[wpaudio url=”/audio/7_9/Chelko.mp3″ text=”listen to this poem” dl=”0″]

I feel the eel of her

skim the undersurface

of my skin. It’s

alive. Now, I imagine

everyone I meet emerging,

rumpled and wet, betwixt legs.

The birthing room dank

with the breath

between screams.

Shrill.

We are bonded,

those of us who have, for whatever reason,

cried together. The cords between us

variously thick

and glistening. It’s tough

to be alive. Stuffed as we are

with this stuff.

No dimple of innocence

at the crest of my skull

(but if I open my mouth wide

there is that soft dip

that opens in front of my ear-

so I’m not all armor). The body

entombs itself. My mother

has shrunk an inch and a half in a year-

her bones growing

inexplicably dense, rarified.

Now even she is

hard to the touch. I undressed

my grandmother once

months before, at ninety,

she died. Now you can see how terrible

old people look, she said. Her skin

iridescent: an insect wing in crumpled rest

which could, at any moment,

span the room.

I say no and they look at me as if my mouth is full of staples. As if not wanting another child means I hate the one I have. Is it a crime to be this selfish with my body? It’s true: I don’t want more stretch marks because I hate the ones I have. There’s a photograph that’s been circulating the Internet lately, of a woman proudly bearing her stretch marks saying something about being a tiger and having earned her stripes. Though I wouldn’t feel less of a mother without mine. Sometimes I ask Google Are single children more or less happy than children with siblings? I think about my siblings, how my little brother is going to Afghanistan soon and how I would put stretch marks on my face if it meant he’d be safe. I’d wear them like earrings. I’d eat them for breakfast if it meant that my 13-year-old sister never looked in the mirror and thought she wasn’t good enough. It scares me, how much control I have over my daughter’s life. How much I don’t.

for Logan

You slipped from the placenta, melted
out of that paraffin into the yellow-blanket hug
of your mother. A boy, we said together,
breathless. Now your dresser full of pinks
and auburns like a painter’s dawn needs emptying,
re-filling of boyish hues and earth-tones.
The ultrasounds brushed

out the layers of you in grayscale-
your upturned face, the amnion cradle.
Lace pigments of a girl. How, son,

will I make you fit? The room I built
for you needs its paint
stripped, valances shipped back.
You need sleeved shirts and blue jeans.
What will you do

with a world built for someone
else? Your day-old whimper rubs like peach skin
against the news channel, its mugshots and bombs
rocking endlessly into the nursery.

I see you behind the glass:
a soldier, a journalist, crouching
back into the incubator, into this mausoleum.
What will you do with a world built for none
of us? They bring you

to me and we yawn together, your exhales the near
inaudible octave of the breeze. How
will I make you fit, I ask
again, your head a tulip bulb in my palm.
You cry in the washbasin, exhausted in a space

too loose, too tight. In your mouth I see your flesh
of my flesh and that you already know
what I do not: that I, too, am new

at this, that you know it’s the other way around-
that I must make this world fit you.

My third-grade son returns from school. We ask about his day. He tells us of a multiplication quiz and the blacktop drama of recess kickball, then a pause. “But you can’t look in my backpack.” That, we tell him, is not an option. He explains he has to write a final draft of a persuasive essay he missed during last week’s sore-throat absence. I tell him I will glance over his work but will not give it a thorough read. I will consider his teacher’s red-pen comments and discuss them with my son before he puts pencil to paper.

With my boy engaged in his post-school wind-down of a snack and Mythbusters, I unzip his backpack. A blank sheet marks a page in his composition book. On the book’s cover, a drawing of a city skyline, the sky dotted with planes. I open the book. There’s his unmistakable scrawl, the letters veering from sloppy to painstaking and back again. The ends of his sentences rise as if lifted by balloons.

I read the first paragraph. The essay’s subject: a plea for a brother or two. Mindful of my promises, I close the book and return it to his backpack.

*

Is there a more human emotion than longing? Longing reaches through the mist of years. Distance itself waits within the word. Empty spaces separate us from our desires. We are left with daydreams of what might have been. For the next few days, I can’t stop thinking about the essay. In my heart, a pang, one for me, another for my son, the two of us longing for what will never be.

A nurse led us down the hospital corridor. We’d gotten to know each other over the past three months of injections and examinations. We’d seen the pictures of her children. We knew each other’s hometowns. She smiled at us. “You’ve got a perfect four-cell.”

There was the moment, my wife and I holding hands, nervous. There was the day, a box circled on our calendar, but beneath waited our private years of longing. The monthly cycles of anticipation and disappointment, a simple gift denied us yet granted so easily to others.

Earlier in the week, two of my wife’s eggs had been harvested, a procedure far less pleasant than my contribution to the cause. The unity of haploid cells had taken place beneath a microscope lens, but only one had developed. Our longing now had a single focus, four clumped cells, a dust speck of hope.

The procedure began, my wife in stirrups, a sheet over her raised knees. On the other side of the sheet, a doctor and his team. A technician wheeled in the cart holding a premeasured transfer tube and an incubator. The doctor and nurses moved with rehearsed precision, their bodies and hands engaged and intent, the workaday chatter behind their surgical masks concerned with the Steelers return to the Super Bowl.

I rested a hand on my wife’s shoulder. I felt myself balanced upon the cusp of longing, yet unlike the other longings I’d known, this time I was not alone. There was my wife. There were the doctors and nurses, and behind them, a benevolent tide, the years of research and shared study, the wonders of a branch of science concerned with a goal beyond squeezing a penny from a nickel or discovering a more efficient way to kill another man.

