Want, стр. 28

With the four-year-old, the ultrasound tech told me thirty-three weeks in that I did not have enough amniotic fluid. Our OB was out of town, so—on my phone, on the sidewalk on Fifty-ninth Street and Eighth Avenue—I googled what the cause and consequence of this might be.

Could be the baby has no brain or an esophageal malfunction, said the internet. Could be everything is fine. I tried to call my husband but he was working. I scrolled through my phone trying to think who else I might call. Not my mother, not my New York friends, who were still new and had never been pregnant, who all still thought I was sane then. Not Sasha.

Instead, I sat on Eighth Avenue somewhere below Fifty-ninth Street, leaning up against a fire hydrant, massive belly bulging, and I cried. I held the base of my stomach with both my hands and people stared at me and I stared back at them until it started to get dark and I walked home.

I mostly walk now. Week after week, I just keep leaving in the afternoon and no one seems to notice I’m not there. I go to the coffee shop and read. Dorothy West, The Living is Easy; Gerald Murnane, The Plains; Mariama Bâ, So Long a Letter; Svetlana Alexievich, Secondhand Time. I walk to the bookstore closest to the coffee shop, my favorite bookstore in the city, small with dark wood floors and two well-curated tables, chosen, specially, by the owner, who is a small, curly-haired man who is often behind the counter, who I see sometimes in other parts of the city and I smile at him, though I’m sure that he can never place my face. I linger, flipping through first pages, knowing that I can’t afford to buy another novel, that there is no extra twenty dollars in our account. I get books from the library, order used books online for work and charge it to the high school, but then I walk past this shop and find myself inside it, attracted to the thrill of passing the book across the counter. Books are my specific version of consumption; it’s the consumption that I walk inside this store to perform. I want to not be someone who says no all the time to every impulse. I want to not make every choice because it is my only choice. This is a stupid, wasteful way to do this, but I do it—the smell inside the store, the people lingering around me—to play briefly at not caring. I pass a book across the counter that I might not ever read: a biography of an artist I love that costs more than twenty dollars, a paperback of translated Scandinavian fiction that I’ve read bits of for a month. I leave the shop disgusted and embarrassed, stuff the book in my bag, crumple the receipt. I will dispose of it before I get home, evidence of all the ways I am still a spoiled rich kid, as if my husband will not also see the charge on our account and choose to quietly ignore it or to point to it at our monthly tracking of expenses and I will nod, hot-faced, and look down at my lap.

As I walk, I go to neighborhoods I never go to any longer. I have ID cards from all the universities at which I’ve been an adjunct and, among them, I get into almost every museum in New York for free. I walk through shows in Chelsea, start reading Artforum. I look at massive canvases of black and white, all charcoal, bloodied heads and children hung from trees, close-up photographs of the ocean and the sky, small bits of vastness blown up, made big. I stand a long time in front of paintings I don’t wholly understand and try to let them work on me.

Kayla misses two days of school. I go to the office of the counselor with whom she’s close to find out if she knows where she’s been but I find out the counselor’s been transferred to a middle school. She was advocating for devoting more resources to kids with learning disabilities so she’s been sent to work under another, less opinionated counselor in an attempt to be retrained.

Are they replacing her? I ask the twenty-three-year-old who was hired to do data entry but is now sitting at the desk where the counselor met with a full caseload of students every day. There are so few places in the building where it’s quiet, and this data-entry person appears to have been the first to learn this space was free.

She says: Probably?

On the third day, I see on the live attendance tracker that Kayla’s at school and I go into the third-floor bathroom and see her shoes under the door of the extra-large handicap accessible stall and I knock and tell her that it’s me.

Where were you? I say.

My mom went on a trip with her new boyfriend.

Did you go with her?

It was supposed to be just for the weekend, so I was supposed to watch my brother, but then she didn’t get back until last night.

Kayla’s little brother is her favorite person, ten years younger; when she talks about him she stops fidgeting and sits up straight.

You guys were alone? I ask her.

I think probably this is something I should tell the counselor except she doesn’t work here anymore.

I’m grown enough, she says.

You cook? I say.

My boyfriend brought stuff, she says.

I think about the bruise she showed me and she sees me looking. It was fine, she says.

I look at her and shake my head and she smiles at me.

She says: You miss me?

Four of my friends come over. They suggested that we go to dinner, but I can’t afford to go to dinner, so I invited them to our house and my husband cooks.

We’ve all been friends for years; we met in grad school; none of them