I met Jess Zimmerman in 2017 at Madame X, a velvet-swathed Manhattan lounge, where she and Liz Gorinsky were releasing the party game Goth Court. Afterward, I followed the courtiers to a post-punk danse macabre, where Zimmerman and I talked about goth business and this website (where she has been the editor-in-chief since 2017).
Now, we are here to talk about monsters.
Zimmerman’s essay collection, Women and Other Monsters, takes female monsters from Greek mythology and explores their grotesqueries as patriarchal metaphors. Feminine anger, sexuality, ambition, and other hungers manifest as dog-crotches, whirlpools, talons, and bird-bits.
Medusa offers “Ugliness for an infinity of options, a universe unconstrained by any desire except your own…Beauty may be a key, but a key is not the only way to open a door; you can do it with a battering ram.” Today’s Furies are “Social Justice Warriors,” the “supposed taunt” that “accidentally sounds cool as hell.” Charybdis—the deadly whirlpool who began life as “a voracious woman who was cast into the sea by Zeus as a punishment”—personifies hunger, “a cautionary tale, not only to sailors, but to women: hunger destroys those around you.” Echidna, the Mother of Monsters, speaks to creation: “even the woman so tightly yoked to her shame that she no longer knows which one of them is the parasite, can bring something ferocious and valiant into the world. It may not feel good, but then again, birth never does.”
Over G-chat, Zimmerman and I discussed our shared childhood obsession with D’Aulaires’ Book of Greek Myths, whether or not harpies are bulletproof, how to get in Scylla and Charybdis’ group chat, and the universality of living inside a rotting meat-coated vehicle.
Jess Zimmerman: THE GOAT. Literally the goat, since all the gods were fed by a goat as babies. No gods without goats.
DC: Personally, it really blew my mind when I hit middle school and realized that the women D’Aulaires’ referred to as Zeus’s “many wives” were actually his mistresses, and not always consensually so. Did you have any moments of shock when you moved from D’Aulaires’ to Ovid and Homer?
JZ: Oh, that’s a great question! I must have, because I was a D’Aulaires’ obsessive from literally preschool, so not only was I getting this slightly predigested version of the myths (I say that with love!) but I was also processing them through an exceptionally oblivious mind. For sure there’s more sex in mythology than I initially understood! The whole Ares/Aphrodite/Hephaestus love triangle is kind of played down in D’Aulaires’ and, in my recollection, played very up in Edith Hamilton for instance.
DC: Yes! There is a lot of euphemism in the way those stories are filtered for children.
JZ: And not only sex but sexual assault, which is often still euphemized even in the adult texts. We had a great essay about the translation of “rape” in the Metamorphoses; people find ways to say anything else. You get Daphne and Syrinx in D’Aulaires’, but I definitely remember reading the Metamorphoses in college and getting to Myrrha and being like “HANG ON.”
There’s a degree to which the engine of Greek mythology is women’s pain and exploitation. And that absolutely doesn’t come through when you’re reading these stories as a kid, or even in school (I did a Greek mythology unit in 6th grade, and the Odyssey in high school, and Ovid in college). But that’s a pretty apt metaphor for the patriarchy, right? All the stories you’re being asked to analyze and in many ways internalize are built on women’s pain but nobody mentions it. Not only sexual assault but also the forcible mutation of feminized bodies, basically all of Ovid is women turning into other stuff often through no choice of their own. And sexual punishment, like Pasiphae and the bull.
DC: Right, and by actually focusing on these monsters’ origin stories—as these essays do—we can see how those patriarchal metaphors are still in play in the way people still use monster terminology.
JZ: This is a good spot to say that I’ll sometimes say “feminized” because when I talk about women I’m talking about people who are treated as and interacted with as women, some of whom aren’t women at all—when society puts you in the space it’s designated for “women” it often doesn’t ask about your identity first! So in mythology Hyacinth also ends up in a similar role, even though he’s a man.
DC: I also wanted to talk about your decision to focus on Greek mythology particularly. You write that you focus on monsters from Greek antiquity “not because they’re the most interesting stories, but because they’re complicit,” that they’re “tight little packages of expectation seeded into the culture.” What are some of your favorite monstrous women from other folkloric traditions?
All the stories you’re being asked to analyze and in many ways internalize are built on women’s pain but nobody mentions it.
JZ: Oh absolutely the penanggalan, which is a Malaysian monster which takes the form of a woman’s head detached from the body but with the intestines still attached. I believe she has a body also but can detach her head at will. There are some great monsters in other traditions that simply aren’t mine to talk about—Jami Nakamura Lin has been writing about some of them for Catapult. And I would be so delighted if someone did this exact same book for other cultures! I just can’t really put myself in a position to be like “this monster from a tradition that has nothing to do with mine? It’s SEXIST.” Whereas the stories of Greek antiquity are really baked into Western culture, like there’s a reason Classics and “the classics” use the same term.
DC: Hence the frequent use of the term “harpy” in recent U.S. politics.
JZ: Yeah, so many of these stories have seeped into our everyday speech! Harpy, Gorgon, “between Scylla and Charybdis.” People talk about ingenues as “screen sirens.” I think it’s significant that when I first read Ovid in college, it wasn’t for anything in the Classics department—it was for an early modern literature class.
DC: Right, because understanding the Western literary canon (however one may feel about “the canon”) requires a certain knowledge of classical mythology.
Western literature is very autophagous, people are always looking back at something in the past to tell them what’s valuable in the present.
JZ: Yeah, you basically need mythology and the Bible. The people who were creating the literature and art that we think of as sort of the wellspring of (Western, European, and therefore privileged in the literary canon) culture were looking back to these stories as their guides.
DC: Which seems strange in 2021, but it still applies to so much of pop culture.
JZ: The Rosetta stones of Renaissance literature and art! And therefore of any literature and art that looks back to Renaissance literature and art as the baseline of quality. Western literature is very autophagous, people are always looking back at something in the past to tell them what’s valuable in the present.
DC: So these essays are hybrids themselves—CHIMERAS IF YOU WILL—of folklore, memoir, and history. Can you talk about the experience of grafting your own life—as well as historical and current events—onto these ancient powers?
JZ: I think for me writing is fundamentally always a process of metaphor. And so in a sense, I didn’t even think of it as “here I am kind of suckering my life story onto the side of this big myth like a male lanternfish,” which when you think of it is an act of great hubris! Which lord knows the Greeks did not countenance. It’s more like, okay, in many ways a myth is already an extended metaphor, stories exist and persist in order to stand alongside the world and give you a framework for understanding it. So what happens if we sort of dissolve and rebuild that metaphor? What happens if we take it apart, show how it was put together, and then use it to form another shape? Like Legos, but figurative language.
A myth is already an extended metaphor, a framework for understanding the world. So what happens if we dissolve and rebuild that metaphor?
Essentially I didn’t think of it like “I am putting my life story into conversation with this myth.” I thought of it as, okay, this myth is already supposed to be in conversation with my life. Stories like this carry a message, which is not always one we are led to recognize, but it influences us all the same. So rather than creating that relationship, I’m reformatting it. And of course, the “I” here is just a stand-in for anyone! There’s plenty of personal anecdotes, but I don’t think of it as a memoir, because to me if this were really about me it wouldn’t be interesting, who cares. What’s interesting is that it’s about us. And I’m simply the one of us I know most about.
DC: And I think any woman (in the broadest sense, again) will relate—I certainly do—to concepts like “Nobody really likes to think about how we all ride around in vehicles of meat that are rotting underneath us for most of our lives, but for a straight man looking at a woman—or anyway, for the Male Gaze looking at a woman—that fact feels like not just a downer but a betrayal.” Sorry, that’s a comment more than a question, and the comment is “YUP.”
JZ: Hahah yes! I mean the whole idea of “us” in writing is… vexed.Like, I obviously can’t write for everyone, because my experience is very limited by being white, American, middle-class, any number of things, so I can be conscious of trying to look beyond those limits but at best I’m putting peep holes in the walls. But there are a few things you can truly say “us” about and “all our bodies are rotting under us” is one of them!
DC: We are all made of meat. Did any particular monster—or concept—act as your point of inspiration for the collection as a whole?
JZ: That is a great question and requires me to think back to a time I can barely remember, which is “before 2020.” When this started to become the germ of an idea, I think I’d already written the essay “Hunger Makes Me” for Hazlitt, which became the substrate of the chapter on Charybdis. So I wasn’t necessarily thinking in terms of mythological monsters but I was thinking in terms of desires and traits and needs that are seen as somehow grotesque in women.
So I think if I can pin it all on anyone it’s probably Charybdis, whose origin story literally is “she was so hungry she became a whirlpool.” And then of course if you’re thinking of Charybdis, you necessarily think of Scylla, and then it’s all over for you bitches. (Even though actually I wrote the Scylla essay way later! It took me a while to figure out what her story means, even though in retrospect it’s both obvious and kind of goes hand in hand with the idea of hunger and bodily needs.)
DC: How does one become part of Scylla and Charybdis’s group chat, is the real question.
JZ: I feel like the way in is almost certainly Circe, she’s the one who started the chat and keeps renaming it.
DC: Yes, I’ve always been obsessed with Circe—and thinking about her relationship with Scylla is…fraught, to say the least.
JZ: And actually reading Madeline Miller’s Circe may well have been part of the thought process here, like thinking about the stories underneath these stories, the lessons we’re supposed to be learning from them that we can refuse to learn. By the time it came out I’d been writing these monster essays for a year or so, but that book certainly convinced me that this was something we were ready for.
DC: If you could pick two traits from any of these monsters, what would they be and how would you use them?
JZ: Ooh! We’re talking like real monster traits here, right, not the excesses they’re supposed to warn us against? Like wings and snake hair, and not “anger”?
DC: Yes, real monster traits. No parameters.
JZ: Well one thing I didn’t talk about much in the book, but which is relevant here, is that Harpies are essentially bulletproof. And I think right now, of all times, it would be really nice to feel indestructible! Aeneas’s men try to hit the Harpies with swords and it simply does nothing. I know I said “bulletproof” but I guess that has never been tested. Let’s just assume there’s a certain nigh-invulnerability there though.
DC: Yes, “sword-proof” seems like it would lead to “bulletproof,” given a few centuries of Harpy evolution. I was terrified of harpies as a child because of The Last Unicorn, but now they seem pretty hot to me?
JZ: Oh man I rewatched that not too long ago and boy people’s idea of what children could handle was different in the ’80s. I was OBSESSED with The Last Unicorn but not only is it wildly dark, the Harpy absolutely has naked boobs if I recall correctly?
DC: SHE DOES, and she loves Doing Topless Murder. An icon.
JZ: Topless Murder is a trait shared by almost all of these monsters. Some of them can’t be said to really have breasts or human torsos but that shouldn’t stop anyone from doing topless murder.
DC: Agreed.
Sphinx power is that instead of a ‘mute’ button on Twitter, I have an ‘eat’ button.
JZ: I’m inclined to say I’d also like Lamia’s ability to pop her eyeballs out of her head, but honestly I don’t know what I’d use that for except as a party trick, and who’s going to parties right now? Oh, another niche one: blood from one side of Medusa’s body had healing properties! But that doesn’t go very well with being bladeproof. Imagine the keen irony of having healing blood but you can’t get at it. Okay so let’s say from the Harpies, nigh-invulnerability, and from the Sphinx, the ability to eat men if they don’t answer your questions properly.
DC: Powerful combo. That is kind of what happens on the internet, but usually it’s women getting eaten. The literal power seems preferable.
JZ: Sphinx power is that instead of a “mute” button on Twitter, I have an “eat” button.
When I started keeping a diary at twelve, it was in English. The daily newspapers we read at home were in Hindi, but to foster a better understanding and faster learning of the language, my father had subscribed to an English business daily as well as an English national daily. In school we were penalized a hefty 5 rupees for every word spoken in Hindi. At age five, I was awarded Best in English by my class teacher. In the subsequent parent-teacher meeting she asked my parents the recipe behind my success in the language, to which my father had replied jokingly, “We talk in English at home.” We didn’t, but it sounded good.
For my family, friends, relatives, and teachers, English was seen as a language of access. It could land you better jobs, remove limitations, and open up avenues. English speakers were high achievers, often conflated with the colonizers who ruled over us for about 200 years. It was ironic that the language of our colonizers was seen as aspirational, something that could lift us out of the discomfort that our parents’ mid-level jobs put us through. In reading all the subjects at school in English, we were made to understand that English was the language of possibilities. My cousins who studied in Hindi schools wouldn’t have all the opportunities that would have been available for me.
Torn between these two worlds, I found accidental love in the language that was imposed upon me.
Torn between these two worlds, I found accidental love in the language that was imposed upon me. From a young age of six or seven I started voluntarily, subconsciously veering towards reading and writing in English. Every April we would get new books for the next class. I would cover them with brown paper, stapling all four corners secure, and then dive into the stories within.
After the end term exams in March, we would get a short ten-day break before starting the new session. During this break we would get to buy new books, notebooks, prepare school uniforms and bags for the new session. By the end of the week before school re-opened, I would have finished reading all the short stories in the English and Hindi coursebooks. An introverted child prone to reading in heaps almost always alone, I would then go on to keep a notebook called the “rough copy” and jot down all the thoughts I had after reading those stories. I chose to write them in English to keep my parents thinking that I was doing something of value, importance and related to school. In fact, subliminally I was drifting further into a self-structured culture of reading in the language of my colonizers.
The year 2020, full of challenges as it was, was also the year I started publishing non-fiction. When I graduated from writing for myself to writing professionally, my chosen language of publication was English. I had worked as a reporter for several national English dailies before, but this writing was for myself alone. It did not come as a surprise to me. Through the last five years I had tried to rebuild my relationship with Hindi. I bought books, read them, albeit very slowly. I sometimes wrote in Hindi, too. When the mood struck, I would type messages in the Devangiri script to friends, family, and especially my mother on WhatsApp. I tried hard to read and re-read Hindi literature writers I had grown up reading, to reignite a spark where there was a long-existing deadness. Despite it all, I kept falling behind. One way or the other, I would lose patience, procrastinate, or simply lose interest and put off reading or writing in Hindi to another day.
Learning English was equivalent to being aspirational, ambitious, and striving.