The doctor stood back and pulled down his mask. A smile-the procedure had gone well. All we could do now was wait.

My son’s ninth winter has been unseasonably mild. Unsure of when we’ll get another chance, we drag our sleds into Sunday morning’s fresh snowfall. A gray sky and icy breeze, our faces numb. Our sleds pack the snow, each run a little faster. We hold races. Snow clings to my boy’s jacket, testaments to his daring, mid-slope bailouts. Sometimes we ride in tandem, my son counting the seconds and comparing them to his solo rides. “Fifteen for the first one,” he says. “Seventeen for the second. Remember those numbers, Dad. We’ll write them down when we get home.” In his head, the burgeoning understanding of physics, just another of the puzzle pieces as he tries to make sense of his world.

My boy’s essay has been turned in, his confessions safe with his kind-hearted teacher. I now believe he didn’t want us to read his paper because he feared it would hurt our feelings, and for this, I love him all the more. We trudge up the hill again. An hour has passed, my steps heavier than when we started. I struggle to keep pace. From behind, his face is hidden, every bit of skin bundled against the cold. He is a shadow in a sea of white, and I think, as I sometimes do, about the fertilized egg that didn’t survive, the sibling ghost whisked away, a whisper consumed by the kinetic din of my son’s days.

Beneath the shadow of longing exists another version of my life, one in which I have another coat to zip, another pair of boots to tie. When we get to the hill’s top, I hug my son. He considers me, his breath steaming, his cheeks stung red. I hug him for the ghost we will never know. I hold the embrace for an extra beat when I imagine what also could have been, the alternate reality of a quiet Sunday morning, a house where there were no toys to sidestep, no sneaker-patterned dirt clumps across the kitchen floor.

I step back. “Seventeen and fifteen, right?”

“Right.” He mounts his sled. “I’ll count this one, too.” He’s gone before I can sit.

The doctor said wait. We waited. Wait implies stasis, stagnation, yet this was not that kind of waiting. Memory is a fragmented lens, and here is how I recall that time: misty nights, long walks, lit windows, glimpses into other lives, the nearness of so many strangers. I’d expected heightened emotions; what I hadn’t counted on was the calm. We’d done what we could, and all that was left was to let go and surrender to our longing. So we drifted on its current, unafraid, liberated by our powerlessness. One night we dined in town’s fanciest restaurant, not bothering to check the menu’s prices. Every night we talked, dreamy tangents that echoed back to our newlywed days.  Worries of money and jobs and the car that never worked right lost their hold, their value undercut by the realization that all that mattered was so close at hand.

I took a half day so my wife and I would be together to receive the doctor’s call. A word, two syllables so embedded with the voice beneath my skull that it rang foreign on another man’s tongue. In a breath, the sea of longing evaporated, our boat for two resting on solid rock, a landscape as unfamiliar as the moon. We climbed out and began our journey.

Our son’s Christmas list was short. We’d prodded, suggesting the toys popular among his peers. “No thanks,” he said.

One day in early December we asked again. A pause this time, then: “Maybe a skeleton on a stand.” He held his hands about a foot apart. “About this big.”

“That would be cool,” I said. I imagined him studying the bones, committing their names to memory, his thoughts churning with an appreciation of the miracles we carry beneath our skin.

He smiled. “And I’d like it to be able to come off the stand so I could carry it around and pretend it’s my little brother.”

On Christmas morning, he received the skeleton, a clattering arrangement of yellowed bones. My son held the skull so the feet danced upon the couch. He lifted its arm in a welcoming wave. The day passed-cutthroat competition on new board games, good smells from the kitchen, a bundled-up hike on our favorite trail. Later that evening, our son slept on the couch. On the floor, open boxes and wrapping paper scraps. Hissing embers in the fireplace. This might be the last Christmas we’d be able to carry his dozing form from the couch to his bed. I pulled up the blanket, only then noticing the skeleton resting on the couch’s top. The skeleton had been thoughtfully laid out, its legs straightened, a bony arm draped over its eyes. A pose of rest and sleep.

I considered the skeleton. Here was a reminder of fate and alternate realities. Here was an echo of the child we had and the one we didn’t. I laid my hand on my son’s chest, a communion with his life-giving currents. A secretly penned essay, play with a skeleton-here were my boy’s first rudimentary tools in the understanding of longing.

We could have opted for another round of IVF. We could have taken out a loan, the debt justified for the chance to have another child, yet I balked. Despite my reading and research, I hadn’t been prepared for the procedure’s ethical implications. Our first go-round gave us our perfect four-cell, but what if the next round gave us four? I wanted another child, not a basketball team. The doctors said we could choose the healthiest one or two; the other fertilized eggs could be frozen or donated to another couple. I couldn’t look into my son’s eyes and make such a decision.

A year passed, then another. My wife entered her forties, an age which brought its own set of worries and potential complications. The decision to change our minds grew harder to reverse. Time formed a sea around us. The three of us huddled close. This was our family.

Longings and dreams of alternate realities are, thankfully, often eclipsed by the day-to-day. The present absorbs us. We forget. We do our laundry and sweep the floors. We pull weeds from our gardens. We navigate traffic. We play with our children. Yet every so often, longing returns, the moment stealthy and hushed, an insulation of years. We employ the impossible math of calculating what we’ve lost. We imagine the trajectories we might have travelled. We spy upon the ghosts of our could-have-been lives.

