Chapter 24
24
The first time Jane leaves the house, it is months later, though she’s lost all sense of time. It takes her hours to get out the door. She has forgotten how buttons work; she keeps having to change her pants; they hurt where the elastic touches her skin. She gets lightheaded tying her shoes and needs to sit down again and again and again.
Upstairs, Abe is giving Max a bath. He is taking a break from working, from writing, which he has done so much of lately. Despite everything. Jane cannot believe it would be possible to make anything at a time like this, much less be creative. And yet: biology. This is the difference, she thinks, between you and me.
Every so often, Jane thinks she hears Max cry and a flare goes off in her neck. A slightly sick, metal feeling as if a shot has been administered there. But Max is not crying. Instead, it is a bird on the sill, the screech of brakes outside. Jane exhales, not knowing she has been holding her breath, or for how long.
She gets to the grocery store before it opens. She is unsure how cold it actually is or if it’s just the sensation from all her time inside, sweatered, socked. She feels like she’s been awake for weeks. Perhaps she has. This year, this winter, is endless. There has been no snow, only wind. Every morning, the sun rises late, and Jane waits for it, sure of its salve. When it comes, however, instead of relief, the cold bleaches everything white, and Jane longs for it to be dark again. Less shrill. But at night, Max wails. He will not feed and when she gives him a bottle, her chest aches. And so she doesn’t pick him up, mostly. Abe does the mornings. Then Abe’s mother comes for hours every day. Sometimes, when she leaves, Jane lets him cry himself to sleep.
It wasn’t supposed to be like this. Jane is not sure how it is supposed to be. When she sees them—Abe and Abe’s mother—she doesn’t feel the appreciation or jealousy that she should. (What would she possibly do without them?) Just utter weariness, resignation, defeat.
The street outside the grocery store is quiet. Jane closes her eyes and puts her face toward the sun. It feels as if something drains out of her ears, warm and thin. But that, too, is just a feeling. She reminds herself of the list: bread, milk, oranges. Abe repeated it to her as if she were a child, though he didn’t mean it that way. He was excited for her. Get out! Get some air! Their tolerance is different. It has everything to do with their childhoods. Abe’s family is loving, sound. He has feelings in all the appropriate doses. When the baby cries, Abe continues to talk to him as if he’s not. He doesn’t cave in, lose his voice, go dark. He sleeps still. Jane cannot imagine that. Releasing.
Jane is different. A maroon balloon, opaque, quivery, alone, and high, high up.
There are moments when Jane would like to confide in someone, to tell them that she isn’t sure about anything. To ask. But there is no one. Abe’s mother is so expert at mothering. She should not have to take sides. Jane’s father: what a joke. He is remarried, always on a cruise. Jane’s friends from art school do not have children. Likely, they never will. It has put a wedge between them. Like, why did she do it? Shouldn’t she have known? Even Bea has always said, Babies become humans when they can appreciate art. Jane can surmise her feelings to Jane’s situation now. Abe’s friends’ wives are easeful, graceful, dozens of kids among them, dressed, fed, and brushed. They keep sending gifts. Little onesies and socks. Where to even begin?
Bread, milk, oranges. Jane wants to buy lemons too. Jane’s mother believed in yellow and orange fruits for happiness. Dates and walnuts after birth. Jane wishes she could ask her mother everything. About her milk, for example. If there is something wrong with it perhaps.
Bread, milk, oranges, lemons. Lemons, oranges, milk, bread.
Soon, a man shows up in a newsboy hat, cuffed pants, and a plaid jacket. Jane marvels at the pattern. For months, she’s only seen her own clothes, Abe’s, and Max’s. Everything has been a shade of dairy and dirt. She’s been wearing a brown linen shift for weeks.
No one here yet? the man says, but he doesn’t wait for Jane’s answer. Instead, he moves on toward Columbus Avenue. This moment, the store closed, means nothing to him, Jane thinks. He will forget about it in no time, has places to go. Jane tries to imagine herself with something she must do besides feed and eat, bathe and wash over the sink. To get on the subway, she thinks, would be wild: the speed violent even as she longs for it. She longs to be broken by rage that doesn’t come from her child or from her—to be overwhelmed by something that isn’t them.
