[ the baby ] [ things i did not tell you; things that are lies ] [ the music ] [ the furher ] [ love will tear us apart again: an extended metaphor of the physical manifestation of a broken heart, or a bloody requiem for the might have been ] [ white space ] [ how to disappear completely ] [ sorry ] [ bus stop ]quasi-fiction
[ the garbage train ] [ dissertation on the concept of forever starting tonight, explained in the second person, to an ex-lover, a best friend, and the man in the astor place subway station who asked me for a nickel (or a true story that is 43% lies and 0% plot) ] [ breakup vignettes ]
The Baby
It is not love. No, it is not love at all that demands this of her, Corrie thinks, as she pulls clumps of newly seeded crabgrass and inefficient fistfuls of dirt from the surprisingly dry earth of the cemetery. She aches to feel love, and she wonders if that might be the worst part: she never even knew what it felt like to love him. She was never given a chance to develop real maternal love for this child. She knew some women who claimed to truly love the child before it was born, but Corrie was not one of them. She could barely remember what it felt like to be pregnant with him. The time when he was in her abdomen, the time when he was alive but not born, was a time stretched behind her blank and grey, without enough contrast, without a soundtrack, like the early benign hours of a party to which someone later shows up with a gun.
The dirt is so dry and soft it feels less like dirt than ashes. It makes her think: what would she have done if they'd cremated him? They suggested it and Justin was all for it, all for keeping their baby in a tiny blue vase, maybe on the piano or maybe in the guest bathroom, but Corrie had burst into tears and it was decided.
If they'd turned him into ashes, she would not be digging this hole. Corrie is both comforted and tormented by if and then statements, either-or divisions making neat forks on her mental map of the way things go. If he'd have lived, she'd also not be digging this hole. Different input, same output. But only one thing could have happened to put her here right now.
And it did.
"It's over," she whispers.
There is some power, she is ashamed to have noticed, in being the most horrified, by default, the most affected. The grieving not-quite-mother. Everyone tiptoes around her, brings her dinner, lets her pick the television show, buys her bath salts and somber lavender-colored cards with texturized script about loss and life and birth and death. Impotent, helpless gestures to make when there are no gestures that are good enough. They'll probably even excuse this. Blinded by--well, it is not quite love but what else could it be. What other impetus is so wild, so stupid, as to call her out here at night, and with only hands, not even a shovel. There are even methodical, sensible ways to do this thing, and I am not doing them. Corrie thinks this, says it aloud very quietly, well aware that this thing she is doing is the antithesis of sensible. If Justin knew. If Justin knew. There is no end.
She hits a stone with her left middle finger, hard, and it cuts her. She winces and keeps digging. It is not love, but it is something. Her old grey tshirt is wet again. It makes her feel stupid to wear those pads they gave her at the hospital. Maybe this is motherhood. Maybe it is love. Maybe I will know what it is to be a mother after all. Rescuing The Baby from the parched, suffocating blindness of the earth.
They'd not even named him. They were going to name him Simon, after Justin's dad, and they had even gotten so far as putting the name on the certificates--both birth and death--but Justin then took her aside and said that maybe they should name him something else. Why, Corrie wanted to know. Because they were going to try again, weren't they. He was gentle, rubbing her neck as he spoke to her, but she hated his tone. She could imagine him using the tone with a three-year-old prospective Simon if his goldfish died. So you mean Simon is too good of a name to waste? She said. More combative than necessary, because she had to admit, maybe he had a point. They were in the hospital hallway, all tan linoleum, fluorescent light, and hushed voices. She stared through the plate glass window into the nursery, where all the living babies slept. She was so terrified that when she finally fell asleep later, she'd wake up and for an instant, not remember that her baby was not in the nursery, not alive, and it would hit her all over again. She pressed her forehead against the window, making a smudge. I didn't say that, Justin said. That fucking soothing tone again. So what do you want to call him instead? How about Justin Junior? She stared him in the eyes. He looked away. Don't want to waste that either? Well, let's not waste any good names on our first child. Corrie--Justin said. Enough, she replied. And The Baby became The Baby.
