A few things you should know about spinning class

It was my induction into modern womanhood, and the single most terrifying workout I’ve ever partaken in. I thought it would be interesting to take a spinning class—I’d heard about how popular they are amongst the hardcore athletes and I was in the mood to get my ass kicked first thing in the morning. So I showed up.

First rule of spinning class—never show up on time.

I sat in an empty and dark room, wandering through the skeletons of bicycles, wondering if I had imagined the start time of this class. And then they came walking in. The yoga pants army.

Second rule of spinning class—never make eye contact.

Eye-contact shows equality, and those who know their way around an immobile bicycle are equal to no mortals. These women came filing in, five to seven minutes late, and considered each bike for one beat before choosing a winner. I watched as they found their spot in the room. “The perfect spot” I thought jealously as they metaphorically pissed on the area upon which their metal structure presided. I looked down through the sea of my thighs below the petals and then up to the front of the room where the combination of poor lighting and a giant pole prevented any visual of the instructor.

Third rule of spinning class—you are there to be seen, not to see.

As the yoga pants army slowly, meticulously, and methodically found their places around the open room, they began to do something that I never would have expected. They didn’t chat amongst themselves, they didn’t stretch their legs or fix their hair. Completely independent of one another, as a part of some mutual understanding, each of these women began to cycle. Slowly. Creepily. So their spider legs moved in a perfect rhythm that was always on the verge of, but never reached the point of, stopping. They spun their wheels at the same rate that, I suppose, barbie might if she were brought to life. With omniscience and anticipation. An entire immobile fitness mosh pit came to life. A pit whose members neither showed indifference nor interest in their activity, a balancing act that I can only attribute to the way their bony asses sat in the tongue depresser of a seat.

It was a sign, I decided. The yoga pants army was ready. The yoga pants army was warmed up. The yoga pants army was waiting for its leader.

Fourth rule of spinning class-- every mob needs a leader.

And so he came, in the same demeanor as his followers. Never directly addressing anyone, never looking a human in the face. He was, after all, a God amongst goddesses. The next 45 minutes were a blur of incoherent screaming on the part of the instructor, incomprehensible amounts of sweat and pain on the part of yours truly, and and an overall sense of awe to those who survived through what I can only explain as the most terrifying exercise I have ever experienced. I don’t know why we did half of the things we did. I don't think I could even tell you what they were.

Fifth rule of spinning class-- if you can't beat them, try again.

All I know, is by the end of this harrowing experience, the yoga pants army left as quickly as they came and in the same fashion—better than me. And most of me agrees with them. I wouldn’t look at me either if I could crack a walnut with one thigh muscle. But I left that room a different person than I arrived. I didn't become one of them. Not even close. But I became the challenger, the observer, the bitch who will take them all down next week, when I out-spin their asses. That is, if I can feel my own ass at that point.

Sunday Ride

Every Sunday, man. Every Sunday I’d hop o the train to see my abuela. Not the regular train—the hoochie-mama midnight express that felt like it would break the tracks if it were going faster. Nah, man—the nice train. You know my abuela was a mujer especial and lived the last days of her life with the ricos. And even with all the gang-banger talk and cutting from school to deal blow—I was a good hijo, an honest hombre, the only family member sober enough to step onto a train on a Sunday morning, much less stand with my abuela in a church for a sweaty hour.
So I put on a belt and rolled down the sleeves of my button-up shirt to cover my tattoos for abuela. And I would hop onto the platform of the commuter train—the track was always deserted. What motherfucker was traveling from the shitty party of town to the ricos on a Sunday? This motherfucker was. And I always bought a ticket. They almost never bothered to check but I bought one because I knew that my little abuela would throw her head back and her eyes up to the Lord if I didn’t. Nieto sucio. I always bought a ticket for her even though they didn’t usually check and she would never know if I didn’t. That shit would burn a hole through my pocket like holy water on a devil. Like one good gesture could tear the legitimacy right off the ink across my chest. It burned and it itched my ass, sitting back there and I couldn’t sit because of it. Can you believe it? Rico train, totally alone, sweat tingling in the air-conditioned car and I couldn’t sit my ass on the carefully pleathered seat.
A fucking trip hombre. I would stand in the automatic doorway with my eyes darting left to right, trying to follow the world outside of the window. The train bastards would walk back and forth behind me. They didn’t give a shit if I had the Willy Wonka golden ticket in my pocket. A latino on a train on a Sunday? They were just glad I wasn’t out there with my wife beater on and a baseball bat in my hand—doing whatever the brown people do where the ricos couldn’t see. I never looked back at them. All those weekend trips to my abuela’s I never saw another mother-fucker’s face on that train. I just looked out my window, gripping the metal pole next to me like it was life, and felt them pass behind me. Closer and closer to my back pocket with the ticket. I wanted them so bad to turn one click to the left, on click to the right, to where I was standing and ask me for it. I wanted them to spidey-sense that shit and straight-up take the motherfucker from my pocket en fuego with legitimacy.
That’s how much I wanted a fight back then. I would fight the ricos for something I did right.

Exerpt from The O'Connell's

There’s nothing like having a person growing inside of you—a clone being created within your own skin, constantly changing, constantly becoming human. What’s stranger is how that little person, the sea urchin sloshing around your insides without a thought of anything outside of survival, has the ability to change everyone else around them. Without even knowing it, without the ability to have control over it, Mary was changing our lives while she sat in the comfort of my womb. Every morning, Richard would wake me up as he went to work to make sure I was feeling okay—to make sure the baby felt okay and nothing weird had happened in the night. He came to every doctor’s visit and kept track of every milestone that occurred during pregnancy. He studied every book that my mother sent us in a cardboard box along with a Hallmark card of congratulations. She signed the card ‘Sincerely, Martha’ and enclosed a twenty-dollar bill. I told Richard that the books were twenty-five years old and didn’t make sense anymore. Besides we had our own, updated, pregnancy books to look at from the Baby Shower. But he just picked up the box and started stacking them on our empty shelves telling me that I should put my feet up, they must hurt after a long day. I did what he told me.

