Belly Up Read online

  In the early light of the morning I decided I didn’t hate the halved husband for widowing two wives and orphaning some Malaysian children as much as I hated him for being halved. This is the kind of hate people have when their morality is challenged, I thought. I hate the halved husband because he hates the way I live.

  I went back into the bedroom where my husband was still asleep. I put on my work clothes and kissed him on the cheek. I whispered in his ear, “Professor Robinson called. There is an emergency. I have to go into work early.”

  “All right,” my husband said. “Well, make them let you off at a decent hour. Tonight I want to make you duck and beans.”

  I took some toast and walked out the door and into my car. When I got in the car I called my work. I got the answering machine, as I knew I would. I left a message. I said, “Hi Professor Robinson, this is Helen. I am sorry to tell you this on such short notice, but I won’t be able to come in to work today. My husband’s brother died unexpectedly last night, and I really have to stay here, at home with him. I should be able to come in tomorrow, but I will let you know.”

  After I hung up the phone I drove into the city. I drove on the highway where the accident had been and sped past the absence of debris. Once in the city, I parked the car in the underground of a mall. I got out of the car and went into the mall and into several stores. I tried on underwear and dresses and shoes and coats. I bought everything I wanted. I walked out wearing new earrings, a new dress and new shoes. I walked to the park and lay down on the park bench. The sun was warmer than it had been the day before. I got up and went to lunch in a nice restaurant. I ordered French onion soup and braised lamb for a main. There was a handsome man about my age sitting next to me. He said, “How is the lamb?”

  “Delicious,” I said. “Would you like a bite?”

  “You know, I would. Mind if I join your table?”

  “Please.”

  A waiter came over and we asked to have the man’s plate moved to my table. I took the man’s fork and cut him a piece of meat.

  “This meat is amazing,” he said.

  “Wait till you taste the soup.” I took a piece of bread from the breadbasket and dipped it in the bowl, making sure that the broth soaked up into it and that it was properly coated with cheese.

  I handed it to the man, and he took it from me and said, “You’re right. The soup is better than the lamb. I could eat a whole lunch of French onion soup. Next time.”

  We made plans to meet back at the same restaurant for dinner. I told him I had tickets to a harp show and invited him to go. We planned to eat dinner early so we could be on time for the harp tuning. I told him all about how I worked in the music building, and how listening to the sound of harps tuning made me feel so other, like another me, and that it was beautiful, I thought, and that I thought he would like it and we should go.

  The man agreed to the harp concert and looked genuinely eager. He left and went back to his office and I got up and walked out into the street. Three blocks away there was a movie theater. I went in and watched a movie that was essentially Hamlet but set in Detroit. Inside the movie theater the seats were sticky. The fabric pulled up when I lifted my hand. The screen made everyone’s faces look blue and pretty. Inside the movie theater I felt like I had nicer skin. If only I could be the harp me with a movie exterior, I thought. Maybe I could be.

  While watching the movie I remembered the halved husband that I cared for and his wives. I wondered which wife he liked better. It would appear that because he married the Malaysian wife after the American wife he liked the Malaysian wife better. But maybe it was a relationship of geographic convenience. I found myself wishing that my husband was in the movie theater with me. I wanted him to put his hand on my thigh in the dark.

  When the movie was over, I walked out of the movie theater and into the dusk of the city. I stood under a lamppost and watched the people pass by. I took my phone out of my pocket and called my husband. He said, “Helen? Are you coming home?”

  “No,” I said. “It’s a big disaster. I hope I don’t have to stay all night. Keep some duck warm in the oven for me. I’ll be home as soon as I can.”

  After I hung up the phone, I walked back to the restaurant. I was a half hour early for dinner so I had a drink at the bar. I wondered why I hadn’t ever asked the college boyfriend about the children. Had I believed that the children were beside the point? Did I always believe children were beside the point?

