No One Belongs Here More Than You (13 page)

Birthmark

On a scale of one to ten, with ten being childbirth, this will be a three.

A three? Really?

Yes. That’s what they say.

What other things are a three?

Well, five is supposed to be having your jaw reset.

So it’s not as bad as that.

No.

What’s two?

Having your foot run over by a car.

Wow, so it’s worse than that?

But it’s over quickly.

Okay, well, I’m ready. No—wait; let me adjust my sweater. Okay, I’m ready.

All right, then.

Here goes a three.

The laser, which had been described as pure white light, was more like a fist slammed against a countertop, and her body was a cup on the counter, jumping with each slam. It turned out three was just a number. It didn’t describe the pain any more than money describes the thing it buys. Two thousand dollars for a port-wine stain removed. A kind of birthmark that seems messy and accidental, as if this red area covering one whole cheek were the careless result of too much fun. She spoke to her body like an animal at the vet, Shhh, it’s okay, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry we have to do this to you. This is not unusual; most people feel that their bodies are innocent of their crimes, like animals or plants. Not that this was a crime. She had waited patiently from the time she was fourteen for aesthetic surgery to get cheap, like computers. Nineteen ninety-eight was the year lasers came to the people as good bread, eat and be full, be finally perfect. Oh yes, perfect. She didn’t think she would have bothered if she hadn’t been what people call “very beautiful except for.” This is a special group of citizens living under special laws. Nobody knows what to do with them. We mostly want to stare at them like the optical illusion of a vase made out of the silhouette of two people kissing. Now it is a vase … now it could only be two people kissing … oh, but it is so completely a vase. It is both! Can the world sustain such a contradiction? And this was even better, because as the illusion of prettiness and horribleness flipped back and forth, we flipped with it. We were uglier than her, then suddenly we were lucky not to be her, but then again, at this angle she was too lovely to bear. She was both, we were both, and the world continued to spin.

Now began the part of her life where she was just very beautiful, except for nothing. Only winners will know what this feels like. Have you ever wanted something very badly and then gotten it? Then you know that winning is many things, but it is never the thing you thought it would be. Poor people who win the lottery do not become rich people. They become poor people who won the lottery. She was a very beautiful person who was missing something very ugly. Her winnings were the absence of something, and this quality hung around her. There was so much potential in the imagined removal of the birthmark; any fool on the bus could play the game of guessing how perfect she would look without it. Now there was not this game to play, there was just a spent feeling. And she was no idiot, she could sense it. In the first few months after the surgery, she received many compliments, but they were always coupled with a kind of disorientation.

Now you can wear your hair up and show off your face more.

Yeah, I’m going to try it that way.

Wait, say that again.

“I’m going to try it that way.” What?

Your little accent is gone.

What accent?

You know, the little Norwegian thing.

Norwegian?

Isn’t your mom Norwegian?

She’s from Denver.

But you have that little bit of an accent, that little … way of saying things.

I do?

Well, not anymore, it’s gone now.

And she felt a real sense of loss. Even though she knew she had never had an accent. It was the birthmark, which in its density had lent color even to her voice. She didn’t miss the birthmark, but she missed her Norwegian heritage, like learning of new relatives, only to discover they have just died.

All in all, though, this was minor, less disruptive than insomnia (but more severe than déjà vu). Over time she knew more and more people who had never seen her with the birthmark. These people didn’t feel any haunting absence, why should they? Her husband was one of these people. You could tell by looking at him. Not that he wouldn’t have married a woman with a port-wine stain. But he probably wouldn’t have. Most people don’t and are none the worse for it. Of course, sometimes it would happen that she would see a couple and one of them would have a port-wine stain and the other would clearly be in love with this stained person and she would hate her husband a little. And he could feel it.

Are you being weird?

No.

You are.

Actually, I’m not. I’m just eating my salad.

I can see them, too, you know. I saw them come in.

Hers is worse than mine was. Mine didn’t go down on my neck like that.

Do you want to try this soup?

