ashamed to look so antique, (1/1)
title: ashamed to look so antique
rating: r for blood and sensitive subjects - one of the integral scenes is a miscarriage. be warned.
writer's note: original fiction for my intermediate fiction writing class, and the story with which i applied to be in advanced fiction writing.
Nobody told her about the blood. Sticky and unguent, congealing even as it runs down her legs and onto the floor. Nobody told her how red it would be, red and not-red, like a scary movie, like Halloween supplies. How there would be something like a cross between a tadpole and a gummy bear there, floating in the mess. How she would need to touch it, to cradle it, to give the love that would never be received. Nobody told her how that thing could stare.
She's still staring back when Jason finds her, holding it in her hands. She doesn't look at him. She doesn't know what he'll see if she does. She can't take that chance. She doesn't have anything vulnerable left.
When he's emptied her hands into the toilet, when he's washed her fingers in the sink, he'll claim he knew something bad was coming. He won't say it, but when her eyes meet his in the mirror she'll see the 'I told you so' lurking there. 'I told you she was real.' Maybe she is. Maybe this house really does have its own merry woman in white - maybe the ghost isn't just a figment of her husband's imagination or a clever marketing ploy to keep the aging bed and breakfast in business, a made up fragment of the Antebellum just waiting for the Travel Channel to show up. Maybe. Or maybe her husband is crazy, and it's a damn good thing they're not having kids any more.
She wonders if they would have been good parents.
She wonders if it's her fault.
She wonders if Jason thinks so. Because she didn't listen when he told her that the ghost had visited. Because she ignored the signs. Because she tried to pretend they were a normal couple living a normal life, having a normal baby.
That she was a normal girl.
In the bedroom, a week later, Jason is dressing. She watches him from the four-poster he won't let her throw out, no matter how many IKEA catalogs she leaves lying about the attic apartment. He is putting on his armor, the white shirt and dark jeans she fell in love with the first time, professional and approachable, easy.
"Don't get out of bed." His mother is a nurse. He repeats her instructions. "If you need anything, ring the desk. Ally comes in at noon. I'll bring you lunch then."
She nods. She will do what he says. They haven't argued yet. Nobody fights in the hospital, and she's only just got out. In the mirror he looks younger, his crooked nose at an odd angle. In Alice in Wonderland, the person in the mirror was a completely different being. Would the Jason from the mirror be a better lay? She will not leave this bed, no. She has far too much to do here. Doctor Phil is talking about women with some kind of penises today. She can't miss that.
Jason kisses her forehead before he leaves. Maybe it's the only way he knows how to tell her he still loves her. Or that he doesn't, and he's getting a divorce. She isn't sure which one she wants to be true. His face is pale. She wants to slap it. She's the one who should be pale. She's the one who should look like death. She's the one who lost the baby. Pallor is her privilege, not his. Does his ghost think the same thing, when she's sitting on the bed with her hand on his foot? He's too pale, and it's not fair? One of them has to be healthy. One of them has to be alive.
She'd like to meet this ghost of his. They might hit it off. Swap stories about death and dying and Jason. Muse aloud if they're all the same thing. Make a pact to be sisters, forever and ever, the living and the dead.
The baby's name was going to be Cassie.
When she was younger her mother told her that God gave babies their souls right when they were born. But Cassie wasn't born. Cassie slipped out, Cassie fell through the chinks in her own faulty body. According to Mom, then, did Cassie even exist at all?
She thinks about Cassie's soul floating in the ether, thinks about Tarot decks and Ouija boards. She thinks about her pointless PhD in Victorian Mysticism, about pages upon pages on how to run a long con, how to tell a believable future, how to spin a pretty web of bullshit.
On the television screen, Dr. Phil is gesturing to a medical diagram. Broad-shouldered, square-faced women sit in sullen rows in the front of the audience bank. She wants to sit with them, to claim her place among defectives everywhere, to offer herself up for product recall. Melt her parts. Cast her again. Wife and mother, version 2.0. She will wear argyle cardigans and summer hats. She will wear sunscreen. She will exercise three times a week, just give her an upgrade. Hard reboot. For God's sake, just troubleshoot her. Make her whole.