Finally, the door is opened. Inside, the lights are harsh, the music tinny. Jane is sore. Something is leaking. Blood is an entirely different liquid, and she knows it. What can she do?
Every now and again, she is sure she hears the baby shrieking somewhere. He is or he isn’t. But he isn’t here. Jane has to remind herself of that. In here, it is a freezer opening, the turn of an old shopping cart. Each time, Jane startles. She drops the groceries twice. The fruit scatters, bloody berries at her feet.
Bread, milk, oranges, lemons.
In the dairy aisle, there is a giant butterfly etched into the floor. Jane thinks of her own art. She wonders how any of it actually came from her. She would have had to be a different person, not because of how good it is necessarily—only because it is. She can make nothing now. The baby cries. She is leaking. How much of her brain must have cracked off like crumbs in the last months. When will it stop?
Every time Max falls asleep—he cries himself into it and out of it—Jane promises herself she will make something. A doodle. A knot. A wire boy. Motion is a virtue. But every day, instead, Jane falls asleep—standing, on the toilet, lying down. Sometimes, she dreams of walking alone in the streets, getting soaked in the rain. She dreams of a tub of blue paint. She hears the tiny slosh of a hog-hair brush in oil—and when she wakes, though she doesn’t remember it, the sound sloshes inside her like a ghost or maybe an angel, making indigo shapes with its wings. Sometimes, when she wakes, she is covered in a blue blanket—and Abe is at the desk, writing like a madman, fully absorbed.
Before she left, she checked the second-story stone out the window where she painted the nude. It is still there. Why not? It feels like a million years ago. Something destructive has happened. But only inside.
Jane forgets the milk. She gets chocolate cookies instead. Abe will understand.
A woman in heels is smoking a cigarette on the street. Jane had forgotten about them too. The smell nearly makes her retch.
Even that, she thinks. She cannot get back.
At home, Max is sleeping in his crib. Jane feels gratitude well up behind her eyes for Abe. Whenever Jane calls to Abe, even now, he puts down whatever he’s doing and comes.
Tell me, he says, as if his whole life is to be there for her.
The thing he loves most about her, he always says, is everything. Sometimes, it feels like the thing she loves most is that it feels like he’s saving her life.
In the living room, with the baby not crying, Jane takes off her coat, her scarf, shoes. She leans back on the couch, this couch that has become part of her. A limb. A womb. She marvels at the ceiling. White. Plain. This place, once so serene and safe, has come undone. It was forestlike in how it made her feel. Now everything is on glass.
Jane whispers something; she doesn’t know what. She won’t remember. She falls asleep instantly, dreams instantly. In it, there are birds against a stormy sky. They are high up and in choreographed formation. They are carrying fish, each one, heavy with seaweed in their mouths. And her mother is watching from the beach.
I wasn’t here is the first thing Jane says when she wakes.
Where were you? Abe asks. He is holding her feet. Tell me.
I was a bird.
What kind?
It doesn’t matter.
How did it feel?
Jane can’t get out the words. There is gauze in her throat.
Abe puts a hand on her leg, on her cheek, says something full of promise with his face.
It doesn’t matter what he does or does not know. Jane tries with everything she has to believe him.
Later, Max is crying. Jane knows that there is nothing that she can do. Sometimes, she tries. But she feels the anger stir up in her and she knows she has to put him down. After a while, she sits in the bathroom, a tornado whizzing in her chest. She has never been a person who yells. Now it comes out of her like flames.
So she lets Max wail. She knows it isn’t right.
Soon, someone knocks. Jane’s first thought—illogical, insane—is that it might be about her art. Jane runs downstairs, opens the door.
It is the neighbor, fully dressed.
She was just walking by, she says. Is everything all right?
Jane doesn’t like to lie. She wants to ask the neighbor if she has any tips. She looks like she may have grandchildren, many, and can rock them all to sleep.
Instead, Jane fusses with her sweater, the brown shift. She apologizes. She realizes she needs to eat. How long has it been? She feels faint.
It isn’t his fault, Jane says, not knowing where the words came from or even what they mean. They’re like a phone ringing somewhere in the distance.
