Separation

He asked Kate out at the reservoir, where she went skinny-dipping in the summer. Early in the morning, before the kids arrived, or sometimes late at night, when the water was almost black. She was towelling her hair when he appeared, and she wasn’t wearing any pants. Her pubic hair was unkempt.

Kate was taken aback, but she said yes. As he walked away, she noticed his uncertain footing on the rocks and the spray of eczema, like something coughed up, all over his back and disappearing into his bathing suit. Already she had forgotten his name.

When she arrived at the restaurant—white tablecloths, heavy menus, a basket of bread swaddled to keep warm—he was wearing enormous glasses. He stood up and his napkin fell out of his lap. They ordered the special, mussels that left sand between Kate’s teeth, and by the end of dinner her plate was a pile of empty shells, each one three different shades of blue. When he took off his glasses to clean the lenses, there was a red mark on either side of his nose. His name was Nick, and as they undressed in her bedroom that night, his hands darting all over her skin, she felt certain he was seeing her for the first time.

In two years, they were married.

The story of the pants—the pantslessness—had become well known. It featured in several wedding toasts. The glasses were removed to demonstrate. He really can’t see! Nick smiled good-naturedly, pawing the air helplessly to make them all laugh. The eczema crawled out from under his collar.

Someone drove them home after the ceremony, and at the last minute Nick said to turn the car around. He checked them into a hotel, a cheap one, and they rode the elevator laughing. They had sex in overstarched sheets. They had agreed they didn’t believe in honeymoons.

“Does this count?” Kate said. She waved at the plastic nightstand painted like wood, the warping watercolor above the headboard—a flimsy French lake.

Nick just smiled. He kept his glasses on. She kissed him. Her pubic hair was more kempt than it used to be. He tasted her.

“You don’t need those,” she said, taking his glasses off. “You know me.”

“I do.”

In two years they were married and in three years he was dead.

They didn’t have the chance to make rash decisions.

By the time they might have considered buying a house, idling the engine in unaffordable neighborhoods, spinning fantasies and squandering savings, they were already carrying around the diagnosis. Kate imagined it on a slip of paper—in pockets and purses, in the glove compartment during long drives, in the cluttered kitchen drawer where they kept cheap indispensable things. They never forgot where it was.

They kept the medical bills in a pile on the bedside table, and, when there was nothing to do but wait, Kate stacked and restacked them, pushing the edges into alignment. The bills were hard to decipher. Numbers they had to look up, which were codes for words they also had to look up.

They said, “Let’s do some math.”

They never said, “Let’s plan ahead.”

They found a new apartment, near the hospital. One and a half baths, the listing said, which just meant there was an extra sink in the bedroom. The kitchen had old pink curtains and cabinet doors with holes where the handles should have been.

Everyone talked about fighting, being a fighter.

“For newlyweds, we do an awful lot of fighting,” Nick said, while they waited for the doctor to be right with them.

There was time, in the end, for him to make his own arrangements.

“No speeches, of course.”

“Of course?”

“Just put some snacks out,” he said. “Pigs in blankets.”

“That’s ridiculous,” Kate said.

“And Pringles.”

“Don’t you have a favorite poem?”

“You can make it a joke,” Nick said. “A joke will be a relief.”

Kate did what he asked, because she wanted it to be exactly as he had pictured it. He had been afraid—when he admitted to being afraid—of the size of the future, of his own desperate predictions, of the simple question that only time would tell, but not to him: Now what?

She chopped the hot dogs and wrapped them in dough from a cannister, the kind that twisted and popped, jolting her each time. She piled them in pyramids and put platters everywhere. She overdid it. On all the countertops, above the fireplace they’d never used, on the bedside table, for people waiting to use the bathroom. She took bowls of chips from one person to the next, raw faces whose tears seemed to have nothing to do with her. They offered to help, but Kate held the serving dishes tightly against her chest. And when they were gone, the pyramids still mostly intact, she sat down and cried over his joke.