About the end of the second trimester when my belly couldn’t be hidden by dark, loose, cotton dresses anymore and I started wondering why women agreed to do this generation after generation—shouldn’t the madness have stopped by now? That’s when I started seeing every piece of furniture as a death trap for our baby. I would walk into the garage and be convinced that she would be born and instantly reach for the propane tank and know how to twist the knob on. The gardening tools became torture devices that the day-old Mary would grab onto and wield it until she pruned herself to death. I would run the faucet in the tub for a bath and see little Mary turned face down into the inch-deep pool of water. My wrists would sweat and my peripheral vision would go black at just the thought of it. I had to make myself sit down wherever I was so I wouldn’t accidentally fall down in a fit of absolute fear. The baby meant more than anything.

Richard told me to try and relax, that it was all in my head and if I just didn’t think about it I wouldn’t have dizzy spells. The doctor ordered me to be on bed rest for the final trimester, both to calm my nerves about the pregnancy and because of my exposure to Diethylstilbestrol—the medication they gave my mother after her first miscarriage before I was born. The doctors told her it would increase her estrogen level for her next child. They didn’t realize then that a whole generation of women later would be sitting on their left sides for three months while trying to have their own children. They told me to take a vacation, to let the baby relax—we both deserved it. But I couldn’t help but notice the way Richard would circle my belly whenever he was home as if he were making sure it wouldn’t burst, pacing around me like a little boy completely helpless and confused by being so far out of his element.

I couldn’t do anything for me either. I had to take control. I couldn’t let this blob of a human swimming around inside of me, not old enough to have an age or a first breath, take over my life. I was the adult. I was in charge. So I made lists for the future, starting with the second I stepped foot out of my bed until the baby graduated from college. I made shopping lists for what we would need when the baby came, I made graphs of our savings—what we should keep in the bank and what we should invest for the baby’s future. I made pro-con lists of the best schools in the country that the baby could go to—different lists for the different personalities that the she could possibly have. This was growing up. This was having adult responsibilities. This was love. And every afternoon Richard would come home, circle dumbly around my growing stomach, and put all of my lists in the filing cabinet.

When she finally came, Mary was beautiful. A perfect birth, no complications, she came out screaming—7 pounds 5 ounces at 2 o’clock on the morning of September 3^rd, 1997. It was the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do, to go through twelve hours of excruciating labor, to watch her leave me and be exposed to the rest of the world. For as thankful as I was to have her born and to be free from my bed rest (God knows I never wanted to see that bed again) there was another part of me that knew she was safer inside of me. She wasn’t ready for the world yet, but the book Richard was reading said that I would feel this way. I had to let her go.

I’ll never forget Richard’s face when he first held her. They were still checking my pulse and blood pressure when they brought her back into the room, clean and covered in hospital pajamas. He was the first one of us to hold her. His big hands cradled the entirety of her head and his forearm was big enough for the length of her body. For the briefest of seconds I could see him sweat. I could see his eyes jet out of their sockets and his knees lock-up with nerves, but only for a second. Something came over him, a second nature, and it took over. I couldn’t believe he ever looked comfortable without a newborn baby in his arms. He started to hum. There wasn’t a clear melody or a real purpose, just the vibrations of masculine vocal chords slowly washing over every sound in the hospital room. He hummed with Mary and rocked her with his big hands and forearms like there was nothing else in the world. I don’t think there was. The nurses asked me if I wanted to hold my baby for the first time and I told them I would rather wait until I had gotten some rest, so I wouldn’t drop her.

Instead I lay in my hospital bed next to her plastic crib, watching her ribcage rise up and down and her fingers twitch when she was getting fussy. Richard lay with me in bed, his head curled up next to mine, watching as I did. We spent the day feigning sleep to one another and refusing to leave for bathroom breaks or meals. We were both mesmerized by her presence. He put his lips next to my ear and whispered to me.

‘I think you were right Lizzie.’

‘Hmmm?’

‘About her. About Mary.’

‘What’s that, Richard.’

‘That everything has changed. I mean—it already has. You have plans… big plans… we have plans. Together. But it’s all about her. That little girl runs our lives now, you know what I mean?’

I felt his breath curl up against my cheek, the scent of un-brushed teeth creating a fog around my face.

‘Is that how it’s supposed to be? Are our kids supposed to be in control?

‘I guess you never grow up. You just move from being ordered around by one group of people to the next. She’s in charge now and she hasn’t even lifted her head yet.’

A pit grew in my stomach and I announced that I was feeling the effects of the pain medication they had given me for the labor. Richard left the room to find something that I could vomit in.

I looked into the bassinet, my beautiful girl sleeping soundly. I couldn’t blame her, it had been a hectic first day. And then I saw it—a smile crept across her face just long enough to let me know that she knew.

My mother never got to see her first and only grandchild be born. We had tried to call her all during the day of Mary’s birth without effect. The day after, while we were bringing Mary home for the first time and Richard was settling her into her nursery, I got the message that my mother had been off her medication and had taken her own life a couple days before. They found her that morning lying in her bed, on the same side that she had slept on for thirty years, with an empty prescription of Dad’s old pain medication and the empty champagne bottle that my parents had saved for their 50^th wedding anniversary. She left no note for her family.

Faking It

It was getting cold in Chicago so Diana had to hang curtains. That’s when she fell in love. She was standing on her bed, trying to drill holes into the crumbling drywall. He was lying in her bed beneath her, watching.

‘I can see your ass crack when you do that.’

He was lying there on the bed, grabbing onto her teddy bear and was groping at the buttons on its sweater- pulling the threads a little looser each time. She stuck her ass out more so that he could see the top of her light blue thong (what the fuck, let him look) her attention, unwavering, on the task at hand. The power drill turned in her palm, 12 rotations a second, and she pulled the bit, in and out, in and out, of the wall. Her hand started to shake with all the focus so she stopped to look down at him.

‘Christopher, what do you think about her?’

‘Do you really want me to say?’

‘I do.’

‘I can see up your shorts.’

‘That’s not an answer. Anyways, you aren’t wearing any yourself so fuck you.’

