Intertextual
Bodies
by
Jill Hochman
They fought last night, the kind of fight that made no
sense a few hours later, the kind of fight that seemed to
have no distinct origin. And she woke up the next morning
with a vague notion that something was a bit off so that
she paused in waking, trying to remember the status of her
relationship with this person whom she lived with, slept
beside, would share breakfast with. She recollected quite
slowly that they were not speaking, had agreed silently to
ignore one another, had agreed silently to disagree, to
refuse compromise, to hold a grudge. This remembrance made
her sigh, weary already at the outset of the day before an
alarm could wake her, before the cat bumped at her, the
lighter sleeper, to be fed.
It was a Saturday morning, a whole weekend yet to be gotten
through, and she imagined the silence or the falsely cheery
formalism that took place after a spat, a meaningless spat.
And she thought slinging her feet over her side of the bed,
thinking, half consciously my side and his side, scrunching
her toes into the heavy plush of carpet, the fibers sawing
and soft simultaneously. This after all is life; this
incessant waking up, acting out, thrusting of feet into
slippers, padding of body into kitchen, rustle of self
through kitchen, pour and rattle and drip and brew of
coffee. This was life; this was all.
So they’d fought. She could call Lou, escape for the day
into Lou’s oblivion, her talk of children’s groups and
cultural enrichment. She could listen to Lou talk about how
much she hated being single and how draining it would be to
be half of a couple. She could bite her tongue at this
obvious inconsistency. They could wheel bicycles together
or pull on sneakers, only canvas as Lou was a vegetarian, a
shunner of cowhides, and power walk together. They could
sleep and eat sundaes, and she could tell Lou that of
course Steven was alright of course she AND Steve were
alright and she could come home with big shopping bags and
continue to ignore Steven’s silence, or she could cry, and
he would come to comfort her, as he always did because
Steven had the bigger heart and tended to give in first, no
matter what women’s magazines claim about men. He would
tell a joke bad enough to make both of them laugh at its
ridiculousness.
This morning in the kitchen none of these solutions were
enough. This half life was not enough. This brewing of
coffee; this making of breakfast was not enough.
Sarah stood in the kitchen, can of Maxwell House still in
hand completely unprepared for this place, this place two
years into marriage, day spilling into day, neatly,
silently. She thought of Lou, fork tines still on the edge
of her lips, eyes clearing, pupils dilating. "Yes," Lou
would mutter as chocolate laced into her system. If only it
were that easy Sarah thought, but no, that wouldn’t be
enough either.
It was Sarah who started to rip up the carpeting though she
couldn’ t explain why or how she got started. After all,
the carpeting had been one of the reasons they’d bought the
house two years ago, "brand new wall to wall," the realtor
had told them, brand new wall to wall in a pale pale tan
that worked as background for anything. The cat had loved
it too, flinging himself onto the soft sawing fibers,
rolling so that it penetrated his fur, stroked his pink
skin.
Once she’d begun she couldn’t quite stop, though the coffee
had dripped completely. The neat carpet tore into her
hands, turned into frayed yarn. It didn’t peel neatly like
she’d imagined it would, like the skin of a turkey, lifting
away from cold pale flesh. The carpet ripped with a sound
so ragged, so splintering that she couldn’t believe,
looking back, that Steven was still in bed. Dust rose in a
spray that was invisible in the early morning light, a
thick concentrated cluster that broke up, dispersed the
dust of disintegrated cat fur and the death of centipedes
or spiders or creatures smaller no matter how indecisive.
She was exhausted, quickly sitting dazedly in the evidence
of her misdeed. What was it they’d fought about last night?