Consider poor Gatsby, the novel’s last lines the most eloquent framing of longing I know: So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past. Gatsby couldn’t escape the dreams he should have let die. The rest of us, if we’re lucky, can weigh our longings and be satisfied that reality has given us more. The difference between the two can be a mountain of stone or a butterfly’s wing. All that matters is the scales are tipped. Only then can we live with ourselves.

There are nine katas a student of Mu Duk Kwan must master before he receives his black belt. The first three are relatively basic, variations on the same set of footwork. Kata four brings new kicks and strikes, the daisy chain of linked moves twice as complicated. For the past year, my son has been working on five, a routine that requires not only the mastery of new poses but also heightened elements of grace and fluidity.

He readies himself, his feet wide, balled fists by his side. He says I can watch if I’d like. This surprises me-for the past few months, he’s shushed me from the room before his practice. I sit on the couch beside the skeleton. He begins. He doesn’t know it, but I’ve spied on him before, his moves sometimes lackadaisical, an uninspired going through the motions. Tonight, however, I’m impressed. His movements are crisp and controlled. There is purpose in his eyes. He pivots and kicks and punches.

He will never have a brother. He will live his days, forgetting then revisiting his longing. His hands chop the air, a snapping cadence. He works his way through the intricate dance, stumbling here, graceful there. I watch, reassured he will find his way, my heart both lightened and filled.

This could be anywhere. This complex with its speckled tan and earth brick, khaki sidings, and hollow chocolate metal doors has a uniformed look. Just like the rest of this city. Flower Mound, Texas: affluent, religious, and white in polite smiles but never in the straight forwardness of a conversation.

Our home is the only apartment complex in this suburb in which we can afford to live. My wife and I do not mind being low-income in the Mound. We take pride in our kids attending good schools and in the absence of gunshots in the night. Privileged communities have safety. Across the street is the public school administrative buildings, and a green belt with a duck pond, where we often go feed the memories of our three children. We are the happy that comes from being able to tread water. Paycheck-to-paycheck poor. Overlooked and underestimated, not any different from the other tenants of the Timber Creek Apartments. Here the daughters are not the cheerleaders. They are either the quietly ignored or the soon-to-be teenage mothers.

Brittany Munoz was sixteen and pregnant. Her boyfriend was twenty-year-old, Garret Cole Gower, who her mother, Judith, would say, “frequently spent the night.”  These two mismatched socks fell in love in a three-bedroom apartment in building sixteen of this anonymous place. Buildings, twelve and sixteen share a large oval courtyard. We live in building twelve.

My family spends hours out in the courtyard and the open patio connected to our front door. The kids of the three or four buildings surrounding us bellow with youth, as they run from the gravel pit playground to the edge of the parking lot. The happiness of their young lives does not remember what past crimes occurred in this innocence. Our front door looks right into what was once Brittany’s bedroom. The place where her sister and she planned for new arrivals and dreamed of love that lasted forever. I can still hear the Latin pop-music that reverberated out of their windowpanes. That unit was remodeled when her family moved out, made the picture of perfection. Now, that apartment is the model home they show all the new prospective tenants.

“We have a quiet family community,” I hear the agents say, when they climb out of the golf cart, preparing to sell the dream of this complex. Every perspective resident is inundated with this mantra. I sit on my patio and smoke, observing the endless spectacle. Day after day, so much so that the words have become a common breath, the phrase has no life or texture. We have a quiet family community.

I often think of Brittany: her long brown hair, the natural shade of lip-gloss she wore that my oldest daughter loved, and her contagious smile. There is such promise in the eyes of a sixteen-year-old girl, misguided and rebellious. I see that promise in my own teenage daughter. I caught Olivia once, in her bedroom practicing “being an older girl”, wearing the shade of lip-gloss that she had admired on Brittany.  I thought Brittany was a good example for my daughter to imagine herself becoming. Simple and beautiful, not overdone or fake. Brittany seemed so happy and kind. She presented herself in a way that said, “The world is in front of me.” She would pass by the patio, walking around the buildings in the evenings. We never talked. We always grinned.

Every time I see strangers walk through her home, I feel they are intruding. From my patio, I stare into the dark crevices of the mini blinds into the window that used to be her bedroom. The darkness is frozen in time, unable to let go of that day almost one year ago.

My first inkling of the horror was a note that arrived, on front door, at five in the afternoon. A statement from the management in the leasing office. It read:

We have had a tragedy today in our community. This is an isolated incident do not be alarmed. We will answer any questions you have please do not hesitate to contact the leasing office by phone. We ask that today you keep your children inside as the police are conducting an investigation on the property. We ask for your prayers for the Munoz family. With respect for the family at this time, this is all we can say.

Distracted by our own lives, we had not noticed a thing. That evening there were red and blue lights on the two main driveways of the property. Their shadows echoed through the buildings like the questions of the housebound youths. By the time I went to work, shortly before six P.M., the large kid-worn field opposite our building was a tangled mess of yellow tape. Black uniforms caressed every space of ground with their eyes, as if a needle lay within their reach.

Eight hundred and thirteen women have died as victims of domestic violence in Texas since 1998; one of them was sixteen year-old mother-to-be Brittany Munoz. This could have been anywhere. We never thought this could happen here.

My wife spent the evening walking around the pool area, at the edge of the tape, talking with the other mothers who worried about the safety of their own homes. By the time I returned home from work, the lights were gone. Everything had returned to normal in the absence of the panic. As I sat in my chair and ate my dinner, my wife filled my empty belly with the gossip of our neighbors.