She puts a hand on her belly, feels the empty place, the sagging skin, soft where once it was just this side of thin and taut. Feels the difference, the absence of womanhood, the acute lifelessness of her own body. As a girl she touched her belly and felt this, learned quickly the defiance of her insides, the unwillingness to let nature direct it. Her body fought Nature and won - who does she think she is? Did she really think she could carry Cassie to term? Did she really think she deserved to? After all, she has not been whole for so long - not since the day in eighth grade when she looked at her body in the mirror and saw a stranger.
When Jason brings lunch she will be napping, curled in her grandmother's memory quilt. Squares of her mother's baby blanket brushing against her cheek; swatches of her own tucked underneath her belly. When she wakes she will smile and pretend she can't see him hesitate. She will eat the soup he brings her. She will not dump the bowl over his head. She will not mention Cassie. She will not mention the ghost.
But it is so hard to resist the violence. It's like his gentleness will undo her. She feels pandered to, humored, patronized. Maybe he's trying to soften the blow, to ease his way into a split. Maybe he doesn't know how to be anyone but the gracious host. The reservation robot. Doing the same play-pretend job for so long that he's forgotten how to be anyone else.
This is untrue, of course. Jason is human, Jason is varied, Jason has emotions - Jason loves her even more today than he did the day they met, more than the day they married. He loves her in an absurd way, in a child's way. He loves her for reasons neither of them understand. The robot, if there is one, must be her.
She feels like she hasn't slept for days, like she's still in the middle of the first and last all nighter she pulled in college, hopped up on too much coffee and the terrible adrenaline of a looming deadline, even if there's no deadline there. Her vision blurs around its edges and she sees the world through a telescopic lens, sharp, focused, limited. The photographs cluttering her grandmother's antique dresser. The gentle sway of the unlatched bedroom door, drifting back and forth with the air currents of the old house. The sharp place where the light from the bathroom cuts into the floor, a constant reminder.
Reminder of what, though? Of her failure? And how, then, has she failed? Was it in utero, somehow incapable of seeking enough of the right ingredients in that warm and liquid place? Or later, as she began to grow up and out, paying too much attention to the wrong things, ignoring the loss of her most obvious of female factors? All those mornings in college that she woke up and realized she hadn't taken her pills on time. Doctors poking and prodding and prescribing drug after drug before pronouncing her body safe for sowing - if not exactly fertile ground. Or did she just fail to know her own shortcomings? Death by negligence. Sorry, Cassie, we tried.
Jason brings her dinner with nightfall, in the dimness between dying sun and artificial light. She knows they should talk - they should discuss - maybe they should fight, she's been ready to fight for weeks, why won't he fight? But she accepts the tray without a word, eats mushy pot pie while he natters about his day. The guests love the poached egg dish he invented. Ally says hello. She'd have visited earlier, but one of the serving staff took it upon himself to shatter twelve bowls before noon, so she's been dealing with that all day. Oh, and Ms. Fairchild asked after you. Don't eat too quickly, you'll choke. Hey, hey, can you hear me?
Can she hear him? His voice is inky, like underwater reverberations, like talking to a merman. She imagines herself in a submarine, listening to the water scuff and thud around her - she remembers the oppressive silence of scuba diving on their honeymoon. She catches fragments of his sentences, pieces them together. Some things you do for money, and some you do for love, love, love.
She curls into his arms, surprising him and herself. These are moments so few and far between - moments that remind them of the beginnings of their love story, not that it's much of a story any more.
"This is good." She takes another mouthful to prove it.
"Thanks." He sounds flat, dejected, not unlike the flesh of her torso. But he kisses the skin behind her ear and she feels forgiven.
"Tell me about your ghost again," she says. It scares her, this question, but after the litany of talk shows, everything else has a sharp and biting ring to it that she longs for.
So he does. He lulls her into sleep with his quiet, earnest tones, his fingers stroking wisps of her hair, clumsy and childish. He talks about women in white, about the gypsy who told his fortune when he and his brother Charlie backpacked through Europe, the onset of the ghost soon after, the night before Charlie's accident. He tells her the story the way he tells it to strangers - is she a stranger? She is strange to herself - this body, this husband, this house. But she is not Betty Friedan's trapped housewife. Perhaps it is she who is the ghost, the delusion, the delusional.