  Sitting there at the bar, drinking my wine, I justified caring about the halved husband more than I cared about the children because the halved husband was a novelty, a rare two-headed snake to be brought up only late into the night at the most intimate of dinner parties when the conversation has gotten too serious and everyone is almost ready to go home. Orphaned children, on the other hand, are common emotional currency.

  I wondered what my husband would think of the halved husband, though I, of course, had no intention of ever asking him. Many times what you think someone would say on a subject is much truer than the words that would actually come out of their mouth. My husband would probably be overly occupied with making sure all the parties were taken care of. If he could figure out a way to make the Malaysian wife and the American wife friends he probably would. What a rancid want. Who would want to meet the partial owner of a husband they believed to belong solely to them? My husband is the only optimist I know who would be blind enough to suggest such a meeting. I was glad I hadn’t invited my husband to the harp concert. He probably would have just made tiresome comments speculating on the manufacturing techniques employed to fabricate the theater seats.

  I put my wine glass down. The man from lunch walked into the restaurant and we sat at a nice table near a window. He told me his name was Huck, which I told him I found hard to believe.

  “Like Huck Finn,” I said.

  “Exactly,” said Huck.

  Huck told me all about his day as a website designer. I told Huck all about my day as a secretary for a music department. I told him about the applications I had filed, and the staff meeting notes I had typed, and the plane flights I had changed for Professor Robinson’s quartet.

  Huck told me about his day writing code and tried to make it sound more important than it was, which I found silly. Huck became more enjoyable when he started talking about his family. His mother was an old Polish woman who lived in Queens. You could tell he loved her by the way he made fun of her. I asked him if I could come over for pierogi sometime and he said, of course.

  We took a cab to the concert hall because the dinner had gotten away from us. We rushed to our seats as the first harps were being carted in. Slowly the musicians unwrapped them from their big jackets and started tuning. There were eighteen harps in total, which was absolutely grand. When the harps started tuning, I felt the other me ecstasy returning. I wished I could walk around with these sounds for the rest of my life. While the harps tuned nothing was required of me. I thought of all the things my husband needs from me. I have to speak to my husband and cook with him. I have to use words to tell him what I feel. Sometimes my husband needs me to reassure him. The easiest thing I have ever done with my husband was lovemaking. That has never been tiresome or hard to do. I wondered if maybe I should suggest that my husband and I stop talking. Perhaps we should only communicate through touch and feel. Maybe that is a truer way to be with someone. Maybe my husband and I just needed to rid ourselves of words and then we could access something more intimate. I found myself truly resenting the pockets of meaning each word I hurled at my husband was meant to communicate. Why couldn’t I just take my raw feeling and give it to him? Why was I required to translate something within me into a symbol that an uncountable number of humans have used before me and will use again?

  While the harps were tuning Huck wanted to keep talking.

  “Shhhh,” I said to Huck. “I am listening to the tuning.”

  He looked confused but not altogether saddened. He closed his eyes and
tried to turn into harp Huck, but I could tell he wasn’t having a good time.

  Eventually the harps stopped tuning and started playing in earnest. I liked the choreographed coordination of their strings as well, although it didn’t induce the same other me.

  After the show I kissed Huck goodbye and told him next time we’d see a rock show. Then I started my long walk back to the parking lot under the mall. I crossed lonely streets strewn with trash and flyers. Every couple blocks I passed a waking bar.

  While I walked I saw two young boys playing cards in an alley. They were about fifteen, and surely lived in one of the buildings nearby. The younger looking one whistled at me. He looked like a young Huck and my husband combined.

  When I got to my car, I was tired. I had walked and been awake for so long. I got into my car and drove along the deserted streets. I weaved in and out of the city blocks aimlessly and then, when my lids began to droop, I found the nearest highway entrance and began my regular commute home.

