Hannah Tennant-Moore - Wreck and Order

I would lose anything to be free.

—

What I need is food. I need to consume all the spices and grains and vegetables and oils in the world.

I march into town, order five curries, have three large bites, let the fourth fall out of my mouth. Gasp. Pay for my meal. Am walking slowly now, noticing every sight and sound and smell around me, but I won’t be bothered to put them into words.

I cannot see him again. I will not.

There is no possible way to imagine myself into the small house we were going to share by the beach. His breath on my neck as he bikes us home from a bar. The sweet pudginess of his large arm muscles going slack as we fall into bed. My lips against his neck in the morning, puckering against his loose skin until he says, “Cut it out, that tickles,” and rolls on top of me, his belly warm and sticky against mine. The relief of his body beside me, after the nights when I won’t know where he is or what he’s doing: all the dumb, tiny soldiers inside me dropping their guns and drifting off to sleep.

If I went through my life in a meditative state — observing instead of reacting — I could live that way. Or if I were normal, more desensitized to the vagaries of sex and connection. Some people feel the pain of love’s disappointment, and then do something else with their time. I cannot move, cannot think, can barely breathe. Passion. What a lie. The way I love gives up everything.

I’m sitting in front of a computer at an Internet café. I’m not sure why I brought myself here. Seven emails from Jared. I guess that’s what my brain was hoping for. He thinks I called him last night, he hopes he wasn’t out of line, he’d had a little to drink, please can I call him again, he misses me so much, he’s so sorry if he was out of line, he’s gonna stop as soon as I get home, he can’t wait for me to get home. Of course. He always asks for my forgiveness in a way that allows me, effortlessly, to grant it. The morning he came to my apartment with a bouquet of handpicked flowers in a handblown vase his mother made for him before she fell in love with a woman and moved to Europe, how the flesh softened around his bones when I opened the door, our foreheads touching and our snot and tears all mixed up.

“Please don’t close your heart to me,” he said. “You are the best friend I’ve ever had.”

And the night when the spider woke me up in some motel bed I was sharing with Jared. At first, the skin on my arm felt something like wonder at how wide apart the creature’s legs were, how many there were, how slowly they walked in perfect concert with one another, creeping, trying not to disturb me. And then it was at my throat and I was wide awake and shrieking. “Get it off! Get it off!” Jared thrashed out of bed and turned on the light. I jammed my finger in the direction of the black body escaping across my pillow on long, strong, gauzy legs, one of which Jared grabbed between his thumb and forefinger. The spider dangled, its free legs pawing the air and its fuzzy head stiff and protracted, while Jared’s wide eyes darted about, landing on the glass of water beside the bed. Into the water Jared flicked the creature. Stillness. He sat on the edge of the bed, his back to me, peering into the glass. Remnants of disgust and outrage at the sensation of the spider’s legs on my throat competed inside my chest with shame at the frivolousness of my outrage. Jared’s shoulders began to shake, his head bent forward, he sputtered and opened his mouth wide, did nothing to stifle his sobs. “He tried so hard,” he said. “He was trying so hard but the water was too much for him. He wanted to live so bad. He just wanted to live. He was trying so hard but the water—” He kept talking as I took the glass from his hand, pulled him down to me, held him, murmured it wasn’t his fault, he had done nothing wrong, I was sorry, I was so sorry, I didn’t know how to not be always freaking out, how did a person stop always freaking out, I didn’t know, I was sorry. He slept and I held him and then sometime in the early morning I became the sleeper, he the holder.

No. Must not think of that. Must choose memories that harden not soften me, must tell myself a story in which he is simple and bad. Fierce determination to get to a place of steadiness. I do not get to keep my love for him.

The tinny ice cream cart song trickles past. Suriya’s name is in my inbox, too. She has written me three notes, all saying the same thing: “Elsie Akki, my mother has died. Can you come to my home please? I hope you are receiving this mail. God bless.”

GAMBAWELLA

My mother had a manuscript of unpublished poems written by a friend of hers in college. She would get them out when she was in one of her moods, lay the pages on the kitchen table and pick them up at random, silently mouthing the words with a deliberateness I found annoyingly melodramatic. One time I snatched the page out of her hands. “My father took me at the same time every day,” I read aloud.

“Her father raped her, that’s what ‘took’ means there.” My mother fidgeted with the edge of the tablecloth. “There was Satan worship. A cult. Anne is complicated. A bird — a large bird of prey — slaughtered over her. The blood dripping on her. She was naked, a little girl. Something happened to her, some thought, something kind of good for the first time. Darlene, too, she has a master’s degree, she is very smart, she never could understand Anne’s poems. Some kind of Satan worship, a large bird of prey. The men wore hoods. But there was this good thing.”

My mother often told stories in fragments like this. When you asked for clarification, she would respond in more fragments. I dropped the piece of paper back on the table and poured myself a glass of orange juice.

When my mother moved across the country with Rick, she brought the box of Anne’s poems with her. I saw it on the backseat before they drove off, Rick gripping the wheel in one hand and a plastic travel mug that said “Dunkin’ Donuts” in bubble letters in the other, my mother’s hair pulled back into a diamond-studded barrette, tears rolling down her cheeks and catching in the thin ring of excess skin around the base of her neck, her biggest insecurity.

Not long ago, I asked my mother if she still had the poems. “Oh yes.” She started to repeat her fragmentary take on Anne, how complicated she was, even Darlene did not really get her, the bird of prey, the Satan worship, the little girl with blood—

“Do you still talk to Anne?” I asked.

“God no. Not since college.”

“Why do you care about her poems so much?”

“I wouldn’t say I care about them so much . You just don’t throw away something like that.”

I want my mother to be a deep person, to matter in some way aside from having pushed babies out of her womb. But she doesn’t want to be deep; she wants to be happy. She answers the phone when I call. And she did bring me on those whale watches and to that Cambodian temple. She cannot be more than she is. Of course I’ve had this thought many times before. It’s Psych 101 stuff. But now, riding the bus to Amma’s funeral, god bless, god bless tolling in my mind, I feel the thought rather than think it.

—

Ayya is waiting for me at the bus stop. He raises one hand. “We happy you come here,” he says, enunciating too deliberately. It’s clear he’s been saving these words. He takes my backpack and I follow him across the street to Suriya’s house. There is a coffin in the empty front room attached to the kitchen. As Ayya carries my bag upstairs, I walk to the edge of the box. Suriya’s mother has been dressed in a white sari and gold jewelry. Her face is made up with kohl around her eyes, cakey whitening powder, red lipstick. Her lips are upturned, but the smile belongs to the living; Suriya’s mother is nowhere near this room. I’m permitted the preciousness of the thought because I have no attachment to Amma’s specific body.