Apparently, it was Brittany’s sister who found her in her bed with blood stained covers pulled up top her neck. Peaceful and serene, like my daughters after I kiss their foreheads and turn off their bedroom light.  Brittany’s sister, Crystal was hysterical, screaming and flopping around in the open courtyard like a balloon with a slow leak. Similar to the dazed fear of my own daughter, when she awakens from a nightmare and seeks the comfort of my safe arms.

“She just kept saying she is dead, she is dead, and there was blood all over her arms and chest.”

By the time the news came on that night, everyone in the complex knew what had happened and who had done this disgusting thing. The police were looking for a twenty-year-old male who had been allowed to date, have sex with, and impregnate a sixteen-year-old high school student. They ran the footage of the sirens, the tape, and police officers standing around with cups of coffee and casual smiles in front of the building where a murder occurred. Our home. The one we thought was away from the violence of where we came from. Captain Wess Griffen took center camera.

“Both families are in agreement about the fact that it appeared to be a normal teenage relationship,” he stated as if unaware to the fact that teenage domestic violence is more normal than we think. As if a twenty-year-old man sleeping with and knocking up a sixteen-year-old girl was something normal, accepted, expected here, as if it’s acceptable anywhere.

My mother was Brittany’s age when she met a Garrett of her own. Married at seventeen, the nightmare of teen pregnancy soon turned into a dependence on a husband who had to be more like a father. With only a GED and no real training, my mom’s only place was home, growing up with her child. The quality of man willing to date a young girl runs the line of predator. If my mom would have known of the violence to come and the struggle that the rest of her short life was to be, I wonder if she would have made a different choice about being a mother. I wonder the same about young, dead Brittany.

Brittany wanted to be a mom. She was not broken as the fourteen year olds in hoochie shorts on The Maury Povich Show just wanting someone to love them into security. We all long for this sensation at the core of our being. That longing amplified in the heart of a teenage girl can be a very devastating emotion, when given to the wrong subject of affection. In her small understanding of how this large world stitches together, when you are in love and pregnant, you get married. Garret’s three months of sporadic attention was forever to her. She was dreaming of the possibilities, shopping for baby clothes with her girlfriends, escaping the shared bedroom of the past sixteen years, and having a family. Being in love. He was thinking, why is this girl ruining my life?

“The police have a murder weapon. Garret Cole Gower, 20, of Ft. Worth is a person of interest,” concluded the anchorperson.

The sterile flavor of the news was not the reality of the investigative reporting going on among the residents. Neighbors would later tell us that, “Brittany’s face was so bloody and bloated from a beating you could not recognize her.”

The medical examiner would calculate the cause of death was blunt force trauma. The apartment complex would send out two more notes over the course of the next four days urging tenants:

Please do not talk with the reporters and news crews. That kind of attention is not respectful of the family. Thank you for putting their needs ahead of our own.

This had to be said as several of our neighbors took the opportunity to claim a few moments of local fame, feeding off the misery of others by posing for the news crews.

It took three days to find Garret, who was arrested in a mental health facility in the next town over. He was reading her obituary in the paper when the authorities entered his room. His jury took ninety minutes to deliberate. He killed his girlfriend and their unborn child because he could not tell his family that she was 16 and pregnant. A life sentence without possibility of parole was a judgment of mercy extended to him. What use is forgiveness to the dead?

It took two weeks for the news crews to move on and the kids’ laughter to once again sound normal in the late autumn sun. I imagine the well-to-dos commented openly at the restaurants of the dangers lurking outside their proper brick walls. Brittany’s family moved shortly after the casseroles were eaten.

A quiet family community, here three lifetimes ended before they began. This could have been anywhere, an isolated incident. As a father, I hope this is as close as my children ever come to domestic violence, that the bad dreams that wake them up at night will never become realities. I pray for my daughters to remember the lessons of a happy girl with a contagious smile. I pray for my girls to find friends before they find lovers. As a son, who survived a home filled with domestic violence, I know the heart pumps a passion, which causes both pleasure and pain. I do not believe in isolated incidents. This can happen to anyone, anywhere. I pray for those two mismatched socks- each discarded for not making a perfect pair.

[wpaudio url=”/audio/7_8/Wolff.mp3″ text=”listen to this poem” dl=”0″]

This poem is presented as a PDF in order to preserve the formatting.

[wpaudio url=”/audio/7_8/Tanzer.mp3″ text=”listen to this story” dl=”0″]

You are running late, always running late to pick up the older one at daycare, and it is five dollars for every minute passed 6:00pm. Which is already late enough as it is, but there you are again, trying to do one last thing in the office, missing a train, sitting on a train, stopping to buy the kid a snack at the scary bodega on Division, and running through the rain to not be late.

Because you are so close, the watch reading, 5:55, then 5:56, suddenly 5:58, but you are at the door now, buzzing and bursting in, where it is so quiet that it’s not clear to you whether any children are still there at all.

Then you see them, a group of kids and the teacher, the young guy, all of them fresh-faced and sweaty, sitting in a big group, leaning forward and intently looking at something.

You slow down, you try to catch your breath, and you tell yourself that it’s okay, everything will be okay. You walk up to see what everyone is looking at.

It is your kid.

He’s in the middle of hundreds of puzzle pieces, and he is methodically putting together the biggest puzzle you’ve ever seen in your life. Everyone is transfixed, as are you, it’s beautiful, like a ballet, and as you watch you think about a piece you must have read once in The New York Times about how our biggest fears are the most irrational.