In April 2020, when my first personal essay was published, I found myself at an impasse. A dilemma confronted me: Why was I writing in English? The more I tried to think about it, the more the answer eluded me. Once again I sat through long afternoons watching interviews of writers in Hindi on YouTube. Understanding the language was not a problem, but I had been brought up to think of Hindi as an obsolete tool. A knowledge of Hindi language alone did not ensure a great career. Drab government jobs, teaching opportunities in the heartland, and a clutch of other such limited avenues would be available to people who did not know the English language. Learning it was equivalent to being aspirational, ambitious, and striving. As kids, my brother and I were often produced before relatives and family friends to recite a poem in English, or just reel off a passage from Shakespeare. Back then, it was a marker of respect, class and being upwardly mobile. But personally, English meant a remove from my daily life, a place wherein I could hide and be by myself reading, writing, existing.
And English had its own talismans. In standard five my English teacher Priyanka Gulati told us, a class full of about 47 children, that any student’s best friend is a dictionary. She made this remark specifically to English, making me think about the language in another new way. While we did have a Hindi to English dictionary at home, getting an English to English one piqued my interest. It opened up my vocabulary, loaning me more time and showing me ways in which the language could be used. This was more than fifteen years ago, and I remember those words crystalize in the inner recesses of my mind. Since then, till about five years ago, I would buy a small English dictionary every now and then, keeping it in the pocket of my clothes, or in the small sling bag I always carried. A pencil, a dictionary, a notebook—these have forever since kept me company through my three big career moves across seven cities in two countries.
Whenever I sat with an English storybook, or an English language newspaper in hand, reading it, that paraphernalia—pencil, notebook, dictionary—was my little fort of protection. The language opened vistas for me that were inviting. They were happier, lighter places of joy, winters, snowfalls and Daffodils. Short stories by Kathrine Mansfield, Anton Chekov, Leo Tolstoy and Guy De Maupassant in English, became a portal to a new, richer place I was not content being a mere visitor to. Bengali writer Rabindranath Tagore’s short story The Postmaster was inviting to me because the details in English language kept me hinged. It was a thrill to discover that a place in India could be written about in a foreign language (English) in a way that would become accessible to me. Similarly, I felt a pull each time I read something in English, realizing that my experiences in Hindi could be translated and written in English for someone, anyone to read.
I was raised speaking French, and did not begin learning English until I was nearly 7 years old. Even after that, French continued to be the language I spoke at home with my parents. (I still speak only French with them to this day.) This fact inevitably affects my recall and evocation of my childhood, since I am writing and primarily thinking in English. There are states of mind, even people and events, that seem inaccessible in English, since they are defined by the character of the language through which I perceived them. My second language has turned out to be my principal tool, my means for making a living, and it lies close to the core of my self-definition. My first language, however, is coiled underneath, governing a more primal realm.
This passage from Luc Sante’s essay Living in Tongues correctly captures the crux of my relationship with English and Hindi. With liberalization, modernity, and technology making their way into our lives after 1991 (the year of national economic reforms, and also the year when I was born), the Hindi that I was so closely attached to also underwent a change. English so densely permeated the air outside our houses that we didn’t even realize when it started drifting inwards. With liberalization, privatization and globalization, as a nation we were moving forward, using English as our crutch to get ahead. In the years that followed, English started assuming a bigger role in the lives of all of us middle- and upper-middle class Indians. From being a luxury, it was moving towards a necessity. My mother’s office graduated from the use of typewriters to computers. This meant she shifted to using English has her modus operandi in office, coming home with books on the Gandhi family written in English. In this way, Hindi began fading farther back into my life as the lingua franca of my daily life with parents, relatives and close friends. A link to my own history, Hindi became the cotton pyjamas I wore at home, while English would be my uniform for school time.
Born to an erstwhile British colony, I have come to understand that heritage comes with burden of maintenance.
In 2021, while my speaking and thinking still continues to be dominated by English, I dream in a no-language grammar or in the Hindi of my childhood. When interacting with our house help or the vegetable vendor, I flit to the Hindi of my hometown. In this I get a peek at the myriad ways in which language dominates and controls how I navigate through life. Among the several parallels between life in my hometown, Kanpur, and Delhi (250 miles away) where I work, the omnipresence of Hindi is one of the most significant. In the years before, I noticed the small ways in which English took over my life; now I notice Hindi overlapping and projecting itself, almost as if asserting its tiny presence over the larger-than-life façade that English casts over us. While talking to my boyfriend, at times, I slip unknowingly into Hindi. This is new—it didn’t used to happen in mid-2018 when we started going out—and it makes him uncomfortable, because his first language is Bengali. I make him understand then that as I am growing older in Delhi, so close to home, my English is beginning to gather a thin patina of Hindi.
Born to an erstwhile British colony, I have come to understand that heritage comes with burden of maintenance. And it has certainly not been easy for India to chart its own path after independence. Some of the more enduring legacies of the British Raj continue to form a big part of our identity and symbolize much of what is right and wrong with it. The English language tops the list. India’s 2011 Census showed English as the primary language of 256,000 people, the second language of 83 million people, and the third language of another 46 million. This makes it the second-most widely spoken language after Hindi.
In my 30 years of life in India, I have traversed the long route of understanding and learning English as the ticket to a better life to now dealing with the language English in a routine, almost mundane way. When I went to school, my parents wanted me to learn the language so as to secure a better career. Now, English has become the language across all kinds of workplaces. Across these diverse workplaces, it is a unifying language, but the way in which it is employed and spoken differs vastly.
Each morning, when I buy vegetables from the vendor outside my house, we talk in Hindi, but we always sign off the transaction in English. I say a thank you and almost always, if he’s not in a crushing hurry, Raju replies with a simple, “You’re welcome, didi.” The recent Census confirmed that English in India is no longer a foreign language, and I see this in my life as well. The colonial language has also become a unifying medium of conversation.
But it still carries colonial legacies. Since I arrived at the language from school and in the spoken way, I tend to use long, complicated words for seemingly mundane things, words that no native English language speaker would use. When I get a word wrong in its meaning or usage there is an instant pang of shame, that is unlikely to be found in any native speaker. A lot of Indian writing in English still continues to be in a “flowery” version of the language that makes for difficult reading. Friends have found it tough to read some of my earlier writing without referring to a dictionary. I now realize that these are colonial burdens, shames that we have carried forward without realizing their nature and gravity.
The fact that English is my colonizers’ language makes me queasy. It was an unintended gift, acquired at the cost of a lot of lives.
The fact that English is my colonizers’ language makes me queasy. It was an unintended gift, acquired at the cost of a lot of lives, money, and years of suppression. Shashi Tharoor, Member of Parliament, Lok Sabha, in his book Inglorious Empire writes, “That Indians seized the English language and turned it into an instrument for our own liberation was to their credit, not by British design.” The English language in India has now moved on from being just a language to a way of life, a common ground. But it’s important to remember that it was initially employed as a tool to rule, divide and suppress us. These were the words of Lord Thomas Babington Macaulay when he wanted to introduce the language in India: “We must do our best to form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern; a class of persons Indians in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinion, in morals, and in intellect.”
Writers like Sante and Vladimir Nabokov, who also learned English as a second language as a child, have a control that is superior to that of most native speakers. They write fluidly, with grace, pulling the reader intuitively into their worlds. While I am yet to let go the pedantic ways in which I use the English language, I also continue to read and mend my relationship with Hindi. While I am acutely attuned to the ways in while English defines the colorisms of my daily experience of life as it is lived, I also look at being once again a fluent reader and writer of Hindi.
Luc Sante in his essay Lingua Franca writes, “In order to write of my childhood I have to translate. It is as if I were writing about someone else. As a boy, I lived in French; now, I live in English. The words don’t fit, because languages are not equivalent to one another.” This mirrors much of my life as a kid, so much of which was lived in Hindi. Now, at 30, as I continue to find my place in the writing world, I believe I could live in either of the languages—Hindi or English—but I choose English. It’s a burden, carrying the heavy weight of a colonial legacy forward, but in doing so, I have also found a struggle and language unique to me. Sometimes it does occur to me that I might not have an authority over either of the languages, but like Sante, it also lends me an advantage of mobility. In drifting between them, I could be anywhere or nowhere at all.
Walking into a frozen yogurt shop is akin to arriving in a land of possibility. Rows of gleaming machines hum with a veritable buffet of flavor. The toppings bar is all texture and color and heat. But for Rachel, the protagonist of Melissa Broder’s Milk Fed, her wildest fantasies are only imagined: “red velvet yogurt dripping in caramel, freckled with slivers of Snickers,” and “a dulce de leche yogurt in marshmallow sauce.” Day after day, she returns to Yo!Good for the same plain serving of yogurt, ensuring that the Orthodox boy behind the counter doesn’t fill her cup beyond the lip. She finds meaning in the withholding of pleasure; the only thing she consumes with abandon is the illusion of control.
Rachel’s kingdom of calorie counts and arduous gym sessions begins to crumble when she meets Miriam, a zaftig young woman who takes over for her brother at Yo!Good and fills Rachel’s cup beyond measure. Once Rachel gets a taste of pleasure, she wants more. She not only starts to crave the ice-cold Scorpion Bowls and abundant pu pu platters that she eats with Miriam at the Golden Dragon, but she hungers for validation from her estranged mother. Good sex. Fulfillment. As Rachel begins to undo the myths about thinness instilled in her from a young age, she is forced to reckon with who she is and come clean about what she really desires.
Broder, who has authored hits like The Pisces, So Sad Today, and Last Sext, brings her characteristic humor and whip-smart cultural commentary to her latest novel in order to explore rich intersections between food, sex, and religion. As Pickles, her dog, fought off one of his archnemeses (a leaf blower), Broder and I talked by phone about what it means to be devoted to control, unmaking harmful myths, and the weirdness of living in a human body.
Jacqueline Alnes: Milk Fed was the kind of book that I couldn’t look away from but also didn’t want to look at all the way because it felt too real. Because of the diet-obsessed culture we live in, I’m sure a lot of people, like me, see themselves in Rachel who vacillates between eating nothing and binging. She is always calorie counting.
Melissa Broder: I say that my oldest relationship is my challenging relationship with food and my body. It wasn’t something I had to go research on Wikipedia or interview anyone. I had all of the resources within me to write this book.
JA: You have said that eating disorders are a “monotheistic religion” which I find to be so compelling. Rachel, who is a lapsed Jew, views food––and her perceived control over it–– as salvation, while Miriam finds pleasure in consumption. What intersections between Judaism and food or observations about the idea of religion in general came to light while you were writing this book?
MB: My own relationship to the Jewish religion is inextricably connected to food. It’s a very tuna-salady religion. That’s number one. Number two: I remember reading my dad’s copy of Goodbye, Columbus when I was young and reading about Neil Klugman’s diagnosis of his Aunt Gladys as a mayonnaise-salad kind of Jew, sort of like an OG Newark versus Brenda Patimkin as a clean, fresh-fruit eating, nose-job sporting goods Jew. Never in my eleven-year-old life had I felt something to be so true on a bones-level.
In the same way that we use a religion to help us make sense of the world and to also compartmentalize existential anxiety, so too does an eating disorder, at least in my own experience. There is a comfort in the reductive. It is a reason people love religion. The human mind wants to simplify and I think that an “answer” is more comfortable to us, even if it’s not the truth. An answer that we can perceive as the truth, like an eating disorder, like certain myths we are raised on––I do think parents are our first gods––there’s something soothing about that, even in its pain. There’s a sort of devotion; you have to be an orthodox disordered eater to really fulfill all the commandments.
JA: The rules are so familiar to me. I was reading a study about how during this pandemic more people have returned to eating disorders, and I think it’s partly because we cannot control so much right now that food becomes this magic system. In an eating disorder, you believe you have control: there are results, and it’s kind of comforting.
We use religion and eating disorders in the same way to help us make sense of the world and to also compartmentalize existential anxiety.
MB: 100%. It’s a way to make order out of the chaos. It may only be an illusion of control, but so is religion. It works until it doesn’t. And I think that’s the problem. My relationship with eating disorders is ultimately different than with a god of my choosing because god is the only thing I can have infinite quantities of. God is the infinite frozen yogurt, the religion is not. God, whatever that is to me on a given day, is the ultimate buffet. But how do you remember that the buffet is even in there?
JA: There is less instant gratification there.
MB: It’s a lot slower than food. It’s nebulous. You can’t see it, can’t taste it, can’t buy it, can’t put it in your pocket. Who is going to turn to that nebulous buffet when there are so many things easier than that? We make gods out of so many other things: eating disorders, validation, shopping. I mean, I find new ones every day.
JA: I’m kind of obsessed with the idea of religion and food in the way that conceptions of women’s purity are tied up in food or tied up with sex. If you abstain from either, we have these harmful myths that tell us we are cleaner, better, people.
MB: Yes.
JA: Rachel’s mother instills those ideas in her, and the mothers are so important in this book. Why the mother instead of the father?
MB: Probably because I don’t have daddy issues. We write our obsessions, so what can I tell you.
We make gods out of so many other things: eating disorders, validation, shopping. I mean, I find new ones every day.
Our parents are our first gods and I think particularly the mother creates a lot of the liturgy, so to speak, about how much pleasure we are entitled to and how whether it has to be earned or our birthright for existing. I wanted to explore the way that all these appetites––our actual hunger, spiritual hunger, desire, familial yearning––are all interconnected. You can’t separate them. For Rachel, I mean Rachel has performed sexuality during her eating disorder. I’m going to go so far as to say, even though this isn’t in the book, that Rachel is a woman who has mimicked things she has seen on porn. She has performed pleasure but she has not allowed herself to experience pleasure with another human being because that’s a loss of control. That’s parallel to her experience with food.
JA: The idea of control is so prevalent in this book. It pops up at the gym, with food, during sex, with her mother, at therapy; it’s so pervasive. I was interested in that tension between comfort and control. Comfort means this loosening of boundaries in regard to food and sex––it allows for lust––while control means relying on a denial of pleasure. Have food, sex, and longing always been a holy trinity of sorts?
MB: If my longest relationship has been between food and my body, then my second longest relationship is with longing and desire. They have gone hand in hand. Again, the performance of desire and pleasure and what we are supposed to look like is very synonymous and wrapped up in what I as a woman believed was the truth about what I was supposed to look like. How, if you’re not allowing yourself to feel your hunger, are you supposed to feel other things? It’s not like all the other things are going to make their way through. How are you going to feel pleasure or lust?