He explains the sensation of the Otherworld. His ghost sits beside him and presses her hand to his foot, grasps his fingers when he reaches for her. Cool hands that feel like kid gloves, that smell like peppermint and warm grass. She always brings news - a herald, an omen. She just knows things, he's decided - a byproduct of her existence on another plane. He is, he admits, a little bit in love with her, or the idea of her visitation. He isn't sure. Does it really matter?
He forgot his wife is listening. She does not answer.
Has he ever seen her? His ghost?
He doesn't need to. He feels her.
And this is the man she fell in love with, she thinks. This is the language he used in those Victorian lit classes, in the library, in their respective graduate offices, carrying on covert conversations on department phones. The language of destiny, of change. Possibilities, planes, skepticism turning into mysticism, believing in what had not ever been seen. And she, alone, as she has always been, staying still. Unable to move into the greatest metamorphose of all, unable to create her own quivering cocoon, unable to break it open on time.
It's her own fault, she's sure of it now. When she was twelve she took her very first purse out to the beach and spent an hour in the sun. Her lipstick melted and ran into the smallest nooks and crannies. Staring into her favorite bag and seeing the goop she knew she would never be a real girl, never break into that cult of mystery.
Soon after, when other girls were talking about boys and movies and Aunt Rose, a relative all of her friends seemed to share, she was drawing designs into her leg with manicure tools, orange sticks and nail files, pressing hard enough that the skin scabbed over, reddened, raw, inflamed. In therapy they called it "self-harm." Pretty psychiatrists in chic skirts and glasses explained to her mother the potential reasons, explored with the unique combination of heavy-handedness and delicacy reserved for them the origins of her violence. She couldn't imagine why - didn't they know her reasons for doing it? Didn't they understand the freedom of claiming one's own body? Making it do as it was told for once, instead of letting it tell her who was boss?
In her shrink's eyes, her earnestness required reconditioning. She spent a week with the crazies before routine bloodwork bailed her out and explained away her boy body to boot - not enough estrogen, too much progesterone. But you'll see, we'll work through this, and you'll live a completely normal life, just wait. So she waited.
"Certain to conceive," they said, innumerable amounts of birth control, anti-diabetics, and synthetic thyroid-stimulating hormone later. "Safe chance of normal pregnancy," they said. And now Cassie is gone, flushed down the toilet - although according to her mother only the body is gone, not the soul. But there's blood in her bathroom grout. But her husband flinches to touch her, even though he's trying, he's trying so hard. But Cassie is haunting this family, doubling as ghost and guilt with frightening alacrity. But Mama, I only did it because it felt so good.
Beside her, Jason is still talking, long past needing the mms and yeses that assure him she's still listening, relaxed to the point that they've both forgotten the guests downstairs. He is describing the instant of contact, the first moment when his ghost met his outstretched hand with her own. The moment when, to his surprise, he felt fingers just this side of corporeal stroking his hand from wrist to tip, mapping the lines of his palm just like the Romanian fortune teller. She has heard it all before, but never quite like this - she feels something in her heart begin to quicken and shake, like the hand being mapped is her own, like pudgy child's fingers are anchoring her to the world around her. There is clarity here, and sharpness, and the quick angry memory of her reflection in her own blood, blood pouring out in waves, making up for a hundred missed Aunt Roses. Red taking white. Checkmate. She the King, unable to move, and Cassie the Queen, moving too far too fast, keeping tight hold of her soul's freedom.
After all, Cassie exists on a higher plane.
The sun is completely gone from the room now. Jason lets the darkness settle around them until the loudest sound in the room is his heartbeat under her ear.
Until they are completely alone.
They fall asleep.
In the deep night she wakes to a voice calling out, high and soft at the foot of the bed. Mama, mama. Cassie is calling - she gropes forward in the darkness, unused to the night after the bright white of her dreams. She is here, she is here. What does her Cassie need?
But Cassie isn't there, was never there. She slumps back to the bedclothes and curls away from Jason. Beside her, his hand reaches out, grasps something in the air, but she is already half-asleep, and she lets herself think he's just resettling in the bed, although she knows it's his way of keeping his ghost woman close. She will let him have her if it means that Cassie can stay too.