Like flying in a plane, it’s immensely safer than getting in your car, but flying has a hold on our collective fears that cars will never match.

And this is how parenting has been for you from the start.

You never worry about how you will pay for college, which on purely technical level is mostly impossible to do at this time, but you endlessly worry about things like Leukemia, porch parties gone awry, and an endless array of possible accidents that will lead to irreparable brain damage.

It is all there, all of it, and all of the time, which is not even to mention your ongoing fears about the boys being sexually abused because you’ve somehow turned away at the wrong time.

You also never worry about whether your kid is special, however, or if he has some kind of gift, you’ve come to assume it, though based on what, and how that will happen, you don’t know.

This performance on the other hand, this puzzle thing, maybe it means something, it must, but again, you don’t really know.

Just like you don’t know exactly why a fresh-faced young man chooses to work around small children, something you know is antiquated and fucked-up, so you push it aside, and decide to take a moment and enjoy what’s happening before you, your beautiful genius boy doing something bizarre and awesome to the amazement of all who are watching.

He doesn’t do puzzles any more though, nothing quite like it really, nothing that appears especially gifted or unique anyway, which is something that doesn’t totally make sense to you, but is so much easier to ignore for now.

Of course, many things don’t make sense, and many things are easier to ignore, for example, the fact that the fresh-faced teacher went on to inappropriately touch one of the other kids, was quickly, though quietly, dealt with, and is now rumored to be living under the watchful eye of his parents and far from your little school.

HELP WANTED

Packed in a girdle
like a sausage in casing,
I’m not “showing.”
In the window of a store
where I purchase pickles and pork rinds,
a Help Wanted sign leans-
dog-eared as the has-been bouffant
checking groceries.

Clutched with nausea,
I grip a clipboard-
dot i’s with open circles,
check the box next to “Miss,”
spell out Boulevard
so the manager
will see someone
larger than ankles,
swollen from salt.

As he scans my application,
asks, “When can you start,”
something flutters-
taps and flips
against my girdle.

Worn as the doorstop heels of her shoes,
the cashier who trains me
calls customers “honey.”
Without looking,
pecks at her register-
asks when I’m due.

GREEN BRA

In the summer of moon walk and Woodstock,
seventeen and pregnant,
I was sent cross-country-
hushed away to swell and wait.

Days out from game shows and solitaire,
I browsed at a thrift shop,
pitched through stale perfume, fusty fur-
stalked weeping, sequined nothings.

In a tangle of straps and lace,
hooks, eyes, garter belts and girdles,
I found a bra-elfish green,
clear as a cresting wave.

In line for a dressing room,
someone asked, “First baby?”
Her friend cooed, “You have that certain glow.”

Topless, trapped between stalls,
I listened as the women prattled-
bundled my breasts into green party hats.

When one began, “Is your husband ready?
Has he timed the route
from home to hospital,
painted the nursery,
purchased cigars,”

I took that bra and shoved it
hard into the throat of my backpack.

It was once said by a man that the gears of the machine can be stopped with enough human bodies resting atop of them. In the end, women’s bodies are always the first to be sacrificed. And how did it happen that we women were the only ones brave enough to place our bodies between the dogs and their hunters? The Wildlands turned into fields of rape when the resistance began. Hunters dropped their phallic symbols and held tight to their phalluses, as if they were beautifully crafted swords forged in a fire kindled by hatred. In the resistance we joked that the hunters carried in their pants rapiers that made them rape-ier. It was a dark joke that we chuckled at only nervously, fearful we’d become one of these women, caught with our puppet decoys and dealt with brutally. I only heard of the rapes second and third hand, but I kept a gun next to my wolf puppet at all times. And even these days, long after the hunt, long after the disappearance of our leader, jane, long after my time in the resistance, I still think of that woman-my comrade-bleeding from a hole in her side, her puppet torn and smudged with dirt, surrounded by snarling dogs who protected her body from further debasement. Soon they’d be picked off too, one bullet for each dog too brave, too honorable or too foolish to run upon hearing the thrusting of a man’s clicking shotgun pump.

Years ago, for a spell that lasted only a few days, figurative speech confused Gretchen. The first time she noticed it, she was at the Museum of Natural History with her friend Mary. They had gone there to see the Butterfly Conservatory.

As they stood in the vivarium, Mary, yanking at a section of hair near the nape of her neck-a nervous habit-told Gretchen about an upcoming job interview. The interviewer would be a prominent psychologist, Mary said, one famous for her research about post-traumatic stress disorder in September 11 victims. If the interview went well, Mary would become the woman’s assistant.

“I’ve got butterflies in my stomach,” Mary said.

Gretchen looked at the Monarchs and Blue Morphos swirling around them and wondered if Mary meant she’d swallowed one. Mary was a little off sometimes. But then Gretchen caught on. Mary meant she had nerves. She was making a joke.

“You’ll be great,” Gretchen said, and smiled, and squeezed Mary’s hand. The two often held hands, and they liked doing so, although lately Gretchen had begun to secretly resent that Mary treated her in the same way she treated her many male admirers, giggling too cutely when Gretchen made jokes and putting too much effort into planning their excursions. Gretchen was also beginning to feel that they’d been friends for too long to carry on like this, petting one another. According to commonly held wisdom about female friendships, by now they should have been undermining each other with prickly jabs, letting their judgments hack away at one another’s self-esteem. History was dotted with tales of female friendships that had likewise soured, rotting into rivalries and sometimes even ending in bloodshed. But that had not been the case in their friendship. And Gretchen, at least, was in need of a wholesome friendship, something simple, pure, and easy.