I’m not a huge fan of feelings. I’m scared of negative feelings. But then, once I have one, it’s not that bad. I think that the problem with cutting off the negative feelings is that you don’t get to experience the heights of joy that are their antithesis. It’s similar: if you’re numbing your feelings of hunger because it is a danger to you, how are you then going to be able to feel your sexual desire? It’s another feeling of equal intensity. When we cut off one sensation or one appetite, we are also cutting off others.
JA: What was interesting while reading is that Miriam and Rachel are almost foils to each other in the beginning. They seem so oppositional, but in reading, you start to realize that they are both harmed by these myths that have kept them where they are.
MB: Absolutely. At first, to Rachel and the reader––and me––it seems like Miriam is so free while Rachel is not. As we progress, we begin to wonder: who among us is totally free? No one. Miriam may be free in some ways that Rachel is not, but she would have to be a mythological creature in order to be completely free from all ties. There’s a sort of self-love industrial complex we all are sold where it’s like, “Buy the ticket and you shall arrive!” Self-love becomes a product and a destination.
God is the infinite frozen yogurt, the religion is not. God is the ultimate buffet. But how do you remember that the buffet is even in there?
In my experience of recovery, it’s quite the opposite. Every day, self-love takes a slightly different recipe and there is not an arrival. Instead, it’s more a question of how you live with it and how you do things to make yourself okay. We decide how much we are willing to sacrifice, especially when we are giving up messages that have been imparted to us as the truth by our families. Even if the messages are wrong, there is love there. It makes it so hard to give up. You don’t dismantle it like it’s a game of Operation; it’s very gooey and sticky.
JA: And untangling those beliefs is an untangling of the self. Once you do, it’s like, who am I now? What am I without these things?
MB: Right. It’s like when people leave a church. Who am I without my eating disorder? I’ve just been numbers for a really long time.
There are things that we begin to question as we grow up, like we understand that some things we were taught as truth are just opinions, but then I start to wonder: how much of how we view the world is still based on “truths” that were instilled in us at a young age? I enjoyed exploring the notion of certitude in Milk Fed. Right now, certitude is very trendy: moral certitude, political certitude. But what about when two groups are certain of opposite things? Can they both be true? Maybe. Or when we hold opposite beliefs within ourselves, what do we do then?
JA: The discomfort that you have to get comfortable with means that it’s hard to get away from the black and white myths we make for ourselves. It’s easier to navigate the world when you are sure of something.
If you’re not allowing yourself to feel your hunger, how are you supposed to feel other things? How are you going to be able to feel your sexual desire?
MB: You’re right. I think that’s why we latch onto certitudes and eating disorders and religion. It is painful to not know. We feel weird in uncertainty.
JA: I love that this book is set in L.A. because we’re sold this idea that we are our best selves, as you write, when we’re drinking “Moon Juice and using organic lip tint.” What was it like writing a book set in such an aesthetic-obsessed place?
MB: Here’s the thing. We all live in bodies, so we take these issues with us wherever we go. The challenges of living in a body can come up any place. However, I will say that on an archetypal level, L.A. was an awesome place to set this. It’s a little extra focused on the external, so that dichotomy can be more pronounced. The performative versus the felt.
JA: That’s a perfect way of putting it. Alexandra Kleeman wrote about the fluidity of humans versus the norms we are supposed to adhere to and the tension between control versus wildness in your book. What prompted you to explore the line between these things?
MB: I feel like that’s the struggle of my existence. The experience of being a soul in a body who didn’t ask to be here—I don’t remember asking to be here in this incarnation—that’s a challenge to begin with. The body feels finite and the body is finite. You’re born and you’re like, “Thanks for the gift of death!” But then, to pile all of these other expectations on a body, it’s quite an undertaking being a human. For me, it’s all very natural to write into these dichotomies. That tension is the itch that drives me to make something. It’s very itchy.
There’s a sentence in my novel The Girls Are All So Nice Here that has remained largely unchanged from first draft to final copy: “It would be years before I realized that girls weren’t supposed to own their ambition, just lease it from time to time when it didn’t offend anyone else.”
When I wrote this line, I knew I had unearthed a major source of my main character Ambrosia’s anger: not toward anyone in particular but toward a society that asks her to have a certain attitude about her goals and achievements. She feels the need to act modest, humble, and surprised when successes happen to her, even when this is much too passive: she has worked hard to make things happen. Amb has been raised, like many of us, with the old adage: good things happen to good people. But while this sentiment is well-meaning, it fails to encompass the unspoken double standard, which is that women are expected to be good at the expense of their own desires.
The events that unfold in The Girls Are All So Nice Here are rooted in Amb wanting more than what she perceives that the world is willing to give her. When her desires mutate past the cookie-cutter shape of societal expectation, her envy takes a deadly life of its own. This book, unsurprisingly given its title, is laser-focused on girls and the labels we inherit, the assumption that we will be palatable and grateful and above all, nice. Amb comes to resent nice so much that she goes in the altogether opposite direction, to horrific consequences.
I have long been fascinated by the burden of expectations placed on women—particularly, how those constraints can be responsible for what happens when we attempt to cast them off— and I tend to gravitate toward stories that put this dynamic at the forefront. These books are ones wherein the woman at the helm wants something very different than what everyone else expects from her, and in that dichotomy, the dark underbelly of expectation is revealed.
Ani FaNelli lives a perfect life on the surface—a glamorous job, handsome fiancé, and lavish wedding to plan. But she has built this life on top of a very dark past. As much as she has reinvented herself, cleaving her way to her dream life with ambition and willpower, the teenage girl she used to be still lurks under the glossy facade. She feels like she should be grateful for what she has, but the pull to her past is about to resurface. As the title implies, Ani is expected to feel lucky, but the truth is so much more complicated.
Violet has long existed in the shadow of her charismatic best friend Stella, and she’s expected to feel grateful for Stella’s attention and content to fulfill her role as the hardworking, steadfast friend to Stella’s endless drama and intrigue. But when the career Violet worked hard for is threatened—by Stella herself— she discovers that she’s capable of darker deeds than she ever expected.
Louise is as plain as Lavinia is dynamic—or so we think. As their friendship plays out, Louise is the less glamorous, less interesting one, a role she plays eagerly at first as the price to pay for entering Lavinia’s orbit, until she gets a taste of what Lavinia’s life is really like—and wants more for herself. A glittering, searingly written exploration of the expectations within a friendship.
This piercingly sharp story focuses on women at two different stages of life: Katherine, in her early 40s, is a magazine editor, and Lily, in her early 20s, is an intern. Katherine is drawn to Lily at the same time as she calls her a “snowflake,” an entitled millennial. The twisted events that ensue speak not only to competition between coworkers, but how women are saddled with generational expectations and stereotypes depending on our ages.
The titular protagonist, Queenie Jenkins, is a 25-year-old Jamaican British woman living in London and working at a newspaper. After a breakup with her white boyfriend, Queenie is sent into a tailspin of bad decisions and questions her place in the world. She faces pressure to compare herself to her white peers and finds temporary solace in men who aren’t right for her, leaving her sense of self-worth even more precarious. Her attempts to figure out exactly who she is on her own terms are raw and authentic to read.
What I was immediately drawn to in Baker’s stunning debut is the use of a Greek chorus of women addressing the reader as “we,” a voice that made me feel seen and heard as a woman by airing the grievances many of us have felt at times in our lives. This story centers on the mysterious death of a male CEO and the four women who may or may not have been involved, and dives deep into toxic workplace culture and the many injustices women are expected to put up with to be part of workplace culture. The women in Whisper Network are expected to smile, put up with harassment, and never let emotions get in the way of their jobs—and at what cost?
In Reid’s astute, incisive debut, Emira is a Black babysitter to a wealthy white family. While watching the family’s young daughter at a local market, a racially charged incident occurs, which is captured on camera. Emira wants to move on with her life, but her employer, Alix, fixates on the event and attempts to ingratiate herself deeper and deeper into Emira’s life. Emira faces expectations from not only Alix but also Kelley, the boy she’s dating (who happens to be the one who took the video), her friends, and her employers. The intersection of other people’s demands and Emira’s own wants comes to a head in such a satisfying way.
Alice Lange is the popular golden girl who every parent loves, so when she goes missing, her idyllic neighborhood is left fractured. Everyone fixates on what happened to Alice—where she went, and how the signs that she was receding into a darker world might have been there for much longer than anyone suspected. This haunting story investigates the cult of suburbia, and how this can provide an expectation in and of itself: that a girl from a good family in a good neighborhood should turn out a certain way, and what happens when she wants something other than what everyone else wants for her.
This bold, unapologetic novel, releasing in May, has already garnered big buzz, for good reason. Sophie has recently abandoned her Chicago career for a slower-paced lifestyle in small-town Texas with her husband and son, a lifestyle within which she’s expected to be satisfied and fulfilled. But Sophie finds herself bored quickly, and her fixation with a beautiful, charismatic socialite fills the void. She joins up with the Hunting Wives, but this is no clique of suburban moms: these women play games, some with devastating consequences. What I loved was the upending of the “old boys’ club” stereotype. These women have big sexual appetites and aren’t constrained within any sort of framework.
Bad things happen when you don’t invite the right people to your parties, my mom said. I explained why I didn’t want Alice at my baby shower: She sucked the life out of everything she touched.
I didn’t mail her invitation. I burned it at the kitchen sink at midnight. The gold lettering flared and hot metallic air blasted up my nose. I dropped the invitation in the sink, where the flames went out in a puddle of stinking spaghetti sauce, and spent the next hour googling whether breathing gold fumes was bad for the baby.
And yet: There she was, gliding down the path, all lipstick and neat white teeth, trailing her signature frilly pink entrails. I was halfway through tying balloons onto the lamp outside the door of my mom’s house. I backed into the doorway and stood there filling it. If there was one thing I could do, it was take up space.
“Jessa, darling, you look gorgeous! You’re as big as a house,” she said.
“What are you doing here?”
“Don’t be silly. It’s your baby shower! I’m here to celebrate you!” She shook out the ropes of shining organs and viscera that dangled from her pale neck. Only Alice could make entrails look like a party dress.
“Would it have killed you to come with a body?”
Her eyes glinted. “Maybe if you’d invited me properly I would have.” She floated closer and all the hairs on my arms pricked up. I crossed my arms over my stomach.
“Oh, relax, Jessa,” she said. “So much negative energy.” She slid past me into the party and left me on the front porch. My nostrils burned with her perfume.
I could have just walked down the steps, down the street, around the corner, and into the 7-Eleven. They had a table outside, a white plastic chair. Sometimes I liked to close my eyes, whatever I was doing, and think about how I could be sitting in that chair drinking a Blue Shock Mountain Dew Slurpee. For just a dollar ninety-nine, I could be doing that instead.
Alice’s voice tinkled through the open door. She was telling the story again to all my mother’s friends. How she went on a wellness retreat in West Palm Springs and came home with the ability to lift her insides right out of her body.
“It was completely life-changing,” Alice said. “Away from everything like that, you can really get in touch with your true self.” She hovered next to my mom’s chair. Her hair was perfectly coiled. Below her neck a cloud of delicate veins and organs drifted, not quite touching the floor.
I had a resolution: Once I had a baby, I would be a better grownup, the kind that didn’t care what Alice did with her life. So I went back to the party.
“If only Jessa could do one of those,” said my mom’s best friend Gladys. “It expands your horizons.”
“Jessa’s always been a homebody,” said my mom. “Oh, Jessa! There you are.” She pinned a ribbon on my chest that said “Mom-to-be” and whispered in my ear: “You’re neglecting your guests.” She steered me around to all of her friends, so that each of them in turn could congratulate me and touch my stomach. Through it all Alice floated nearby, chatting away in her mosquito voice.
Pat pat pat. “Carrying high! Must be a boy.”
(“Of course I wish she could have come! Well, she’s doing something much more important right now, isn’t she?”)
Pat pat pat. “My dear, you look exhausted! Must be a girl. Jealous little things, they steal all your beauty.”
(“Oh, you’re so sweet. I certainly didn’t master it right away. It took weeks of self-reflection.”)
Pat pat pat. “Only seven months along! It can’t be! Are you sure it isn’t twins?”
(“Diet, too. Eliminating toxins. Nothing processed or artificial.”)
Pat pat pat. “Are you getting any sleep, Jessa? Get it while you can! You won’t be sleeping at all once the baby comes!”
(“People feel so entitled to women’s bodies, you know? It’s so liberating to leave all that behind and force people to see you, really see you, right down to the guts!”)
I turned around and came face-to-face with Alice, who was hovering by the cheese plate.
“That looks delicious,” said Alice.
“It’s processed.”
“So dramatic, Jessa. One bite won’t hurt me.”
“Take some, then.”
“With these?” She waved her intestines at me. “It would be awfully rude.”
“You could have come to the party with hands.”
“You don’t know what it’s like. I can hardly bear to walk around inside my body now. I feel so objectified.”
“What’s wrong, dear?” said Gladys from across the dining room.
“Oh, I’m just wishing I could have some of this cheese plate.”
“Don’t be silly! Jessa, pass her some cheese.”
Alice turned to me with a faint smile and opened her mouth.
“I can’t,” I said.
“What are you afraid of, Jessa?” said Alice. Her voice was loud, and other conversations around the room paused. Everyone was watching us.
I speared a piece of cheese on a toothpick and held it to her lips. She opened her mouth and took it between her teeth, chewed, swallowed. The lump worked its way down the thick red cord of her esophagus and landed with a plop in her stomach.
“Won’t you have some?” said Alice. “You’re eating for two.”
I swallowed down vomit. “Heartburn,” I said.
“Let’s open gifts,” said my mom. She arranged me in an armchair with the pile of pink packages and bags. What I really needed was cash, but my mom said it was gauche to ask for it, so instead my plan was to unwrap them, pretend to love them, and keep the receipts.
I was almost through the pile when Alice floated towards me with something wrapped in her intestines.
“You haven’t opened mine yet,” she said. Barely visible in the nest of wriggling entrails was a tiny gold box.
“No,” I said.