They’d been to a party she remembered this with the vague
recollection of a witness on the stand, a witness forced to
analyze now actions that at the time seemed random,
insubstantial. She remembered a broken wine glass and a
dog, one of those miniature collies, whose heads always
seemed too small to hold a brain large enough to
accommodate thoughts necessary for anything beyond crass
survival. The dog had walked through the glass before
anyone swept up, before the host arrived, eyes bloodshot,
with a dust pan and a miniature broom to clean it up. But
the fight hadn’t been about the glass, Sarah was pretty
sure about this. The fight was about something else, maybe
something sparked by the sound of breaking glass or the
sight of a woman standing, fingers clutching only empty
air, tears streaking her face, tears only a child or a very
drunk woman would allow themselves to cry in front of a
crowd of people.
It seemed that the carpet, after all, could not be pushed
easily back into place. Steven was walking around overhead,
and Sarah was slowly beginning to realize that the
thickness of the air, her tongue, her head, the cotton in
her ears was evidence of a hangover. And Steven now
clattering overhead dropping something, maybe his own feet,
had said something the night before that had made her mad
enough to argue, to snatch at his shirt front hard enough,
carelessly enough to tear off buttons, to feel his flesh
under her nails. They were drunk both of them this was
obvious now, more obvious than the fight they’d had.
She’d thought about laughing laughing hysterically
because that was really the only action that would fit this
moment. But laughter would be too painful. The very thought
of laughter echoed through her head. She imagined Steven
upstairs clattering around remembering their fight. Steven
brushing a hand through his morning spiky hair. He’d grunt
and shuffle around looking for a book to read at breakfast
so that he wouldn’t have to look at her, Sarah. She could
almost predict his every move at this point. It was her own
actions that had her baffled, sometimes even the words that
came out of her own mouth were a shock.
She could shove a piece of furniture over this spot, this
corner. She was holding a ragged edged section of carpet
when Steven walked in. Boots carelessly splayed over one
arm. Steven’s speechless way of showing that she had
neglected Boots’ needs. This reprimand was, of course, at
this point, useless. Sarah thought about herself, what she
must look like. She thought of this with one wrenching pain
that shot through her head. Sarah with hair pulled back,
bathrobe hanging open, sleeves rolled up, makeup still
audible from the night before. Sarah holding her
wall-to-wall.
"Don’t laugh, don’t laugh, don’t even smile," she repeated
to herself. Steven’s jaw fell. "Jesus Christ!" and Boots
hopped down from his arms and pranced in the easy sway gait
of cats to the cellar door. "Jesus Christ!" Steven said
again, stopped in his progress to the kitchen where his
first cup of coffee awaited him.
"We’re hung over," Sarah told Steven quite smoothly because
this explained everything. "We’re hung over and last night
we had a fight." There was no inflection in Sarah’s voice,
no hint at who was to blame, no need for accusations.
Steven continued to the kitchen, returned with a mug of
coffee. She’d stopped pulling at the carpet, her arms
ached. The muscles in her shoulders burned, and she
couldn’t physically continue. She sat back on her heels and
rolled her wrists, popped her fingers. Steven came over and
looked at the floor. She’d begun in the dining room,
somewhere between the living room and the kitchen. Steven
bent and gripped a piece of the carpet still attached to
the floor and pulled. She could hear every staple pop up
out of the floor, a row like dominoes pop, pop, pop, and a
huge sheet was yanked free. The brutality of Steven’s
gesture shocked her, a movement more smooth and fluid than
her own diggings and scrapings, her ineffectual tearing.
Neither of them spoke. Sarah watched Steven move the
furniture, clear out the room.
The dining room was bare within a half an hour. Sheets of
the carpet were piled into the living room, some of it in
thick rolls. They’d assumed certain roles, and as the
coffee grew cold, Steven removed the top layer, his body
bending under the strain. Susan began to scrape the
padding, sweeping debris, each movement of her hand, each
sweep revealing the rich wood that made up the floor of the
house. The exposed color, a sunburst orange, warmed up the
room, was hot against the flat of her palm, and she
lingered, rubbing her fingers into the grain, into the
imperfections of the woodwork. Steven leaned back, relaxed.
