But after he’d gone I found myself not getting ready for work, instead filling a sock with flour to approximate the weight and feel of a baby’s leg. I had never held a baby’s leg in my hand, but my heart knew the sensation it was after. I had seen photographs.
I lay prone on my bathroom floor, thinking the forbidden thought I want to die, though I was not sure it was true. True and false were no longer opposing binaries. My body was speaking to me in a language I had not heard before.
I knew objectively that to want the small flame of your life to do anything other than what had been given to you was unthinkable, but here I was anyway, doing it. I did not know what they did to the women who got pregnant illegally, though I assumed there must be others out there, I couldn’t be the only one. Was motherhood something that could be halted on command, something they could compel out of you once discovered? Was it something you had to see through regardless? I had not lived a life of complete badness, and I wanted to believe that might make a difference, but I knew it would not. There was no way to change your ticket.
When I tried out the words I have attempted not to want it but I can’t help myself, they felt so good that I said them again, and then again. Please remember that I was not a survivalist, or someone instinctively good at being alive. Please understand that lots of mistakes were made, and some of them were necessary.
Nice tall man, said my neighbour Iona the minute I went outside. She fell into step with me and sparked up her own cigarette, held out the flame so I could light mine. What happened to the last one?
I killed him, Iona, I said to her. He’s buried underneath the apple tree. Dig it up if you don’t believe me.
Inhale, exhale. A little break from caring. My want had been cracked open. Now I’d have to look inside and see what it contained. Now I had really gone and done it.
She laughed. Oh, you’re awful, aren’t you!
I agreed. I blew smoke out into the air.
6
I was early for my water aerobics class, so I bought a plastic cup of weak juice and sat in the café. From my table I could not see the children’s swimming session, babies bussed in from elsewhere in the city, the more docile suburbs where white-ticket women and their families flocked, but I could hear their heartbreaking noises. Another woman that I did not know caught my eye and grimaced at the sound.
What a racket, she said.
Yes, I agreed.
Glad I don’t have to deal with that, the woman said. She returned serenely to her magazine, to her breakfast. She raised a piece of toast neatly spread with peanut butter to her mouth. She seemed truly happy. Her skin was smooth, her clothes seemed expensive. I wondered what she might do afterwards with her day, where she worked, what her house was like, whether she was bound to anyone or anything, whether she was thankful for her freedom.
Maybe her day looked like mine. Before coming to the class I had spent some time on an interesting paper for work, scrubbed the bathroom, floor to ceiling, with diluted bleach, so everything was clean the way I liked it. Later I intended to get down on my knees and crawl around for R in the living room, right there where a baby might, in another world, flail and pick things up to chew. We would drink fancy vermouth and it didn’t matter if I drank enough to throw up, if I drank enough to ruin the next day, because there were days and days afterwards, endless days marked only by my choices. I had walked to the train station with a spring in my step. My time belonged to me, my life was only mine.
Now, hearing the noises of the children, that all evaporated. A trigger, a reflex. I dug my fingernails into my palms and drank the juice down. But I avoided tears—by now I was used to this intrusion before our sessions in the pool. It was a matter of desensitization. The dark feeling swelled in my chest like a balloon.
Nearer the water, when I had changed into my black lycra costume, I saw some of the children lagging in the pool. They were very small. They laughed and laughed. The chlorine got me right at the back of the throat. I forgot something, I said to the others in my class, and went back into the changing rooms, into the communal showers, crouching down and hitting the water button with my hand as I did so to disguise the sound of my weeping. By the time I recovered my composure, all of the other women were in the pool.
The lifeguard on his red chair waited for me to get in, too, before pressing the button on the tape player. Music rang out. I moved my arms up, and around, lowered myself under. The women pirouetted next to me, splashing in smooth controlled arcs. When I was under the surface I could see their limbs all around me. It was like being inside a strange animal. When we stood up at the end to be congratulated by the lifeguard, the water streamed from our bodies and we felt cold, under the high and vaulted ceiling; we did not feel alone, we were not alone.
7
Trust is integral to our practice, Doctor A said. Trust that I know you better than you know yourself.
I didn’t want to do that necessarily, but there was a certain relief in giving myself over to him. There was a relief in being given permission, the same way there had been relief in knowing that there were some paths my life would not take.
I told him once about how I had thought about becoming a doctor myself, and he had laughed at me. He said that being a doctor required a very specific sort of person, and that, with all due respect, that was not the sort of person I was, but I knew that already, didn’t I?
For example, he told me, I was injected with a solution that stopped my heart for ten seconds. As part of my training. So I could technically die and then come back to life.
So you could feel superior to us? I asked.
So I could understand and help you, actually, he replied.
A rare intimacy, among interactions designed to approximate intimacy. He knew that was my weakness, that I was both repulsed and flattered when he let me in. I couldn’t resist.
What did you see? I asked him.
I didn’t see anything, he said. It was like being in a room with all the curtains closed. I have never forgotten it. You don’t want to be in that room.
But what if I’m already in that room?
I think he smiled at that, but his reddish facial hair was longer than usual, obscuring most of his mouth, so it was hard to tell. I could see that he looked tired. It was difficult to pin an age on Doctor A, but that day I put him at around forty-five. The next time I saw him it would be something different. Sometimes I sat outside in my car waiting for him to emerge from the clinic, but though I saw everybody else leave I never saw him walk out, even when it was dark.
8
R and I settled into a pattern quickly. When I got the train or drove to his part of the city we had sex in his clean, spare apartment and then went down to the cheap restaurant a street away from his building to eat plates of eggs or pasta. In the lift we did not speak but sometimes we looked at each other, maybe even a smile, and sometimes in the lift there was another man who lived in the building and R would say Hello, and I liked to hear his voice when not addressing me. It felt like overhearing a telephone conversation or opening somebody else’s mail. I already sensed that I was not going to become a full part of his universe, and had made my peace with it. R cracked his knuckles and adjusted his collar in the mirrored wall of the lift, every time. I thought how these insignificant quirks of physical routine built up eventually into a reluctant intimacy, whether you wanted them to or not. I watched my reflection beside his. We looked very good together. We ate our food like we hadn’t eaten in years, our knees occasionally jostling under the precarious wooden table.