“Don’t be rude, Jessa. Take the gift,” said my mom.
“No.”
Alice began to cry. “Why did you even invite me if you hate me so much?”
“I didn’t invite you. I don’t want you here!”
“Jessa!” said my mother.
Alice cried harder.
“Take the gift, Jessa.” said Gladys. “Look what you’ve done.”
“No.”
Gladys grabbed my hand and shoved it into Alice’s entrails. I felt acid burn my fingers, then nothing. I was out of my body, looking down on the top of my head from somewhere near the kitchen ceiling. My body took out Alice’s gift and opened it. Inside was a gift certificate. Gold lettering.
“It’s the same place I went!” said Alice. “You’ll have to wait until after the birth, of course. But it will be the perfect way to get your body back.”
I tried to imagine myself somewhere else, in a plastic chair. But I couldn’t get away from the tug of my body, sitting in my mom’s house, covered in bits of pink tissue paper. My mom cleared her throat. My body smiled and said thank you, she loved all the gifts.
“That house has become a mausoleum,” Idris Nasr tells his daughter, Ava, as he breaks the news that he is selling the family’s ancestral home in Beirut. In Ava’s mind, the house comes to life through memory: she feels the swampy summer heat and visualizes walls speckled with the blood of mosquitos. But Idris sees it differently. “The life has been taken out of it,” he says.
Home is a tenuous concept in Hala Alyan’s second novel, The Arsonist’s City, a sweeping family saga that examines the insidious long shadow of war. The Nasr family—made up of a Lebanese father, Syrian mother, and three American children—live in far-flung places: Austin, Brooklyn, Beirut, and Blythe, a small town in California. However distant they are from one another, and however far they might be from Beirut, they cannot escape the histories of violence that have left their family reckoning with intergenerational trauma. When they return to Beirut to mark the sale of their family home, long-held secrets and difficult memories begin to unravel, and political tensions in Lebanon escalate into thawra (revolution).
An award-winning Palestian American poet, clinical psychologist, and writer, Hala Alyan brings her talents to examine the ongoing crisis of Palestinian displacement in The Arsonist’s City through deeply imagined characters, place-based descriptions that teem with life, and attention to conflicts from past to present day. Over Zoom, we talked about how Alyan’s work as a clinical psychologist serves her fiction, the idea of home, the intimacy that secrets can offer, and the effects of intergenerational trauma.
Jacqueline Alnes: There is a line early in the novel, “They’d hurt that young man for no reason other than that people were hurting people.” One of the most poignant parts of this book for me is the ways you so deftly capture both the immediate impact of violence as well as the way that trauma radiates outward, oftentimes for generations. What draws you to write about all these different wounds?
Hala Alyan: The ways in which sociopolitical turmoil, occupation, and war trauma have spidered their way through my family’s history is something that I definitely keep gravitating back towards. It is a story that I feel the reverberations of on a daily basis, even as someone who is so privileged and so sheltered. I’m in Brooklyn now, I’m in a safe place, and my family is safe––thank God––but there are ways in which I see traumatic histories play out in myself, my family, and my community, in the anxieties that people have, in the ways that people are waiting for the other shoe to drop, in the ways that there is a deep mistrust of history, of certain institutions, of certain countries, of certain parts of the world. There’s a defeatedness in a lot of people I know around certain countries in my home region who wonder: Will those places ever be revived? Will they ever be actual options of places to live?
It’s also something I see a lot in clinical work. As a therapist, I work a lot with immigrants, children of immigrants, and folks that have been displaced. A generation later, you see how traumatic histories have trickled down to the folks that never lived in a war-torn zone or have never actually directly interacted with their parents’ house or their grandparents’ house. You see how that intergenerational trauma can touch even the most sheltered, comfortable, suburban kid. If a part of the world has been occupied or colonized, you never fully shed yourself from those shackles. You have the shadow of that for many generations.
JA: Having a safe place to live is a theme that resonates so powerfully throughout the book. Something that I kept thinking about is that homes are often viewed as concrete or permanent in some way, but in the book, some of them are the last vestiges of a wealth that no longer exists. Or, they’re structures that are beautiful and laden with generations of money, but they are located in precarious spaces.
HA: They aren’t safe. That’s something I think about a lot. You can have these ancestral homes that are gorgeous and so meaningful and such a part of your lineage, but if they are in a place where you can’t safely live or visit, then what are they but walls and plaster?
JA: When you mention working with people in the suburbs who still carry intergenerational trauma, I found it interesting that in the book we visit such a sprawl of places: Austin, Brooklyn, Beirut, and a small town in California, Blythe. How do you approach writing about place and home?
HA: I constantly lament the fact that there isn’t enough life for any of us to spend our youth in like ten different places. I am someone, for example, who always felt like I was supposed to live in Boston. I’m very attached to the idea, and I don’t know why. Same thing with Santa Fe and Tucson; I feel like I’m supposed to be in the Southwest. I’m someone who thinks a lot about factored timelines and the way that if you took this turn and you ended up in this place, you’d live an entirely different life. Not only would you have a different history, but your children would have a different history. Place colors the texture and the fabric of everyday life and zooming out also changes the entire trajectory of what happens to you: the opportunities you have, the people you fall in love with, where you go to school, etc.
This book feels to me like a love letter to Beirut.
JA: The novel alternates between present day and the 1960’s through the 1980’s. What drew you to those time periods?
If a part of the world has been occupied or colonized, you never fully shed yourself from those shackles. You have the shadow of that for many generations.
HA: I knew I wanted it to end in present day and I knew I wanted it to span the civil war, so in some ways, those became logistical markers; if I had a character coming of age as the civil war is happening, I would have to adjust the years accordingly. You see this in writers who write about things close to home, I’m fascinated with my parents’ generation. I’m interested in folks who moved to the States in the ‘70s and ‘80s. My parents didn’t move until ‘91, but people who moved during that era fascinate me. It was a time when there was still a high demand on assimilation. You got rid of your accent, taught your kid English; those were values that were being prioritized and communicated to immigrants and people seeking asylum. It’s interesting to really get inside the families that had that pressure. If they had moved to Chicago or New York City, it would have been a different story. But in a small town, the pressure to assimilate is higher.
JA: I felt like the present was a place in the novel where you could lean into queerness.
HA: Naj was one of the first characters I wrote and it was interesting to think about these different tension points of a queer character who is living very authentically to herself, but is in a position where telling her family doesn’t feel like it’s feasible. Playing with that tension also was important for me because there is this narrative––and it’s mostly a Western narrative–—that coming out is the graduation of queerness, that the end goal or destination of being queer is to come out, and I don’t think that’s something that resonates with people in different cultural backgrounds.
There are certainly people who are Muslim and Arab who want to ultimately come out, but imposing that narrative on people gets dicey. Writing a character who does live in this borderland space––and in a lot of ways is fulfilled in it––was really interesting.
JA: The book opens with Zakaria, who lives in the refugee camps outside of Beirut, and an epigraph from Svetlana Boym: “the main feature of exile is a double conscience…a constant bifurcation.” You have written about the Palestinian diaspora in your previous work. What aspects of this ongoing crisis did this book in particular allow you to explore?
HA: In some ways, Palestine is the shadow of the book; Palestine trails story. It’s in many ways the most central plot and one of the most central characters, but the book doesn’t center straightforwardly Palestinian characters or take place in Palestine. I was called upon to research these other countries and conflicts in the rest of the region. I have put a lot of attention on Palestine, and I always will, but writing this book enabled me to learn more about the Lebanese Civil War. I lived in Lebanon for a long time, I’ve taken all the classes, I read all the books, but there is still so much that is incredibly nuanced. The version of history you get depends upon the person who is telling it. Because it was a conflict so marked by sectarianism, many people, even now, will tell different stories of who started the civil war. It enabled me to research that more, to speak with people from different groups, and it also enabled me to think about that region as a gestalt.
These borders are arbitrary. The land kisses each other, these places are close to each other, and what happens in one happens in the others. What happens in Palestine spills over to Lebanon, spills over to Syria. What happens to Syria––I mean, we just saw this in the last decade. Their fates feel inexorably linked. This book allowed me to dig deeper into the history of the region as a whole and just to think more about this relationship between sister countries that have this reciprocal, sometimes mutually symbiotic, and at times a really divided dynamic. It let me dig into it in a way I hadn’t before.
JA: Why was it important to you to write this book now?
HA: When I finished writing this book, the revolution in Lebanon had not begun. The publication date got pushed back, which enabled me to go back and write things in. It was tricky. There was the inflation, the hunger, the poverty that people are experiencing, and I kept needing just one more paragraph; I felt an intense responsibility to capture what was happening in Lebanon. The publishers were very accommodating and generous, but they reminded me that at some point the story has to end; you’re not going to know what happens next.
JA: That’s so interesting. In fiction, I feel like there are varying degrees to which you have to be married to “truth,” however we want to define that. How much of an allegiance did you feel toward representing the world accurately in this book, even though it’s a novel?
There’s a defeatedness in a lot of people I know in my home region who wonder: Will those places ever be revived? Will they ever be actual options of places to live?
HA: I’ve got to be honest with you: I’ve never had any issues playing fast and loose with things in fiction. But, what happened in Lebanon post-thawra (revolution) starting, was such a different chapter. It set such a different tenor for the country, and set into motion so many unprecedented things, that I knew I had to allude to it. If I didn’t, it would have been really odd to anyone who knows anything about Lebanon.
Normally, I try to get the facts right so I speak with historians, and I do my research, but the past is much easier; the past is static. Writing about something that was dynamically shifting as I was doing edits was a whole different experience.
JA: They vary from being trivial to not, and some are only revealed when a body can no longer physically hold them. What intrigues you about this withholding of information, which, in itself, seems like a kind of an intimacy?
HA: I am fascinated with why we keep secrets and fascinated by how people decide what the truth is. I’m less interested in how people lie to other people than I am in how people lie to themselves. I am interested in how people decide what needs to be hidden and how it’s almost always tied to some narrative or some story they have about what will be accepted or loved. It’s very rarely tied in reality. It’s connected to their own story about what’s okay and what’s not okay. Writing that out is so gratifying to me.
I’m also, particularly with families, fascinated by the ways that the secrets we keep in families trickle down across generations. So the secrets that my great-grandmother might have kept, have impacted me. They have shot out backwards and forwards. They did something with the trust that my great-grandmother had with her mother and how that trickled down to my grandmother and mother. We learn how to hide things from the people we grow up with. We learn how open we are or how guarded we are from our families or caretakers. This idea that something that happened way before you were born can have a direct influence on you and how you move through the world –– what you share and what you don’t –– is such fertile territory to explore.
JA: I was going to ask if that’s why you love writing these rich, intergenerational stories.
You can have these ancestral homes that are so meaningful, but if they are in a place where you can’t safely live or visit, then what are they but walls and plaster?
HA: Totally. I think this is where psychology comes in. Something that happens to you is going to impact like three generations later. It just is. There is the epigenetic passing of trauma, but then also these subtle things that we pass down and inherit. This isn’t exclusive to people you’re genetically linked to; it’s also caretakers. We inherit things emotionally and psychologically from people. The fact that that is something I really believe means that the idea that something can go wrong at some point and then fast forward to see how something plays out means that it requires a family to really explore. You have to have several generations to see how a secret plays out so that’s why I think I end up writing these sweeping, long stories.
JA: I’m sure you are asked this often all the time, but you are a clinical psychologist who specialized in trauma and addiction work while earning your PhD. How does that inform your writing and the stories you’re drawn to?
HA: The training that you have to do in order to be a psychologist has been super useful to me as a writer. When you meet somebody for the first time as a therapist, you are taking a few fragmented, unconnected pieces of a story, and someone’s history, and over the few months or however long, you’re trying to help that person create a cohesive narrative. That’s very similar to writing a story: fiction, nonfiction, whatever. You have pieces of interests, hypotheses, interests of characters, and then you’re trying to create something that’s whole.
That kind of sleuthing feels very similar, as do the questions that you ask yourself when you’re doing therapy that have to do with client motivations: why do people do the things they do? People are constantly doing things that don’t make sense from the outside. Both you and I, in the span of the next two days, are going to do things that seem super irrational to people outside of us. There are such multifaceted, complex reasons for why people do things. To write good characters, you have to ask those questions about what moves somebody and what are a person’s desires and feelings and what they are moving toward.
Nearly a hundred pages arranged in 22 stacks of varying thickness reached from one wall of my apartment to the other. Lorde’s “Hard Feelings / Loveless” played from the bluetooth speaker on my bookshelf. I tried to pinch back tears—mostly of frustration and doubt—and failed.
It was late 2019, and I was finishing up edits on my debut poetry collection, due out from Big Lucks Books the following summer. I had the content: thirty-some poems in varying conditions, some complete or near-final drafts, others mere placeholder pages. I had a subject: love, including the desire, conflict, heartbreak, bitterness, and spectacle that accompany it. I had a name: That Ex, the charged eponym of the book’s speaker. But the manuscript held shape in only two dimensions: length, mass. It didn’t exist in that third dimension that makes a manuscript a book: It had no arc, that yearning of meaning against the gravity of language itself.
It had no arc, that yearning of meaning against the gravity of language itself.
I had ordered the manuscript chronologically by the approximate date of each poem’s completion, and this arrangement reflected nothing but the chaos of those years. These were the poems of my twenties; I had written them over the course of many relationships, crushes, and flings. But I wasn’t interested in writing a memoir-in-verse. (Worse, I knew readers wouldn’t be interested, either.) I shuffled the pages around the hardwood floor like enormous cards in a game of solitaire. I needed to bring order to the disparate experiences that produced these poems, but the possible plays seemed endless.
I tried grouping the poems together by form, but quickly discovered that no form appeared more than twice. This failed experiment offered an unexpected insight, at least: The shifts from monostiches to couplets to zig-zags to lines swimming in open space reflected the experience of the speaker trying out different inherited models for how a woman can navigate her world in the widening wake of a breakup.
I thought I could lean into this by dividing the book more explicitly into two parts, with poems twinned in form mirroring one another’s placements in the opposite half. It was fun to play with point and counterpoint in form—before and after, cause and effect, exterior and interior, conscious and subconscious, public and private—but I ultimately didn’t want to risk the oversimplification of obvious binaries.