He smiled like an idiot and scratched his balls in agreement, letting his legs bend and spread across her sheets. She had just washed them and he liked the way the fabric softener mixed with the smell of his skin, like a free douse of cologne. Still looking down at him, she noticed the way the lilac print played off his dark skin and made his arms look bigger when he was lying like that, with his hands behind his head.

He took the grin off his face long enough to give her a response. ‘I think she’s nice.’

‘I think she’s a slut.’

‘Because she puts out?’

‘Because she puts out.’

Diana punctuated the sentence by drilling another hole, this one an inch higher than the last one according to the instructions that Pier 1 had given her.

He was still enjoying his position of power as the one under her. ‘When you lift the drill that high I can see through the arm holes of your tank top.’

She could hardly hear him speaking to her anymore, she was too busy weighing pros and cons delicately in her head. She took some time drilling in the curtain rod holders, absentmindedly making sure that all the holes were level with one another, making sure the chemical imbalances within her own brain weren’t interfering with the process. She raised the curtain rod up and spread the cloth across the length of the window.

‘I think I’m in love with her.’

She set her hands on her hips to look at her work. It reminded her of college, the polka dotted pattern on the fabric looked like the same pattern that her freshman roommate Laura had on her bed sheets. Not exactly, she guessed. The curtains had little white dots against a black background and Laura’s sheets had bigger dots on them in varying pastel colors but the idea was the same. The white circles pulsated against Diana’s eyeballs, threatening to bore into her skull. She remembered making forts in her dorm room with their chairs and desks. They would always place a bottle of stolen Skol or cheap Gin in the middle of their creation and it served as an altar of their church of misdemeanor. Under the blankets they could do all the things that they supposed college girls did when they were bored and experimenting with sex for the first time. Or at least they could make excuses for their actions and Laura could blame the alcohol and Diana could blame her suppressive, closed-minded, WASPy upbringing. The fort was a safe zone.

Diana remembered how Laura would get a concerned look on her face after they messed around for a bit and how she would run away to her top bunk and cry as quietly as she could. She would be left under the polka dotted stars, counting each one until the buzz of the cheap alcohol wore off and her eyes felt like rubber. But that was then. Diana was an adult now and was in charge of her own relationships and polka dotted curtains. She didn’t need a fort to hide from anything.

‘Come here,’ Christopher grabbed at Diana’s legs and she fell onto the bed. He liked the way her chest landed on top of his so that his lungs were pushed down and each breath turned ragged. He became more and more nauseous every time he inhaled, dizzy with thinking that each breath could be the last. How fucked would that be? Death by tits. He pulled his arms around her, holding her even closer to him.

‘I think I love her,’ she repeated, this time directly into his ear and a little quicker too because her lungs felt like they were going to burst for some reason. Why did Christopher always insist on holding her so painfully close to him?

‘Does it hurt you?’

‘What?’

‘Lying like this.’

‘On top of you?’

‘No.’

‘What?’

‘Never mind.’

‘Why does your skin feel like fabric softener?’

Christopher let go of her. She fell off his chest and over to his right side, his diaphragm pumping up and down from the freedom. Diana curled in between his bicep and torso in order to be protected by him on all sides. She still had the drill in her hand and started fiddling with it. She started drilling into his shoulder- only two rotations a second, slowly, and just above his skin so that all he could feel was the whisper of the drill bit against his arm. Christopher looked down at his shoulder. Adrenaline pumped through his body at the thought of being that close to injury, to death. Or maybe he just needed to get high again. That might have been it too.

‘What do you think I should do?’ she asked.

‘Fuck me.’

‘But I love her.’

‘Fuck me.’

‘Then what?’

Christopher pushed her off of him all together and turned towards the curtains. The grid of black and white reminded him of the homemade dresses that his little sisters used to wear when they could still get away with all that matching shit. He was always glad that he was the only boy in his family so that he didn’t have to wear the same thing as someone else. But there was always a chance that the extra fabric could be made into a tie or even a vest, so he got into the habit of hiding away his mother’s scraps- he was sure he could remember a print just like those curtains. His two sisters would match wherever they went so that they wouldn’t get lose, so that their mother would be able to remember which children were hers. Christopher was in charge of holding one gloved hand of each girl while his mother walked two steps behind them. He could see her face- not as she was at that moment but how she looked when he last saw her. He was leaving home for the last time. She was standing in the kitchen. Her reading glasses at the furthest end of her nose as she flipped through what she called her ‘trust cookbook’, a cluster of stapled together pages that had been ripped out of women’s magazines and napkins that had been written on by old friends or helpful strangers. At the moment she was trying to figure out what the correct temperature was to boil a pot of water. Christopher was watching her turn the gas stove on and off, his pants were on inside and his shirt was drenched in sweat- too high to care at all.

‘Bye Ma.’

‘Do you have your vitamins?’

‘I’m leaving now, Ma. For a long time.’

‘Vitamins… they are very important for your bones… and blood… don’t forget your vitamins.’

She hadn’t looked up and was still turning the knobs on the stove, deciding on a temperature somewhere between the numbers six and seven.

‘Yea I got ‘em here.’ Christopher shook a bottle of oxycontin. ‘Bye.’

‘Two a day.’

‘Once before breakfast and once before brushing your teeth…’ he muttered for her, already opening the screen door towards the running car that was waiting for him in the driveway. That was so long ago, wasn’t it? No, that was just last year. Since then his checking account had dried up and his youngest sister had gotten knocked up. He wondered if his sister would want to tear down these curtains to make clothing for her new baby. He wasn’t sure if it was a woman thing or just a crazy person thing.

Diana looked at Christopher’s back turned toward her, the muscles along his shoulders twitching only a little bit. His hair made an indent on his head where he had been lying on it. She couldn’t ever be sure of what he was thinking at these kinds of moments, with his body turned completely away from her. In these moments, all that she could read from him were big shoulders, a tapering waist, and two ass cheeks looking back at her with disdain. Well, what the fuck was she supposed to do anyways? She pushed off his shoulder and rolled herself onto the floor. She liked him better when he was high anyways and he hadn’t taken a pill in a few days. She couldn’t deal with his human emotion when she knew that it wasn’t just drugs talking back to her.