" Did you see this?" Susan didn’t look up, didn’t want to
risk the confrontation that eye contact might induce. "Did
you see this scrape?" Her hand rubbed a deep scar in the
floorboard, a scar jagged enough to splinter, to catch in
the flesh of her hand. "Damn!" She pulled back, studied her
skin.
"Took the finish right off." Steven bent down near her,
"Looks like somebody slid something across the floor, maybe
a table or maybe someone pushed their chair back, dug the
legs into the floor." They grew silent, listening for the
echo of a movement that had left this mark. If they were
quiet enough long enough, they would hear it, the room
would remember. They heard the echo instead of their own
breathing. "It’s louder in here, "Susan said in a whisper
that moved leisurely around the room with each bounce.
She lay back, head rested on the floor so that she could
feel contact, body flat, hands spread out to her sides as
if she were about to make a snow angel. "It’s so empty!"
and she laughed, wincing only slightly at the pain in her
head. Steven lay back, his body perpendicular at Susan’s
navel so that they made a T not touching. Looking at the
ceiling, the light fixture now naked and obvious, casting
spider shaped shadows across the room, down the walls and
onto the floor.
Susan wasn’t ready to forgive Steven yet. She remembered
the fight now, remembered just how mad she had been. It had
nothing to do with the young graduate students that had
surrounded him, these girls with long gauzy scarves tied
around their necks so many times that it appeared as if
they heads were held on precariously by the knots. These
girls with their hair slicked back in severe ponytails,
plain ballerina style necklines, skin-tight black tops.
These girls who eyed up her husband in the wondrous
awe-struck way that preceded seduction. She wasn’t angry
that her husband in his green checkered pants and tweed
sports coat, an intriguing mismatch that only added to his
artsy charm was attractive to other women. This never
bothered her. One of the girls, a student of Steve’s had
brought record albums. She carried them under her arm,
bringing them out to show Steven. "Vinyl’s the way to go,"
she told him and Steven had nodded though neither Sarah nor
Steven owned any vinyl or even a record player, though both
of them had even sold the last of their cassette tapes and
invested in a joint CD collection. Vinyl, yes, this young
girl just back from dance school in Germany, this young
girl with her boy-short hair and the smile of an
orthodontist’s child, this young girl with decided views of
the world that she’d borrowed from someone else. Steven
feigned very convincing interest in her vinyl collection.
The Beatles’ White Album that both Steven and Sarah had
been just a little too young to have owned. But it seemed
that vinyl was all the rage in Europe.
"Ah, Melinda, this is my wife Sarah," Steven spotted Sarah
creeping up with a refilled wineglass in hand, black skirts
swishing, thick glasses sliding haphazardly down her nose.
He held his arm out invitingly an arm that suggested Sarah
walk into him become quite naturally his better half. "We
were discussing the merits of vinyl," Steven said in a way
that only Sarah would recognize as condescending.
"Oh, yes, vinyl," Sarah smiled larger than she felt right.
"I remember that. You mean records, albums, the round
kind."
"My wife," Steven turned, "is a feminist scholar." Steven
continued, ignoring the stiffening of Sarah’s body. "She
just completed a book on women’s body images, changes in
trends." Sarah hated this, this use of the word feminist to
define what she did. This scrutiny, this thick shrewd
female scrutiny that followed. This examination of her
flawed feminine form. This assessment, this categorizing,
defining, judging that followed loaded declarations like my
wife is a feminist scholar. This moment when Sarah wondered
how Steven would take being referred to as a masculinist
scholar just because he happened to be studying the
theological works of a white man.