I tried approaching the sequence like a scavenger hunt, with a word or phrase in each poem determining which one came next, a playful gesture toward the traditions of the ghazal, pantoum, or villanelle. This was interesting on a poem-to-poem level, but once I stepped back, I saw it as a purely formal exercise: The book still had no arc, no story. What I wanted was an emergent meaning. I wanted to mimic the setup and payoff of an individual poem within the expansive space of a book.
Following themes, I stacked the poems into four piles: crush, love, conflict, and heartbreak. I began to give in to a subtle narrative arc—I did want my little brat of a speaker to come out on the other side of something—but I thought it would be boring to tell the story of a woman who falls in love and gets her heart broken, or who gets her heart broken and then falls in love again. I had to be careful about what I centered as the book’s climactic feeling—and how it would leave the speaker transformed in the denouement.
If poems have always sung to me, then a well-ordered book of poems can feel like a pop album.
Sometimes when I’m stuck on something I’m writing I’ll try translating it into another art form to see if it’ll help me identify a resolution. I’ve reordered the images in a poem by thinking of them as clips in a film montage; I’ve reformatted a poem by imagining it as a building.
Most often I turn to music. So many of my poems begin with a realization: I like the way that sounds. I know I have to follow that first feeling to finish the poem. While this isn’t true for all poets, I’ve found that I can’t successfully access the abstractions available in poetry—metaphor, allusion, etc.—without grounding them in rhythm, harmony, and the play of assonance and consonance—all fundamental elements in music.
And if poems have always sung to me, then a well-ordered book of poems can feel like a pop album. Looking at the pages still spread across the floor, arranged and rearranged unsuccessfully, I thought of the albums from my twenties that I considered expertly ordered—In Colour by Jamie xx, Lemonade by Beyoncé—and I decided to turn—or rather, return—to music. I thought that if I could reflect on how the best albums work, I’d be able to use those same principles to bring structure to That Ex.
The first song of any great album is an invitation. A voice—that we can trust, or that echoes with something of ourselves—piques our curiosity, offers a wager, shows us that something is at stake.
After we’re hooked, the early tracks establish a range in mood, tone, and theme, which surprises and delights us; each one advances the musical and narrative ideas of the album and leaves us eager to discover what the artist will try next. The listener’s experience of this range requires thoughtful transitions: In Colour, for example, segues the end of each song into the beginning of the next, while the stark transitions of Lemonade, in contrast, emphasizes the nonlinear quality of stages of grief.
Also critical: The hits, bangers, and singles are spread out. Albums that fail to do this are top-heavy, clustered, and inevitably forgettable. Artists want the listener to experience tension and release, so they intersperse the album’s standout anthems with longer, mood-establishing pieces and short tracks to slow us down and offer moments of relief: Think of Beyoncé preceding “Freedom (ft. Kendrick Lamar)” with “Forward (ft. James Blake).”
Toward the end, most great albums offer an unexpected complication: a change in tone like Jamie xx’s “I Know There’s Gonna Be (Good Times)” or a narrative surprise like Beyoncé’s “All Night.” In this way, they evade narrative cliché and the boredom of expected resolutions. Then there’s the outro: loose ends are either tied up or left playfully unresolved, and musical ideas from earlier in the album are reintroduced, a roll call of favorites and familiars before the final curtain. And, if we’re lucky, there’s a bonus track—a tonal coda, a narrative epilogue, or a flirtatious gesture in an entirely new direction.
With these principles in mind, I jumped back into the poems. I went through my music library and assigned a song to each poem to match its harmonies, and then, leaving the paper on the floor, I turned to my computer to pick up an effort that had been familiar to me since junior high: I started making a mixtape. (Instead of addressing a crush, I addressed my speaker: from one ex to another.) I arranged the tracks until I arrived at a playlist that felt complete and coherent—and then I returned to the floor of my apartment to reorder the poems accordingly.
Making the playlist took several tries, but none was frustrating; the experience of momentarily stepping out of the poems to look back at them through another form—in this case, music—was fun. Thinking of the book as a mixtape for my readers refreshed and reconnected the project with some of the feelings I had set out, years before, to capture: intimacy, candor, vulnerability, mischief, and play.
A virus outbreak makes us aware of the presence of death in our lives. Or one could say that the threat of a virus makes us aware of the fragility of life in a progressively estranged world. Older virus outbreaks provide information to fuel medical awareness. Scientists are currently researching the similarities between survivors of Ebola and patients with “long Covid” in order to develop treatments to combat the coronavirus. By the same token, reading about the human toll of Ebola can help us understand how our communities can be a driving force on the road to recovery.
“The history of Ebola is punctuated with speculations, questionings, incomplete answers, and a whole lot of theories,” notes a narrator in the novel In the Company of Men (original title: En compagnie des hommes) by Franco-Ivorian writer Véronique Tadjo, translated by Tadjo and John Cullen.
What are the facts? The Ebola virus first emerged in West Africa in 1976 but from March 21, 2014 to June 2016, it had a deadly effect in Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone with 11,323 confirmed deaths. The difference with coronavirus is that Ebola is less contagious but more deadly—the virus has a 50 percent mortality rate. The Ebola virus is transmitted through bodily fluids and can lead to fever, muscle aches, vomiting blood, and death by organ failure.
Tadjo’s first-person narratives reveal a varied ensemble of storytellers who recount their experience: a doctor, a gravedigger, a foreign volunteer, a distant relative of an orphan, a man who loses his fiancée, the Congolese researcher who discovered the virus, and more. But humans are not the only narrators in the novel. The author also writes from the point of view of the sacred Baobab tree who represents nature and serves as the voice of reason; the criticized Bat who spreads his wings to reveal its consciousness and wisdom; and the omnipresent Ebola virus itself. The novel’s layered story highlights the faith and commitment of those who were involved in the management of the epidemic, and the ones who’ve bravely battled the virus.
Relying on African oral tradition, the story unfolds through the wisdom of the ancestral Baobab, the mythical symbol of the bond between nature and mankind. The voice of the Baobab calmly and powerfully leads us through the crisis. The tree shows the link between humanity’s exploitation of nature and the epidemic and warns that if human greed lingers on, nature will give us more viruses, pandemics and disasters. “Humans today think they can do whatever they like,” whispers Baobab.
The multiple angles in Tadjo’s story together form a poignant reflection on the Ebola crisis, which is underlined by the perceptiveness of all characters. Through the polyphonic narrative the author informs us how a viral threat exposes our weaknesses, but also highlights our connection. A crisis gives us space to reconsider how we depend on one another in society, because the death threat discards cultural hierarchy and economic privileges. In the ongoing pandemic this interconnection has become glaringly visible: people in “low-status” jobs are most essential.
The Ebola virus outbreak, as described in Tadjo’s book, unraveled through a chain reaction. The poor and socially disenfranchised were the first affected, and the least likely to have a safety net. The people who were desperate to survive and hunted and ate the Bat, unleashing the virus; they were then condemned to fight the battle against Ebola alone, as if their lives were deemed worthless.
The crisis accelerated through fear and ignorance. One of the narrators Tadjo inhabits states that religion can be an obstacle because some prefer to listen to a priest who full-heartedly believes that Ebola is the incarnation of Evil, which will punish people who have strayed from the word of God. Others are villagers holding on to indispensable rituals of death because they can’t accept the idea that their loved ones will be buried in plastic in a mass grave—after all, memorials are essential to navigate grief where one needs human connection to handle the pain—but fueling hundreds more deaths by gathering for a funeral.
But despite tinges of despair and chaos, solidarity rings through the accounts of all narrators. As a prefect, responsible for the outreach teams in his region, notes: “I’ve understood one thing: scientific reason can’t satisfy every human need. In the fight against Ebola, human beings have always been more important than everything else. They are the agents of their own recovery, their own safety.”
Tadjo captures layered and poetical moments of humanity in her narrative: from the traditional healer who uses ancestral knowledge to bring relief to the sick; to the burial teams who make concessions so families can cloth the diseased and visit the grave from a safe distance; to the Bat who regrets that he let Ebola escape from his body, and reminds us how Man and all living creatures in nature depend on another, despite long-standing divisions. In a broader context, the author reminds us that we have to respect the global ecological system in order to survive. It’s through the deforestation and the disturbance of flora and fauna that the Bat was able to get closer to society and transfer the virus: “the bats seek the company of Men.”
A crisis gives us space to reconsider how we depend on one another in society.
Building on the rich history of African literature, Tadjo mixes historical facts with testimonies. She uses the Ancien combattant, a song from the Congolese singer Zao, African legends inspired by the ethnologist and writer Amadou Hampâté Bâ, biblical quotes (John 20:1–18), and poems from the Cameroonian author Nsah Mala, Congolese poet Gabriel Okoundji, and her own collection of poems (Red Earth/ Latérite).
In the Company of Men shows a beautiful pastiche about the ebb and flow of a health crisis, renewal, a fable on the bond between human and nature. Despite the anonymity of the protagonists, and vagueness of the location, the author humanizes the crisis. Because the unnamed first-person discourse blends into layered polyphony, one can easily draw a parallel to our present-day reality. It’s in the moments of urgency and despair from the doctor who fights the virus in an ill equipped hospital, the Baobab who warns that the virus could cross borders, families are afraid of gestures of affection because of fear of contagion, to the lingering symptoms after patients have recovered from the virus, and more. Tadjo sharply shows how during a catastrophic health threat humanity can crumble which encourages introspection.
The fight against the Ebola virus was fought through scientific, social, economic and religious means. While Ebola did not have the same societal and economic disruption in our society as the coronavirus, it contained a warning that humans are certainly not the masters of the universe, and that the world is not our personal playground.
The 20th century Senegalese poet and storyteller Birago Diop wrote in Souffles: “Those who died never left/ They are in the shadow that lights up…/The dead are not under the earth/ They are in the tree that quivers,/They are in the woods groaning/ They are in flowing water … the dead are not dead.” Tadjo embodies his poem and creates a moving story where she beautifully harnesses the ability to weave spirituality into a contemporary African tale.
The Covid-19 pandemic highlights how fear and ignorance play a significant role in our behavioral responses during a health crisis. Mass media outlets have influenced how we react when faced with a modern imperceptible enemy. The media should combat fear and prejudice, but as Tadjo’s prefect notes during the height of the Ebola crisis: “Instead of inspiring compassion and support, the increased media coverage caused the opposite reaction: self-preservation and withdrawal.” Our current crisis-related individual and collective behavior continues without a break: a never-ending cycle of risk and prevention of infection, life and death, loss and remembrance.
The coronavirus is a viral wake-up call that holds up an unforgiving mirror to humanity: all our lives are interconnected and must be protected.
The coronavirus has altered the way we live, and the way we die. It’s a viral wake-up call that holds up an unforgiving mirror to humanity: all our lives are interconnected and must be protected.
Today, the coronavirus continues to surge in the U.S., U.K., India, and other parts of the world. It targets those with preexisting health conditions and continues to fuel massive social inequalities. It’s accelerated by the rise in consumerism during the global lockdown: the intricate capitalist ties that bind us all.
Whether you live in Los Angeles, Amsterdam or Istanbul, In the Company of Men reminds us to hold tight to our humanity when it comes to the elderly, vulnerable or the sick. We are all connected to the overworked healthcare professional in Barcelona, the exhausted Korean delivery driver who works from dawn to midnight, to the unheralded Amazon warehouse worker in Indianapolis.
The lesson for the future is clear: solidarity is humanity’s best hope for survival.
When people “from away” learn I’m from Maine, most respond in one of two ways: they tell me they’ve never been here, but it’s high on their list, or they say they love my home state. More often than not, the latter group spent idyllic summers at sleepaway camps by the lake, peeped at the fall colors, or vacationed on the coast in high season when the nights settle in cool, lobster shells are soft, and the sun stays above the horizon well into the evening hours. And they are right; it’s glorious. What they’ve seen, however, is really just one small corner of a larger, more complex picture of Maine and its people.
My family has lived in New England for twelve generations, the last nine in Maine. Although I spent most of my working life in cities, I never shook the push-pull of this place, never completely slipped its tether. Like my ancestors, I grew up eating fish from Maine’s lakes and bays, potatoes and berries from its farms, rhubarb from the sunny patch by the stone wall; I drank its water and breathed its air. And so, no matter how far I travel or how long I’m gone, my home state is literally in my bones and will be until they’re settled in the frozen ground.
My first novel, The Northern Reach, is set in the fictional Downeast town of Wellbridge, a hardscrabble place that has little in common with the quaint, cutified villages that dot the tourist coast. Rather, I imagine Wellbridge as one of Maine’s many hard, unyielding towns that produce tough, darkly funny people, eking out a living, hand to mouth, day to day, enduring what would break others and sometimes breaks them. It’s long shadows, ever encroaching woods, peeling paint, stinking bait shacks, rusted log skidders, and endless winters under the white snow sky. This is the Maine I know, the place I come from.
Here are a few of my favorite books that convey the broader story of my home state:
The history of Maine comes as much from the woods as the sea, and this is the story of how European loggers claimed, and very nearly destroyed, its forests. Beginning when Maine was part of New France and spanning the next 300 years, Barkskins describes the wretched conditions in those early, excruciating years and offers an unflinching look at the origin story of interloping white settlers in the state and their place in the history of New England.
In 1937, Helen Leidy took a teaching position in a North Woods lumber camp near Churchill Lake, married a local game warden, Curly Hamlin, and moved with him to an isolated cabin in the deep woods, connected to the outside world by a single, vulnerable phone wire and accessible only by dog sled or snowshoe in winter. Her chatty, first-person account of the years in the woods is an intimate time capsule of daily life in the wilds of Aroostook County, on what was then the largest privately owned timber tract in the country.
For all its natural beauty, sparkling air and crystal lakes, Maine has a long history of industrial pollution that went largely unchecked for decades. Paper and textile mills—once productive, now largely disused—still dot the landscape. A descendant of French-speaking Acadian immigrants who came to Maine to work the mills, Kerri Arsenault grew up in one of those towns and deftly weaves together the story of industrial abuse, of the people and the land, with the cultural history of her family in the part of the state called Cancer Valley. (If you’re interested in a fictional account of a dying Maine mill town, try Richard Russo’s Empire Falls.)
