving like a ninety-five-year-old. We arrived to find Sheryl and my father and cousin Erica and whoever else doting on the turkey, bobbing and weaving around it like it was made of eternal fucking light, barely able to pull themselves away long enough to greet us. The turkey, the turkey, look at the turkey! Sue me: I’d imagined them making a little fuss over the baby . They’re real into their juiced-up carcasses, my father and Sheryl. It gets them incredibly excited, ministering to a dead animal.
There are no pictures of me or my mother in that apartment, by the way. Not a one. There’s Sheryl’s mother’s mother in a late nineteenth-century Russian portrait, Sheryl’s mother as kid, Sheryl’s parents’ wedding, Sheryl as sorority president. There are the sons as grade-schoolers, sons and wives on respective wedding days, grandchildren in studio portraits. There’s Norman and Sheryl on a group tour, Norman and Sheryl on another group tour, Norman and Sheryl on yet another group tour.
They had made us a salad and a bowl of overcooked greens ( for the vegetarians! ) as though it were a proud meal to offer a post-op nursing mother. Of course they added turkey juice to the stuffing, so I ate the bread and salad and over-sautéed greens and this awful pie one of Sheryl’s sons brought from FoodLand. You would not believe the crap Sheryl’s greasy sons and their wives call food. The waxy, genetically engineered fruits, the processed shit, the corn syrup dextrose canola preservative crap they call food. That they’re not all dead is testimony to general good genes, I guess.
I mostly sat on the couch and nursed, as one nurses and nurses and nurses a newborn. Paul brought me a plate, kept asking if I was okay. At one point Sheryl tried to drape a blanket over me.
Later one of Sheryl’s grandkids came over and stood right next to me. She was about six, watching with great interest.
What’s he doing? she whispered, peering intently at the baby’s tiny working mouth.
He’s drinking milk , I whispered back. There was still time for her. She stood stock-still for another moment, then ran over to her mother.
THAT BABY’S DRINKING MILK FROM HER BOOBIE , she stage-whispered, eyes wide. The room burst into laughter.
Yeah , her mother whined in that hellish fake voice people use to bullshit to their kids, you didn’t do that, did you, Hayden?
Hayden said she guessed not.
My next visitor over on the couch was Erica. Walker had fallen asleep and released my swollen, still-wet nipple, which I hadn’t yet bothered to put away. The face Erica made, you’d think she was looking at a steaming fresh defecation. I pulled the cloth diaper out from under my shirt, where it had been stemming the leak from my other boob, and hooked the nursing bra all up again without waking the sleeping kid, proud of myself for having recently mastered this kick-ass series of moves. As proud as I’ve ever been of anything, come right down to it.
Erica sat there with that face like she was about to puke, or masturbate, or both. She was blind to the baby—the endlessly fascinating curve of his forehead, his astonishingly perfect nostrils and fingernails and eyelashes. Holding him in your arms reframed all things. How painfully obvious it was that men, with their secret societies and weapons stockpiles, could know little of life. Elsewhere in the room were heated discussions about football and politics and a new sci-fi movie
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