The vivarium, the length of a subway car, had cost fourteen dollars admission on top of the museum’s regular fee, and so, being young and poor, they took their time perusing the placards and inching down the exhibit, even though the room was humid and they were wearing jackets. As they strolled, Gretchen hoped the butterflies would not land on her. They were beautiful, but she did not consider herself a nature person. When an Owl butterfly fluttered off a leaf and alighted on Mary’s soft, round shoulder, Mary asked to have her picture taken. Gretchen would have brushed it off.

Near the exit doors, the caterpillars were stored in a small display case. It was hard for Gretchen to see they were alive except for the fact that one leaf shook under the weight where several of them had bunched together, crawling toward the stem. A few of the butterfly larvae had become chrysalides; these hung from the branches like straightjacketed men. One had bound himself to the display’s windowsill and convulsed as the small children standing near Gretchen and Mary tapped their fingers against the glass. The children laughed loudly, oh yes-tyrannical little gods.

By five o’clock Gretchen and Mary had exhausted the museum. Mary had to leave for a date she’d found on the Internet. She worried he would be shorter than he claimed. Privately Gretchen thought that anything would be better than the man Mary had been seeing-her married boss. If Mary had been someone else, Gretchen would have said to her, “You should love yourself enough to find an emotionally available, unattached man.”  But you see, they weren’t in the stage of friendship where such remarks could be made, even masked by opaque wording. So instead, Gretchen wished Mary luck.

Mary kissed Gretchen on the cheek and said goodbye. Gretchen took the train back to Brooklyn, having no Saturday night plans herself, and found her roommate home. He was a friend she had known since college who slammed the cupboard drawers and stomped around the apartment.

“Where have you been?” he asked.

“With Mary,” she said, “at the Museum of Natural History.”

“Why go all the way up there?”

Gretchen tried to slam the fridge door, but it silently eased itself shut. “I don’t know,” she said angrily. “Intellectual curiosity.”

He raked his hand through his hair. “How is she, anyway?”

“She’s fine. Going on a date tonight.”

“Does she need a ride? Because I’d like to take her all the way.”

Gretchen’s ability to decode figurative speech failed again, and it took her a moment to figure out what he was implying. She stared blankly ahead at the plastic fruit lying on the kitchen counter. “No,” she finally said, and went to her room and shut the door. Later that night she looked up brain disorders on the Internet, wondering what had been causing her linguistic troubles. She looked at the peeling paint on her radiator. Lead, maybe. Still later she phoned the emotionally unavailable man in her own life and asked him to come over. But this isn’t a story about that.

*

            Mary called Gretchen the next day. “I don’t want to be small,” she said-which confused Gretchen, since Mary was rather small, barely five feet and at most one-ten-“but he’s short. Five-four, tops.”

Had Gretchen been more direct, she might have asked about the date’s character, whether he seemed like a man who might be worth getting to know better. “Good things come in small packages,” she might have joked, had her language facilities been sharp and had she felt comfortable enough with Mary.

“But let’s not talk about him,” Mary said, her voice tiny, the reception crackling. “I need help planning for the interview next week.”

“I’ll help,” Gretchen said, alacritous, always, for Mary.

So Mary invited Gretchen to come to Queens for the night. And since it was Sunday, when the train service between the boroughs was fickle-and because Gretchen could not afford to take car service home instead-Gretchen would commute from Mary’s place in the morning. Gretchen packed her overnight bag with a gray dress and a pair of ballet flats and traveled on the trains for over an hour to reach Mary’s apartment in Queens.

Mary’s apartment was much larger than anything a typical young person might rent in Brooklyn, and for as long as they had been friends, Gretchen had enjoyed a recurring dream about Mary’s apartment. In the dream, Gretchen walked through Mary’s bedroom and found a door that opened into secret, bigger rooms and hallways, ones that did not exist in waking life.  These empty rooms were sparsely decorated, sometimes containing only a chair or couch, and sometimes they were windowless with low, cage-like ceilings. In these dreams, Gretchen always knew the newfound spaces could be hers to fill, if she wanted them, and she woke up feeling ecstatic.

In real life, Mary kept all her books in the bedroom, stacked on the bookshelves haphazardly to fit-some vertically, some horizontally, and some tucked behind the rows because they could not fit on the three bookshelves otherwise. On the windowsill Mary kept a collection of plants, large and small, succulents nestled among the green and leafy. How she kept them alive, Gretchen could not understand. Gretchen had no talent with houseplants. She was not a nature person. She could barely keep alive her one zebrina plant, even though the man at the nursery with a tear drop tattoo had said it would be easy.

Gretchen sat on Mary’s futon, her legs crossed at the ankles, watching while Mary gave a preview of her interview outfit options. “I’ve been agonizing,” Mary said. “I need a fresh pair of eyes.”

Gretchen wondered for a moment how Mary would get these eyes.

On the bottom Mary wore a gray tweed skirt. On the top she was shirtless, displaying her barbell nipple piercings. Gretchen had known about them, but never seen them. To Gretchen they looked painful and deforming. Mary buttoned up a white chiffon blouse. “Of course I’d wear a bra,” Mary said. “But what do you think?”

Gretchen told her it was good, but in truth she thought the chiffon too frilly to be professional. Mary switched to a red sweater with a deeply plunging neckline.

“How about this one?” she asked.

Gretchen hesitated. “A bit low cut, maybe?”

Mary sighed. “You think?”