Corrie had never been the love of anyone's life before Justin, and he made her keenly aware of it, that she was the love of his. It was one of those love-at-first-sight things for him, one of those things she didn't really believe in until they happened, like cancer or a car crash. Corrie is the kind of pale, spectral, staring-eyed beautiful that shows itself best via fleeting reflections in storefront windows and nearly-still water. Justin is the kind of guy who would spend ten dollars on one of those fifty cent claw games just to win the exact desired stuffed animal. He'd proposed to her on their third date, over warm beers neither of them liked on the Staten Island Ferry, and she had turned him down. It was too soon. She often thinks about that, not with regret or satisfaction, but with neutrality--the same way she considers New York and the decision they'd made to leave it a year ago.
He'd proposed again seven months later, that time, on the downtown R train. He began by saying "please don't say no," and she didn't.
The cemetery is not as dark at this hour as Corrie had expected. She stands up and stretches her naked arms, which are sweaty and caked with that weird, dry dirt. She'd pictured the sky over the cemetery to be black at night. It is not. There are bright streetlights on the straight, one-lane roads that divide the place into neat little squares, and the place is lit up like a baseball field. There isn't a tree in sight, much less an eerie fog or a bat or an owl. This cemetery they'd chosen, she thinks, kind of sucks. The idea of coming here for the rest of her life, leaving flowers on a small granite square planted in grass, surrounded by nearly identical other small granite squares planted in grass is too much. Just too much. It is a joke. People placed in the ground six feet down, a respectful six feet apart, with a pragmatism more becoming to the planting of tulip bulbs in a rooftop garden. Or, she thinks, a regular garden. They have regular gardens out here. We're in the country now. Country in quotes. Really, the suburbs. There are probably not very many grave robberies here. Well, she thinks, kneeling down again, plunging her arms into the hole to resume digging. Here's one.
It has only been three weeks. The grief booklet they gave her at the hospital scheduled her grieving stages on a color-coded calendar on the inside of the back cover. She'd thrown the thing away on day two. Now she wonders what stage she is in. Was this better or worse than last week? Last week she was definitely not digging The Baby out of the ground, but last week she couldn't bear to be in the same room with Justin, and this week, she is all about having sex with him as many times a day as possible. That had to be an improvement. And the week before, week one, that was the hardest. Week one, she wanted to die.
Week one is over, she says aloud. She couldn't believe that the grief booklet had the gall to divide mourning into weeks. It was like pregnancy backwards. It was cruel.
Week one, on the third day, she took the train back to the city on a panicky impulse, an unpleasant two hour train ride, her breasts leaking milk and her cunt leaking rust-colored birth goo. She walked around, slowly, crying, all night. Unsure what she was looking for, unsure what she was doing, until somewhere near Chinatown, a guy pushed her against a brick wall and held a gun pointed to her forehead. Gimme your wallet, he said. He looked really young and unsure. Maybe seventeen years old. He had the stubble of a boy who could not grow a full beard. No, she replied, more calmly than she could even believe. Just kill me and then take it. He held fast. You don't want to do this, bitch. I ain't kiddin. Good, she replied. He pushed the gun against her head. The barrel felt like the end of a highlighter. She vaguely remembered a movie in which the characters robbed a bank using highlighters under fabric instead of guns. I'm gonna shoot you, he said. She could see his finger move. Definitely not a highlighter. She saw it move a little more. She closed her eyes. In that moment, with the gun tight against her head, Corrie considered, against her will, everything good and delicious in life--the little crosshatch pattern water sometimes makes when streaming in the curb to a puddle, the way everyone gets excited about a Goodyear blimp, Justin's clean and toned and masculine hands, bubble wrap, cirrus clouds, fountain soda, the intense blue color of the sky right after sunset, chapstick, the smell of mint--and thought, is this worth it? Am I done? What scared her was that she decided yes, okay, she was. She was willing to forfeit all those good and delicious things for a way to stop. She held her breath and braced herself. He didn't shoot. Well? She said. She opened her eyes. He stepped back and looked at her. Aren't you going to kill me? He shook his head and started to run away. Come back! Corrie yelled. Hey! But he kept running.