I bet he’s an environmentalist. Doesn’t he look like one?

Maybe you should go sit with them.

Maybe I will.

I don’t see you moving.

Did you just finish the soup? I thought we were splitting.

I offered it to you.

Well, you can’t have any of this salad, then.

It was a small thing, but it was a thing, and things have a way of either dying or growing, and it wasn’t dying. Years went by. This thing grew, like a child, microscopically, every day. And since they were a team, and all teams want to win, they continuously adjusted their vision to keep its growth invisible. They wordlessly excused each other for not loving each other as much as they had planned to. There were empty rooms in the house where they had meant to put their love, and they worked together to fill these rooms with midcentury modern furniture. Herman Miller, George Nelson, Charles and Ray Eames. They were never alone; it became crowded. The next sudden move would have to be through the wall. What happened was this. She was trying to get the lid off a new jar of jam, and she was banging it on the counter. This is a well-known tip, a kitchen trick, a bang to loosen the lid. It’s not witchery or black magic, it’s simply a way to release the pressure under the lid. She banged it too hard, and the jar broke. She screamed. Her husband came running when he heard the sound. There was red everywhere, and in that instant he saw blood. Hallucinatory clarity: you are certain of what you see. But in the next moment, your fear relinquishes control: it was jam. Everywhere. She was laughing, picking shards of glass out of the strawberry mash. She was laughing at the mess, and her face was down, looking at the floor, and her hair was around her face like a curtain, and then she looked up at him and said, Can you bring the trash can over here?

And it happened again. For a moment he thought he saw a port-wine stain on her cheek. It was fiercely red and bigger than he had ever imagined. It was bloodier than even blood, like sick blood, animal blood, the blood racist people think beats inside people of other races: blood that shouldn’t touch my own. But the next moment it was just jam, and he laughed and rubbed the kitchen towel on her cheek. Her clean cheek. Her port-wine stain.

Honey.

Can you get the trash can?

Honey.

What?

Go look in the mirror.

What?

Go look in the mirror.

Stop talking like that. Why are you talking like that? What?

He was looking at her cheek. She instinctively put her hand on the mark and ran to the bathroom.

She was in there for a long time. Maybe thirty minutes. You’ve never had thirty minutes like these. She stared at the port-wine stain and she breathed in and she breathed out. It was like being twenty-three again, but she was thirty-eight now. Fifteen years without it, and now here it was. In the same exact place. She rubbed her finger around its edges. It came as high as her right eye, over to the edge of her right nostril, across her whole cheek to the ear, ending at her jawbone. In purplish-red. She wasn’t thinking anything, she wasn’t afraid or disappointed or worried. She was looking at the stain the way one would look at oneself fifteen years after one’s own death. Oh, you again. Now it was obvious it had always been there; she had startled it back into sight. She looked into its redness and breathed in and breathed out and found herself in a kind of trance. She thought: I am in a kind of trance. She was just blowing around. It lasted about twenty-five minutes, a very, very long time to be just blowing around. Mostly, you waft for a second or two, a half second, maybe. And then you spend the rest of your life trying to describe it, to regain the perspective. You say, It was like I was just blowing around, and you wave your arms in the air. But there were no arms like that, and you know it. She came out of the trance like a plane taking off. Instead of being inside the stain, she was now looking down on it from above. Like a lake, it grew smaller and smaller until it was only a tiny region in a larger mass. One that this pilot favored, hovered over, but would not touch down on again. She pulled some toilet paper off the roll and blew her nose.

He found himself kneeling. He was waiting for her on his knees. He was worried she would not let him love her with the stain. He had already decided long ago, twenty or thirty minutes ago, that the stain was fine. He had only seen it for a moment, but he was already used to it. It was good. It somehow allowed them to have more. They could have a child now, he thought. There was a loose feeling in the air. The jam was still on the floor, and that was okay. He would just kneel here and wait for her to come out and hope he would be able to tell her about the looseness in a loose way. He wanted to keep the feeling. He hoped she wasn’t removing it somehow, the stain. She should keep it, and they should have a kid. He could hear her blowing her nose; now she was opening the door. He would stay on his knees, just like this. She would see him this way and understand.