She pushed her feet towards the opposite side of the room, methodically picking up abandoned articles of clothing and pieces of trash. She brought the shirts up to her chest and hug the arms into herself and let the top fall down to her waist; that was the way that her father always did the laundry. They would sit in the living room and he would surround her with giant piles of clean clothing, telling her that she had to fold her way out while he folded his way in and they would meet somewhere in the middle and she would be free. But Diana would take her time with each piece, making sure the creases were just right. She liked the way everything would overwhelm her when she was in her cocoon of clothing, the way the heat from the drier stayed with the laundry for the perfect length of time and the static electricity would giver her random shocks.

Diana remembered this while she was folding her dirty laundry into neat piles, still looking at Christopher’s naked ass. He did have a fine ass, she couldn’t deny him that, but there was something unnerving about the casual handsomeness that came with it. It bordered on cockiness. She hated the way he had the perfect body while eating Twinkies for breakfast and popping pills for lunch and dinner. She resented that he knew more after one year of living on his own than she could decipher after five years of studying the modern bohemian lifestyle. It drove her crazy to think that someone could get along with such little effort, and excel at being exactly what she needed to be. She couldn’t stand to look at him, lying on her bed like that, taking up all of her love and devotion. But she couldn’t get rid of him yet. She needed him, to be close to him, to be inside of him for as long as it took for her to fully understand.

Christopher turned over to look at Diana, his head propped up on his elbow, his naked body falling wherever gravity took it.

‘Has your Daddy paid for this month’s rent yet?’

‘What the fuck Christopher.’

‘What? It was an honest question. I’m broke and I need to squat somewhere for a while.’

‘And you think I’m just going to let you sleep here? You think there aren’t… others… that might be taking up space in my bed?’

She was facing him now, her hands gripping dirty laundry and set on her hips. She hadn’t washed her hair in days and filthy strands were creeping into her eye-line. He knew that it killed her not to shower, she would put on deodorant two or three times a day to counteract the filth, but she brushed away the oily hair with quick hatred. She always cleaned whenever she was trying to break-up with him- like a knock kneed, bug eyed, skeleton of a mother hen. Her nipples would get hard with excitement whenever she started folding shirts- something about the feeling and the smell of the clothe, about how they remind her of her childhood. It all sounded a little fucked up to him.

‘Come over here,’ he lifted up the comforter on the bed and slid under it, leaving it open to invite her in. She stopped for a second, considering the cave that he had made for her. It looked so nice, to be surrounded by darkness, and someone else’s arms. And standing alone in the middle of her room made her feel so exposed to him. She didn’t like it when he was like this, like he knew exactly what she was thinking. She didn’t like him when he was being caring a non-confrontational. But she slipped into the blankets with him. She liked the way he wrapped his arms and legs around her even if she couldn’t breathe all that well while he was doing it.

‘What am I going to do?’

‘Fuck me.’

‘Seriously, Christopher. I love her.’

‘No you don’t.’

She slid her hands towards his back, rubbing his shoulders. Christopher had already unsnapped her bra with expert precision and was already working on taking off her shorts.

‘Maybe you’re right.’

Moving Pictures

‘Come with me.’

He grabs my hand and we’re swept into a small movie theatre. Everything is dark, so I can’t tell if there’s anyone in it—but I have a weird feeling that it’s empty. I walk through the dark and I can see the dusty streams of light coming from the projector in the back of the theatre. I look at the way the lint in the air does a slow dance through the beams. I remember being a kid and looking at the same bits of dust, wondering where they came from and where they were gliding towards.

Pretty soon, I’m wrapped up in him. His arms find the small of my back and we’re pressed up against the back wall. The wall feels like velvet against my t-shirt and it scratches me the wrong way. I move my palms against it to try and coax it to move the right way so it feels smooth again. I remember this feeling, this moment, just like high school, just like things used to be—the way he’s leaning just a little bit against me to let me know what he wants but not so much that I feel trapped there. I could leave—but I don’t. It feels nice to be a tangled mess with him again.

My eyes look to the front of the room to see what’s playing on the screen, but I can’t make anything out. It’s still just the bits of air swimming through space as the projector shows dull fuzz against a white backdrop.

But the light isn’t just projecting blank space. It’s projecting the screen just before the movie starts—when you get settled in your seat and pick up your drink to take a purposeful sip before you get lost in the feature film. The light is setting the stage for the last moment that you are completely aware of yourself, before the production swallows you and you can’t feel the armrests on your elbows anymore. The screen is waiting for something and I am starting to get annoyed.

‘Why are we here?’ I gasp, trying to breathe. He doesn’t respond. He’s busy with other things.

‘Hey.’

‘Mhm…’

‘What are we doing here?’

He takes a quick laugh and turns his head to my face. ‘What do you mean?’

I peel myself away from him and start walking towards the screen.

‘What is it doing?’

He starts to walk a few steps behind me, but I quicken my stride and he stops a few feet from the back wall.

‘I mean,’ my voice raises and I’m suddenly aware that my hair is all over the place, ‘what is supposed to be playing right now?’

I turn back to him quickly and see that he’s buttoning up his shirt with sad hands, his head dropped low. Completely distracted from me. I turn away.

I’m walking towards the screen but it isn’t getting any closer to me. Each step I take it seems like the other wall is taking an equal step in the other directions. It’s a fantastic game of cat-and-mouse and it’s driving me crazy. My heart races up—I don’t want to miss what’s about to come onto the screen and I seem to think that getting closer to it will ensure that I won’t. I’m running now. I’ve forgotten that I’m not wearing shoes and my bra is unlatched, but I don’t care. I pull my bra down and out through my sleeves without missing a step. I pull off my shirt. My pants and underwear slide down effortlessly. I can’t be sure where he is now, but I’m confident he isn’t behind me. I’m alone, naked, running after the screen.

I run so fast that I can’t feel my thighs. I should be sweating but the wind from my stride dries any beads that have accumulated. I lift my arms up and the light envelops me. My feet take one more leap and I am in the air. I am in the screen, I am in the light with the bits of lint swimming around me. I am weightless and I am waiting to see what comes after the moment before the movie starts.

Literary Autobiography

‘Read me a story.’