"Oh," the young girl, Melinda, looked Sarah over
dismissively Sarah cringed. Feminism had become a dirty
word, a word that implied militance, discomfort with ones
own flesh, lesbianism, radicalism too many extremes that
Sarah was not prepared to deal with, too many, an implied
bias that Sarah didn’t associate with her work. "I’m
actually an historian," Sarah tried to explain, yanking a
burgundy shawl around her exposed shoulders, but Melinda
had ceased paying attention to her and was listening to
Steven gibbering on and on about Aeropagetica. "Have you
read Aeropagetica?" he asked Melinda for the third or
fourth time. Melinda nodded and Sarah wanted to scream "no
she hasn’t." It was obvious, obvious to Sarah that this
girl probably hadn’t read a book ever, not even in high
school, no not even then. But Steven was ranting and waving
his drink about rather precariously. He was drunk,
crunching recklessly on potato chips half of which sat on
his loosened tie. Melinda was enamoured, trying not to
laugh, occasionally reaching out to touch Steven’s shirt
front. "Oh, yes," she’d nod, covering her mouth, hiding her
beautiful teeth with her fingers, long dancer’s fingers,
fingers that matched the fine length of her legs, a hand
gesture that she’d probably acquired as an awkward teen
with braces that picked her lips raw. Sarah was dismissed,
the frigid feminist wife, a woman whose dumpy physique made
her hate men, made her bitter enough to research women’s
body images over the ages.
Arguments had a way of coming back like this in pieces that
seemed ridiculous after the fact but revealed information,
emotions that could not be wished away later, that could
not be forgotten easily and now they were only a man and
woman devoid of green checkered sport coats and black
rustling skirts and colorful head scarves, a couple devoid
of alcohol, a couple dehydrated and aching on a bare wood
floor. She got up, wrapping her pink terry-robe around her,
yanking a belt tightly around her waist. "I’ll heat up the
coffee." Steven reached out, touched her ankle, gripped it
loosely, "Watch your feet there might be nails, splinters."
He looked away, trying to be elusive careless. He let his
body go slack, head falling back against the floor, and she
imagined briefly that the two of them were in a movie, and
he’d uttered his last important lines and leaned back dead
of illness or a duel, but Sarah shook her head to clear the
dust, the clutter, the thin vines of inebriation that
crawled still behind her eyes and shook her foot, belated,
as if to free herself from the grip that was no longer
there. Coffee…she reminded herself, resisting the urge to
give in, to lie down, dig her chin into Steven’s chest to
rub her nose into his bathrobe and breath him in, but Sarah
didn’t believe in forgiveness, forgiveness was somehow
taboo, weak. Coffee.
It was the smug way that he said feminist "My wife is a
feminist scholar," as if this negated all of her work,
explained her success. She’d had a book published shortly
after her marriage. Feminist scholarship was, as Steven
called it, the hot ticket, physical quotes inserted. Steven
hadn’t, even two years later, found a publisher for his
book. The market for dead white men was small, nonexistent.
Steven was almost proud of his failure, bragged about it at
departmental parties. Emasculation was in vogue, and Sarah
seethed, despised the fact that he had found this innocuous
way to destroy, to lessen her success.
How easy it would be she thought, to trip, to accidentally
spill hot coffee on Steven. She could imagine the scald
marks rising on his skin. The compulsive scissoring of his
body when the hot liquid bit in, took hold, the electric
blue of his eyes when they snapped open. "Coffee?" she held
out the mug.
They were companions, these two. She remembered that even
now without a word exchanged between them, even now, when
the anger of past words spoken, hung like a wall, like a
cold war between them. They drank coffee, and Steven walked
away to the bathroom to their bedroom. She sat on the bare
floor of the dining room, legs sprawled out in front of
her, legs she realized that were only a child’s length,
reminded her of sitting with girlfriends as a child, legs
stretched side-by-side. Only their legs grew, and Sarah’s
hadn’t she’d remained small. She wriggled her feet,
thumped her heels to hear the echo, a thousand sounds
bouncing off unpadded surfaces.
Steven returned in jeans and a flannel shirt. He pulled
gloves on. He intended to be serious about carpet removal.
She took her empty mug only momentarily registering the
thick coffee sludge at the bottom and went into the living
room to collect knick-knacks and lamps. They removed the
couch, one on either end, and waddled, a three part
lumbering beast, into the dining room where they were both
briefly compelled to hop onto the cushions and view their
changing home. They giggled like children and looked to
each other before they remembered and the stillness
descended again.
