Sweet Affliction (11 page)

Abby's hair aches. She reaches up and pulls her ponytail out of its elastic, massaging her scalp with her hands. It's so easy, she thinks. It's so easy to tell ourselves that what we do is normal, that there is order and logic to everything. She thinks about her friend Liz, in the time between when Liz had a nervous breakdown and when she got better. She told Abby “I would lie on the floor of my parents' house and think, My God, we live on a
planet
.”

Marcus calls to say he's picking up Thai on his way home so don't bother with dinner. Then he says, “I can't wait to see you.”

“Okay,” Abby says. When she hangs up her hands are shaking. Her face hurts, and she realizes she's been grinding her teeth to the rhythm of a song in her head. From the kitchen come what sound like the cries of the loneliest, most despondent cat in the universe. “I fed you,” Abby says, “what else can there be?” She goes into the bathroom and closes the door.

Their governing philosophy was one of abundance. They knew that love was a resource whose volume increased as it was used, like bottomless coffee at a diner—the more you drink, the more refills you get. Or like a muscle that needs to be worked in order to grow. But now Abby wonders if perhaps they were wrong to be so generous with their feelings. Maybe a better approach is one of scarcity. She finds herself wanting to hoard.

It's not that she's worried Marcus will leave her—he's old-fashioned when it comes to the daughters, and generally averse to change. She's not even really bothered by the idea of him with another woman, or only superficially bothered. What disgusts her most is the thrill of gratification she feels when she knows for certain about Helga Volga.

At a party once she watched Marcus dance with a woman she vaguely knew. It was dark, the air blue and heavy with cigarette smoke. The woman reached over and took his beer by the neck. She sipped it, and as she handed it to him she kissed him on the mouth. He kissed her back. When they separated he looked up and saw her, Abby, watching. He looked at her over the woman's head. He smiled as if to say, what's a guy like me doing here? And Abby felt a stab of gruesome pleasure, like worrying a loose tooth with your tongue. Pleasure that she was losing, that Marcus was more popular, more attractive than she was, that he was getting what he wanted, something she could never achieve. A sweet self-pitying surrender, like the actor's graceful fall onto the sword. It was the only way she could get it.

Abby pulls up her leggings. The toilet, as always, says “shadow” as she flushes it. She wonders if it says this to everyone, or just her. In Brazil, does the toilet speak Portuguese? Or does it still say “shadow,” keeping its meaning to itself.

The kids are starting to wake up. Stacey always sighs loudly and continuously just before she comes to, like she's reluctant to leave the dreamworld. Abby lifts her out of the crib and lays her over a shoulder. She carries her into the kitchen, where she notices she's filled the cat's bowl with blueberries.

The phone rings again.

“Four times,” says Abby's sister Lydia. “Can you believe it?”

“Wow,” says Abby. Lydia and her childhood sweetheart husband divorced amicably a year ago, and since then Lydia has been embarking on a journey of sexual discovery. She likes to tell Abby about how many orgasms she has, reporting dutifully to her after each session.

“Yeah, well, I'm sure it's nothing compared to what you're used to.”

“Everyone is different,” says Abby.

“See you Friday,” says Lydia.

Once, while dropping Angela off at preschool, she overheard another mother say to her son, “well honey, it's hard for parents to invite
all
the kids in the class to a party.”

It's well after eight when Marcus gets in. The kids are sleeping. They eat the Thai and watch a couple episodes of
Other People's Lives
. Then they lie in bed and do things that would be preludes to sex if they hadn't been together so long.

Marcus insists on trimming his pubic hair down to a lawn-like covering. The tree looks bigger when you cut back the foliage, he says. But is that really true? Doesn't the foliage contribute to an all-over sense of abundance?

Marcus is a selfish lover, but due to some fluke his selfishness overlaps with Abby's own: what he wants to do is, miraculously, exactly what she wants him to do. In that regard they are matched like cup and saucer.

