transformed it. Midas fingers, Midas lips, Midas cunt
.
Sasha had taken drugs and was in the hospital.
At her bedside in the emergency ward, seeing my daughter unconscious and gaunt, yet still more beautiful than when we’d left her, I knew that what I’d touched in Egypt was gone. “I’m staying here for the night,” Anna said, and her voice pushed me into a back corridor of our marriage, where I would remain long after Sasha’s recovery the next day.
Two weeks later, in the park behind the DesignAge office, the blonde hair would snag me; a cliché bait for aman whose whole life had been defined by his preference for dark hair, brown eyes, long legs. I was a man, who at the age of forty-nine, became the prisoner of a short, bosomy woman in her thirties with green eyes that made a laughingstock of emeralds.
SIX
I am skittish around the machines in the house—the dishwasher, the dryer, even the blender—anything that Anna focusses her attention on. My stomach clenches at the sound of an appliance, as though holding in something that is the last of all that is mine alone.
Even so, Anna seems less intent on the whir and spin of things than she is on building piles of objects around our house. There is a pile of letters, junk mail she has refused to throw out, on the kitchen counter beside the telephone. A pile of hats has grown on the floor of our bedroom near her dresser drawers. I hadn’t considered how she might look after the operation, but clearly she has and is preparing for it.
The recovery time in hospital after the surgery is four to six days, the first days in intensive care. The home recovery period ranges from three to six weeks, “if the surgery isn’t complicated.” Doctors like Gottlieb must say these things to cover themselves against potential fuckups. Anna is obviously planning long into this recovery period and so must I.
A pile of novels is growing beside our bed. It’s comprised of authors I haven’t known her to read before: Jane Austen, Herman Melville, and, oddly, Jack Kerouac—as though she’s revisiting some thread of her MA studies that isn’t yet apparent to me. If I weave that thread through the things she says, will I be able to decode what is going on in her head? Still, there are other piles that seem to have no significance to the past or to how she will spend her recovery time.
One I discovered yesterday, outside, at the back of the house where she normally has potted plants, gardening tools and bags of soil for her flower garden (which often fails in this sandy terrain). There a pile of cookware has grown: saucepans, griddles, frying pans, kettles, soup pots, a wok. I hadn’t realized we owned so many pots, and when I went to the cupboard below the kitchen counter, I saw that all that was left in it was one small stainless steel saucepan that might be sufficient to boil an egg.
Another pile is growing in the living room next to the television. This consists of every lifestyle magazine and journal that has been brought into our home over the years as renovations, beautifying facelifts and springcleaning were contemplated:
Architectural Digest, House and Garden, Redbook, Farm Beautiful
. A pile of suggestions for all that has never come true. There is a tall pile next to that one of
Maclean’s, Harper’s, Glamour
and
Modern Dance
. What for? There might be a pattern if I try to link these titles, or link the piles—magazines, pots, hats … There is yet another in the bathroom, which disturbs me most of all: a pile of items that must have been on the shelf for years, accumulated not only by Anna but also by our daughters. On the floor, near the toilet, the pile begins with a rubber contraceptive diaphragm stuffed with several individual packets of condoms to help keep its shape and firmness; three pink contraceptive pill dial dispensers rest against the dome of the diaphragm. On top of the dispensers are two pregnancy detection sticks, and on top of those are
.
Sasha had taken drugs and was in the hospital.
At her bedside in the emergency ward, seeing my daughter unconscious and gaunt, yet still more beautiful than when we’d left her, I knew that what I’d touched in Egypt was gone. “I’m staying here for the night,” Anna said, and her voice pushed me into a back corridor of our marriage, where I would remain long after Sasha’s recovery the next day.
Two weeks later, in the park behind the DesignAge office, the blonde hair would snag me; a cliché bait for aman whose whole life had been defined by his preference for dark hair, brown eyes, long legs. I was a man, who at the age of forty-nine, became the prisoner of a short, bosomy woman in her thirties with green eyes that made a laughingstock of emeralds.
SIX
I am skittish around the machines in the house—the dishwasher, the dryer, even the blender—anything that Anna focusses her attention on. My stomach clenches at the sound of an appliance, as though holding in something that is the last of all that is mine alone.
Even so, Anna seems less intent on the whir and spin of things than she is on building piles of objects around our house. There is a pile of letters, junk mail she has refused to throw out, on the kitchen counter beside the telephone. A pile of hats has grown on the floor of our bedroom near her dresser drawers. I hadn’t considered how she might look after the operation, but clearly she has and is preparing for it.
The recovery time in hospital after the surgery is four to six days, the first days in intensive care. The home recovery period ranges from three to six weeks, “if the surgery isn’t complicated.” Doctors like Gottlieb must say these things to cover themselves against potential fuckups. Anna is obviously planning long into this recovery period and so must I.
A pile of novels is growing beside our bed. It’s comprised of authors I haven’t known her to read before: Jane Austen, Herman Melville, and, oddly, Jack Kerouac—as though she’s revisiting some thread of her MA studies that isn’t yet apparent to me. If I weave that thread through the things she says, will I be able to decode what is going on in her head? Still, there are other piles that seem to have no significance to the past or to how she will spend her recovery time.
One I discovered yesterday, outside, at the back of the house where she normally has potted plants, gardening tools and bags of soil for her flower garden (which often fails in this sandy terrain). There a pile of cookware has grown: saucepans, griddles, frying pans, kettles, soup pots, a wok. I hadn’t realized we owned so many pots, and when I went to the cupboard below the kitchen counter, I saw that all that was left in it was one small stainless steel saucepan that might be sufficient to boil an egg.
Another pile is growing in the living room next to the television. This consists of every lifestyle magazine and journal that has been brought into our home over the years as renovations, beautifying facelifts and springcleaning were contemplated:
Architectural Digest, House and Garden, Redbook, Farm Beautiful
. A pile of suggestions for all that has never come true. There is a tall pile next to that one of
Maclean’s, Harper’s, Glamour
and
Modern Dance
. What for? There might be a pattern if I try to link these titles, or link the piles—magazines, pots, hats … There is yet another in the bathroom, which disturbs me most of all: a pile of items that must have been on the shelf for years, accumulated not only by Anna but also by our daughters. On the floor, near the toilet, the pile begins with a rubber contraceptive diaphragm stuffed with several individual packets of condoms to help keep its shape and firmness; three pink contraceptive pill dial dispensers rest against the dome of the diaphragm. On top of the dispensers are two pregnancy detection sticks, and on top of those are
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