The lady nods, but Jane can tell she doesn’t understand. She doesn’t have to.
Jane closes the door.
She goes into the kitchen. Abe has done most of the dishes. But not all. Jane is thrilled by what’s left. A task while Max cries himself to sleep. The splash of the water dims the sound. As she washes, Jane sees a woman across the way, zipping up the back of her dress herself. Jane has seen her many times over the years. She seems to be a teacher. Something about her gait. Sometimes, Jane is doing dishes and the woman is doing dishes too. Jane is getting out of the bath. The woman is in her robe. But she leaves at eight in the morning, is home at four. Unlike Jane.
Jane imagines herself zipping up her own dress. She misses a particular wool green one she used to wear with a suede coat. What would it feel like to have fabric like that on her body? What would it feel like to zip herself up?
Jane is drying dishes; the woman is on the street, walking in purposeful, tight steps like snips with scissors. She is headed west. She has a large leather purse and a piece of paper in her hand. A list maybe? A love letter? Jane longs to know. She puts the dishes away.
Max is quiet for a moment. And then? He starts again.
Stop, Jane begs. Please, just stop.
Jane goes into Max’s room. He is in his crib. Where else? Jane lifts him, tries to pat him, sing to him, soothe him. He flails. Jane has to breathe through an urge to drop him. Just like that. It’s not that she wants to drop him. Or maybe it is.
She doesn’t.
Jane thinks of Abe, who doesn’t lose his mind over anything. But even he has taken to apologizing before he leaves for work, or to write, knowing…just knowing. There is a high stack of pages on the kitchen counter that he’s completed in the last—how long? Recently. Every once in a while, they pop into Jane’s head. The weight of them, their density and durability. The impossibility of that, she thinks, like a reminder, a taunting, an impossible, unfathomable feat.
Jane puts Max back in his crib. She closes the door. She clenches her hands to be sure she is awake. Or alive. There is a sandstorm between her eyes, scratching and spinning. She goes to the window, peers down at the sidewalk, to see what anyone else is doing. No one is there.
She goes to the front door, opens it, traces I Am Here in big letters in the frost. The chill makes her ribs twinge.
In the bathroom, she lets out a hollow moan that sounds like a cry of torture but is not. The toilet is the only place where she feels safe. With the door closed, she can barely hear Max. From here, she can talk to him. Tell him what she wants to say.
It is going to be all right.
She sings him a song. The same one Abe’s mother likes to sing. You are my sunshine. She is not sure she believes herself.
When she opens the door, the screaming hits her in the face like a smack.
Eventually, Abe’s mother comes. Jane has known her for more years than she knew her own mother.
Her mother-in-law has brought kugel, baked fish, orange juice, and milk. She hugs Jane, looks her in the eyes sympathetically, gives her a squeeze. She goes into Max’s room, and as soon as she does—like a light—the crying stops.
There is that draining again in Jane’s ears: a soft release.
Jane stands at the door, watching them, careful not to be seen by her own child. She looks for clues. She has bought the same shampoo as her mother-in-law. She wears the same colors. She holds Max in exactly the same way. Rocks him to the same beat. Jane stands and sits in the same places. It is not that Jane is trying to trick her child when she does this. She is just trying to conform. She knows that he is not the problem. Neither are the clothes.
With Abe’s mother here, Jane can almost rest. She goes into their room, lies on the bed. She is too tired to get under the sheets. She longs to be held, but not by Abe exactly or at least not as things are now. She longs to be held by Abe before Max, when holding meant security and not protection.
The room has changed. Jane has taken down the cuckoo clock. The wall is now naked, raw. She has pulled all the curtains shut, taken down the fruit collage she’d done in school that Abe inexplicably loves. Too much color. Even Abe’s watch is in the other room. Jane kept asking him what that racket was. It was in a drawer, barely audible. But it was that.