“Or maybe it’s the color,” Gretchen quickly added. “Maybe the cut and color together.”

The last option Mary tried on was a worsted wool pantsuit. Although the seat bagged a bit and the sleeves came short of Mary’s wrists, Gretchen thought it looked professional.

“The suit is most suitable,” Gretchen said. Mary laughed. Gretchen clarified. “You can’t overdress for a first interview.”

“So the best is worsted,” Mary said. She sighed again, and changed back into her jeans.  “Dinner?” she asked.

Before they left for the restaurant, Gretchen used Mary’s bathroom. There was a book on the tub’s ledge, a first edition of Veronica. It was Mary’s habit, Gretchen knew, to take the dust-jackets off while she read in the bath. This was one of the reasons Gretchen loved Mary.

*

Gretchen and Mary were drunk by the time they left the restaurant and stumbled down Roosevelt Avenue. The liquor store they found was shadowed by the elevated tracks. Its back walls were packed high with brown boxes and dark bottles. They wanted two bottles of cheap wine-they knew that much-but didn’t know how to pick, so they decided to choose bottles based on the animals on their labels.

Gretchen draped her arm around Mary’s shoulder, although the great difference in their height always made Gretchen, the taller, feel awkward, as if they represented different species: there was no way they could both represent the human female. The old man behind the counter leered at them, his gaze both sexual and disapproving. The first bottle they selected featured a lioness stalking. The second label showed a cheetah, ready to pounce. “Meow meow,” Mary said, pulling Gretchen close.

At the apartment Mary uncorked the bottles and filled their glasses once, then twice, then a third time. They changed into their stained and unraveling sleeping clothes and set the alarm. Mary’s small futon lay on the ground beneath her windowsill garden, and branches and leaves hung over them. They turned on the TV at the foot of the bed and listened to a gentle narrator speak about the forests of the northern hemisphere. Mary turned the volume low.

            “So this woman, my job interview,” Mary said. “Do you want to hear what she’s researching now?”

“Sure,” Gretchen said, loopy and taciturn. She sneezed into her hand.

“She’s researching postpartum depression in September 11 survivors. Some of them were pregnant at the time. That means the babies are what, two or three now? Shooting up like beanstalks.”

“I don’t understand,” Gretchen said, meaning beanstalks, for her problem lingered. She laid her face on the pillow.  Mary took a swig from her glass and went on.

“The question is whether the mothers are normal or not. Whether being in that type of trauma can affect these women long term, whether they’ll be overly clingy mothers or emotionally distant. Dr. Morrow checks the mothers. Later she’ll do the children too. To see how messed up they are.”

Gretchen’s eyelids grew heavy. “That’s intense,” she said, and she meant it.

“I was here, you know, in Queens. I should have been on the train, but I was hungover. So I’d slept in, really late. I didn’t hear anyone call. When I woke up I noticed the planes weren’t overhead. Usually I hear them every few minutes going into LaGuardia.”

Gretchen knew that Mary was saying something important and intimate. Gretchen knew she should say something back, but she was very tired. She wished Mary would stop talking.

But Mary spoke again. “I had one of those hangovers where you’d rather die than stay awake. When I turned on the TV and saw what happened, I thought, how useless am I?” Mary was quiet for a minute. “Were you here? When it happened?”

Gretchen had already drooled on the pillow, so close she was to passing out. “I was in Philadelphia,” she muttered, and closed her eyes.

The next time she stirred, Gretchen realized Mary had turned off the lamp. The television was still on, the program about forests running, with the camera panned high above the canopy, zooming out to show the forest’s great expanse. Mary was still drinking wine, still propped up on her pillow, leaning towards Gretchen. The program’s narrator said something about the Ukraine, and Gretchen dozed. When she awoke again the room was dark and Mary’s arm lay across her chest, her hand cupped under Gretchen’s breast. Gretchen figured Mary had groped her asleep, dreaming of someone else. She took Mary’s hand off her breast and moved it aside. Mary groaned and rolled onto her back.

Later Gretchen woke up again and felt the futon shaking. Mary was panting and rubbing herself. Gretchen shut her eyes, embarrassed for them both. But Mary’s panting grew louder and she began moaning. Gretchen felt Mary’s arm brush against her, and she realized Mary intended for her to know. No form of speech, figurative or not, could have made this less clear. As Mary’s mewling grew louder, Gretchen’s doubts disappeared. The sounds Mary made were arousing to Gretchen-although she never would have admitted it-and had it been a man beside her, she would have gotten out of bed, argued, slapped him, she was sure.  She would have demanded cab fare to get home. But it wasn’t a man. It was Mary. Suddenly Gretchen understood that Mary was forcing her to make a choice. Gretchen could speak now, and surrender herself to a change in their friendship, or she could stay silent, preserving an illusion of something she loved, though it would now be fake forever.  Gretchen closed her eyes and stayed still. When it was over, and Mary had lain silent for a while, Gretchen went to the bathroom, ran the tap cold, and splashed her face. She took the book from the tub’s ledge and ripped out the last page, then tore it into tiny pieces and flushed them down the toilet-a make-do act of passive vengeance.

Back on the futon, Gretchen kept herself contained near the edge, her back turned towards Mary, arms curled under her head. In the morning Mary served them cottage cheese mixed with blueberries and pretended nothing had happened. They sat at her kitchen table, beneath a big window.

“I slept like a log,” Mary said. “You?”

Logs don’t sleep, Gretchen thought. Nor do they masturbate next to their sleeping log friends.