How to Tell Stories to Children

Tom had done some bad things. Now, it seemed, he was getting his comeuppance. There was almost nothing to say that the universe had not said already. I asked about his wife.

Is Sarah willing to talk about it?

Sure, but she’s blasé. She doesn’t give a shit.

That’s terrible.

Yeah.

And the student?

She won’t stop fucking him.

Oh man. Man oh man.

Yeah.

And she knows about your, your things—your affairs?

No.

We sat in silence, sipping our tea. And to think that twelve years ago I had been one of these things. I pressed my finger against a cold tea bag. A few minutes later, we embraced and went our separate ways.

He didn’t call me for a few weeks. This was customary within our friendship, confide and retreat, but I wondered. I wondered if perhaps our last conversation had been an overture. Not the conversation, exactly, but the silences within it. There had been many dark pits of tea-sipping silence; looking back, I could imagine placing my hand on his hand while kneeling in one of these dark pits. And in such a pit could one even be sure what one was doing? One might seek solace in a friend and literally go inside this friend to get the solace; and the friend, being old and familiar, might give especially good solace. With this kindness in mind, I e-mailed Tom.

Lunch?

And he responded:

Sarah is pregnant and we’re having the baby!! More soon,
I have to run. Just wanted you to hear it from me first. Love, Tom

At the baby shower, Tom’s mother walked around with a clipboard assigning all the guests days on which to bring a healthy meal to the new parents. It was called a meal tree, like a telephone tree. If Tom and Sarah did not answer the door, I was told, I should leave the meal on the front porch in a basket that would be labeled:
Thank You Friends!

Luckily, I was allocated the last possible day, and I hoped that the passing of time would carry me out of horror toward feelings of joy. But the day came and I had no such feelings. I knocked on their door very quietly, hoping to leave the meal in the
Thank You Friends
basket, which actually said
Put
Meals Here
. The door swung open immediately.

Deb, thank God you’re here, can you take her?

And the baby was handed to me. Tom guided us past a tear-stained Sarah, who gave a sarcastic wave, and into the office/baby room. Tom looked at me and winced apologetically before shutting the door and leaving us alone. There was a silence, and then,

I didn’t say that! I said I could have if I wanted to because it’s my body!

But our baby was in your body! You could have hurt her!

It’s perfectly safe as long as it’s not rough sex!

Oh. So it did happen.

I held my breath and pulled the child to my chest as if she were me. There was a long silence during which I imagined Sarah weeping silently. But suddenly, her voice issued, clear and unadorned with guilt.

Yeah.

Yeah. And what was this not-rough sex like if it was not rough?

It was gentle.

They were in a wilderness that was too wild for me, they were living with bears, they were bears, their words flew past deadly animal teeth. I wished I were hearing about this in second or even third hand: “We had a terrible fight,” “I heard they had a terrible fight,” “I had an acquaintance who knew a couple who, back in the early part of the century, had a terrible fight, perhaps even had terrible fights on a regular basis, this acquaintance doesn’t know for sure, she is realizing now that she didn’t really know the couple, on account of the fact that she had mixed intentions with regard to the man in the couple, intentions that now are even more ancient history than this ancient, historical, terrible fight.”

Tom began screaming, and I wondered if the baby’s soft brain was, in this moment, changing shape in response to the violent stimuli. I tried to intellectualize the noise to protect the baby’s psyche. I whispered: Isn’t that interesting to hear a man scream? Doesn’t that challenge our stereotypes of what men can do? And then I tried, Shhhhhhhhh.