What happened next wasn’t that she recovered—never that, really—but she did move to a new city, where she would have to bump into life every day. She got a job at a nursery school. She rented an attic room with a slanted turquoise ceiling. On weekends, she woke to the sound of things being banged in the house’s shared kitchen. Old muffled sounds, which she heard and remembered all at once. Kate lingered like that, her eyelids erupting with morning color.

The children at the school where she worked were undergoing separation. A technical term—to be left on one’s own. It involved several steps, which could not be skipped or performed out of sequence.

First, the mothers left the room for five minutes. This was just practice. They timed themselves and returned as soon as the second hand permitted.

“Ta-da,” they said, waiting to see relief mirrored on their children’s faces.

Next, the mothers said goodbye in earnest. Kate told them to wait in the hallway—in case. Sometimes children drifted out the door, crawling beside dump trucks or steering shopping carts of plastic produce, and were surprised to find the mothers hiding, towering over miniature chairs. They drove their trucks into the high heels or sensible flats blocking their way.

“Beep beep,” they said.

“Move,” they said.

Kate worked at the nursery school for too long.

The women she worked with had gray or orange hair and arms that jiggled when they scrubbed the tabletops. Kate wondered if she really belonged there. Her stomach sank between her hips, her muscles showed through her skin. She didn’t think this looked attractive. She thought it looked a little grotesque.

Each year, Kate separated a new group of children. Some of the mothers envied her stomach and her throaty neck, her bare face a reproach to theirs, which were painted gold and pink with time they didn’t have. There were occasions, Kate suspected, when they despised her. When their clothes were no longer clung to, when they entered the classroom and no one looked up. Or all the times in between, at a desk or a sink or a jammed-up intersection, when their children surged back into awareness, when the mothers realized—a crest of guilt and fear—how long they had managed to forget.

At the end of every day, Kate stood by herself in the center of the carpet, a checkerboard of loud colors. She held out the implausibly small knapsacks.

One year, there was a father among the mothers. His face was big, nearly ugly. But he was tall and tanned and his voice was so softly beautiful that Kate let herself assume it was full of the same grief as hers.

When she looked at his tongue on her skin, she didn’t believe her own body. When she lowered herself onto him, she wished she had dimples at the base of her back, hips with flesh he could hold on to. He cooked her cream sauces and meat sauces, bought expensive, oozing cheeses. For one month, she had sex with him and hoped to change shape. He told her that she was warm inside, and she shook her head, unconvinced.

“Touch yourself.”

He propped himself up on an elbow and watched. Kate slid her index finger inside her vagina. The skin—or was it muscle?—was slick and smooth, except where it was rough. It seemed as if the walls of her body were closing in around her finger. It had never occurred to her that she had walls.

Then one afternoon, while the classroom emptied, she held out the knapsack for the man’s son. She was weaving his arms through the straps when she heard a woman’s voice calling his name, high and kind and careless. Kate followed the boy outside and stood in the parking lot, waving at her reflection in his mother’s car window.

Kate up and left. Years later, she still repeated this phrase, she liked it so much. That “up” could be a verb! A house lifted right off its foundation. She pictured the moment when the whole clapboard thing hovered over its footprint, casting a shadow on the dirt.

She went to work in a cubicle where she answered two phones and took notes on many pads. Sometimes she unplugged the phones and listened to the bleating rings and the disembodied scribbling on the other side of the gray particleboard. According to company policy, the phones rang exactly once. It was boring; it delighted her.

The women in the office wore belted dresses and tortoiseshell hair clips. They enjoyed setting Kate up on dates with men their husbands or brothers knew, or sometimes with the brothers themselves. The men all had dependable jobs, some in cubicles like hers and others, as they made known, in offices with multiple windows.

She was on a date with a management consultant—two windows—when she met her second husband. They were both waiting for change, their drinks sweating in their hands. Kate saw him in the mirror behind the bar, where his face hovered above two bottles of gin. In the other corner of the mirror, beside the liqueurs, she saw the back of her date’s head.