I can remember the dim light of my bedside-table lamp glowing against the Beauty and the Beast comforter smoothed across my lap as I heard these words. I can still see my mother, striding across the carpet towards my bed to tuck me in. She would casually snatch a book from my shelf as she moved by, bringing a small gust of wind with her as she climbed into bed with me. Even when I was very young and slept in what we called a ‘troll bed’, she always found a way to curl herself around me—taking up only half of the space. I remember how her hair felt against my cheek, a little sticky from her hairspray and frizzed on the outside from the stress of the day in the office.

She would put the book on my lap and open it for me, encouraging me by insisting that she loved how I read the story—‘your voice sounds so nice.’ No child can resist the compliments of her mother and so I obliged, taking a deep breath and starting with the first sentence.

In my first years of reading, she would pick out The Berenstein Bears Have Too Much Fun, or the Dr. Seuss classic Take Me to the Zoo and I remember the way she would wait for each sentence—encouraging me while she held me in her cocoon. As I gained confidence in the words, she held me tighter until the last page when her head would be against mine and it was like we were one person reading.

As I got a few years older, my mother would still come to tuck me in—her pajamas buttons slightly off and a copy of Roald Dahl’s The BFG under the crook of her arm. She would set herself up in the same fashion as always, her arm encircling my shoulders and her cold feet warming against my leg. As I began to read, I could see my mother’s eyes passing over each word. I could see her solemn expression reassuring what I was reading. But as the rhythm of my voice continued over each of the pages, her eyelids would droop.

‘Are you listening, Mommy?’

‘Mhmmmm’

‘Mom?’

‘What.’

‘Open your eyes.’

‘I’m just resting them. Keep going, you’re doing a good job. You just said that the little girl saw the giant…’

She was right, and I was convinced she was still with me. So I would read until her head dropped all the way down onto my shoulder and her breath became even and throaty. Then, when it was time to sleep, I would carefully reach around my mother to put the book back on the bedside table and turn off the light. I would fall asleep with her still wrapped around me until my father came into my room and woke her up. Some nights he would just coax her back into her own bed. But some nights I could tell he was mad, and he would yell at me—‘Don’t let your mother fall asleep here, it’s not good for her.’ I was never sure why it was a bad thing. It felt good to have her next to me as I was sleeping after she would leave us for London or China any given week. Someone had to earn a living in the house. But someone had to tuck their children in too.

That’s how I came to love and read literature. Those nights that my mother was home and I could sit with her and show her how wonderfully my voice carried through the story we would read together. I would read her Shel Silverstein poems to make her laugh, but the rhythm of the poems would just make her fall asleep faster. I would read her my fantasy books to show her how I could change my voice between the different mythical characters. Patricia C. Wrede’s Dealing with Dragons was a favorite on the rotation of books. As long as I had something to read to her, she would stay in my bed and fall asleep with me. Reading still gives me that comfort. I’ll curl up with a David Sedaris, or Everything is Illuminated and still feel my mother with me. I feel like she is still watching over my shoulder to make sure that all the words are right, the smell of perfume, toothpaste and a little bit of sweat coming off of her. These authors, Milan Kundera and Alice Munro, keep me close to them like she would and keep me safe. They are my literary guardian angels.

American Pranayama

Breathe in—I calm. Breathe out—I smile.
—Thich Nhat Hanh

She was breathing into a ‘cobra’ position, back arched in a perfect half-moon with eyes looking to the ceiling when it hit her. Between the second and third repetition of sun salutation, when she had begun to exhale in order to lift her hips up and lean her body back into ‘downward dog,’ that is when the tears started to drip-drop out of her eyelids and onto the purple yoga mat. Of course it was hard to tell what drops were teardrops and what drops were sweat drops and what drops were just the essence of her being strenuously seeping out of her every pore. The sensation of knives running up and down her hamstrings and deep into her Achilles tendon made her throat catch and her arms ache in rubbery compensation. The yoga instructor stood behind her, gently tugging on her pelvic bone in the attempt to make her muscles relax from the fist-like state the had become accustomed to. And while getting physically closer to her than any woman over the age of 40 ever had, she heard the yoga instructor asking everyone in the room to let everything go, hear the voice inside you say it’s going to be okay. Closing her eyes she tried to breathe, pranayama, in order to inhale new life and exhale the pain. That’s when she lost her shit.

The breakdown wasn’t one of those noticeable, weepy, sky-is-falling moments that cause mountains to tremble and strangers to appear from unknown places in order to gawk obscenely. It was simply and aquatic release from the eyeballs—just a typical function of the human body, nothing more. She inhaled with the tears and forced her neck and legs to relax for the first time in a long time. She exhaled and her mind went blank. All she could feel was empty as she surrendered to the notion that she could be safe within herself. Even with her ass raised to the heavens and her heart sinking slowly into her throat she could feel confidence in her breath allowing her to leave the present for a minute, if only for a minute. She closed her eyes and breathed.

It isn’t usually like this. She isn’t usually the girl having an intense emotional confrontation with a yoga mat in the middle of a dance studio. Usually she’s the girl who walks down the street and says ‘hello’ to everyone she knows, even if they refuse to remember her. Mostly laughing, too loud, too happy, too much confidence than any normal person should have.

But that’s during the day. At night the façade is unnecessary. One doesn’t have to pretend that they are a full person when the only sound in the room is their own breathing, long and steady breaths uninterrupted by the inconsistent measure of conversation. Without distraction, without words, the demons come out. Albeit small, a daily depression ensues while she ponders the age-old question of if she can ever really be happy.

It’s around this time of night when she can hear loud staccato breaths coming from the girl next door, struggling along with their creator to find her ears. These breaths are often accompanied by a deeper, smoother, more masculine series of breaths, but the tone varies from night to night. Although the sounds of sex through the wall usually only last a few minutes, it is enough time for her armor to melt off her resting body and drip-drop from the sheets onto the dirty floor. It only takes two sets of respiratory systems and two strategically placed, squeaky mattress springs from one room over to scream through the paper maché walls and let her know exactly how empty a twin-sized bed can be with only one person in it. It only takes five minutes at twelve-o’clock for the past to seep into her brain and muddy the pathways that she had spent all day making clean and safe for travel.