When Jane closes her eyes, she thinks of her mother. Jane is maybe five. They are on line at Sahadi’s, buying pistachios and apricots and loose black tea. Jane’s mother is in brown heels and a yellow dress, with a white cardigan. Her hair is pulled into a low bun, tied with a red scarf. Jane’s father bought all her mother’s clothes. They met at a country club when her mother had just come from Iraq. She cleaned the club kitchen at night. Her father wanted to keep her like a bird in a cage. Instead, because of her strength of spirit, he kept her like a cat. She was quiet, but intentional. A housewife who went to museums with her allowance. Who loved modern art. Her father was fastidious, uncreative, detached. It never felt as if he chose her mother though he did. Specifically. As a child, Jane felt as if at any moment he might choose someone else. A woman with a return or exchange option. An entire family.
At Sahadi’s, Jane’s mother leans down and asks Jane what she might like to eat. Dates, Jane says. The juicy ones. Jane’s mother orders them in Arabic from the man behind the counter. Just then, Jane notices the button on her mother’s cardigan is broken, halved.
Your button, she says.
Her mother looks down at it and, without a breath, picks a blanched almond from a bin, snaps it over the top of the button, and voilà. A new button. Her mother’s hands. They could do anything. Jane imagines them. They are jotting an address in Arabic at the post office. They are peeling a grapefruit. They are putting a bandage on Jane’s knee or counting money, putting a stack of bills under the bed.
There were things Jane knew about her mother: she loved color, nuts, music on the streets. It aches: the things she doesn’t know.
On the way home, Jane’s mother buys her a sketchbook and a pen with a felt tip. They sit on a bench, eat apricots, green olives, dates, and sip orange blossom lemonade with sturdy leaves of mint.
What should I draw? she asks her mother, whose weight is warm and quiet against her. Her mother always says the same thing but Jane asks anyway just to hear her mother’s voice.
Draw love, her mother says.
Was it because of the constraints of language that she was never specific? Or perhaps a craving so piercing that it severed her throat? Either way.
In response, sometimes, Jane would draw an artichoke, the sunrise, the neighbors’ gray cat. She would draw a star made of stars, gloves in a sandbank, a large door with a strong knob. The night before, Jane’s mother had told her about Baghdad—a story about her own mother, praying under a lemon tree. They would stop there anytime they went anywhere. It felt sacred. Jane had fallen asleep to the language of curved balconies, the tulip top of the temple, the stone school with broken panes, and Jane’s grandmother, plucking feathers from a chicken, a white apron over her lap.
Now she tries to draw it all, pulling from memory as much as imagination.
Like this? she says.
Like that, her mother says.
And like this?
Like that.
Jane draws until the page is full, flecked, shaded. There is a whole city, and maybe it is Baghdad or maybe it is her Baghdad. Theirs. Her mother runs her finger over a flower growing between the cracks. She makes a sound that is as much pain as pleasure.
When she finally speaks, her voice wobbly and frayed, she says that it is even better than she’d imagined.
Why? Jane asks.
Because you are there too.
After Jane’s mother died, for months, Jane thought she saw her everywhere: running toward the sun at dusk, skirt flying behind her like fabric wings, humming hallelujah amen to a baby that wasn’t Jane in the produce aisle, in front of the pears, swaying back and forth and back and forth, boarding a bus. Always, always, Jane would stay up late drawing the images. To keep her. To be there too.
When Max comes, it is the same but it is different.
Jane sees her old self everywhere. She is not at the Guggenheim, wearing boots with a heel, making art in the studio, grazing the tiny scar on Abe’s face as though he were a Buddha or a small rabbit, or in the throes of orgasm. She is not cupping her own son’s warm head and dabbing his face with a wet cloth. She is not zipping up a dress.
And she cannot draw. She isn’t there either.
Instead, Jane is doing dishes. Jane is rubbing her eyes. Jane is sleeping on the toilet. Jane’s mother-in-law is rocking the baby to sleep because Jane’s body is misery and she might drop her son but not just because she is so depleted. Because.
What she wouldn’t give, she thinks, to hear her mother’s voice again, Arabic curling the outside of her letters like heat. What she wouldn’t do to hold her mother’s slender fingers, chilled from the faucet. What she wouldn’t do to look her mother in the eyes one more time. To mouth, I love you. To draw for her. To rebuild her a world.
What she wouldn’t do to be herself again too. To have someone waiting for her and to come late, apologize, and say, I’m so sorry. I got carried away. I was busy. I was eating pistachios. I was drawing love.