Want, стр. 15

What kind of shape is the house in? the man who has come to represent the bank says.

Bad, says the man who borrowed all that money. Real old, real bad, he says. He shakes his head.

He keeps speaking English, even though he asked for the translator; he answers the questions before they’ve been translated. The lawyer keeps telling him to wait, but he keeps interrupting. The man from the bank is young and can’t stop fidgeting. His knee shakes up down up down underneath the table. He has a legal pad he writes on, a large scrawl; circles and squares around specific questions. He takes notes as the man talks.

You can send more questions to my office, says our lawyer. We can answer all these questions for you in writing at a later date.

The bank lawyer nods at our lawyer but keeps looking at the man who looks at the speaker where the translator sits, quiet now that she’s stopped trying.

Is your wife’s name on the deed? asks the bank lawyer.

She hate me, says the man. She want divorce.

When it’s our turn we sit in the chairs and the woman asks us to say our names and to show her our IDs and to confirm we live at the address on the forms she shows us. She asks half the questions the lawyer told us she would ask us. Then our lawyer is ushering us out of the chairs and then out of the room and then we are outside and my husband says we should go eat before I go back to work.

We declared bankruptcy today, I text Sasha. I text this to my parents also, who have a lot of money. They have a lot of money but a few months ago, when I told my dad the state that we were in and that we needed help—though I hadn’t asked for help before and for a long time I said fuck them and their fucking money and was angry and was mean—he told me that giving me money would be like throwing it away.

Neither of them responds to me, not Sasha, not my parents. The next day, while I’m staring at a young woman who is wearing too much makeup on the subway on my way to work, my dad texts to say, I know how hard it must have been. My mom texts an hour later: It will all be fine, I’m sure.

I wonder if any family, after too long trying and failing to love one another, can hear one another’s words beyond all the ways that they fall short.

I’m pregnant, Sasha texts at two in the morning.

I wonder if she meant to send this to me, if she sent it like I sent the one on her birthday: not quite knowing what I was doing. I sent it because I needed her to remember that I was still somewhere in the world.

IT WAS HOT already, wet and sticky—college; I was nineteen; she was twenty; she’d driven from her school three hours away to spend the summer with me—and she shaved my head out on the roof of the row house I shared with two other girls and laughed as large chunks of hair fell down to the porch; the buzz of her hands on my neck was the closest that I’d come to joy in years. For weeks, we’d talked about it, a joke I made that she latched onto. I liked the thrill she seemed to get at the prospect: a sort of recklessness I’d receded from—mostly, then, I was locked up in my attic room—just as hers was amping up.

I didn’t think I’d care what I looked like after. I had images of waiflike women with large features staring back at me from pictures, pictures that I’d found online when we first discussed shaving my head. I must have cared if I searched this. I must have been invested in how it’d turn out in the end. These women were all barefaced as well as bareheaded: Sinéad O’Connor, cancer victims, Yael Stone. All of them wide-eyed toward the camera. All of them gaunt. Their features threatened from their faces, big and unprotected, unapologetic; it was the viewer, though, who seemed to need protecting then.

That my features were too small and my face already too wide and blunt was not something I’d considered. That I’d gained weight and what was, would always be, too soft had gotten softer was something I tried not to think about. But then the hair had fallen to the porch and we were sweeping it into the trash and there was nothing to be done but to wear skullcaps in the wet summer heat and try to forget it was possible that I was making passers-by afraid.

I didn’t mind because she loved me like that. She loved me most when, at night, she’d rub my back as I cried about whatever small thing made me cry that day and she could tell me my crying was allowed and important, that she’d be there no matter what. She reached her hands over the nubs of my head, strong and sure and doting, she talked and talked, until I fell asleep.

Men sought her out, always. I was an obstacle they had to overcome. They pretended to care about what I was reading so she would see that they were kind and thoughtful. They would half listen to the things I said as they turned their chairs closer to her. We both brought books to the same bar every night—it was the summer I read all of Woolf and Faulkner—the presence of the absence, circling, circling but not ever touching, knowing that there was no such thing as saying just exactly what one wanted, no such thing as connecting wholly with another human, but still trying anyway. She sometimes picked up whatever I had finished