That it will all be better in the morning.
rating: r for blood and sensitive subjects - one of the integral scenes is a miscarriage. be warned.
writer's note: original fiction for my intermediate fiction writing class, and the story with which i applied to be in advanced fiction writing.
Nobody told her about the blood. Sticky and unguent, congealing even as it runs down her legs and onto the floor. Nobody told her how red it would be, red and not-red, like a scary movie, like Halloween supplies. How there would be something like a cross between a tadpole and a gummy bear there, floating in the mess. How she would need to touch it, to cradle it, to give the love that would never be received. Nobody told her how that thing could stare.
She's still staring back when Jason finds her, holding it in her hands. She doesn't look at him. She doesn't know what he'll see if she does. She can't take that chance. She doesn't have anything vulnerable left.
When he's emptied her hands into the toilet, when he's washed her fingers in the sink, he'll claim he knew something bad was coming. He won't say it, but when her eyes meet his in the mirror she'll see the 'I told you so' lurking there. 'I told you she was real.' Maybe she is. Maybe this house really does have its own merry woman in white - maybe the ghost isn't just a figment of her husband's imagination or a clever marketing ploy to keep the aging bed and breakfast in business, a made up fragment of the Antebellum just waiting for the Travel Channel to show up. Maybe. Or maybe her husband is crazy, and it's a damn good thing they're not having kids any more.
She wonders if they would have been good parents.
She wonders if it's her fault.
She wonders if Jason thinks so. Because she didn't listen when he told her that the ghost had visited. Because she ignored the signs. Because she tried to pretend they were a normal couple living a normal life, having a normal baby.
That she was a normal girl.
In the bedroom, a week later, Jason is dressing. She watches him from the four-poster he won't let her throw out, no matter how many IKEA catalogs she leaves lying about the attic apartment. He is putting on his armor, the white shirt and dark jeans she fell in love with the first time, professional and approachable, easy.
"Don't get out of bed." His mother is a nurse. He repeats her instructions. "If you need anything, ring the desk. Ally comes in at noon. I'll bring you lunch then."
She nods. She will do what he says. They haven't argued yet. Nobody fights in the hospital, and she's only just got out. In the mirror he looks younger, his crooked nose at an odd angle. In Alice in Wonderland, the person in the mirror was a completely different being. Would the Jason from the mirror be a better lay? She will not leave this bed, no. She has far too much to do here. Doctor Phil is talking about women with some kind of penises today. She can't miss that.
Jason kisses her forehead before he leaves. Maybe it's the only way he knows how to tell her he still loves her. Or that he doesn't, and he's getting a divorce. She isn't sure which one she wants to be true. His face is pale. She wants to slap it. She's the one who should be pale. She's the one who should look like death. She's the one who lost the baby. Pallor is her privilege, not his. Does his ghost think the same thing, when she's sitting on the bed with her hand on his foot? He's too pale, and it's not fair? One of them has to be healthy. One of them has to be alive.
She'd like to meet this ghost of his. They might hit it off. Swap stories about death and dying and Jason. Muse aloud if they're all the same thing. Make a pact to be sisters, forever and ever, the living and the dead.
The baby's name was going to be Cassie.
When she was younger her mother told her that God gave babies their souls right when they were born. But Cassie wasn't born. Cassie slipped out, Cassie fell through the chinks in her own faulty body. According to Mom, then, did Cassie even exist at all?
She thinks about Cassie's soul floating in the ether, thinks about Tarot decks and Ouija boards. She thinks about her pointless PhD in Victorian Mysticism, about pages upon pages on how to run a long con, how to tell a believable future, how to spin a pretty web of bullshit.
On the television screen, Dr. Phil is gesturing to a medical diagram. Broad-shouldered, square-faced women sit in sullen rows in the front of the audience bank. She wants to sit with them, to claim her place among defectives everywhere, to offer herself up for product recall. Melt her parts. Cast her again. Wife and mother, version 2.0. She will wear argyle cardigans and summer hats. She will wear sunscreen. She will exercise three times a week, just give her an upgrade. Hard reboot. For God's sake, just troubleshoot her. Make her whole.