Her brain swims, floundering and drowning in the memories of when she was happy or was she ever really happy or could she have prevented this or was it worth it and goddamn it anyways. Even after the girl next door and her bunkmate have rolled over, exhausted from the exertions, she’s the one wide-eyed awake trying to catch her breath. But, at the moment, her eyes are actually closed because she’s been reduced to crying on a yoga mat which is exactly one step forward and one step back from where she was last night.

On the mat she is breathing in, allowing her eyes to open and her pupils to dilate and fill with light. It’s the darkness that gets to her, that follows her during the day when the whole world is watching, keeping every muscle tense and at attention. But yoga instructors have a strange way of pulling your pelvis to the back of your hips in order to alleviate the strain in your back and arms while simultaneously pulling your brain from the past into the present. With feet planted into the purple mat, hands spread out in front of her, body shaking with fatigue and pain, she realizes that this is right now. The past is gone and the future will come soon enough if she can just give it enough time. She is there: sweating, crying, being mildly molested by a well-intended AARP cardholder.

Exhale slowly, let your mind be free. The instructor is still talking. Let you body loose—trust yourself. While still struck in downward dog, a small laugh escapes from her diaphragm, interfering with the in-an-out movement of the stomach, and melts among the drops of liquid below her.

Growing Up

I love my Nana, but she can be a real bitch sometimes.

Nana Keller, my great-grandmother is the five-foot even, 85-pound, matriarch of the family. After surviving 97 years and three generations of Keller offspring, she is completely sound of mind and body. This is why I was so confused on my eighteenth birthday when she pulled me aside to have a private word.

‘You’re getting so grown-up,’ she clucked while patting my hand in that way that old people always do when they’re talking to you. I smiled and said something along the lines of ‘thank-you’, being the gracious and perfect great-granddaughter that I am. Feeling that the conversation was over and my birthday-hostess duties had been met for the day, I moved to turn away from her. But she held on. Tight.

My Nana pulled me in close. Very close. So close that an unusual amount of Chanel No 5 found its way up my nose at an alarming pace. As I looked down at my petite and loving great-grandmother, I could see where her curls were set in perfect white ringlets on top of her scalp. I saw the individual strokes of pencil where her eyebrows were meant to be and where the eyeliner had strayed dangerously far from her eyelid. Then she spoke to me with more authority than twenty professors.

‘I was pregnant with your grandfather by the time I was eighteen.’

I’ll never forget those words. She didn’t say it out of nostalgia or shock or even as a tale of caution. She said it plainly, as a statement—or even as a challenge that I had not met. The words shocked me, to say the least, and as she slowly walked away I could almost catch her looking to my empty womb and barren left-ring finger in simultaneous confusion and disappointment.

This only seems strange if you don’t know my family’s history of settling down early in life. After my great-grandparents married barely out of puberty, my grandparents were engaged by the time they were nineteen. Even my parents had met one another in college and were dating for many years before they were married at twenty-five. It’s a ridiculous and unintentional legacy to be a part of, a legacy one could only assume would die out in these modern times.

But no. The Keller tradition lives on in even the most recent generations. I find myself on the defense when I travel home for holidays, feeling inadequate without a ‘plus one’ to bring to the holiday festivities. My cousins’ girlfriends have become a staple at the family dinner table. They’re lovely girls, really, and they blend in well sitting next to my grandmothers—talking over cranberry sauce about modern family life and generally having it all. They nibble conservatively as they discuss their life goals, which include, but are not limited to, curing leukemia with their biochemistry degree while simultaneously providing my cousin with a large and loving family. They’re swirling cookies in their herbal tea with one hand as they’re surviving the family name with the other.

I’m in awe of them. It takes a confident woman to fill shoes that big. I can barely form a sentence together to explain to my aunts and uncles that the lovely necklace I’m wearing wasn’t a gift from someone special—I bought it for myself at Claire’s.

But if there’s anything that three and a half years of college has taught me it’s this: never let a pushy old lady tell you when and when not to be married or pregnant (even if she’s the source of your life-blood) and always have a decoy in times of distress. Recent years have shown me that these wonderful women do more than provide love and comfort to my cousins and my family’s peace-of-mind, the girlfriends provide a buffer.

I am no longer plagued with the uncomfortable confrontations that, apparently, occur with the older generations of my family. They field questions about table manners and quantum physics while I help myself to seconds on apple pie. They are perfect candidates for my replacement. I’ll gladly take the romantic hit while they’re worrying about public schooling systems in whatever county they get their first crappy office job. I’ll be in the condo next to them, ready to baby-sit. Because that’s what family is for.

And the system seems to have worked so far. With the help of higher education and a keen sense of avoidance, I feel like the Keller tradition is safe with them. I haven’t had an uncomfortable confrontation with my Nana in a few years, although I do see her from time to time making a pass at my belly. Although there may not be a way to get her off my back for good, at least she knows far less about my sex life than she used to. And that is something we can all be thankful for.

Replay

Allen walks into the kitchen where his mother is making a picnic lunch. He looks down at where she is busy on the counter-top, peeling and slicing cucumbers to be smeared with chive cream cheese. It’s the same picnic that they have every Sunday.

‘It’s the same picnic we have every Sunday.’

Allen’s voice takes on a falsetto during the word ‘every’ that is uncomfortably high for his newly discovered manhood. His right hand feigns up to his Adam’s Apple in frustration and embarrassment, the lines of his jaw clench slightly on the sides of his skull. Allen turns around, and takes a few steps back across the threshold of the kitchen and his hand drops down to his side. He has forgotten why it was up there in the first place. He hears the clean sound of kitchen knives slicing against a cutting board. Allen turns to see his mother in the kitchen, and walks into the kitchen to see what she is preparing for the Sunday picnic.

She is peeling and slicing cucumbers to be smeared with chive cream cheese. It’s the same picnic they have every Sunday.

‘It’s the same picnic we have every Sunday.’

Allen projects this to his mother in a deep tenor. He adjusts the crotch of his pants to physically compensate for an insecurity that he cannot be fully aware of while his mother wipes the flat edge of the knife against a dishtowel that’s been tucked into her waistband.