"It wouldn’t be so bad," Sarah once confided to Lou, "if
he’d just talk about it." Lou hadn’t replied, she knew
better. They’d fought before, she and Sarah, over Steven’s
behavior. "He’s so sweet, so loving in every other
respect," Sarah would continue, "but this book…" Sometimes
she wondered if it was Steven’s attitude, his behavior,
that kept her from moving on, writing anything else…as if
her progress, her success, would destroy the precarious
balance of their marriage. She considered the inscription
in her book: "Thanks most to my loving husband, Steven,
without whose support, love and laughter I would never have
had the courage to finish this book." Had all of this
changed in two years?
They were inexplicably tied: Steven and the book, so that
if pressed Sarah probably couldn’t even say which had come
first. The house echoed, Sarah lurched and her yelp moved
from wall-to-wall. She curled her foot around the agony,
curled it tight like a fist and stood, body clenched, foot
lifted. She didn’t dare look, but she could picture the
splintered wood, the nail, which she imagined deeply
embedded in her foot, puncturing layers of what, skin, fat,
flesh, sinew, bone…The pain moved, pulsed with her blood.
She tried to picture Steven on the stairs yanking at sheets
of carpeting, cursing only moments before, pausing between
each jerk of his body, each rip and tear of the carpet that
disintegrated in his grip, that tore from his hands before
it tore from the floorboards, the stairs. She sat on the
floor where she’d stood only moments before, sat
cross-legged and held her injured foot to her chest. She
expected blood on the floor, on her bathrobe, on her hands,
but there was none, no blood. Even when Steven came to her,
pried the foot from her hand, forced it out flat and looked
at her face gauging the fear, the pain, before he revealed
the extent of the damages. "You’ll have to hold still while
I take it out," he said this before revealing that it was a
carpet staple, a nail, a splinter. She pulled her foot
away, "No," grimacing at the pain she curled her entire
body around it. "NO." Steven thought momentarily about
wrestling the foot back and forcing it open but decided
against it. It was after all Sarah’s foot.
He gave up more easily than he would have under normal
conditions. Sarah sat in the living room, the living room
bare of furniture, bare of the choices of their marriage,
the pieces: the living room now filled with scraps of
carpet and patches of carpet padding. They’d left only the
TV, still plugged in on an island of carpet, adrift on a
wooden sea.
Sarah leaned forward still clutching the foot, the curled
claw foot, and got the remote control, flipped through
channels, glancing down occasionally, expecting to see
blood oozing out between her clenched toes, but there was
nothing, nothing but the steady thump of intrusion. She
pulled back her toes manually as if the foot belonged to
someone else, as if whatever had penetrated her skin had
begun to take over and gained control. The haze of hangover
was pushed aside by this new pain, by the expectation of
atrocity. It was a splinter thick, fat, pushed up and
under her skin, pushed deep so that she couldn’t see the
end that was stuck inside of her only the beginning
outlined under her translucent layers of skin. She squeezed
her foot shut tight again.
Steven had the rest of the carpeting ripped up while she
sat nursing her foot. Boots, who had watched Steven’s
progress from the second floor landing, had long since
become nervous at the magnitude of the devastation and had
run to Sarah for protection. She imagined what he must be
thinking when he looked questioningly up at her. His
tendency to scratch the carpeted steps, throwing his whole
body front and back paws sunk into the nap of the carpet
often enough earned him smacks or at least banishment to
the cellar. Sarah watched Boots nervously flex his paws and
chew at the claws, pick at the pink paw pads, and she began
to wish that she could lift her foot and lick, chew the
splinter out from under her skin; it still throbbed.