She puts a hand on her belly, feels the empty place, the sagging skin, soft where once it was just this side of thin and taut. Feels the difference, the absence of womanhood, the acute lifelessness of her own body. As a girl she touched her belly and felt this, learned quickly the defiance of her insides, the unwillingness to let nature direct it. Her body fought Nature and won - who does she think she is? Did she really think she could carry Cassie to term? Did she really think she deserved to? After all, she has not been whole for so long - not since the day in eighth grade when she looked at her body in the mirror and saw a stranger.
When Jason brings lunch she will be napping, curled in her grandmother's memory quilt. Squares of her mother's baby blanket brushing against her cheek; swatches of her own tucked underneath her belly. When she wakes she will smile and pretend she can't see him hesitate. She will eat the soup he brings her. She will not dump the bowl over his head. She will not mention Cassie. She will not mention the ghost.
But it is so hard to resist the violence. It's like his gentleness will undo her. She feels pandered to, humored, patronized. Maybe he's trying to soften the blow, to ease his way into a split. Maybe he doesn't know how to be anyone but the gracious host. The reservation robot. Doing the same play-pretend job for so long that he's forgotten how to be anyone else.
This is untrue, of course. Jason is human, Jason is varied, Jason has emotions - Jason loves her even more today than he did the day they met, more than the day they married. He loves her in an absurd way, in a child's way. He loves her for reasons neither of them understand. The robot, if there is one, must be her.
She feels like she hasn't slept for days, like she's still in the middle of the first and last all nighter she pulled in college, hopped up on too much coffee and the terrible adrenaline of a looming deadline, even if there's no deadline there. Her vision blurs around its edges and she sees the world through a telescopic lens, sharp, focused, limited. The photographs cluttering her grandmother's antique dresser. The gentle sway of the unlatched bedroom door, drifting back and forth with the air currents of the old house. The sharp place where the light from the bathroom cuts into the floor, a constant reminder.
Reminder of what, though? Of her failure? And how, then, has she failed? Was it in utero, somehow incapable of seeking enough of the right ingredients in that warm and liquid place? Or later, as she began to grow up and out, paying too much attention to the wrong things, ignoring the loss of her most obvious of female factors? All those mornings in college that she woke up and realized she hadn't taken her pills on time. Doctors poking and prodding and prescribing drug after drug before pronouncing her body safe for sowing - if not exactly fertile ground. Or did she just fail to know her own shortcomings? Death by negligence. Sorry, Cassie, we tried.
Jason brings her dinner with nightfall, in the dimness between dying sun and artificial light. She knows they should talk - they should discuss - maybe they should fight, she's been ready to fight for weeks, why won't he fight? But she accepts the tray without a word, eats mushy pot pie while he natters about his day. The guests love the poached egg dish he invented. Ally says hello. She'd have visited earlier, but one of the serving staff took it upon himself to shatter twelve bowls before noon, so she's been dealing with that all day. Oh, and Ms. Fairchild asked after you. Don't eat too quickly, you'll choke. Hey, hey, can you hear me?
Can she hear him? His voice is inky, like underwater reverberations, like talking to a merman. She imagines herself in a submarine, listening to the water scuff and thud around her - she remembers the oppressive silence of scuba diving on their honeymoon. She catches fragments of his sentences, pieces them together. Some things you do for money, and some you do for love, love, love.
She curls into his arms, surprising him and herself. These are moments so few and far between - moments that remind them of the beginnings of their love story, not that it's much of a story any more.
"This is good." She takes another mouthful to prove it.
"Thanks." He sounds flat, dejected, not unlike the flesh of her torso. But he kisses the skin behind her ear and she feels forgiven.
"Tell me about your ghost again," she says. It scares her, this question, but after the litany of talk shows, everything else has a sharp and biting ring to it that she longs for.
So he does. He lulls her into sleep with his quiet, earnest tones, his fingers stroking wisps of her hair, clumsy and childish. He talks about women in white, about the gypsy who told his fortune when he and his brother Charlie backpacked through Europe, the onset of the ghost soon after, the night before Charlie's accident. He tells her the story the way he tells it to strangers - is she a stranger? She is strange to herself - this body, this husband, this house. But she is not Betty Friedan's trapped housewife. Perhaps it is she who is the ghost, the delusion, the delusional.
