Read Online Since You Left Me by Allen Zadoff - Free Book Online Page A

some big, some wide and some narrow. I’ve seen pregnant women before, but never lying down with so few clothes on. When you see pregnant women out in the world they can look fat, but in tight yoga clothes you realize they’re not fat at all. There’s something growing inside them, and it’s running out of room and wants to get out.
    “Deep breath,” Mom says. “Let your worries and cares drift away on the music.…”
    I try to let my worries and cares drift, but they stick to me. First I worry about what’s going on with school, then I worry about my deal with Sweet Caroline, then I worry about what Herschel said on the phone last night, about how I’m hurting people with my lie. Maybe even damaging my character.
    Mom says, “Imagine there’s an empty space inside of you and it’s filling with warm, blue water. It is good. All is good.”
    All is not good , I think. Not for me, and not for these bumps, these babies-to-be. If they pop out into the world now, they’re going to find themselves in yoga class, trapped in Dead Man’s Pose with their obsessed mothers.
    Because there’s no escaping when you’re a baby.
    Wherever and whenever you’re born, you start getting brainwashed. Maybe you have a grandfather who desperately wants you to practice Judaism, or a mother who forces you to do yoga, or a father who’s spent ten years in a bedroom inventing something that still doesn’t exist and probably never will. And these are the adults in your life who are supposed to be teaching you how to do things.
    I look out across the bumps, and I feel bad for them. As soon as they pop out, the world is going to start pushing them in different directions, and what chance do they have?
    “Now let the water flow out of you,” Mom says.
    “I’m waiting for my water to flow,” one of the ladies says, followed by giggles.
    I imagine crawling up to the first lady’s stomach and telling the baby, “Don’t come out. It’s not safe. Pass it on.”
    That baby passes the message to the next, and on and on.
    “Roll over on your sides, ladies. Let me know if you need help,” Mom says.
    But if I tell the babies not to come out, maybe there are going to be thirty stillbirths in the class, and they’ll blame Mom. They’ll say that all these women came to a prenatal class that killed their babies. Mom will have a terrible reputation, and it will ruin her life. If her life is ruined, my life is guaranteed to be ruined.
    I decide I sent the wrong message. So I imagine going up to the first baby and saying, “Come out, but don’t believe everything they tell you. Pass it on.”
    Then I think that might also be a bad message, because all these kids will be born not knowing who to trust. That’s a terrible way to go through life, being surrounded by adults you can’t trust.
    That’s when I decide I’m not the best person to be giving advice to fetuses.
    “Mom,” I whisper.
    She shushes me.
    “Bathroom.”
    She gives me a disappointed look.
    “All this talk of water,” I say, pulling at my shorts.
    “Go ahead,” she whispers.
    I stand up. The ladies look at me.
    “Mucous break,” I say, and they giggle as I head for the door.

“Sat nam.”
    That’s a mantra, a phrase you repeat over and over again in meditation. Mom told me it means something like, Truth is my identity . But truth is not exactly my strong point these days.
    It’s playing on a meditation CD piped into the bathroom.
    Sat nam. Sat nam .
    Anyway, Sat nam sounds more like, Sit down . Which is a pretty good mantra for the bathroom.
    It’s like the bathroom is inviting me to do my business.
    So I open a stall and avail myself of the invitation.
    The nice part about the men’s room at the Center is that it’s rarely used because there aren’t many men to use it. There are guys who take yoga, but the female to male ratio is something like a hundred to one. While this is easy on the eyes, it’s also easy on the men’s room.
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