She burrowed for a nipple, and I slipped my finger into her mouth. As she slept in my arms, I found I could only think thoughts that were cosmological in scale. I considered the round ball of the sun, the food cycle, and time itself, which seemed miraculous and poignant. I curled my whole body around her. Tom and Sarah were distant traffic beside my primeval blossoming, the almost painful expansion of my heart to include their descendent. I studied each scale model of a finger; I gazed at her shut eyes with their majestic lashes, and her good intention of a nose. But I could not remember her name. I looked at her face. Lilya? No, it was something less innocent, more overly clever. I stared at a stuffed bunny and a row of acrobatic wooden clowns on a shelf. Lana? No. The clowns leaned and bent and gradually came into focus. They were not only acrobatic, they were alphabetic, and they would contort forever to spell the name Lyon.

Throughout time there have been women who came by their children gradually, organically, without the formalities of conception or adoption. It felt intuitive to me but was a confusing situation for my boyfriends.

Didn’t we just see Lyon?

Not since she learned to swim with water wings.

But can one really call that swimming?

Oh, come on, you know how afraid she is of water. It’s a big, huge deal.

How about “it’s a big deal” and we save “big, huge deal” for us? Can we do that? Can we save that for something big and huge that happens to us?

Like what?

Like, I don’t know, a big, huge … feeling between us.

Uh-oh, this sounds like it’s about to be a long conversation. Look, you don’t have to go. Just drop me off and pick me up at four.

She is running toward me, covered in hundreds of water droplets, a pink-and-yellow-flowered swimsuit, sunlight in her eyes, red mouth broken open into a shout, crashing wetly into my legs with so much to say.

I went in before but that was holding on to the side and then
today this morning I went in again, holding on to the side, but then
I let go! I let go! And I couldn’t touch the bottom! And it was for
nine seconds! But I think I can do it longer but I had to rest on a
towel because I was so tired and Daddy said you were coming over
so I waited, I’ve been waiting for almost a million years, can we go
in now? Did you see my towel? See, it has a picture of a teenager
with a bikini and a little dog, don’t step on it, you messed it up, can
you fix it, please? Yeah. Can we go in now? Can you hold me at
first?

We bobbed around in the middle of the pool, her legs wrapped around my waist, one arm around my neck, the other directing us through the water. We were heavy and clumsy but also weightless and graceful. In the deep end, she gripped me and screamed; in the shallow end, she broke free and marveled at her own bravery. She checked the water wings every couple of minutes, pressing on them to make sure they were still hard.

I think this one’s going down.

No, it’s fine.

Can you blow it up a little more?

I don’t want to pop it.

Can you check it?

It’s fine, see? It’s the same as the other one.

She felt the other one, looked up at me solemnly, opened her eyes wide, and then jumped up and down, shouting, splashing, reckless. Sarah looked up from her magazine and then looked down again. Tom looked across the patio, our eyes met, and for a split second I remembered my drunken nineteen-year-old face pressed against his chest at a party, his lips resting on the top of my head, murmuring, You know I wish I could. It seemed impossible that I ever thought of him as the main attraction. Now he was Lyon’s father, and she possessed the daring, the warmth, the wicked charm I once thought I would find in him. Lyon plunged her face into the water and held a winged arm in the air; her fist released a spiky finger for each second endured. One, two, three, four, five, the other arm shot up, six, seven, eight, nine, ten—her arms froze in the air, all digits holding numbers—and then her face, smeared with wet hair and mucus, rose out of the depths. Gasping, furious, she shook her stiff hands at me.

I ran out of fingers! That was longer than ten seconds! You saw it was longer! Did you count?

I think it was thirteen.

I think it might have been twenty-seven!

Do you want to know how to count higher? You just start over on the first hand.

No.

You remember ten, and you start on the first hand with eleven.

I said no. I don’t want to know.

But how will you count big numbers?

When it goes bigger than ten, you can do it.

Okay, but what if I’m not there?

At this she laughed. She jumped out of the pool and ran toward her mother on the lounger. She shrieked, now in a drunken imitation of laughter, and hurled herself onto Sarah.

What’s so funny?

Deb.

She is funny, isn’t she. A funny bunny.