“Can you make eye contact in a mirror?” the man above the gin said.

“What?” She picked up the bills from the counter.

“If I’m looking at you from across the room,” he said, “and you’re looking at me. We both know we’re looking.”

“Ah,” she said, “but if I’m looking at you in the mirror, and you’re looking at me in the mirror—”

“Yes,” they said at the same time.

When Kate and Felix’s daughter was old enough to start nursery school, Kate put her foot down. Leah was three. She had fine yellow hair—Felix’s hair—and too many teeth in her mouth.

“Not yet,” Kate said.

Felix had called several schools. He had found one with an enlightened pedagogy and baby rabbits in the classrooms. There were no reptiles. Leah hated reptiles.

“She’s ready,” he said.

“Don’t use the script on me,” Kate shouted. “I wrote the script.”

In general, she didn’t shout.

“Next year,” she said, more gently. “Can one more year really hurt?”

Leah wrapped herself around Felix’s leg. He lifted her above his head and made her laugh. She kicked her feet, pretending to be afraid, hitting him in the chest, then in the nose.

“Be careful,” Kate said.

Felix raised her even higher.

“It’s all right. It’s nothing.”

Leah looked down and he looked up, two golden heads in the air.

Kate went upstairs. She sat at her desk, listening to them laugh. She gave herself tasks—untangling a pile of paper clips, testing her pens for ink. The desk was filled with pictures and letters and other scraps. Mostly, they were scraps of Nick. A matchbook, a receipt with his signature, a Post-it note from the fridge: Need more ketchup. Every year, she promised herself she would go through it all. She called them remnants once, but the drama of the word embarrassed her.

Someday—soon—she’d take it all up to the attic, because this was how she had arranged the story in the version she liked best. Leah, long and lean, with straighter teeth, would be upstairs, sliding boxes, banging her knees and elbows in the crawl space. Two floors below, Kate would close her eyes and wait for the moment when her daughter would emerge, filmed with dust, radiant with her question: Who is this?

Of course, Kate’s story never happened. She labelled and stacked the boxes in the attic, but no one ever went up there, and, anyway, Leah didn’t like photo albums. She’d taken a photography class for a few weeks, but couldn’t get used to the camera—all its cruel sounds. Clicks and flashes, the menacing zoom. Whenever she saw a picture of herself, she winced.

When Leah turned fifteen, she began starving herself. This was the sort of thing, Kate knew, that teen-age girls did, but she had imagined it differently. She’d imagined vain girls or boring girls, girls with boyfriends and shiny makeup. Or maybe sad girls, girls with bad parents, secret abortions—things that swallowed them up. Leah’s life was smooth and unblemished.

It took them months to notice. By then, Leah’s clothes were all too big, and she was always cold. Kate wondered how they could have been so stupid.

“What if we’d caught it earlier?” she said to Felix.

There was hair all over Leah’s body, which the doctors had a special name for. It was the same hair that newborns had. Soft and colorless, the kind that looks, in the right light, like the glow of a halo.

Once the doctors were involved, the rules were strict. Five meals a day, thick and white: whole milk and real butter, yogurt with cream on top. Leah had to quit the swim team and then the track team. When Felix found her doing sit-ups in the middle of the night, Kate called the nutritionist’s cell phone.

“Eat a big breakfast,” he suggested.

“Like what?”

“Well.” The nutritionist sounded groggy. “How about a bagel with cream cheese?”

The rules made Leah cry. She’d followed all the others, hadn’t she? No drugs, no sex, no driving without a license.

“This isn’t punishment,” Kate said.

Leah stared at the bagel. She licked her finger and ate the sesame seeds one at a time. “Don’t rush me.” Tears dribbled into her mouth.

“We’ve got time,” Felix said. “All the time in the world.”

Kate didn’t really believe him. She followed the rules, too, out of something like penance. Potato chips at lunch, ice cream before dinner. Her coffee came with skim milk—watery, almost blue—and she sent it back. She weighed herself every day, because she wanted to see the numbers grow. But nothing changed. If anything, her skin got cleaner, her hair got shinier.