She didn't tell Justin about that. Justin had called the police. She lied and said she'd fallen asleep at a movie theater.
She isn't going to tell Justin about this, either. She is trying to think of another lie. People do not fall asleep for seven hours in movie theaters twice in one month.
She is not sure what the goal is, here, in digging up The Baby. It isn't to see him. She'd seen him in the hospital, for a minute while he was alive, and then after he'd died. There was so much wrong, they'd told her. It was a miracle that he'd even survived that long. He had never opened his eyes. His head had been bigger than the rest of his entire body. His hands and feet were not fully formed. His heart couldn't beat on its own. Instead of a nose, he had a little hole in his face. It's for the best, her own mother told her. What kind of life could he have had? Corrie shook her head and replied, what kind of life does anyone have? Point taken, her mother said, but Corrie didn't know she was making a point.
It is about rescue, perhaps. Yes, that is it. She'd woken up in the middle of the night, from a dream she couldn't remember, and felt a horrible sense of suffocation. Then she couldn't get the idea of The Baby's undergroundness out of her head. She knew he wasn't alive. There was no question of that. But still, the idea of his little body in a box being surrounded by dusty, dry dirt on all sides--it was too much. So she slid out of bed, tiptoed across in the room in the weird suburban-house grey, streetlight-illuminated darkness, grabbed the car keys from the basket on Justin's dresser, walked out to the car, and left. She hadn't even remembered to put on shoes, or, for that matter, clothes.
She is only wearing underwear and a thin tshirt. It's not cold, but she is shivering; she thinks it is due mostly to nerves.
She feels crazy. She is not crazy. I am not crazy, she says, her voice uncomfortably loud because she is all alone. She says it again, louder. I'm not.
Is this worse than the time she rescued her teddy bear from behind the radiator when she was six? Is this worse than keeping her first laptop computer, now completely broken, at the top of her closet, wrapped in a soft blanket, because she could not bear to think of the poor thing being salvaged for parts? Are any of these things so unthinkable? She shovels the dirt with cupped hands, mole-like. The hole is almost two feet deep now. She straddles it, her knees on either side, the refuse dirt flying through the space between her legs and forming a little hill on the grass behind her. Where is the line drawn? Where is the line drawn, she says aloud.
A cough. "How about here," says Justin, from behind her. "I think you've crossed it."
She jumps up. "You followed me." She turns around and squints. He has the big flashlight with the handle, the one they bought in case the car broke down.
"I followed you."
"Why?" she crosses her arms.
"Why?" he asks. "How can you ask me why, when you're doing this--" he gestures to the hole. He wants her to know he finds her unbelievable. She wonders if he really does.
"You don't trust me?"
"Again, how can you ask me that, when--"
"You don't trust me."
He sighs. "Corrie, this is not a matter of trusting you."
"Then what is it a matter of?"
"It's a matter of my wife sneaking out of the house at three in the morning. It's a matter of me being worried. It's a matter of--" he shines the light into the hole.
"He's my son."
"Corrie. He is dead. He is. He just is. Doing this isn't going to change a thing."
"I'm not an idiot. I remember."
"Then what--"
Corrie shakes her head, bites her lip. "I can't!" she wails, not so much a response to Justin as an announcement to the world at large. Justin slowly begins to heave the hill of dirt that she made, handful by handful, back over The Baby. Corrie sits down on the ground, cross-legged, the cold dew on the grass soaking her underwear through to the skin.
They drive home in silence, their route an unintentional though cruel tour through the biggest foibles of their time in this town--there, in the sparsely lit, nearly abandoned strip mall, is the Safeway where he'd told her he wasn't even ready for a baby. Seven months pregnant, after trying for a year, and that. She'd whacked him with the box of Shredded Wheat she'd been holding, seemingly playfully, but they spent all weekend crying and discussing a divorce. And in the next strip mall is the OBGYN. Across the street is the Comfort Inn where she'd cheated on him with an exboyfriend that she'd never really even loved. She didn't know that he knew that she knew that he knew. For two weeks they had tredded lightly in uneasy silence. They'd never really discussed it. It just went away on its own. Upon passing it now, Corrie cannot help but to softly cry. Justin reaches over and strokes her hair, but there is a heaviness to his touch. It is almost mean.