Friday night was date night, named for the date Sarah and Tom would go on while Lyon slept over at my house. But because they usually just stayed home and fought, and Lyon and I more often went to dinner and saw a movie, date night became our code for Night of Endless Fun. Don’t underestimate how much joy an eight-year-old and an almost-forty-year-old can bring each other. We usually began at Miso Happy, our favorite Japanese place. We thought the name was terrible, but we liked the noodles. We talked about everything, including but not limited to: My gray hairs, should I dye them? Could I dye them individually? Could I pay a mouse with a tiny paintbrush to jump on my head and dye them one by one? And why did Tom and Sarah have to fight so much? Was it Lyon’s fault? No, absolutely not. Could she stop them from fighting? Again, no. Also: would they buy her a twenty-four-color pen set, and, if they did, how jealous would best friend Claire be when Lyon brought it to school? Our guess was very. And why had Deb’s last boyfriend dumped her?

I dumped
him
.

Maybe you didn’t French-kiss him enough.

I promise you that wasn’t it.

Tell me how many times a day you kissed, and I’ll say if it was enough.

Four hundred.

Not enough.

If there was a decent kid movie, we would see that after dinner, but usually, we went to the second-run theater, where we saw things like
McCabe & Mrs. Miller or Bonnie and Clyde
or
Shampoo
. We were massive Warren Beatty fans. I worried at first about the sex and violence, but Lyon discovered that as long as the movie was made before 1986, she could take it. Thus,
Reds
was okay, but
Ishtar
was too disturbing. After the movie, we came home and took a bath in my tub, also known as La Salon Paree. We made potions out of combinations of shampoos and tested them on each other’s backs for scent, froth, and beautification properties. We checked Lyon’s body for signs of puberty, which never appeared. (Or yes, they did, but years after the close of La Salon Paree.) We slept together in my giant bed that was exactly as wide as it was long. It made as much sense to sleep in one direction as another, and Lyon charted our course by spinning around, Tonight weee willlll sleeeeeep, and then flinging herself down, this way! She lay still, holding the spot, while I moved the pillows around to our new north. We read from an antique book called
How to Tell Stories to Children, and
Some Stories to Tell
. Lyon was bored by the prosaic “Billy Beg and His Ball” and “The Fox and the Ox,” but she loved to hear me read the chapter called “The Storyteller’s Mood—A Few Principles of Method, Manner, and Voice, from the Psychological Point of View.” And then we slept. Spooning at first, and then, because Lyon radiated an uncomfortable heat, back to back.

By the time she was nine, she was living at my house three or four days a week, and Sarah and Tom were sleeping at other people’s houses most of the time. Sometimes Tom, in a moment of manic elation, would suggest I meet his current girlfriend.

It’s only because she’s gorgeous, and I think you would appreciate that.

Well, thank you, but that’s okay.

Oh. Are you jealous?

No.

But you would have been when we were younger.

Probably.

Sarah sure is. Do you at least want to see a picture?

No.

What do you think of her? Is she not perfect?

She is.

Do you want to keep the picture?

What would I do with it?

I don’t know, you could put it on your refrigerator.

I wouldn’t want Lyon to see it.

Oh, she’s already met her.

When Lyon was ten, she entered a spiritual phase. None of us three was religious, so she drew from a wide array of sources. She called it the Pleiades, an ever-evolving combination of mythology, Anne Frank, and gleanings from her friend Claire, who went to Sunday school and wore a crucifix. She could add and subtract rituals as they were needed; some days were Days of Darkness, and she asked me to either cover my face with a veil or just stay away from her. On Ms. Frank’s birthday, we cried, and those of us who could not spontaneously cry were given the option of whispering every bad thing we had ever done to the last page of the book, the page before they are discovered by the SS. The Pleiades derived much of its authority from an ability to conjure guilt. Lyon wore my castoff silver Gaia pendant, which was abstractly vaginal in a way she wasn’t aware of, and pretended to loathe wearing it. When Claire made a big fuss about having to wear her stupid old cross, Lyon said, Tell me about it, my parents make me wear this.

What is that?

It’s for our religion.

Are you Jewish?

No, it’s really complicated. Here, let me show you, take off your shirt.