Elisa Albert - After Birth

Remnants of the shirt-cuff era abound. A leathery, delightful old girl band called the Cuffs. The empty shell of the mill downriver. Once in a while there’s a spirited movement to turn it into some sort of performance space, a DIY community center they want to call “the Downriver,” but local bureaucrats crush that regenerative shit time and again, dashing the hopes of our sweet, stoned cheesecake artistes.

Few blocks in any direction are desperate slums, and on Sundays you can’t so much as buy a newspaper within a mile. But there’s a tiny, unpretentious farmers’ market in the courtyard of a vacant mini-mall on the edge of town, and a chain pharmacy just opened a ways down Main Street, in a long-empty storefront that was for a hundred years a jewelry store. BARLOW AND SONS, EST. 1893: you can still see remnants of the old gold lettering. The chain pharmacy didn’t even bother to fully renovate. Just slapped a fluorescent sign over the door and drywalled the interior.

First official Mina Morris sighting. My heart did an Olympic dive. Bulk section at the co-op. Unwashed hair in loose knot, filling a bag with organic honey caramels. I watched her unwrap one and pop it into her mouth. Total insouciance. Gorgeous creature. And! She is way pregnant. Hard-not-to-stare pregnant.

I wrote to her months ago, hey and if you need anything and welcome to our shithole and please don’t hesitate , blah blah, and an elaborately casual offer of tea or something anytime . Spent like half an hour trying to make it sound casual, cut down from the volumes in my head. Embarrassing. I have zero friends here.

She responded immediately, in full: cool thanks.

Meanwhile I devoured her book. Weird beautiful bewildered little prose poems about the summer of 1990, mostly, just after the Misogynists broke up. Roaming Europe, shooting up, regularly letting a disgusting man named Ivan pay to fuck her up the ass, pining for some nameless bastard with a wife in Paris. Then her family brings her home and puts her away. Electroshock. And the best part is how she just kind of leaves you there, wondering if she’ll make it out all right. Which, I mean, to whatever degree, it appears she has, but Jesus . Makes my own fucked-up shit seem downright housewifely.

I held the book close when I finished, actually embraced the thing. Had the inclination to rip out and ingest a page, for the same reason you might get a tattoo, so it’ll stay a part of you, edify you forever.

Paul has no idea who the Misogynists are. That’s Paul in a nutshell. He can tell you what foods gave Whitman gas, though.

They sound familiar, I think , he said in the spring, when the department announced Mina was coming. It was a nice night, almost warm, the worst of winter receding.

Paul’s colleague Cat was over. She sat bolt upright, set her wineglass on the floor.

Nuh-uh, don’t even. You don’t know the Misogynists? “Eat Me While I Decide”? “Can’t Stop Wanting”? “Who the Fuck Are You”?

Paul shrugged. Cat is always really appalled when other people don’t share her precise cultural context. Crispin once described it that way. He meant it as an insult, I’m pretty sure, but it’s one of the things I actually like about Cat: the way she wants us all on the same page, the way she seems sort of angry, betrayed, when it appears that we are not all on the same page.

Wait , she said, tapping at her device. Wait, wait. Here .

Promptly we hooked up the speakers and were joyously assaulted by a Misogynists number. Na na na hey hey hey suck my clit and we’ll call it a day .

Subtle , Paul said.

I saw them at the Paradise in 1989 , Cat said. Right before they broke up and Kelly died.

Cat needs you to know that she’s seen things, knows people, has been in the right place at the right time even if she’s currently in the wrong place all the time.

Paul went up to bed. Have fun, ladies .

If we get drunk or high enough, we can usually rally some sort of good time, Cat and I, at least a little sliver of fun, but sometimes we try and try and only end up morose and drunk/high, side by side. Then we don’t hang out for a while and it’s like we’ve never hung out next time we hang out and I get inexplicably mad at Paul, like how could you do this to me, make me this desperate isolated hausfrau scrounging for simpaticos in this backwater shitbox?

The first girl I ever loved was Nora Pulaski. Adorable athletic little doe-eyed cutie. First day of kindergarten she sits down next to me with all the assurance of her almost six years, gives me this knowing look, and informs me that we are going to be best friends.

Thrilling. She chose me. I don’t think I even wondered why.

We played with Barbies and rearranged the furniture in the elaborate dollhouse my father bought me the first time my mother was sick. Moved through all the levels of cat’s cradle, practiced cartwheels in the unfurnished living room of Nora’s rental on East Fifty-Seventh, coauthored a pamphlet of appreciation for the third-grade boy we both loved, a skinny, freckled redhead. Strange choice, that kid, but wow did we love him. We drew his name in bubble letters so many times.

Nora was confident, at home in herself. Her mom was calm and made us muffins. Once I heard Nora call her Mommy, which surprised me, because mine was strictly Janice. “Mommy” sounded so fond, so assumptive. I would no sooner call mine Mommy than throw myself into the arms of a stranger on the subway.

Around fifth grade we had this game in which I was Hugo and Nora was Nancy. Hugo would return home from a day of work “horny,” and Nancy would be waiting for him on the bed, and we would grind for a while.

One time Nora’s mom stretched out on the couch with us while we watched TV. She smoothed my hair, murmured how’s your mom, sweetheart , and I froze. Couldn’t speak for fear I’d lose it (lose what?), shake out some highly embarrassing primal wail.

By middle school, when my mom was dead, Nora got new friends. Smart girls. Confident girls. Girls with good mothers. Girls who were going to work from within the system and kick ass in college. She still said hi to me, wasn’t ever mean or anything, but we weren’t friends anymore.

I love fucking Paul.

Sometimes it’s like being on a floating dock in a breeze; sometimes it’s like saying goodbye aboard a failing airplane. Tonight it’s like a firm handshake to seal a deal.

I was with a series of angry fuckers up til Paul, real flip-you-over-try-to-hurt-you types, not a lot of eye contact. Thought I was having fun.

Such sweet beginnings we had, me and Paul. The delicious, clandestine smell of him on my sheets. Nothing intellectual about it, just wanted to bury my face in his skin, breathe him. Gave me the shivers. He’s the kind of guy who’ll fuck you nice and slow. But sweet beginnings are not the challenge, now, are they.

We kept it secret for almost a year. There was the whiff of scandal: he an associate professor and I a grad student fifteen years his junior. Apparently they still frown on that sort of thing. Ridiculous, besides which he already had tenure. But there was also the issue of his long-term, long-distance girlfriend, a theory-of-theory-of-theory type stuck on the tenure track in some godforsaken corner of Indiana.

Commitment-phobe , my bitchiest friend, Subeena, warned me. He’s how old? They’ve been together how long?

We have an agreement , Paul told me. We live our own lives .

But when he finally broke it off with her, she was livid, absolutely devastated, and he could not wrap his head around why.