Cathie Pelletier’s novel clatters through Maine’s northernmost county in a riot of dark hilarity and looming heartbreak, eavesdropping all the way. She fills the dead-end towns, rolling potato fields and murky woods of Aroostook County with the language of the plain-spoken, such as Old Man Gardener:
“I remember that puny little wife of his going around with a book with bird pictures in it. I could’ve told her in a flash which bird was which . . . I don’t like the way some city folks carry on. I don’t like it. And what’s more the birds don’t like it.”
There is a perception that Maine’s summer people live gilded lives of ease and excess in their grand cottages on the coast, and though there is more than a grain of truth in that, it’s not the whole story. Life is never that simple. Sarah Blake’s gorgeous, chewy novel, as sprawling as the Milton family cottage on the private island they own, shows the dark side of privilege and its ripples across generations.
There is a long Protestant tradition in Maine that goes back to the Pilgrims and Puritans of Massachusetts. In her second novel, Elizabeth Strout explores loss, grief and faith through a religious lens in the story of Tyler Caskey, a minister who “lived with his small daughter in a town up north near the Sabbanock River, up where the river is narrow and the winters used to be especially long.” I loved Strout’s Olive Kittredge books, but this one is my favorite. Taking on great issues amidst small-town concerns, it’s quietly powerful and ultimately uplifting.
Paul Harding’s first novel won the Pulitzer Prize in 2010. Deeply evocative, beautifully written, and utterly heartbreaking, the book tells the story of an epileptic tinker and his clock-fixing son, as it meanders through time, from the son’s deathbed hallucinations back to his father’s days as a tinker—a salesman who traveled the back roads and woods of New England by wagon, winter and summer, selling and trading dry goods with farmers and hermits scattered in the wilderness.
No list of Maine books is complete without The King. There are so many to choose from, but for me ‘Salem’s Lot is the best Maine book, diving deep into the insular and secretive way of life in small towns. When the vampires return, called by the dreadful Marsten House, the buried secrets, resentments and hatreds of the townsfolk make them easy pickings. And so the book offers a cautionary tale of what can happen when the aggrieved, made powerful by the vampire’s bite, get a bit of their own back. In harrowing fashion, King sets fire to the image of small towns as idyllic havens of benevolent neighborliness. Read it in daylight is my advice.
They want to give us the grand tour of the apartment, that’s how Tanya and Kire put it. “We just moved in last week and we’re almost done with everything,” Tanya is speaking so loudly into the receiver I have to hold the phone away from my ear. I can hear Kire yapping in the background. Here’s something I really hate: I’m on the phone and someone can’t stop yammering and doesn’t give a shit that I’m trying to have a conversation. “Have them come early, before it gets dark!” Kire barks, which is swiftly followed by Tanya’s loud repetition, “Yes, come early, come at seven, before it gets dark!”
Nino is sitting next to me, puzzling through a crossword puzzle. I nudge him and roll my eyes. He shrugs and then finally sniffs. “Alright then, we’ll see you soon!” I say, happy to hang up.
“God,” I groan. “She must’ve ruptured my eardrum. You could hear her, right?”
Nino nods.
“I hate housewarmings. Nino, are you listening? We need to get them something. It’s tomorrow.”
“Well, you know, we’re not exactly swimming in money,” he says without taking his eyes off the puzzle. The reading glasses he bought at a stall at the farmer’s market a month ago were poised at the tip of his nose. He only wears them at home because he didn’t want people to know he was growing old.
“I know,” I say, thinking of the thousand-denar bill I kept hidden in the side pocket of my purse in case I need to go for a drink or have the urge to buy something. And, of course, there are those three hundred euros I’ve set aside in a separate account. You never know what can come up. Nino doesn’t think about these things. Sometimes I wonder if he does know I’ve set aside a little something and is at ease because he believes this money is for the two of us, for hard times, God forbid. “This means we’re going to have to tighten our belts,” I add.
I wince at the thought of all the potato-stew, beans, and lentil soup we’ll be forced to eat for days on end. And there’ll be no more going out for drinks or coffee, even on the weekend, which is just around the corner. And we can’t invite anyone over for drinks, unless they brought their own liquor, which we could never ask them to do, because it would be so embarrassing. Not that any of our friends are much better off. Sometimes I feel they only want to come over to get a free drink.
We sit there in silence until I blurt, “But we’ve got to get them something.”
“Do we have to?” Nino asks. I’ve always found his disregard for social conventions annoying.
“Yes, we have to. We could drop by JYSK tomorrow on the way to their place,” I say, knowing the store is on the pricey side. But the fact is, I just want to go there. I dream the day when I will be able to purchase those fluffy pillows, those colorful doormats, those elegant bathroom soap dispensers and toothbrush holders, which I don’t really have any place to put because our sink is so wobbly.
“So what do they need?” he asks, filling in the crossword puzzle with his big, messy letters sprawling out of the boxes. He presses the pen so hard, he sometimes rips the page with its tip, making a pop that gives me goosebumps.
“How would I know? I just don’t get it. You go to somebody’s home for the first time and you’re supposed to bring a housewarming gift, but you have no idea what to get them because you’ve never been there before and you don’t know what they’re missing, and of course you can’t ask them what they need, because they’ll just lie and say, we don’t need anything! Stupid phony Macedonian humility, that’s all that is,” I grumble.
“M-hm,” Nino peers at me over the rim of his glasses, which is his way of saying he agrees. Then he takes them off and becomes lost in thought. “Yes,” he finally says, and falls silent again. It always takes him ages to say what he’s thinking. At the beginning of our relationship, his pauses impressed me, especially considering the words simply tumble out of my mouth as fast as I can think them up. But after a few years together, the silences are really starting getting on my nerves. “Yes,” he repeats. “You remember when we moved in here, and Tom and Lydia gave us that vase?”
We both look at it, which is easy in a living room as small as ours. The one big wall is barricaded by a block of square white cabinets with round brown handles. Some of the handles have fallen off, and the holes they’ve left look just like a pig’s snout. Several cabinet doors are loose, exposing threads of cheap plywood. Whoever designed this place had two shelves cut into the wall, which is where we keep our books. These are mostly books from our childhood, sets of Serbian translations we took from our homes. We don’t have a lot of new books. Because you know, we’re always saying Macedonian translations are so crappy, and the Serbian versions are so expensive, that there’s nothing to read anyway. The shelves used to have glass doors but for some reason the landlord took them off. In the middle of the wall there is a deep hole meant for a TV set. Ours is pretty small, albeit large enough for a room like this, so we put Tom and Lydia’s vase beside it. This vase, the nicest thing we own.
It’s a classic Greek-style amphora. Not those that are long and narrow, but with a fat belly, smaller than the ones you typically see in museums. It’s not brown and doesn’t have any Greek motifs. Rather, it’s a deep vibrant green. In fact, if you look up close, it’s got a mixture of different shades of green that all blend into each other and a fine web of thin cracks that give it a kind of rough texture, as if it were made of stone. Looking at this vase calms me. They gave it too us about a year ago, and come to think of it, we haven’t gotten together with them since. Even when we’re watching TV, I’ll glance at it. Then I’ll think of Tom and Lydia and a warm feeling comes over me.
I probably get this feeling because of their perfumes. It’s not that they wear a lot, but every time Lydia would swish her scarf or Tom came up close, the fragrance would hit me: his sharp, yet fresh, hers more flowery, more like the smell of some expensive hand cream. Lydia always smells like all the women with painted nails and jangling bracelets who used to come over to our house when I was a child and stroke my hair and pinch my cheeks. Tom is the kind of guy you could easily fall for, with his olive skin and hazel eyes, sitting elegantly in his chair with his legs crossed, one athletic arm dangling from the armrest, the other holding a perpetual cigarette in its hand.
“Jade-colored,” that’s what Lydia said as she removed the vase from the box to present it to us. Jade. I didn’t really know what color jade was, but I liked the sound of it
“It’s our housewarming gift,” said Tom in his husky voice.
“But dis is not our apartment,” Nino explained in the hard Slavic accent he was not the least ashamed of.
“Well, think of it as a step in the right direction,” said Lydia as she gently held it out to us. The textured gold rings on her strong and slender pianist fingers stood out against the vase’s deep greens. I thanked them in my somewhat broken English, trying to echo Tom and Lydia’s perfect British accent, knowing full well I overextend my vowels and sometimes confuse the “th” sound with “d” and “t.” I explained that what Nino meant was this was not our permanent home. We were only living here until we got back on our feet, until we settled some inheritance issues. They didn’t say a word, seeing I’d delved into waters they were not prepared to swim in, at least not while they were sober. It annoyed me that I was making more excuses than Nino. But nonetheless I kept digging myself deeper into a hole, saying the apartment was much too small for us, it was very old. But the location was great—
“Yes, it’s a fantastic location!” Tom chimed in, happy to change the subject.
“And new location of dis beautiful vase is?” Nino asked, returning attention to the gift, for which I was grateful. But my gratitude was short-lived. Because all this did was make Tom and Lydia look around the apartment and realize we were barricaded by cabinets, that the sofa and armchairs we were sitting in were old and mismatched and camouflaged by decorative covers, and that the stained and beat-up coffee table crammed between them barely left room for our legs.
“We’ll find a good place for it,” I said, just before Lydia suggested, “Maybe you could put it in the bedroom?” not knowing that we didn’t have one, that we slept on the two-seater sofa bed we could barely open even after wedging the coffee table into the corner of the room, so I just pretended I hadn’t heard what she’d said and asked, “Is it from Greece?”
Indeed, it was. They had bought it from a “perfectly charming” little shop in one of those picture postcard villages with the whitewashed houses and blue-shuttered windows, the balconies draped with bougainvillea, and narrow, cobbled lanes that meandered to hidden squares lined with cafes where one can have a cool glass of water and savor a spoonful of homemade preserves.
The vase was made by a local but internationally acclaimed artist. “The certificate is inside the box. You can read more about her later,” Tom cut in, eager to tell us about their Aegean island cruise, about the fresh octopus they had grilled, the dolphins leaping around the prow of their boat. The crystal-clear blue of the deep see where you can bathe nude. Where the water is so salty it seems to lick your skin. (“It makes love to you!” Lydia exclaimed and her head nearly lolled back in ecstasy.) And then once again about the dreamy little villages. The hospitality of the locals. The homemade specialties they had tasted. “The moussaka!” Lydia sighed.
“Svetlana makes very good moussaka,” Nino said, clambering to his feet. We hadn’t yet offered them anything to drink. “But for food we have only meze with cold homemade rakija or white wine.” Nino stooped as he was offering these “homemade specialties,” as Tom and Lydia later dubbed the tomatoes, peppers, cheese, and liquor Nino had lugged back from his uncle’s village.
“I wouldn’t drink whiskey or eat seafood while I’m in Macedonia,” Lydia said as she savored a pepper. Even the homely pepper looked distinguished between her elegant fingers.
We’d heard Lydia play once. She had stopped performing a while back, but agreed to give a recital. Tom was an art historian visiting on a university research scholarship and, without a job of her own, Lydia had little to do. Despite Nino, who works at the National Opera and Ballet, I know next to nothing about classical music, and really, it’s not something he enjoys either. Regardless, I was enchanted by the way she moved her body as she played: her elbows flaring, her back arching with the rhythm and the music, her torso swaying in circles, her head turned so that her silvery hair hung across her eyes. She had striking fingers: strong, angular, nimble as a spider. I became so enthralled I clapped when I wasn’t supposed to. The elderly lady I sat next to shushed me angrily. We were in the first row and Lydia must have noticed, Tom too.
I was just as embarrassed as we sat in our tiny living room, crowded with cabinets. It seemed like Nino didn’t give a damn. He kept topping up his glass of rakija and sweating since it had gotten so stuffy. We opened the balcony door leading to the miniature kitchenette, but we still couldn’t get a breeze. It was hot and the four of us were smoking, I more than ever, nervous that I had invited Tom and Lydia to this dump. I shifted my foot to cover what looked like a crusty ketchup stain on the carpet which I hadn’t noticed before. My embarrassment grew with the increasing realization of how stupid it was to invite them over. But we had no money and we wanted so much to hang out with them. We were flattered that they wanted to drink with us and tell stories about their dazzling past. We were flattered they chose us as their audience, flattered by how they looked, long and lean, in loose white flannel that outlined their sinewy figures and highlighted their sun-bronzed skin.
We’re not too bad ourselves. Maybe our apartment is awful, maybe we don’t have the money to move into a better one, but we look impeccable, especially me. That evening, even as I covered up the carpet stain, I could not help but admire how beautiful my heels were, how my sandals complemented my slender feet, how my red toe-nails glittered like wild strawberries. I was sure that we also smelled good and that if anyone came into the room, they’d notice the crisp mix of the fragrances we wore and the aroma of the cigarettes we smoked. But Nino had started to sweat. Beads had formed on his forehead and there were big wet patches under his armpits. He was clearly drunk and wouldn’t shut up.
Maybe our apartment is awful, maybe we don’t have the money to move into a better one, but we look impeccable, especially me.
“We’re working towards saving up to get a bigger apartment. We’d like to have children. We’re trying,” he said, his eyes a little crossed from all that rakija.
“We don’t have any children either,” Tom said, his head cocked back as he took a dramatic puff of his cigarette. “We don’t know why. It was nature’s way. We never bothered to get it checked out.”
“Some people are so inconsiderate,” Lydia added, “they’ll ask you right up front: what’s wrong with you? I remember this particularly brazen couple who asked me that and I said: what, do you mean physically or mentally?”
We tsk-tsked and then fell silent. I could tell Nino was getting emotional, like he always does when he’s drunk. He slapped both palms on his knees, as if finally mustering up the courage to do something grand: “Can I play someting?” he asked. Tom and Lydia shifted excitedly.
“Of course! Why in the world didn’t we think of that sooner… what a pleasure that would be,” their voices overlapped. Nino took out the violin from the case he kept behind the door.
“Someting traditional,” he announced, leaving room for Tom and Lydia’s sighs of satisfaction. He then improvised a jazzed-up version of Kaži, kaži, libe Stano, tears welling up in the corners of his eyes. To my taste, this song was too slow and sad, and it had too many grace notes. Honestly, I thought it was trite, but at the end of his little recital, Tom and Lydia gave him an encouraging applause.