  I love driving on the freeway when everyone else is absent. I thought maybe I should start commuting at night. I sped along the freeway and passed the trees and the rocks that looked so stunning in the daylight. At night they weren’t as beautiful. Instead of feeling like a canopy from the sun they felt like a dark cloak. Their black arms reached over the road and threatened to engulf me. I put my chin over the wheel and leaned forward so I could see the foliage on both sides in one view. I fingered the stereo in longing and made a mental note that I had to find a recording of the harps tuning. Perhaps I could befriend the harp professor and convince her to make a recording for a charitable cause. Or, I could see her being the kind of woman who was suspicious of charity. Maybe we could become friends in earnest and I could tell her about the harp me.

  As I neared the spot where the accident had happened I slowed down. Someone had put a cross and a bouquet of lilies on the side of the road. I stopped the car in the middle of the freeway and beamed my lights on the memorial. A long shadow pulled out from the cross and I saw that there were more offerings scattered about.

  After sitting in the car for several moments in stark silence I decided to pull off and investigate. I drove the car off the road and under the overhang of a tree. I walked the fifty feet back to the memorial site. When I got there I saw that there were indeed many more flowers. Amaryllis and baby’s breath were scattered all around. It looked like they had all been a part of the same bouquet and then the wind had gotten a hold of them. In the dark the baby’s breath looked like clumps of cloud.

  I looked at this memorial for the man whose head was on the wheel, the man who crashed and made me remember the halved husband. The man who crashed and made me remember the Malaysian wife. I tried to understand in what ways this memorial was and was not for the halved husband of my imagination. Could every husband be partially halved in some way? I decided I needed to seek counsel with the halved husband and sat down next to his memorial. First I sat with my legs pulled up to my chest and addressed his cross directly, but then I grew tired and lay down. I spread out all my limbs on the ground like I was making a snow angel. I tried to pull myself apart from the inside out. I imagined all my organs choosing a side and then willing my sternum open. I made harp tuning sounds with my mouth and sung into the split. I could feel the halved husband helping me form two new bodies. His hands gripped the inside of my ribs and pulled up. I kept humming until I could feel that the separation was finished. When I was finally halved and happy, I put my two selves back in the car and started the engine. I turned on the radio and listened to a heavy beat. A great relief washed over me. I knew then I could do what I wanted. I knew then that the reason I hated the halved husband so much was not because he hated the way I lived, but because I envied him. Now that I too was halved, I had no resentment toward him.

  I got up and drove home and got into bed with my husband. I woke him early in the morning and we made love. He cooked me a hearty breakfast of eggs and bacon. Before I went to work, I held him in the doorway. I put my hands into his hair and felt the back of his skull. I pulled his body towards mine and put my own head into the crook of his shoulder.

  While driving back into the city, I listened to music. I turned the radio to a classical station that mostly played Brahms. When I was two blocks away from my work building I was stopped by a red light at a big intersection. A couple stepped off the sidewalk and traversed the street. The woman was wearing a headscarf and the man was wearing a suit. They took their time crossing. When the light turned green they were directly in front of my bumper. They were walking so slow. I wished they would hurry up. Didn’t they know this was a city? People have to get places. I didn’t have all day to wait for them. When it became clear that they truly would take all day if the day was given to them, I honked my horn and made my eyes bulge out and look at them. Surprised by the sudden noise they jumped, stared into the windshield, and then hurried on.

  PHYLUM

  I WAS THE TYPE OF MAN who got his ears cleaned. I was the type of woman who didn’t like dogs. We lived together in a house on a street that was the color of asphalt. I told you what I thought of you. I told you to leave me alone. You didn’t own the house. I never liked our street. It smelled like cough syrup. I like living in a place that smells good.

  I was the type of man who went to board meetings. I was the type of woman who liked gouda cheese. We lived together in an apartment next to a deli. I stole money from your wallet. I knew you hated how I dressed. I snuck out in the night and went to Harlem. The thing about cities is anyone can go anywhere and never be seen. We both knew it made the game easier. We both liked knowing there was a game.

  I was the type of woman who liked swimming in hotel pools. I was the type of man who liked listening to plays. We didn’t have children. You listened to Mozart and Bach, and always said you loved classical music, but I knew, and you knew that you don’t know any other composers. I like John Lennon. That isn’t a composer. Says who?

