Want, стр. 25

heat inside the room is stifling, thick. She wears a dark-blue short-sleeved shirt that pulls in places that suggest it was constructed for a man. She has a small vine tattoo that loops around her wrist, then spreads in thin intricate twists all up her arm. She wears glasses and pushes them up on her nose each time she writes on the board. She has a tiny speck of chalk on the left side of her cheek.

Five steps, she says, make up the basic stasis questions. One: fact or conjecture. Everything is arguable, she says, maybe most of all the facts. Two: definition. Definitions, she says, are logotropic; definitions can trope, confine, recapitulate a whole argument. Three is quality or value—what sort of act is being argued, what it’s worth. Four: cause or consequence. Five: procedure, proposal, policy—what should we do, she says, about whatever we’re arguing? How do we find a way to move on?

I go home and get our girls and somehow end up at my younger sister’s. I do not like my younger sister. I think sometimes I would like my younger sister if we had not, our whole lives, been in a not-quite-clearly-constituted fight over who deserved to make it out intact.

She doesn’t mean it, my sister says, on the too-hard loveseat my parents bought her. She never cut up their credit cards and now talks to them daily. They purchased and paid to renovate this apartment in Murray Hill. My girls laugh and play with a box of Q-tips that sits below my sister’s vanity. They break them, then stick them in each other’s noses.

For three years, most of college, my sister stopped eating almost completely and her bones began to turn to chalk and hair grew on her face, and I could still, now, loop my thumb and index finger around her wrists and they would meet.

You know how she is, my sister says. She’s just hurt, she says.

My husband calls my sister the apologist.

She’s not good at dealing with hurt, my sister says. Tell them that you’re sorry, she says. Let them think you think you’re wrong.

Before Dante gets on the boat in the Inferno, I tell my sister, there are cries of anguish from the uncommitted—the souls who took no sides, those concerned not with good or bad but with how to take care of themselves. These people, I tell my sister, were naked and futile. They were stung relentlessly by wasps, fed on by maggots, in a sort of spiritual stagnation, I say.

My sister looks at me, then at my girls, who have stopped with the Q-tips and are helping each other climb onto my sister’s bed. She leans toward me, whispers to me—when she was little she used to threaten them, she used to tell them that if they yelled at her, if they made her practice her piano or come home at a certain time, she said, if they did that then she might turn out like me—she says: Are you sure you’re okay?

What is she threatening? asks the Chilean writer at our now weekly coffee.

I tell her that my mother wants to remind me there is evidence. She could find proof. She could make a case—more than enough documentation of all my various diagnoses, prescriptions, and probations—against my right to be a mother to my children and there would not be shit that I could do.

Would she take them? she says.

Probably not, I say.

I sip my coffee, look down, then up. I was sick a while, I say.

What kind of sick? she asks.

Depression, I say. Anxiety? So many diagnoses, I say, shaking my head and looking down.

I’m bored already by how pedestrian I find these diagnoses. How I’m just like everyone I know who thinks.

And they’d hold that against you? She looks up from her plate.

They’ll hold it over me abstractly. They want me to remember always that they could hold it against me, while maintaining sufficient plausible deniability that they’ve done anything wrong.

I think she’ll respond but she doesn’t. She catches the eye of the waiter and he comes over. She orders us two gin martinis and we wait for them and are quiet. When they come the glasses sit close together, each with a lemon-rind twist. She nods toward mine and lifts hers and we clink them, quietly, before we take a sip.

THE NEXT DAY, I’m at work and my husband texts me a photo of him holding our girls in our apartment. They’re all grinning. The two-year-old has hold of his face with both her hands. I leave early and decide to walk the twelve miles home instead of taking the train. I figure at some point I’ll get on the subway, but I don’t. I still have that feeling, leaving work now daily long before I’m supposed to, that I’m supposed to be somewhere doing something, but I also think maybe what I have to do right now is walk.

An hour in, I call my mom.

What was that supposed to be? I say.

I just worry, she says. She just worries, but she also likes me afraid.

About what? I say. If you worry, why don’t you talk to me?

I’ve been functional for years now, but I think it is a functional that is difficult for them to make sense of. I think they thought when I got better, I’d be better than they think I am.

You don’t talk to me, she says.

Okay, Mom, I say.

She starts crying then, and I know I’m supposed to ask her what I can do to help her, to tell her that I’m sorry. I’m supposed to tell her everything is fine.

She’s telling me that she just doesn’t know why it’s not ever enough for me, all her trying, all her loving. My eyes are dry and I know that I will not start crying. I feel fury at her for crying like this, fury at myself for not being willing or able anymore to