Silence: the woof, crick, crack, tear sound of Steven’s war
with the carpet had ceased. Sarah got up and padded to the
steps, her damaged foot held vertical so that only her heel
met the ground as she walked arms slightly held out for
balance. She held the knob of the banister and looked at
the steps. "They’re pretty," she clawed with her fingers at
the orange foam that still obscured some of the wood
"Yeah," Steven replied from atop the stairs where he was
still panting. Sarah briefly remembered what her father had
said when she married Steven, "One day you’ll wish you’d
married a real man, the kind who gets his hands
dirty"…Steven still wasn’t in the best of shape and this
still didn’t really bother Sarah, who hadn’t married so
that there would always be someone to unscrew jelly jars or
change her oil. The top of each step was done in a pale
blonde wood, framed by darker wood, and Sarah sat
momentarily stunned by the elaborate woodwork. "These steps
should really never have been covered," Sarah said to no
one in particular. "We should get them refinished."
"You’ll have to sweep everyday, "Steven commented, as he
descended, stripping his gloves from his hands to reveal
blisters, to reveal deep cuts between his fingers in the
fleshy webbing between his fingers.
She had yelled, something she rarely did; she remembered
this now and blushed though there was no one to see, not
even Steven who’d left to get a dustpan and broom. She’d
yelled in some strange man’s house, yelled, and this was
the worst part, out of context entirely. They’d agreed to a
house tour, she and Steven, a tour of Gerald’s house. Other
guests were coming as well, and they trooped this small
group holding their wine glasses, beer bottles up in the
attic, a room darkened with only small lamp lighting.
"This," Gerald revealed, "is my masterpiece." He switched
on an overhead light. It was a miniature solar system
dangling, if dangling was the word, from the ceiling on
the walls there were meticulously drawn star and planet
charts.
Sarah was astounded by the intricacy of Gerald’s models.
The miniature universe he’d constructed….not only the
scaled models, but the elaborately penciled diagrams on the
walls of the attic. Her head spun with alcohol and with the
enormity of Gerald’s project, his attempt to contain the
whole of the universe as man knew it under his roof. Sarah
caught her balance on the edge of a table, and Steven moved
in behind her so that she could feel the heat of his body
against her back. She reached out to touch the structure in
front of her, startled, fascinated, like a baby reaching up
toward a mobile. "I think they’re tinker toys," Steven
whispered, and the spell was broken. Sarah felt like Steven
had destroyed the universe, had exposed the weakness, the
insignificance of the models. He always broke things down
into their parts, overanalyzed. Something in Sarah snapped
so that she turned, twisting to face him and hissed loudly,
loud enough to draw attention, loud enough to be heard,
"When did you become such a fucking prick?" There was a
momentary pause in action, a lapse in time, a beat skipped,
a bead left unstrung.
She turned and stormed down the stairs registering but
ignoring the sharp peg of her heels against the unfinished
wood stairs, hands clutching at the gutted, incompletely
plastered walls of the stairwell. That was when she heard
the glass breaking, paused momentarily to confirm that it
wasn’t her that had dropped the glass. She saw Gerald’s
ex-wife standing crying in a helpless uncontrollable spasm
at the same time as Steven did. They turned toward each
other like sharks who’d scented blood.
"Jesus!" Gerald had pushed through the room and the
sweeping tinkle of glass. Joyce’s crying and Bandit’s
steady yipping, as he’d most likely already stepped in the
glass, combined to create total chaos. Sarah and Steven
stood frozen, angry, appalled as they watched Gerald heave
Joyce, who was conveniently tiny, up over his shoulder and
into one of the bedrooms. They still lived together, so
Gerald was relatively used to the scenes, came out of the
bedroom dusting his hands and did his best to smile and
shrug. Joyce’s sobs were still audible through the door,
and Bandit stood outside alternately scratching and howling
to get in. Everything suddenly seemed ridiculous. The party
felt over and Steven and Sarah had headed for the door
without saying goodbye. The real fighting had begun at
home.
"Pizza?" Steven proposed for dinner, and Sarah looked up
from her foot where she was poking and prodding at the wood
wedged under her flesh. "You’re probably only making it
worse." Steven said as dismissively as a parent to a
stubborn child, and Sarah realized that before the day was
over it would be Steven who dug the offending scrap of
floorboard out of her foot.