As they turn onto their street, there is the neighbors' house, their only neighbors, a couple of old, cheerful lesbians, Edie and Cynthia, who had delivered a pan of baked ziti upon seeing Corrie's deflated belly and notable lack of baby. It looked too much like placenta and guts and viscera to Corrie, so she couldn't eat it. Justin ate the entire thing in one day, directly from the pan, sometimes cold.
And there, hulking in the garage, is the never-used crib, always a stately, ghostly physical manifestation of the metaphorical elephant in the room. In three big boxes next to it sits never-used everything else.
"You have got to get rid of that stuff," Corrie mumbles, as she climbs out of the car. She knows she is starting.
"I thought we were going to try again." They'd had this conversation at least four times. "There's no use in throwing it away, if--" He slams his car door and locks it. Justin always locks the car, even in the garage. Old New York habits, Corrie thinks.
"It can't just sit here. I can't keep looking at it. It's just... it's mocking me. It's just always here."
"Maybe we can store it." This is his assigned line. It is as though someone has written them into a play, and they can not get out.
"You have to get rid of it." This is not her line. Usually, she says "okay" here, and usually it ends the conversation.
He crosses his arms. He looks befuddled. A part of Corrie hopes that he will call "line!" and someone from offstage will tell him what to say. This would be comforting. This would mean someone could tell her what to say, too. This would make everything not real. He does not call "line!" He uncrosses his arms, places his hands on his hips, and crosses his arms again. "I'll call a storage place tomorrow."
Goodbye, script, Corrie thinks. "No. I will know it's there. I will know we own it. It will be in our lives. We have to get rid of it. We have to sell it, or we have to throw it away."
"But, Corrie--"
"We can't reuse his things if we, as you say, try again."
"Corrie, they were never his things to begin with."
"They were meant for him."
"They were never his."
"You can't even say his name."
"He doesn't have a name."
"We named him The Baby."
"That is not a name."
"Well, it's his." Checkmate, Corrie thinks. She regrets thinking this. It makes trivial, well, everything.
"This is... well. Wow. Come inside, Corrie. Please." Justin reaches for her, stupidly, over the car's hood. She remains in place, with her arms hugged tightly around her belly, her hands gripping her own back.
"Justin," she says. "I just can't."
He knows better than to ask what it is that she can't do. She wonders if he knows when she thinks the word "checkmate." She feels bad, gives him a conciliatory half-smile. He nods. "Well, when you're ready, then." He leans against the car, facing her, arms resting folded on the roof, chin resting on arms, as though he is a first grader tired in class.
"Aren't you going in?"
"Nope."
"Don't trust me out here? Think I'll get in the car again and go to the cemetery?"
"Nope." He is obviously lying. She finds this touching.
"Well, I would."
"Why?" He looks into her eyes. "Really, why."
Corrie thinks for a moment and realizes that she isn't even sure. "I just had to." She thinks again of The Baby's misshapen little body, alone, surrounded by dirt. She tries again. "He's all alone out there."
Justin nods. Clumsily, he tries to appease her: "Corrie, that's not him. That's just his body."
"Fuck that shit." Corrie is not easy to appease. "It's not that simple. This is not a question of religion. It's not a--it's not a thing I decided that I should do based on, well, whatever beliefs I may have. It's just something I woke up and had to do."
Corrie stopped believing in God when she was nine, and while learning the details of sex: she thought about how no intelligent being would make the same hole squirt sperm and pee, and thus cause a pee-squirt hole to squirt something else into someone else to make another person. It was preposterous. It was ridiculous. It sounded like a horrible mutation. Either God was silly and cruel, or there was no God at all. The former terrified her so much that she latched onto the latter with a definiteness similar to that of her grandmother, only her grandmother was, as a Catholic, on the other end of the spectrum.
"How can you say it's not about religion?"
"Because it's not, Justin. It's not even close."