Afterwards he says “Lie on me,” so she does, chest to chest like a PB & J sandwich, sticky side in. Her face presses into the mattress beside his neck. Gradually he begins to snuffle. Without looking at him she cups the side of his face with her hand and strokes his stubble, from the earlobe down to the neck.

“Whatever it is, we'll get through it,” she says. She rolls off and looks at him. His eyes are spilling over kind of messily. He doesn't cry in drops but with an all-over seepage, as if the water table in him is rising.

He sighs shakily then, and takes Abby's hand.

“Remember my old friend Sally?”

She nods. Oh yes. Simultaneous to the memory of this friend is the remembrance of the fact that cicadas can live underground for up to seventeen years.

Marcus swallows, then takes a breath. “She had a, what… A brain scan, I guess. And it came back irregular, and I guess it's MS. The doctors say.”

“Multiple sclerosis?” Abby says. He just looks at her. Then he moans and covers his face.

“Oh sweetie,” Abby says, “oh babe.” She is surprised at how normal he looks when he cries. Abby tries to cover his body with hers, and thinks Thank God, thank God, thank God. That that's all it is. Thank God.

Frenching the Eagle

We close our eyes. It is important that our eyes stay closed for the duration of the talk, because this is about finding a special space, and our special space is not outside our faces. So we keep them closed until the facilitator says we can open them. The facilitator is me. Now we put our minds in our bellies. What does that mean? It means be present in the centre of your body, because that is where the breath begins. In our bellies. We put our mind there. What do we see? Not a lot. That's right. That's because we're not practiced. We are amateurs at belly vision, and we don't know how to see from the inside. But we don't worry. We are here to learn.

We relax every muscle in our bodies. We see each muscle as a shape made out of jelly, a moulded pudding pop, and we allow it to dissolve into the sea of consciousness. We breathe. We become aware of how our bodies are in contact with the floor, all the aches and pains we hold in our muscles, and then we let them go. We see our aches and pains as butterflies that we are releasing into the sky. They flutter upwards, and some are eaten by birds. We let them go. We understand our conscious mind as a sheet flapping on a laundry line,
somewhere far in the distance. We let it flap.

Now we picture an object for each colour of the rainbow.

For instance, red might be an apple, a sunset, a spot of blood.

What might orange be? Yes, an orange, that's good. Or maybe an orange ball, or an orange cup. Yes, or a sunset.

Yellow: a banana, ripe. Yes, or a sunset.

Green: a banana, unripe. Yes, or for red we could see one of those red bananas from Panama, but let's stick with green. A blade of grass, a forest in the unfurling of summer.

Blue: the sea, in which our muscle-shapes have dissolved. The sky, in which our aches and pains have fluttered away.

And last is violet. What do we see for violet? A flower, or a silken violet robe. A velvet cushion with deep and lustrous pile.

Now we see ourselves in a hallway. We don't name the hallway, but we see it. Once we can see a place without using words, we will be able to leave our bodies behind. We walk down the hallway, over the carpet, passing many doors on our right and our left. Which door will we choose? We choose a door. We place a hand on the knob and open the door. We go through the door.

In front of us we see a large marble staircase leading down. There are twenty-one steps. When we have stepped off the last step, we will be in our special place. We count together.

Twenty-one.

Twenty.

Nineteen.

Eighteen.

Seventeen.

Sixteen.

Fifteen.

Fourteen.

Thirteen.

Twelve.

Eleven.

Ten.

Nine.

Eight.

Seven.

Six.

Five.

Four.

Three.

Two.

We are ready to enter our special place.

One.

Now, we put on our high heels.

We put on our high heels because we are becoming something else, and to become something else we need to change the way we stand. Here is some pertinent information: personality begins at the sole. We understand this on the level of the animal within us, but our human bodies forget. It is an interesting fact that in French, the heels are called “les talons.” Talons. Does that make us think of anything? The French understand the relationship between the animal self and the human body. That is why they are the most sensual people. Why do you think they call it
“frenching?” The eagle is a bird with chronic halitosis, because it eats mainly raw meat. Not many veggies on the mountain cold and craggy. But we are not here to judge or comment. We are here to be. We are here to embrace the eagle, to french it. Until we become it.