He explains the sensation of the Otherworld. His ghost sits beside him and presses her hand to his foot, grasps his fingers when he reaches for her. Cool hands that feel like kid gloves, that smell like peppermint and warm grass. She always brings news - a herald, an omen. She just knows things, he's decided - a byproduct of her existence on another plane. He is, he admits, a little bit in love with her, or the idea of her visitation. He isn't sure. Does it really matter?
He forgot his wife is listening. She does not answer.
Has he ever seen her? His ghost?
He doesn't need to. He feels her.
And this is the man she fell in love with, she thinks. This is the language he used in those Victorian lit classes, in the library, in their respective graduate offices, carrying on covert conversations on department phones. The language of destiny, of change. Possibilities, planes, skepticism turning into mysticism, believing in what had not ever been seen. And she, alone, as she has always been, staying still. Unable to move into the greatest metamorphose of all, unable to create her own quivering cocoon, unable to break it open on time.
It's her own fault, she's sure of it now. When she was twelve she took her very first purse out to the beach and spent an hour in the sun. Her lipstick melted and ran into the smallest nooks and crannies. Staring into her favorite bag and seeing the goop she knew she would never be a real girl, never break into that cult of mystery.
Soon after, when other girls were talking about boys and movies and Aunt Rose, a relative all of her friends seemed to share, she was drawing designs into her leg with manicure tools, orange sticks and nail files, pressing hard enough that the skin scabbed over, reddened, raw, inflamed. In therapy they called it "self-harm." Pretty psychiatrists in chic skirts and glasses explained to her mother the potential reasons, explored with the unique combination of heavy-handedness and delicacy reserved for them the origins of her violence. She couldn't imagine why - didn't they know her reasons for doing it? Didn't they understand the freedom of claiming one's own body? Making it do as it was told for once, instead of letting it tell her who was boss?
In her shrink's eyes, her earnestness required reconditioning. She spent a week with the crazies before routine bloodwork bailed her out and explained away her boy body to boot - not enough estrogen, too much progesterone. But you'll see, we'll work through this, and you'll live a completely normal life, just wait. So she waited.
"Certain to conceive," they said, innumerable amounts of birth control, anti-diabetics, and synthetic thyroid-stimulating hormone later. "Safe chance of normal pregnancy," they said. And now Cassie is gone, flushed down the toilet - although according to her mother only the body is gone, not the soul. But there's blood in her bathroom grout. But her husband flinches to touch her, even though he's trying, he's trying so hard. But Cassie is haunting this family, doubling as ghost and guilt with frightening alacrity. But Mama, I only did it because it felt so good.
Beside her, Jason is still talking, long past needing the mms and yeses that assure him she's still listening, relaxed to the point that they've both forgotten the guests downstairs. He is describing the instant of contact, the first moment when his ghost met his outstretched hand with her own. The moment when, to his surprise, he felt fingers just this side of corporeal stroking his hand from wrist to tip, mapping the lines of his palm just like the Romanian fortune teller. She has heard it all before, but never quite like this - she feels something in her heart begin to quicken and shake, like the hand being mapped is her own, like pudgy child's fingers are anchoring her to the world around her. There is clarity here, and sharpness, and the quick angry memory of her reflection in her own blood, blood pouring out in waves, making up for a hundred missed Aunt Roses. Red taking white. Checkmate. She the King, unable to move, and Cassie the Queen, moving too far too fast, keeping tight hold of her soul's freedom.
After all, Cassie exists on a higher plane.
The sun is completely gone from the room now. Jason lets the darkness settle around them until the loudest sound in the room is his heartbeat under her ear.
Until they are completely alone.
They fall asleep.
In the deep night she wakes to a voice calling out, high and soft at the foot of the bed. Mama, mama. Cassie is calling - she gropes forward in the darkness, unused to the night after the bright white of her dreams. She is here, she is here. What does her Cassie need?
But Cassie isn't there, was never there. She slumps back to the bedclothes and curls away from Jason. Beside her, his hand reaches out, grasps something in the air, but she is already half-asleep, and she lets herself think he's just resettling in the bed, although she knows it's his way of keeping his ghost woman close. She will let him have her if it means that Cassie can stay too.
That it will all be better in the morning.