"Do you believe that he is still in his body?"
"It's completely irrelevant to me. As I said, not about that."
"Mmhm."
"You don't understand it, do you? I knew you wouldn't."
"Now that's not fair."
"Well, you don't, do you?"
"I could."
"Could? What is 'could' supposed to mean?" She starts to pace back and forth, along the length of the car. "You either do or you don't."
"How about, I want to. I want to so badly."
"Haven't you ever just had to do something?"
She can tell Justin is thinking about it. Finally, he says "I'm not sure... that I have. Not like you mean, anyway."
"Not something crazy."
"No."
They look at each other for a long while. Corrie climbs to the hood of the car and sits on it, Indian style. Justin moves to sit beside her. His legs are so long that they dangle to the floor of the garage. He nudges her gently, probing. He hopes that they can make up and go inside and that eventually this will all be in the past. She knows that this is what he hopes. She strokes his arm. He gazes into her eyes like a Munchausen's-by-proxy child might stare into his mother's eyes when he has a slight suspicion of what might be going on.
"I want to move back to the city," she says. "this place creeps me out. It has been nothing but awful to us. We are different people now. I hate us."
"Corrie," he says. "It's not the fault of the town."
"I didn't say it was the fault of the town. I'm not stupid."
"I know."
She strokes his arm, back and forth. She loves him so much that the gulf between them is real enough and full of water enough to drown her. She almost feels herself choking on it.
"Please," she says. "Please don't say no."
He closes his eyes.
"We have to. I have to."
"Corrie." He brings his fingers to his temples, in the attitude of having a bad headache. "You know we've been through this. You know we can't."
"I have to. Please."
"We can't leave. At least not right now."
"I can't not leave." She says it so simply and with so much weight that he stops. His hands come down from his temples.
"It just doesn't make sense. We just bought this house. My job. Your job."
These things are so small and they annoy her. She does not care about her job. She teaches community college math. She should be on maternity leave. "Justin."
"Gym memberships."
"Gym memberships. You're really going to let gym memberships be something that determines where we live."
"Corrie, no. It's not just that and you are well aware."
"Then what is it really?"
"We have a life here."
She looks at the crib and the three boxes. "No," she says. "We don't."
He stands up straight, pulls his arm away from her hand. "I like it here!" He makes a sweeping gesture. "It's great here! It's everything we wanted! It's everything we talked about wanting, and it's all the reasons we left! Why are you doing this! Why are you doing this now! Of all times, Corrie. You act like you are the only one affected by--"
"Affected by...?"
"By his death."
"Say his name, Justin."
"He doesn't have a name."
"His name is The Baby. That's what we named him. Call him The Baby."
"Fine! You act like you are the only one affected by: The Baby. You act like you are the only one who is sad, the only one who wants to do crazy things. Crazy things, Corrie, this cemetery stunt was absolutely fucking psycho, and the fact that instead of writing you off as completely out of your goddamn mind, I am sitting here, in the garage with you, is just evidence of--"
"If you're so affected, how can you want to stay here, in this place? How can it not remind you?"
"And how can you want to run away. How can you want to leave him." The look on Justin's face says, and, how can you want to leave me.
"It's not running. It's not leaving."
"Then what the hell is it."
She doesn't answer. Her head is in her hands. Her hands are wet with tears. She hadn't realized that she'd been crying. It is dark with her hands over her eyes. She presses a little on her left eye and she sees a cascade of blue rings. "I really have to go back to the city. I can't live here anymore. Tomorrow. I'm sorry. I have to go."
"No, you don't."
"Yes I do." She screams it into her hands. Her hands fly into the air. She is crying so hard that the garage is merely a mess of color. "I can't live here where he died! I can't understand how you can! I can't understand how you can want me to! I am leaving and I'm leaving tomorrow!"
Justin cannot see her like this without doing something to fix it. He wraps his arms around her entire upper body, tight, like a tourniquet. He rubs his cheek on her hair, which is peppered with dirt. She sobs into his torso. He is crying very quietly. She can only tell because she feels tears drip onto the part in her hair. "You're serious this time, aren't you," he says, after awhile.