Becoming. It's a beautiful word, isn't it? It's what we say of a girl who is turned out just right, just the cat's pyjamas: Isn't she becoming? Soon, that's what they will say about you.

Good.

We notice how the shoes change the organization of our bodies. How many of us suffer under the impression that our bodies are imperfect communication devices, that they speak to us in a language we do not understand? We observe the increased arch in the back, the way the hips and breasts form a balance on either end, like dumbbells. It doesn't matter what we're wearing. Any outfit will do. Even in a baggy jumpsuit we can assume a certain degree of physical intelligibility, just by paying heed to how we stand. Even if we were in a straightjacket, even if we were swathed in canvas like a boat, our arms all twisted behind us, we would say, Okay, how can I turn this situation to my advantage? The answer is: elegance. Elegance is our sorcerer's wand.

The heels are not elegance. The heels are the container for elegance. The rest is us.

All of us have done things that make us unable or unfit to walk amongst the majority of people. Some of us are thieves. Some of us—many of us—are whores. Some of us are murderers, child-killers, father-killers, lover-killers, husband-killers. Man-eaters. That is a joke, though most of us have tasted man-flesh in one form or another. Some of us did it out of necessity. Some of us did it out of sadness, or loneliness, or temporary insanity. Some of us did it because the voices wouldn't stop. Some of us were too poor to be able to buy food for our baby, so we went out one night and shot a bank manager, just because. Because that's what happens when you interfere with the natural order of womanhood. We are not talking about hunt and gather here, tend and nurture. We are talking about the mountain cold and craggy. We are talking about frenching the eagle. We are talking about a woman's natural predisposition toward preservation of the integrity and beauty of the self. Another word for this is: elegance. Do you see where we're headed here?

Our crimes are pitiful. But they are not us. We must remember to separate the crime, which is a product of the human body and its reachings and failings, from the animal self, which is us. When we feel fear, we repeat our mantra:

We are safe. We are loved. We are precious and above all elegant.

Our mantra, if said correctly, can reverse the order of things. It is like an earthquake that happens backwards. Vases fly up onto tables and heal themselves, two broken slabs become a bridge, children emerge from piles of rubble. Our mantra is our defence against everything that threatens to undo us, to uglify us, to make us into cattle. Have you ever seen a cow you could describe as elegant? Exactly. We repeat our mantra, as needed.

Don't be afraid if it doesn't come right away. Elegance is not easy. It is about staying loose while maintaining the strictest discipline, holding tight while letting go. Like so many things. We know a person, a man, who once fell two storeys off a roof and came away with no more than bruises because he had enough presence of mind to go completely limp as he fell. It sounds easy, but you try it—relinquishing control as the ground rushes up and the wind hoots past your ears. It is the opposite of easy.

Here is a useful tip. Many of us are haunted people. If we see a ghost, if we are afraid of ghosts, we must eat a piece of meat in front of him. Raw meat? It doesn't matter. Any kind of meat. A chicken leg. Why is this? Because ghosts don't like to be reminded of the world of flesh. And to eat meat is to show a ghost that you are a master of the world of flesh. After that, he will show you some respect.

How did we get here, to this point of pain and antagonism, to these jumpsuits which are orange, orange like a cup or a ball or a sunset. To these smallish rooms, each smaller than the last, to the bus that takes us not like a lover but like a heart attack. From the bus we watch Harvey's roll past us and Wendy's and Timmy Ho's, all the familiar names of our childhood, now gathered here to say goodbye to us on our final journey, though it is possible they have been saying goodbye to us all along because the more we think about it the more we realize we have always been on this bus. From when we were crapped ungloriously out into the world until now, and we will stay here evermore. It is a kind of death, this bus.

We must calm ourselves. We are in our special space. We are safe. We are loved. We are precious and above all elegant.

The bus rolls on. Out the window we can now see the white marble stone of the courthouse, the house of court, of courting, of courtship, which is another word for dating, a coincidence that strikes us now as funny, since we only have one date left and we think there will not be roses for us.