Elisa Albert - After Birth

Véronique and Helge never made it out, by the way. Mere weeks before liberation they went on a walk together on the outskirts of camp, just a quick taste of air, sharing a precious cigarette: so stupid, so arrogant! An idiotic Kapo didn’t recognize the officers’ vaunted whores, just saw two Jew girls and shot them both dead on the spot.

Later, for good measure, the commandant and a few senior officers beat the living shit out of that Kapo. The memory of Véronique’s perfect pink pussy spurred them into a frenzy.

But my mother’s mother survived, yes she sure did. Made it to America, to electroshock, to DES, to scopolamine. Tied to a bed in a different country, begging for someone to help her in a language no one could understand.

Husband, where is her husband, he’s not here, he’s not allowed. They’re giving her another injection now. Another drug, lead fist. Muted pain, it turns out, is much worse than clear pain. Clear pain is quantifiable. One can face it, reckon with it, come away braver. There is no way to understand what you cannot feel. No reckoning to be had. It will haunt you forever, make you afraid. Still, they call her this laughable word: Survivor .

Eighteen years later she sticks her head in the oven. Amazing she made it that long.

The perfect baby girl, my mother, got a call on the Wellesley dorm hall phone.

A Survivor no more.

The girls in grad school hated me. They all wanted to be Marianne’s favorite, but only I was Marianne’s favorite.

At first I wanted to use feminist theory as a lens through which to read literature.

Marianne dismissed novels: irrelevant, because they are forever going on and on about the things around the thing; if they actually attempted to name the thing, all that narrative would become immediately inconsequential. Novelists know this. It’s the bread and butter of storytelling. Stories are where people go when they don’t have the tenaciousness to go straight to the heart of the matter in a scientific manner. Stories are a rehearsal, an avoidance of politics and activism and rage and grief. A way for the writer to remove herself from the real problem.

So… you think I shouldn’t go for an MFA?

We’d have dinner, lots of wine. She had me to her house upstate. More wine. Her glamorous life, her many lovers. The most important of whom, a painter, had recently died. They hadn’t lived together; he’d had a wife, a grown family, the works. But they’d been involved on and off for years. She was vague about the details. I had a hunch he bought her the upstate house. So what.

She wasn’t the baby-having type. She was uninterested in baby having. She’d lost too many friends to baby having.

They were good women , she’d say. More matter-of-fact than bitter.

Her work was about how we look at women, how we understand and own them by looking at them. The various ways a necessarily self-conscious woman appropriates this, to her benefit or detriment.

Yes, I thought when I read her in preparation for her seminar. Yesssssss. She’d made her name with that stuff in the eighties, though now it’s taken so for granted, she doesn’t really get her due. In her office I noticed a Barbara Kruger postcard tacked up over her desk. Your gaze hits the side of my face. She took it down and gave it to me. It’s on my fridge even now, yellowing.

She was riveting. Places she’d been, people she knew. I sat myself directly at her feet. What should I think? How should I feel?

When I finished my master’s, she gave me her grandfather’s pocket watch. When I published that first big-deal article, a garnet brooch of her grandmother’s. I never had a daughter , she wrote in a small note made from a three-inch-high thrift store black-and-white photograph of a blurry, bonneted baby.

No choice but to take it as a compliment when the other girls hate you: you must be hot shit. Still, they hated me. Also because their boyfriends wanted to fuck me.

One of the girls especially did not like me. She had it out for me. I found this hilarious. I was no threat! Not really. Not actually. What kind of moron did she have to be to imagine me a threat? At base I hate myself so much I can barely speak! Hate myself so much that to this very day I sometimes can’t manage to get dressed. So the fuck what if I fucked your stupid fucking boyfriend? Be mad at your mediocre boyfriend, sweetie-pants. But you had to kind of love that girl. You can always at least sort of love whatever you fully understand.

Then there was Anna, always a weird one. Just starting the program as I was on my way out. WASP. Cut off from something essential, earthy. Doing some best imitation of life. Anorectic’s anorectic. True hunger artist, to the bone. Never dated until a few years later, in her late twenties, when she was adjuncting in a midsized city in the South and took up with the vice president of a local bank. A man whose quirk was to insist she grow her nails extremely long and make sure they were perfectly manicured at all times. He was willing to pay for weekly manicures, he told her on their first or second date. She was fine with it, though more than a little sheepish.

I know how it sounds , she told me. He’s an interesting guy. But I know how it sounds.

Whatever , I said.

I know. I know. But he’s nice. I like him.

Last I saw her I was pregnant. We had dinner. ( I had dinner.) She confessed a deep, abiding fear of pregnant bellies.

They disgust me, actually , she said.

After the birth I never heard from her. Nothing. I called her in a sorry state with the stroller alone on a bench in the park one day, wanting to tell her everything, if only she’d pick up. She was smart, and smart ones aren’t easy to come by. She never called back.

I sat on that cold park bench for a while, couldn’t think of anyone else to call. Do you slowly lose everyone? Do you just get lonelier and lonelier until you die?

I tried again a few months later. She answered that time— Heyyyyy! How are you? — polite, distant.

I actually can’t talk right now , she said, but can I call you in, like, ten minutes? Specious bitch!

Sure thing , I said.

Still waiting for that call.

Anyway, no matter. It’s not personal. You don’t go to funerals because you can’t deal with going to funerals. Because you’re scared, inept, phobic. Shrink-wrapped in your own smallness. Because you can’t handle it. You might even be ashamed of yourself for failing to show up at the funeral. But sorry, you’re just not the kind of person who goes to funerals. Also known as an asshole.

When I broke the news to Marianne that I was pregnant, she gazed out her office window, took a drag off a cigarette, angled a long, graceful exhale.

Well. If that’s. What you think. You want.

Looking at some Firestone on the stoop for twenty minutes before it’s time to get Walker. Some second-wave bullshit about how biology isn’t destiny. Defeat the female body and be liberated from it.

I’d like to send around a paper on this with a long, involved academic title. The entirety of the piece would just read: Bullshit! Bullshit! Bullshit! Bullshit! Bullshit!

It’s a clear day, and I’m sitting with my face to the sun. I can see my breath. But the sun, the sun, the sun!

Cat comes up the block pushing a stroller. Apparently the woman next door to her has a new baby.

She just needed a couple hours to herself , Cat tells me authoritatively.

And you’re helping her out.

Her smile is beatific.

You’ve found yourself another friend, it conveys, and so, so, so have I, I, I.