"I am serious. Tomorrow."
He breathes in deeply.
She can tell he thinks she is leaving him.
She is not leaving him.
"Maybe only for a little," she says.
"What?"
"Maybe I can try going back to the city, for maybe a month. And if it's better, I'll stay."
"If what's better?"
"If I." She can't finish the statement. He loosens his grip on her, leans back.
"And what if you're not?" It's clear that this is what he believes.
"Then." They stare at each other. "Then I'll come back," she says finally. "Might as well."
"Might as well," he echoes. But he means that she might as well go.
Corrie takes the first train the next morning. She has not slept. She has yet to make arrangements for a place to stay. There are people she could call, but the idea of making telephone calls daunts her. She knows what the silence will sound like. She can imagine the unasked questions spinning around in the static, fast and dizzying like electrons.
It's ten in the morning. She sits down at the first outdoor café she comes upon, somewhere in Hell's Kitchen, and she orders a mimosa and a plate of curly fries. She likes the curly fries but is ambivalent about the mimosa--she orders it not because of the taste or the buzz but because she likes the neat, translucent, slightly glowing yellow hue of the drink. She likes to hold it and look at it. It looks like ink from a highlighter.
She drinks part of it, very slowly, and eats the fries with tiny bites. Her bill is fourteen dollars. She leaves her American Express at the table and gets up to go, without knowing precisely why she has done this.
Justin will cancel it. They'll call about weird charges. He'll think it got stolen.
But he'll worry.
She will call him in three days.
The day is a blur, partially because she is tired, and partially because she has no direction. There is nothing to do and nowhere to go. There is not even a train to catch, because she's not going home. She is home. That place is not home. It almost feels like she never lived there, that none of it ever happened. She is walking on Sixth avenue and her hand moves to her belly, which is as flat as it had been before she'd even gotten pregnant.
There is that ache, though. And the constant feeling that something has gone terribly wrong.
Something has gone terribly wrong.
Corrie walks because she doesn't know what else to do or where to go. She walks for hours. The back of her heels are bleeding. Her sneakers without socks have rubbed them raw.
By late afternoon, the light is less harsh and the commuters are starting to leave work, and Corrie feels drawn to Central Park. She enters on the west side, up in the eighties, and she meanders her way around the paths until she is compelled to sit in a patch of grass that is roped off due to seeding. She hops the low fence. She sits, cross-legged, her default posture, and before she can think of a reason not to, she begins to dig.
She knows The Baby is not underneath every patch of grass. She is not stupid. "I am not stupid," she says to herself. But this is beyond. This is not literal. This is something else.
Corrie digs and digs, for hours, and her hands are bleeding, sweat is pouring down her face, tears are spilling from her eyes, milk is seeping from her nipples and down her stomach and through her shirt. It has gotten dark. There are no more voices in the distance. No one is around. It is supposed to be dangerous in Central Park at night. She continues to dig. She cannot believe how big the hole has gotten. The hole is four feet deep. Her muscles ache and she feels faint but she is so close. Close to what, she does not know. There is no plan beyond digging. There is no plan for anything at all. She feels that maybe, once she has done this, something will have to happen. Something will have to give. Her arms are so heavy. The hole is so deep that she has to be in it to dig it. She is eye-level with the ground. She stops for a minute, thinking she hears a voice--she remembers what happened to her the last time she was in the city, two weeks ago, when she decided that nothing good or delicious was worth being alive anymore--but there is nothing. An animal, perhaps. She remains still, just in case. And then it strikes her, maybe, that this was what the digging has always been about. It's about this particular perspective, and being underground, and not moving. It's about sitting in a hole in the dark. Corrie knows it is crazy, knows that Justin would be very upset if he ever were to find out, but she decides that she has to spend the night here. She curls up into the fetal position, and does just that. The acoustics of the hole amplify the sounds of her body: the wooshing of her blood, her breathing, the gurgling of peristalsis. She lies awake all night, with her eyes shut, trying in vain to reconcile the motionlessness of her forever-sleeping child with the relentless pounding of her own still-beating heart.