“It’s about couple which can’t have keeds,” he began to explain. “D’ men says to d’ women: do you need anyting? Mannie or cloths? She says, no, I have everyting, but I don’t have child. D’ men says to d’ women: I’m gonna go to Greece and getchoo golden child. She says, golden child can’t call me dear mami. Very sad.”
“Oh it’s heartbreaking,” Lydia said, raising the rakija glass to her lips and accidentally hitting a tooth. Meanwhile, Tom unintentionally slammed his glass on the table and covered his face with his large hands. “Oh, oh,” he moaned. “Oh.” We all knew what was next. He always cried when he got hammered. Once he cried for an hour over the tsunami in Indonesia, but that was nothing compared to the way he blubbered over the war in Bosnia. It was like he wasn’t sure what was wrong with the human race. He insisted the world was falling apart, that the apocalypse was nigh.
“Things fall apart! The centre cannot hold!” he declared. I later found out he had been quoting a famous Irish poet whose name I can’t remember. “To make a child a man, a man a child!” he said with a solemnity that made me suspect this was a meaningful and well-known line. Lydia looked at him compassionately, while Nino and I didn’t know what to say. Tom and Lydia knew so many things and had traveled everywhere. They were incredibly open-minded and educated. We didn’t know anyone like them. True, they drank an awful lot and always got plastered, but it’s not like Nino and I are exactly lightweights, either. Lydia stroked Tom’s neck as he sank his face in his hands in a sweet, inspired state of despair. Watching this display of emotion somehow pleased me, but what was even more appealing was how Tom snuggled up to Lydia and gently laid his cheek upon her breast. His hand reached around her waist while his other hand cupped her breast, as Lydia toyed with his thick strands of ash-blonde hair. Cuddling his face against her chest, he rose up and kissed her throat, softly moaning. Lydia whispered in return, “My darling, my darling, it’s all right.” I saw her gently nip his earlobe.
Seeing people intimate in public usually makes me uncomfortable. But watching Tom and Lydia like this, in our apartment, got me excited. There was a warmth stirring inside me, rising from my groin. I couldn’t say a word for fear of falling softly apart. Lydia looked around and said that perhaps it was time for them to go. Tom shook himself out of his reverie and began to say, still choked up, that we were terrific hosts, that they had had such a wonderful time with us.
“Come back,” Nino replied, his eyes droopy as if he were about to fall asleep. For some reason he did not get up from his chair. Tom and Lydia bent down to give him a goodbye kiss. I took the four steps to the door to see them off, where they embraced me, their perfume lingering on my skin. Tom left a wet streak of tears on my cheek. As I closed the door, I didn’t want to wipe it off.
Nino was still sprawled in the armchair. I had to virtually step over him to get back to my seat in the cramped space, and as I did, he grabbed me. He pulled me down on his lap, and I felt he was hard. He kissed me on the throat, he wrenched my shirt off, he licked and squeezed my breasts, then pushed me over on the two-seater and in one brisk move he stripped off my panties and shoved his penis inside me. I was so aroused at first that I forgot about everything, which is hardly ever the case. I melted into a pool of flesh. But after a bit Nino began to falter and went a little limp. My ears suddenly switched on again and I could hear the rhythmic squeaking of the sofa, like a creaky old swing about to break. I opened my eyes and saw all the little pig snout holes in the cabinets peering down at us from the wall and then Nino just stopped.
“My knee’s numb. I keep hitting it against a loose spring,” he complained. Pity and shame swept over me. It was like we were in high school, fucking in my little brother’s bed.
“Fuck me on the table,” I said, not knowing where these words were coming from. I’d never spoken like that before. I wanted him to lift me as I was and carry me to the little dining room table adjoining the hall that pretended to be a kitchen, but that would never occur to him, so we strolled half-naked to our destination. I got up on the table and we continued unsteadily. This time I decided to keep my eyes closed. I imagined Nino was Tom, and that Lydia was sitting on the two-seater where Nino and I had just been fucking, watching Tom’s copper buns wriggling between my legs. “Shoot your wad!” I said, again saying something I had never said before, and I felt sugar running through my thighs and Nino letting go inside me. After this I felt nauseous all night long.
The next morning I realized it’d been one of my fertile days. If it’s a boy, I thought, I’ll call him Tomislav. If it’s a girl, I’ll name her Lydia. I told Nino. He looked puzzled. “Why?” he asked. It dawned on me we hadn’t experienced the same thing. “They’re just pretty names,” I lied, but Nino isn’t stupid.
But no, I didn’t get pregnant. Not that time, nor any other time Nino and I had sex. The doctors kept assuring us that, anatomically, we were fine and shouldn’t have a problem conceiving. Which is why I got more and more annoyed when I chanced to see a cradle in a furniture store window, and those dangly things you hang above them, those tiny wardrobes painted pink or blue. Not only were those kiddy things a painful reminder that sex was becoming more and more exasperating because we just couldn’t make a baby, but it also drove home the fact that we were stuck in a one-room apartment so jammed with cabinets there wasn’t room for a cradle anyway. There was no room for anything.
This might be why, when I get to JYSK, I feel like going into the children’s section with all the stacked up cradles and the fluffy kiddie pillows piled on the floor and just mess them up. It is all I can do not to go there. So, like usual, I go to see the shelves with the colorful cushions. But one cushion (hey, a single cushion!) costs six hundred denars, and I only have a thousand. I also don’t want to get them anything I deeply desire for myself. I’m not so crazy about furniture. What I really want are accessories.
So, then I stroll to the bedding section. Not that I can afford to buy Kire and Tanya matching sheets, and I don’t even know how big their bed was. No, I go there because our sheets are ugly. Nino has this inexplicable fondness for stripes. In fact, he once came home with matching Auschwitz pajamas and bedsheets.
I finally stumble on a selection of clocks on sale, some of which have unusually odd shapes. But then I think maybe giving a married couple a clock isn’t such a great idea. If someone gave me a clock, I’d think they were telling me I was growing old and my clock was ticking. Maybe they would think that I was saying: “Your time is up!” But then maybe the opposite: “May you live forever!” Right. This is what I’ll say when I give them this stylish clock that probably won’t fit with their furniture.
I have just twelve denars left. It is such a pitiful amount, I decide to spend it. I walk into the nearest shop and buy matches for eight denars. Out of sheer contrariness, I drop the remaining coins one by one as I walk out. “Madam, madam! You dropped something!” two responsible citizens call after me. I turned and looked them straight in the eye, then cast a disdainful glance towards the metal on the ground, as if to say here, it’s yours. As I wait for Nino by the curb outside, I take out the matches and light them one after the other, letting them fall at my feet when they were half burned down. When Nino arrives, it looks like I’m standing in the middle of a small pyre.
I hate our car. Whenever we go to Ohrid for vacation, I can barely endure the two-and-a-half-hour drive that feels like I’m riding a busted exhaust pipe. Not only is it outrageously loud and draughty as hell, but it rattles and shakes, and has that cheap plastic smell. Our car is like a toy, like something not meant for adults.
Nino has just come from a rehearsal at the Opera. On our way to Kire and Tanya’s for the housewarming, he looks lost in thought.
“You don’t care what I got them?” I shout over the clanking of our wreck, which rattles like a can whenever we hit a pothole on the streets of Skopje.
“Huh?” he says. It is like I’ve shaken him out of a dream. “Sorry. What did you get them?”
He has apologized, but too late. I feel the need to punish him. He didn’t even notice my symbolic little pyre. He should understand.
“It’s supposed to be from both of us. It will be embarrassing if you don’t know what’s in the box. ”
“Yes, you’re right,” he says. I can tell he’s trying to shut me up.
“Ok, it’s one thing not to go shopping with me, but you don’t even care what I got.” I know I’m pushing it, but I want to see how far I can go.
“Right. Please tell me what you got them. I really want to know, really,” he adds in a soothing tone, as he stares straight ahead. I look at his silhouette. He’s got this extremely large, beak-like nose. When we first met, I found it sexy. Now it just makes him look more “whatever you say, dear,” which gets on my nerves.
“A clock. A cool clock. If it doesn’t match their furniture, they can regift it, because I didn’t know what else to get them.”
“That’s ok. A clock is fine. It’s the gesture that matters anyway, not the actual gift. The act of paying attention. You know how excited they are to have finally found a place. You know how long they looked,” Nino says calmly, as if it isn’t the two of us who are stuck in a rut. “Here we are. I think that’s the right door,” he says, parking in front of an apartment block straight out of the 70s.
It’s definitely not a new building. That’s good, I think. Because now there are these nice new ones, with cute little porches, flashy doorways and intercoms, marble staircases with elaborate banisters. The walls at these places smell fresh. On the other hand, new buildings are really flimsy. If there’s an earthquake, they’re more liable to collapse and kill everyone inside. Which is why it’s better to live in an old building like ours, especially one of these sturdy ones that don’t just fall apart. Still, I gloat as we climb the stairs, because it smells of piss. As we huff and puff our way up, I relished the thought of Tanya and Kire having to lug all their groceries and the stroller and the baby up all these stairs, panting under the weight of all the bottled water you have to keep buying because the tap water in Skopje tastes like rust. The higher the floor, the cheaper the place. But that’s not going to happen to us. All we need is for Nino’s mother to die. Just let her die.
“This is it,” says Nino and rings the bell next to a shiny new white door with the plate Trpeski inscribed in gold. Look at my friend Tanya, the great feminist, taking her husband’s name, I think to myself. I could understand it if she had some peasant-sounding last name. But no. She just had to go for the hillbilly Trpeski.
They both meet us at the door, their mouths stretched wide in gleaming grins that reveal all their teeth. The scent of baby hits my face. The foyer smelled of baby, they both smell of baby. “Where’s the little one?” I ask. I haven’t seen her since shortly after she was born.
“She’s asleep,” Kire half-whispers. “We’d better go into the living room. We don’t want to wake her up. But first I’m going to have to ask you to take your shoes off. Babies like to crawl, you know.” So we take them off, which Nino isn’t too happy about. He’s always getting holes on his socks, and his feet tend to stink. Fortunately, Tanya and Kire have slippers. They don’t gloat over the grandeur of their entryway, probably because they want us to leave as quickly as possible. As for us, we don’t even have an entryway. Just a place where we pile our shoes, in front of the little bathroom where Nino had to shove the washing machine under the rusty old water heater that breaks down every six months and rumbles like an empty stomach whenever we turn it on.
Here there is ample room for four people. We can comfortably take off our shoes and marvel at the circular patterns on the floor tiling, just like the one in Tito’s mausoleum in Belgrade. There is room for coat hangers. There’s a shoe cabinet with a row of drawers and a stone bowl for depositing loose change, like the change I threw out earlier that day. Atop the coins, their car fob gleams. I can see my figure in the hallway mirror. It’s one of those mirrors that makes you look thinner.
Tanya doesn’t need a mirror like that to feel good about herself. She looks incredible for someone who gave birth less than a year ago. She doesn’t even have those puffy eyebags you see in new mothers. I examine her from head to foot as she guides us into the living room. Her hips are as slender as ever. It’s if she’d never even had a baby.
They usher us into the living room. I can’t disguise my admiration. Neither can Nino. Nino, who had the nerve to buy Auschwitz pajamas and bedding, could actually see the place was really nice. Matching armchairs and two-seater sofas complement the turquoise wooden coffee table that occupy the middle of the spacious room. A single peach scented candle adorns the table. An enormous abstract painting in pastel hues fills one whole wall. “This is one of our favorite things,” Tanya says, “a painting by Nevena Maksimovska,” a name that meant nothing to me. I nod, as if I know who she’s talking about, while Nino just stands there. “We asked her to make the painting just to cover that wall, and it turned out to be a masterpiece!”
“Yes, it matches your furniture,” I say, knowing Tanya won’t appreciate the remark. “Maybe what we got you won’t fit in so well in this room, but I’m sure you can find a place for it,” I say, handing her the gift-wrapped clock.
“Oh, you really shouldn’t have,” Tanya says. She and Kire give each other a look and smile courteously. Come on, unwrap this clock that has nothing to do with your living room, that looks like we picked it up at a flea market, I think to myself. “A clock!” Tanya exclaims. “Thank you, it really is beautiful. I’m sure we’ll find a place for it,” she adds.
I’ve forgotten my lines about time and eternity, so I just stand there with a stupid grin on my face. Nino steps in at the right moment, complimenting the floor to ceiling bookcase next to the painting. “Oh yes, we also had that made,” says Tanya, setting the clock down on the coffee table. She walks to the bookcase, stroked one of the shelves, and says, “Baltic birch,” as if we were supposed to know what that is.
“You get a lot of sunlight in here, don’t you?” says Nino, just for the sake of saying something.
“That’s the best thing about this apartment,” Tanya replies, slowly turning in a circle with her arms extended, as if she’s showcasing the place for sale. Coming to a stop, she gestures at the bay window across from the bookcase. We follow her out onto the balcony with green tiles just like the ones in the foyer. “And this is Kire’s project,” she says, showing us the lush potted flowers in bloom lining little shelves and hanging from handrails.
“Dude, I would’ve gotten you some flowers if I knew you were so into them.” Nino turns to Kire and slaps him on the back. Kire’s back is rather huge. In fact, he’s a big guy all around and doesn’t come across as a guy who likes flowers.
“What a great place to put your dining room table,” I say as we step back inside, admiring the space made by the bay window.
“The light bathes us in the morning when we sit down to breakfast with the sun.” Tanya waves a hand towards the windows like a flight attendant indicating the nearest emergency exit.
I make a note of this remark so I will remember to make fun of it to Nino later. When Tanya first got together with Kire, she would write him love poems. I don’t know how he could stand it. But then Tanya has an amazing body, so Kire puts up with her sentimental shit. From the sun-lit dining area, she takes us into the kitchen. “It’s got a pantry and natural ventilation,” Tanya says.
“You sound like a real estate agent,” Kire adds. We all laughed.
“The kitchen didn’t cost us that much,” Tanya continues. “It’s small, but efficient. We weren’t going for anything flashy.”