‘Is there something wrong with Aunt Greta’s cucumber surprise?’ she asks with a weak smile.

‘It’s not exactly a surprise if you serve it every weekend.’

Allen walks up to the table and flicks the peeled strings of cucumber wetly.

‘Don’t you want to mix it up every once in a while?’

Allen’s mother ignores his childish complaints and cracks open a fresh container of chive cream cheese. She peels the seal-top violently away from the cup in frustration and loses control of it. The thin leaf of plastic takes a short trip in the air before the messy side of it lands against her thigh. It hangs for one, unbelievable second, and falls—face up—on the ground.

‘Shit.’

Allen and his mother both look at one another. Although her son has heard far worse language in his first few months at public high school, he hasn’t reached the age where parents and children can cuss openly in front of one another. And being a devout Christian woman, Allen’s mother excuses herself from her son and the cutting board to step out of the kitchen and into the mudroom. Her shoulders relax, and she finds herself face-to-face with the family’s collection of winter coats. The kitchen knife is still in her hand and she realizes that she has crossed over the kitchen threshold.

She turns around to see her son who is standing with both palms flat against the tops of his thighs. His eyes are pointed blankly at the white wall opposite him, searching a little further upward than normal. A significant twinge of annoyance comes over her, she is curious about it, but walks back into the kitchen nonetheless—aware of the cucumbers that she must have been cutting before she stepped into the mudroom for the Sunday picnic that she must have been preparing for her family.

Allen’s mother strides back to where she was on the counter-top, brushing her son’s left arm as she passes to bring him back to where she is. Allen’s body does a small jump involuntarily, like the ones that happen when he’s about to fall asleep and it feels like all his muscles are getting their last bits of energy out at once before a long rest, but he doesn’t notice. He looks down at where the strings of cucumber peels have plastered themselves against the tabletop and automatically flicks them with his forefinger in an uncomfortably natural motion.

‘Stupid cucumber surprise,’ Allen mutters with more rancor than he thought he intended. Allen’s mother continues to cut the cucumbers faster and harder than any housewife should.

‘Can’t we have sloppy joe picnics instead?’

Allen looks down to his mother’s leg where there is a milky, white splotch. Allen’s mother follows her son’s eyes and sees where the cream cheese must have hit her leg. She clucks her tongue and wets her thumb with her tongue to try and massage the spot out. Allen stands and watches as the offending stain gets rubbed even more permanently into the jean fabric.

‘Allen, you can’t bring sloppy joes to a picnic,’ Allen’s mother says between gasps of breath—both from exersion and annoyance.

‘Why not?’

‘They’re messy.’

‘They’re spontaneous!’

‘They’re rude and they’re not tradition.’

‘Dad likes sloppy joes.’

‘Dad likes whatever I tell Dad to like.’

‘Well, if that’s not controlling…’ Allen stops himself midsentence. Even if his body indicates his arrival into manhood, he is still a child in his mother’s eyes. He isn’t supposed to know about these things yet—the complicated dynamics of a marriage. He isn’t supposed to know that it’s a power struggle. He isn’t supposed to know that it’s something his parents deal with every day.

Allen quickly finds his exit, taking brisk steps to where his mother had left before. Both his feet pass through the threshold and his brow softens. He looks back into the kitchen to see where his mother is standing at the countertop, eyes gazed down and body completely numb. Her hands are still on the cutting board, her right clutching her knife so that Allen can see the knuckles through her skin.

Allen takes a half-step back towards the kitchen. It looks like his mother is busy on the counter-top, peeling and slicing cucumbers to be smeared with chive cream cheese. It’s the same picnic that they have every Sunday.

‘It’s the same picnic we have every Sunday.’

Allen walks with confidence toward his mother and touches her knife-arm as he says this. Her body does a jump like it’s going to sleep but she doesn’t notice it because all she feels is this rush of hatred travel all the way up her spine and shoot to her fingertips and she finds herself stabbing her own son in the shoulder.

A little alarmed, Allen’s mother quickly retrieves the knife from her son and wipes it against the dishtowel that has been tucked into the waist of her pants. She looks to the counter in confusion. She had been peeling and cutting cucumbers before he walked in. She looks back towards her son.

Allen hasn’t moved. He hasn’t looked at the stab wound because he knows that the second he does his body will feel it. He can’t look because he knows, doesn’t know—assumes, that he deserved whatever he got from before he left the room. He keeps looking at his mother. Never taking his eyes off of hers, causing his head to tilt downward. This is the first time he has noticed how small she is.

Allen’s mother tries not to break face.

‘Why don’t you get cleaned up and fetch your father. It looks like we’re about ready to head out for our picnic. I’m sorry. ’

Allen turns and walks out of the kitchen.

My near death experience

**This is a story that I would tell at the Moth next month if I had the balls.**

Last year, my father came up with the idea to fly me home for the weekend in the middle of September to surprise my mother for her birthday. I'm from Boston, so when I do fly home all the way from Chicago, it's a little bit of an event. So my dad creates this plan where I would work my waitress-ing shift at this restaurant, and then I would speed off to O'hare and hop on a plane to Boston where he'd pick me up and drive me home. All of this planning in the hopes that I would show up and my mom would freak out and cry and have the best birthday ever.

So, the restaurant I worked at was called "Jamaica, Jamaica". Let me just start by saying, being a white waitress at a Jamaican food restaurant in Chicago is nt as easy as you think it would be. People get mad at you- like, legitimately upset that you're white. It's as if they think they are in Jamaica, and you're lying to them.
Sir, Ma'am, look out the window. Is that a Jimmy John's? Yes, it is. Because you are in Illinois, and you are on your lunch break.

So I got harassed by white people for a few hours, close up the shop, grab my ox tail to go, and hop in my car to put the surprise plan in action. I got on the Kennedy Express and I noticed that my break light is going off. So I do what any girl does when she has a question about cars- I call my dad. He picks up the phone and I ask him it it's a problem that the brake light is going off and he says no, no, you're fine. So I hang up and I continue to barrel down the highway, thinking about what my mom would make for me to eat when I got home. I mean, it might have been her birthday, but come on- let's not get lazy here, right? So my foot is firmly on the gas as I'm deciding whether she'll make me mac and cheese and pizza and I realize that I'm going a little fast. So I start to step on the brake and the pedal instantly hits the floor. No resistance, no nothing, no slowing down or braking of any kind. I just think- "Oh. Shit."