Her colleagues had warned her that Steven would react this
way. Talk about the repression of white men, talk about
soft scholarship, what he had referred to as the
politicized truth. "One reference to the body as text,"
he’d said and you got a deal. Sarah had thought she could
handle it, had prayed that he would get an offer for his
book, but she hadn’t let his book affect her own
excitement, pride over hers. She’d opened each chapter of
her book when it got sent from her publishers for its final
proofing. She’d ripped the package open and read the
manuscript, loving her words more and more with each read.
Steven read through each chapter before she sent the
corrections back. She’d wait for him to get done, pacing
and nervous, hearing the echo of every awkward phrase until
he gave it back to her and she’d revise again. He’d been
happy for her then, still pretty certain that his own book
would find a home.
"We could do it ourselves," Steven said, interrupting
Sarah’s thoughts, and Sarah jolted back to now, back to
reality. He’d meant the floor, of course. He meant that
they could refinish the floor together. It was six p.m.,
still winter and now already dark, only one floor lamp and
the TV now lit the room and suddenly Sarah was aware of the
deepness of the shadows around them, the limitless dark
beyond their door and windows. Sarah was still in her pink
bathrobe. The Saturday Morning Post was still unread, still
rolled and rubber banded. They’d brought it in when the
pizza arrived.
Sarah knew that her answer was important, meant something
more than whether or not they should finish floors
themselves. And Sarah wondered if all couples did this, if
all couples reflected after two years of marriage whether
or not they should continue. Steven looked young in these
moments, no trace of the self-confident man she’d met years
ago. The man who had confidently, providentially recited
the last lines of Paradise Lost to her on the night of
their first date "the world all before them." In these
moments, Steven was again the man who put his head on her
chest his big hands firm on her back, holding her while she
ran her fingers into his hair, rested her chin on the top
of his head. He’d held her and he’d cried when his editor
called to tell him that they’d changed their minds, his
book wasn’t going to be published. They’d taken on more
titles then they could support. This Steven was afraid,
afraid that he had no talent, that he wasn’t worth being
loved.
Sarah had met Steven in a bar a block away from campus. She
was still an undergraduate, and he was a third year
graduate student. "The secret," he told her relatively out
of context, "is to find someone to resuscitate," and though
Sarah wasn’t quite sure what he was talking about there was
something about Steven that she’d immediately liked.
Something that she could never explain now.
"How?" Sarah was conscious that her answer was noncommittal
and she knew this was intentional, her tendency to make
Steven work harder, walk the extra mile, toward her, and he
always did.
"You can rent this floor buffer varnishing machine. Shit,
imagine that. Can you see me running one of those things?"
Steven couldn’t help laughing at himself.
And Sarah suddenly pictured Steven’s inept attempts to weed
whack their front lawn when they’d first moved in. She’d
been afraid he’d lose a limb, at least a finger or toe,
maybe an ear. "Well," Sarah was smiling herself by this
time, "can you imagine me waking up one morning and
deciding to uninstall the wall-to-wall?" They both laughed
and surveyed the wreckage of their home, the scarred
floors, the subtle creaks and groans of their every
movement. The give of floorboards under their feet.
Sarah leaned back onto the floor boards, conscious of her
arched lower-back, the way it lifted off the floor.
"Hmmmm…," she felt the air release from her body, felt the
hollow, the empty spot that fighting with Steven had
cleared out in her chest, her lower abdomen. He picked up
her foot and held it even when she jerked, her reflexes,
recoiling against the pain.
"That has to come out. I can sterilize a needle." Steven
went to get up.
"Wait," Sarah pulled him down next to her, and they fell
asleep. The two of them exhausted, leaving the lights and
the TV on, leaving Boots to find his own way, to find his
own spot to nestle between their bodies. They would wake on
Sunday on stripped bare floors. They would wake with their
fight a day further away.