Yes, the room is nothing out of the ordinary. Јust a plain white kitchen, like any other, only that everything is brand new. The sink and faucet have a silvery gleam. Our faucet has long since turned green with bacteria and buildup, but I have no intention of cleaning or replacing it. Our landlord never invests in anything. He just waits for us to fix something when it breaks down. And he has a way of you screwing us over. He’s cross-eyed so he pretends he’s slow. We never know what he’s looking at, and whenever we ask him something, he seems disoriented. “I can’t argue with him. He’s not right in the head,” Nino says every time he spends our own money to fix the water heater or what not.
“We’ve got two more rooms,” Tanya says. “It’s just that Anfisa is asleep, so we’ll have to be quick. And quiet. Is that ok?”
Anfisa Trpeski. What a name. A grand display of petty bourgeois sentiment. “We don’t have to go in there if you’re afraid we might wake her up,” I say. I’ve had enough. It’s all I can do to refrain from looking down to see what kind of tiles they have in the kitchen floor. If there’s something I admire, it is nice tiles. And king-sized beds. If they have one and it has а pretty coverlet, I can’t be sure I won’t burst into tears.
We all tiptoe into a long hallway, to the left of which is a built-in closet with mirrored sliding doors. Train-like, we move one behind the other: Tanya up front, dressed in an unassuming yet costly white cardigan, her spine erect, obviously proud as a peacock to show us what she has created. Close behind her, Kire, like her bodyguard. Then Nino, thin as a rail in comparison to Kire, and finally me, bringing up the rear.
“This room is empty. We haven’t furnished it yet. It’s for Anfisa, when she gets a little older,” Tanya says. She opens the first door in the hallway, slides her hand in and gently flicks on a light. We catch a glimpse of pinkish walls.
“And now, the bedroom. Shhh,” Tanya whispers and opens the next door.
The scent of baby—of diaper cream, sweet and sticky—grows stronger as we moved further along the hallway. And when Tanya opens this last door, it hits us like a wave. The room is pretty big. Anfisa’s elaborate crib is decked with those dangly toys floating around her head. A lamp atop a corner bedside table gives the room an orange glow.
Nino backs out. “There’s too many of us,” he whispers after stretching his neck like a turkey to get a peak at the child.
Not that he’s really into kids. Even the cutest baby will rarely change the composure of his face. “Isn’t it adorable?” I’ll occasionally say when we see a baby. He’ll just nod and force a smile. That’s it.
In fact, sometimes I’ll ask him, “Are you sure you want kids?” And he’ll respond, “I do,” in a flat voice. Never, “Oh, you have no idea how much I do. It would be so nice to have a baby snuggle up between us.”
I’m so stupid—we don’t even have the room for a baby on that godawful two-seater. And here’s Tanya and Kire’s bed, which could easily fit three people. It’s humongous. I’m sure Anfisa will sleep in the middle once she gets a little older.
Kire follow Nino out of the room, leaving Tanya and me alone with the baby. “Let me have a peek at her,” I whisper, trying to ignore the bedsheets and covers and the rows of fluffy pillows. Right then, I just want to watch Anfisa sleep. I want to hold my head over that cloud of baby scent and close my eyes in the near darkness. I don’t want Tanya to see this. But she is right next to me, invading my space by shoving her head into it. Аll I can smell now is her heavy perfume. Тhe sight of her shiny long earring distracts me. Move away. Move away, bitch, I imagine telling her. Right then she places her hot palm on the small of my back, as if in sympathy, which makes me sick to my stomach.
“She’s beautiful,” I say in an unsteady voice. Then I take in a last breath of that scent rising from the crib before I straighten up and follow Tanya out of the room.
“And here’s our bathroom,” Tanya whispers after soundlessly closing the bedroom door behind her. I know I will have to use the bathroom before we leave, so I really don’t want to witness the latest feats of toilet designmanship, now, with her watching. I pray it is just an average bathroom. But it’s surprisingly large, with a brand new washing machine and a great big tub that houses a smaller, red tub for Anfisa. With its turquoise tiles, it’s oceany and smells of baby-soap.
“Really nice,” I mutter, eyeing the matching soap dispenser and toothbrush holder. “Where did you get these?” I ask.
“IKEA,” she answers quietly. “It’s gotten so expensive lately. What am I saying! It’s not that IKEA has gotten expensive, it’s our standard of living that keeps falling. We can’t afford things the way we used to. Even for me this cost too much. But they are beautiful, aren’t they?” she gently runs the long polished nail of her index finger along the neck of the soap dispenser.
In the living room Nino and Kire are deep in conversation, drinking whiskey. There is a bottle on the table and a bowl full of ice.
“Your apartment is wonderful,” I say.
“Yes, your apartment is wonderful,” Nino parrots after me. He’s going to just keep on repeating what I say because he’s clueless as far as apartments go. If they lived in a shack, he wouldn’t know the difference.
“You’ve really done a great job with the interior design. Great taste. Functional and cozy,” I continue, more emphatically.
“That’s all the wifey’s doing,” Kire chimes in. Tanya’s face lights up. But just like any other well-mannered lady, she attempts to diminish the value of her accomplishments.
“Oh, come on. Anyone can do this. I just had some more time on my hands to spend on the apartment. The agency found it right off the bat. The moment I saw it, I just knew. This is it. This is where I want to live,” she says, clasping Kire’s hand. They looked like a commercial for housing loans.
“It must be rough, though, carrying the stroller up all those stairs,” I delight in saying.
“Oh my, yes. I’m not saying this apartment doesn’t have its faults,” Tanya admits, which bothers me.
“Faults? Come on. Why do you think she has such a great butt? She’s lived on the top floor her entire life,” Nino say, pointing to me.
“Yes, it definitely does help with one’s figure,” Kire intervenes, stupid as ever.
“It’s a pity you don’t live on the top floor. But you know how hot it was at Mimi’s place because they were right under the roof? You get so hot, you don’t want to eat and so you get the best figure ever,” I say. “And eating nothing but beans and lentils four times a week? And climbing those stairs? Beat that, Kate Moss,” I say, knocking back the glass of whiskey Kire poured me. The tension I’ve created magically revives me. It’s as if my head has cleared. I motion to Kire to pour me another glass. Whiskey is such a rarity for Nino and me that I have every intention of getting wasted. I’m not going to be the one to drive our junk heap home. I’d rather be the drunk one, I think, downing my second glass. Nino is quietly chewing ice, trying not to look at me. He’s not stupid and knows exactly what I’m up to.
“Look,” Tanya says, “living up here definitely helps if you want to get rid of those post-pregnancy love handles.”
“Post-pregnancy love handles!” Kire says. “Don’t give me that. I’m the one with the love handles!” he laughs.
“You’re such a teddy bear,” Nino adds and the three of them laugh and laugh. What an amazing sense of humor, I think.
“And you know when she starts walking she’ll run you ragged!” I say with a sarcasm that goes right over their heads.
“True, she hasn’t started walking yet,” Tanya says. “But she can stand up! Though most of the time she crawls all over the place.”
“Is that so?” I say, pouring myself another whiskey. Nino looks at me, still chewing on his ice. He doesn’t want to argue in public. In fact, he never wants to argue, which drives me nuts.
“Yes, and she’s so fast!” Kire says. “And of course she’ll put anything in her mouth within reach.”
“She’s very cute,” Nino says.
“How do you know that?” I snap. “You’ve never really seen her.”
“I’ve seen a picture of her.”
“Liar,” I say. “You’re just showing off your manners.”
“I’m not lying,” he shoots back. “There’s a picture of her over there by the TV set. As for manners, we all know who lacks them,” he says and gulps down the rest of his whiskey. But there was no way he is catching up with me. I am already on my third. With every drink I am getting more and more pissed at him, and at his mother for not dying. The idea that she is sitting there all sick and hideous in her living room like a neglected houseplant, watching stupid soap operas all day, enrages me. If I ever turn out like her that, kill me, just kill me.
“Well, thank you, Nino. I know you think we’re partial because she’s our daughter, but she really is cute,” Tanya says.
“We hope that things finally work out for you guys, too,” Kire blurts out indelicately. I would be livid if Tanya said this, but Kire clearly means well. He’s just one of those dumb males who unintentionally says things that hurt people.
I wonder if I should hold my tongue. But why should I? Because if I do, they’ll never learn that they can’t talk shit in front of people who can’t have kids, people who don’t have a space to raise a kid, people who barely have the space to fuck in.
“I doubt it. Your friend Nino here shoots blanks.”
Nino finally loses his composure.
“What did you say?” Nino turns toward me, his expression dark.
There is a terrific silence and tension you could cut with a knife, as they say.
“Just like that. Boom, boom. Nada, zilch, zero,” I say, bursting into laughter.
“Hey, this is a little too intimate,” Kire says. Tanya would never say something like that, unless she could benefit from it. She’s savvy, unlike her husband. But he brings home good money, and they are annoyingly functional as a family. They take holidays together, then show us pictures of the azure beaches where they got great value for their money.
“Oh, come on, that’s not intimate,” I say. “I was just inside your bedroom. I saw your baby sleeping. Now that’s what I call intimate.”
“You’re mean and you’re a bitch, and you always have been,” Nino spits. “The doctors said I was just fine,” he says to Tanya and Kire, articulating every word. His face is transformed, which scares me a little. I like that. So, I knock back my whiskey and decide to egg him on.
“Yes, your male doctors in their male world of medicine. Your balls could be rotten and full of rice pudding and they’d still say it’s our fault.”
“Here we go again with that feminist shit of yours,” he says.
“Feminist shit? Thanks for reminding me I need to use the john,” I say, staggering to my feet. And then I see it on the TV table, the very same vase Tom and Lydia gave us. I am sure. I know that vase so well from seeing it so often. They gave both of us the identical vase.
“Wow, what a nice vase!” I say. “Where’d you get it?”
Tanya’s reply was cautious. “It’s by a Greek artist from the island of Paros. Tom and Lydia gave it to us after they came back from cruising the Aegean last year. Tom and Lydia—you remember them?”
“Why, of course we do,” I say, giving Nino a sideways glance. He can’t take his eyes off the vase, which I am now holding in my hands. The air is so heavy with anticipation I’m afraid to breathe. “It’s a beautiful vase,” I say, beginning to turn it over as if to inspect it. “What the name of the artist?”
“Anfisa Papadopoulou? Was it Papadopoulou?” Tanya turns towards Kire, who shrugs.
“Anfisa?”
“Yes, we loved that name. They said it means child of the flower.”
“Wonderful!” I say, as if I was exhilarated. “Are you still in touch with Tom and Lydia?”
“Of course,” Kire says. “They’re here, in Skopje. They’re back for another semester. I think two months ago. You haven’t seen each other yet?”
I shake my head, glad I’m not going to have a child called Lydia.
“Nino, look. Our vase is just a bit different than theirs. Because it’s handmade.”
“You’ve got one too?”
I don’t respond. I let them sit in silent dread, wondering what I’m going to do next.
“Hey Nino, catch!” I call and pretend to throw the vase. Nino jolts and makes as if to catch it, then drops his hands. That’s when I toss it at him.
The vase hits the parquet floor and shatters into little jade shards. As it breaks, it’s as if it releases the dusty stench of all the flattering hopes that Tom and Lydia, in their refined exoticism, raised in us.
Stone-faced, Kire and Tanya stare at the shards, as if they are imagining Anfisa crawling among the remains of her Greek namesake.
“We’re leaving,” Nino snaps. “Get your stuff.” He springs up and moves gingerly across the floor. There is no running away from this.
“She’s crying,” Tanya says, jumping to her feet. It’s only then that we hear Anfisa’s piercing little voice in the other room, Tanya’s excuse for leaving this mess. Deer-like, she leaps across the room and vanishes, depriving me of the pleasure of seeing her burst into tears, of telling me to go to hell, of screaming at the top of her voice, of just losing control. As she disappears, I catch her throwing Nino a look of compassion. Nino moves toward me, his slippers crunching the little bits of vase. He grabs me by the elbow and shoves me towards the entryway. “Come on. Let’s go.”
I turn towards Kire. “I would like to extend my deepest apologies,” I say, “for my unsensitive clumsiness. I mean, insensitive clumsiness. As you know, we have the same vase and Nino will drop it off tomorrow. Which provides you with the perfect opportunity to give us back the clock, which I am sure you don’t want anyway.” Nino snatches my jacket from the coat hanger, shoves it in my hand and tries to push me out the door.
“Dude, I’m sorry about this,” I hear him whisper.
“Hey, and I’m sorry about all the cleaning you’ll have to do,” I say over his shoulder, my voice echoing down the staircase. “And I’m really really sorry if I woke up Amanfisa,” I add.
Kire shuts the door and Nino races down the stairs without waiting for me.
“Hey, wait a minute! You don’t want me to trip and fall, do you?” I say, trying to keep up with him. But he obviously isn’t listening. By the time I get to the street, he’s smoking a cigarette at some distance. When he hears the glass door closing, he turns to face me but does not approach.
“What, you’re running away from me? So where are you going to go?” I say.
“Wherever I want!” he yells.
“Wherever you want? Maybe your mom’s, huh?”
“At least I have some place to go. Where are you going to go?”
“Go to hell if you want. I’m not going anywhere. I’m staying right here. You think I want to get into that junk car of yours? Go ahead!” I scream, and he really does go. I hear the engine coughing to life and the rumble of our car fading in the distance.
I sit on the edge of a concrete flower bed and stare at the pedestrian crossing. I’m just going to sit here doing nothing, I reason. Not a thing. I’m not going to get up, I’m not going to budge. I’m going to wait for something to happen, anything. But I’m not leaving this place. I imagine Nino driving home, his hawkish profile silhouetted against the car window, and feel a stabbing sorrow. I remember him playing Kaži, kaži libe Stano for Tom and Lydia. I remembered how gently and how well he played, not the least bit embarrassed for performing in front of a musician like Lydia, and how his beautiful, unrepentant playing made no difference because he was just going to go lie down on our two-seater bed and wait for his mother to die so we could be happy.
I lie on the concrete wall even though I’m wearing a short skirt. I might get some kind of feminine inflammation from the cold, I worry. And someone could rape me. No difference. Nothing was going to grow inside me. Nothing will come of nothing, Lydia and Tom had repeated that night, as if we were supposed to know what that meant. I roll the words in my mouth, expecting to see our junk car approaching with its cool darkness inside, and the outline of Nino’s nose and scruffy hair, and then me, snuggling up against him, laying my cheek on his violin hickey, feeling his graying stubble brushing my eyelids.
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