And I do what any girl would do while she's barreling down the highway during rush-hour while her brakes are completely gone- I call my dad. I call my dad and I'm like, "DAD. SOMETHING IS WRONG."

I didn't mention this before, but my father is not a mechanical person. he is a football coach from Connecticut who wears swim trunks as if they were real pants and keeps what he calls a "loaded toothbrush" in his car at all times. So I'm realizing my initial mistake in calling him the first time, at this very moment while certain death is upon me. And I'm like, "Dad. No brakes." And my father, being the bullshitted that only a man who wears swim trunks as real pants could be, goes- "Oh, THAT break light. Yeah, you have a problem." Thanks Dad. Thanks.

So I'm over halfway to the airport and there aren't many exits that have a place to get my car fixed. And all I'm thinking of is my beautiful mother, with a tear of joy glistening down her cheek as she sees me walk into our home on this- the day of her birth. And my Dad goes, "E-brake it." So I do. I use the emergency brake on my entire way to the airport and I get home in time to see my mother weep with sheer happiness on her birthday.

A Portrait of Mother and Child

Her mother always called her little girl ‘precocious’ in front of company because she knew that there was something wrong. She didn’t want to call attention to the peculiar way that the three-year-old interacted with adults or her strange habit of sitting in the grandmother’s wing chair that stood proudly in the grandmother’s living room. No one wants to admit to raising a strange child.

It seemed like the wing chair had always been there, a staple in the matriarch’s home that stood as a testament to the family’s resilience over time. It had once been upholstered in soft pink and white stripes when Nana Swaine bought it years before. But by the time the baby was old enough to lift herself up on the seat the fabric had begun to blend together, carefully fading the past deeper until all that remained was a handful of memories and anecdotes. The strings of roses that had been carefully stitched into the stripes feigned their color. The chair gave off an odor that can only be described as the amalgamation of many generations who had taken their turns shifting their weight against its cushions, rubbing their scent deeper into the thread count.

When the mother saw her girl sitting in the chair she could see the past through her posture. The baby took control of the wing chair, her marshmallow palms pushing against the lumpy cushions. She sat with her brow knit and the red curls on top of her head carefully dropping down against her neck. Her backside sat firmly against the back of the wing chair while her shoulders leaned forward, as if she were about to participate in the discussion about Great Aunt Edie’s health problems even though she had discovered her own toes only a few years ago.

And she would sit there—at Christmas, at Easter, on weekends when three children proved to be too much work for the mother. They would go visit the grandmother so that the mother could have a break and the baby could sit in the chair and worry everyone further. No child that age should have so much feeling written across her forehead or sorrow in her eyes. The aunts and uncles and other relatives worried that their baby had already taken too much of the sadness out of life—that, somehow, the experiences of the previous generations which had been crushed against the pink stripes for so many years had found their way into her skin. So they looked away when she sat there during those Christmases and Easters and those certain weekends when her mother needed a break. They carefully took hors d’oeuvres from the coffee table in front of her, tip-toeing in fear of the baby. They would tickle her side and pinch her cheek to show her that they knew she was there, to show her that she was still their baby, but they never looked in her eyes. They knew that even precocious children didn’t have the same presence that she did. The baby didn’t know more than she was supposed to, just more than they wanted her to, and that was enough to make them fear her. Only humans who had seen the best and worst parts of life could fill up that chair with so little room.

But it wasn’t the sitting there that made everything feel so backwards and upside-down. It was what she said while she sat in Nana Swaine’s old wing chair. She would ask simple questions that seemed normal for a curious child to pose, but all the more disconcerting in their construction and delivery. Things like—what if it never rains again? Or, is it better to follow your mind or your heart? The first of these questions could be dismissed with a quick answer—‘I don’t know’ or ‘Ask someone else.’ But as she continued to sit in the chair the questions would get more persistent. What if this is the last time I get to hold your hand? What happens when we finally get buried by all our own filth and can’t move? How will you know that I am safe after I die? What if we get in an unforgivable fight and never talk to one another again? What if I never fall in love? What if I do?

They were questions that everyone has thought about at least once or twice. The kinds of things that pop up in your head—completely unannounced—and you forget about until you do something, twist a certain knob or look in the mirror a particular way, and you remember it again. They weren’t pleasant thoughts, but they weren’t unpleasant either. They were just thoughts. And how do you tell a baby to stop thinking them? They tried to distract her with toys, her mother stuffed her mouth with food so she wouldn’t say anything. But they all knew what she was thinking anyways. It was something in the way that the chair cradled her body with the perfect resistance so she almost popped out of it.

They started pinching the baby every time she spoke—a Pavlovian suppression of the most basic fears. But she wouldn’t stop. The pinches made it worse which made them madder. They could feel the verbal manifestation of their innermost thoughts coming from the smallest, most controllable being in the world. They had created her, hadn’t they? Although they hadn’t all created her directly, each of them constructed a part of her in a sense. That’s what family is, after all. And just as equally as they were creating her, they were destroying her. The mother wrapped her arms around her child as Aunt Judith pinched the baby’s mouth to sever her words. She sobbed helplessly as Cousin Ivan shook her ankles to suppress the kicking. The family continued, each boxing the baby’s ears to keep her from thinking these things as the mother screamed silently that it was all in their head. They were just words, only words, that the Baby had learned from their own mouths. Where else could she have learned them? The mother grasped at the doughy flesh of her child until all that laid in her hands was a body in a dress.

A dress that she had spent days making as a present for her little girl to wear so that she would be good for her family. She was just a baby, the mother cried at them, beating her fists against the sides of the wing chair that held her daughter. The redness of the baby’s curls now crushed against the pink fabric so that it almost blended in. The mother’s tears fell against her baby’s face so that they dripped down her cheek as if they were her own. She was just a baby, the mother screamed from the back of her throat, with a voice that no one could hear.