  I was the type of man who walked out into the night and took my hair in my hands and dropped to my knees and wept. I was the type of woman who recycled every scrap of waste I ever produced because the thought that I was slowly killing our planet made me feel like my intestines were climbing up my throat and out my mouth. We clung to each other mostly out of fear.

  I was the type of woman who looked out the window and saw a parade of elephants and cats and hogs. I was the type of man who cut his food in half so many times that my bites were the size of raisins. We lived together in a hand-built structure in Vermont. We both knew conversation wasn’t for us. You didn’t speak for a year. Is that too long of a time not to speak?

  I was the type of woman who carved local stones into arrows and cooked snakes into stews and looked at the sky with longing. I was the type of man who sucked juice out of straws and cooked enough grand meals to make anybody love me. We both rotted in the sand of a far-off beach. Our skin fell from our bodies and the sun bleached what was left of us until children found our remains and made them into playthings. The castles of our bones had moats, and the moon pulled the tides so close to us that water came and knocked at the door of our dead bodies. You wanted to go with the moon. I was happy to stay in the sand. What you wanted didn’t matter in the end because in the end we were both taken by the sea.

  BLACK TONGUE

  THERE WAS A SOCKET in the wall my mother told me not to touch. The wire innards of the plug spilled out of the unguarded hole. The wires looked like black spaghetti. When my mother left the room, I walked over to the socket and bent my small body down so that my head was level with the wire mess. I inched close to the wall and closed my eyes and stuck out my tongue. My brother, who was older, once told me that one of our cousins got his tongue stuck licking a pole in winter. When my tongue licked the wires, I thought, spaghetti. When my tongue burnt black, I pulled it back into my mouth and pulled both hands to my chin. Things are so easy to ruin, I remember thinking. I remember thinking, why did I do this thing th
at I knew was going to have a bad ending?

  LITTLE DRIPS OF WHITE PUS came out of my ears and my nails all felt as if they had been lifted off my fingers. There was an absent, lackluster silence. I couldn’t hear. I wandered around the backyard and went to the shed where I kept my treasure. I dug up the box and opened it. Inside the box was a mirror.

  MUCH LATER, when I was an adult, I played a sport that required one to break a lot of fingers. The two smallest sets of fingers were the ones that got broken the most. The bones are too tiny to set, all the doctors told us, so just brace them with the other, nonbroken fingers and bathe them in ice at night. The result was me having hands that looked like paddles. I wrapped the broken digits to the good ones with white waterproof tape. I imagine now, a decade after the finger breaking, that if someone were to cut open my fingers and peel back the skin, the bone would be shattered-fissured like the way rivers snake around in valleys on maps. I can still feel the cracks when I make fists.

  THE SUMMER OF THE BLACK TONGUE was the summer my parents were building a new home for us. We, the children, were young, still, young enough that our parents didn’t think it would matter much if we had to move schools. The parents bought a single-story rancher an hour outside of the city. We moved into the rancher and they lifted off the roof the week after we moved in. I slept on an air mattress in my would-be bedroom. If it was supposed to rain, my father got up on a ladder and put big blue tarps over all the rooms. The tarps made everybody look like they were underwater. Most nights, though, it was just stars and birdcalls. We’re doing a live-in remodel, our mother told us. This live-in remodel was maybe the most fun thing we had ever done. It was like a permanent camping trip, only with better food. Most rules seemed to be forgotten. And everyone was so much nicer to one another because we were building something together. We could see the house grow day by day, mushroom out with my father’s new electric saw and the new kitchen he was building in the back. It felt like the house would keep growing if I willed it. I never wanted the live-in remodel to end. I wanted everything in my life to be live-in. I wanted to do a live-in basketball game and live-in birthday parties and live-in Marco Polo with live-in friends. Can we do live-in friends? I asked my mother. That’s called a commune, she said. When you’re old enough, you can do live-in friends.