One afternoon, Kate came home early and found Leah in the bathroom, blood streaming down her leg and all over her foot. She was standing in the tub with the faucet running, the water turning faintly pink before it disappeared down the drain. She was dressed from the waist up, her socks and jeans draped neatly over the sink.

Kate knew about mothers who did heroic things with the help of adrenaline—vaulted over fences, jumped into the ocean. And so when she sprang into action, when she felt the panicked hum in her temples and the knotted confusion in her throat, she told herself that this was how rescue stories were supposed to go. When she found herself kneeling beside the tub, holding her daughter’s shin in her hands, what she said was “Who did this to you?”

“What?”

Kate looked up at Leah, who seemed so tall and calm—almost a stranger.

“I’m fine.”

Up close, Kate could see that the cut was small. The kind of cut she had made a hundred times. These things—accidents—happened. Didn’t they? She let go and there was blood on her fingers. Collect yourself, she said in her head, because it was something to visualize: a rewound video of broken glass, all the pieces reassembling themselves into a single, seamless shape. When Kate spoke again, her voice was her teacher voice. She found the paper towels and the Band-Aids, she squeezed the very last of the Neosporin from the tube. Leah sat down in the tub. Her hips were two sharp blades. The Band-Aid bloomed red. For a moment, Kate thought about climbing in beside her. But Leah didn’t look at her—not pleadingly, or searchingly, or any of the other ways that eyes are said to look—so she stayed where she was.

When it was time for Leah to leave home, she moved across the country. She didn’t have any particular reason—no school, no job, no far-flung romance. A city she’d only ever seen on postcards.

One night, when they were still getting used to the empty house, Kate slept in Leah’s bed. She had a bad cough. Felix said he could sleep through anything, but she insisted. Her lungs burned and her ribs ached; she tossed and turned for hours. For a moment when she woke up—how had she finally fallen asleep?—she had no idea where she was. In daylight, her body seemed huge in the narrow bed. The quilt was clearly made for a child. Felix came and sat on the edge of the mattress, like a dad. They stayed that way for a while, not speaking, looking around the room as if it were a museum, or a dream.

She got better—it was just a cough—but after that the room was a little frightening. When Felix suggested that they renovate the kitchen, Kate consumed herself with the details of transformation. Blueprints and paint chips, ten different kinds of door handles.

Construction began. Kate wanted to stay and watch, but Felix said the pleasure would be in the surprise—how much could change in the course of a single day. Walls were knocked over between breakfast and dinner, and by the next night new ones had appeared in their place. They saw what was underneath the floorboards. Holes were filled with glass. One evening, they came home and the wallpaper had been hung upside down. The pattern was simple and geometric—it was admittedly not so clear which side was up. They left it that way. Soon enough, they liked it better that way.

Leah called on Sundays. Most of the time, Felix picked up on the first ring. She told him about her job and her girlfriend, about the community garden around the block—the tomatoes and the gladiola and the two orange hens. Kate learned the details afterward, when Felix told her. She pictured the hens with their bulging chests, their dinosaur feet. He couldn’t remember the girlfriend’s name.

“Did you even ask?” she said.

“It isn’t always good to ask.”

The next week, he put Leah on speaker in the middle of a sentence, and her voice filled up the empty kitchen. Kate and Felix looked at the phone in between them. It was surprisingly easy to forget that it didn’t really contain anything. Kate wanted to know if the hens laid eggs.

“I don’t sound like myself,” Leah said.

There were too many hard, clean surfaces. Kate looked from the phone to Felix. Leah’s gray eyes and yellow eyelashes. She didn’t want to say the wrong thing. Eggs? she mouthed.

“I’m hearing my own echo.”

The fridge was still in plastic, silver and unsmudged. There was a sink-shaped hole in the counter.

“I’ll take you to a different room,” Felix said. “With softer things.”

He carried the phone into the hall, the voice coming out of his palm, tinny and getting quieter, then gone. ♦