“I was too drunk.” Gretchen shaded her eyes from the daggering sunbeams. The window above the kitchen table was enormous. Gretchen wondered what a giant, looking in the window of this Queens kitchen, would see. The apartment, so large to Gretchen, would seem miniscule to the giant, and she and Mary would both seem small and lifeless, like miniature dolls.

*

Back at her apartment that night, Gretchen’s roommate asked about Mary.  “How was your sleepover?” he said. “You ladies paint each others’ nails?”

Gretchen told him that yes, they did paint each other’s nails. That hers had been painted Yellow Rose. Mary’s, Sparkle Blue. That they had watched old episodes of I Love Lucy, laughed until they almost peed, ate brownies, and made crank calls. There were other things, too, Gretchen told him-secret girl things he could never know about.

*

Mary called the next day, sounding devastated. “I’m pretty sure I bombed it.”

“Bombed it?” Gretchen said, muddled. “You bombed something?”

“You know, the interview. I don’t think it went well. I doubt I’ll get the job.”

A minute sense of figurative language was starting to creep back into Gretchen. The little beast inside of her licked its paws. She rolled on her back and stared at the ceiling. “Did you wear the red sweater?”

Mary was quiet for a minute. “Why?”

Gretchen’s voice fluttered high. “It was a little, well.  To me, I guess-” Gretchen swallowed. She let her voice go cold. “It looked cheap.”

“What?  No, I didn’t wear it.” Mary’s voice wavered.

“What went wrong, then?” Gretchen paused. “Did you act professional? Were you hung over?  Sometimes you have a tendency to self-sabotage, you know.” When Mary didn’t say anything, Gretchen said, “Hello? Can you hear me?”

“I wore the worsted wool.” Mary’s voice sounded small and distant.

“Oh,” Gretchen said. “Then I’m sure you looked great, at least.” Her figurative speech clicked on fully right then. She was cutting someone down to size.

Gretchen hung up and remembered lying stunned and paralyzed next to Mary while Mary groaned and squirmed, and how much simpler their friendship had been earlier that same evening, playing dress-up for Mary’s interview. Now, with her language facilities restored, Gretchen better understood what had happened between them on the futon. To have acknowledged the situation would have been like opening the shutters in a rainstorm and letting the damaging gales whip inside a fragile home. Mary had held Gretchen in check like a chess Queen, cornering her there on the futon’s edge, but Gretchen had demanded a choice; Gretchen had played dead.

*

            The expression “to fall asleep” makes little sense, but perhaps has something to do with the common dream sensation, most often experienced in the first minutes of slumber, of tripping or dropping, freefall, several feet. “To fall in love” is a stranger one-more mysterious, too.  Surely it has something to do with the vulnerability of falling, of slipping, of surrendering control.

The two friends didn’t see each other for months-that was easy enough, having the excuse of living in such a big and messy city-and when they did see each other, they were at parties, hectic environments where they did not have to be alone. A little over a year later, Gretchen moved back to Philadelphia and made several trips to New York before she thought of calling Mary. When she did call, it was because she’d seen an ad for the Butterfly Conservatory and been reminded of their trip. Gretchen didn’t have much of a reason, but enough time had passed for the night in Queens to seem small. She still dreamt about Mary’s apartment and its secret rooms.

They met in Manhattan, at a small café on the Upper West Side. Mary was living in Englewood now, and had come to the city by bus. She was working for the psychologist. Gretchen asked about the job, and tried to listen, but in truth, Mary bored her now. Gretchen picked at her croissant as Mary spoke. They didn’t have much to say. Still Gretchen felt the rush of the familiar, sitting there across from Mary, and felt comforted by Mary’s presence and satisfied with herself for initiating their reunion. Gretchen left the cafe feeling dazed but ecstatic.

As Gretchen walked uptown, the wind whistled around the street corners. On her way to the subway, she saw another poster for the vivarium, with an illustration of a caterpillar. Butterflies, she remembered, were different from moths-unlike the moth caterpillars who became ensconced in cocoons, butterfly larvae became chrysalides, and completed their metamorphosis when they abandoned their hard shells.

Gretchen remembered then that after Mary and she had gone through the vivarium, they took turns showing each other their other favorite parts of the Natural History Museum. Mary had taken her to see the dinosaurs. The T-Rex fossil copy had been rearranged, though, since Mary had last seen it, due to new discoveries about the dinosaurs’ physiques. The scientists now believed that what they had initially assumed-a standing posture-would have been anatomically impossible. Now the dinosaur lunged forward, stalking. She and Mary had stood before the display, staring at the wires and bolts and cables suspending the bones. “It’s squatter, mounted this way,” Mary had said. She had folded her arms and sighed. “How do they know how it’s supposed to be, anyway?  It’s disappointing, really.”

And when it had come time for Gretchen to show Mary her favorite part, Gretchen had led her into the habitat rooms, which she had loved ever since she was a little girl. Perhaps that strange episode of not understanding figurative language had begun even then, she realized now, for as a child she had never enjoyed thinking about the actual flora and fauna represented in the dioramas. She had never imagined them coming to life, or fantasized about what life might have been like there, in those other, distant, extinct places; instead she had wished she could invade the museum at night and rearrange the exhibitions. There she could have full rein, you see, pretending to be a manager, a night guard, or perhaps even the taxidermist responsible for stuffing the creatures.

On the street corner Gretchen stopped walking and stood still, marveling at this.  To fantasize about being a taxidermist! Such a lack of imagination in a child was no doubt indicative of a greater problem. And why had she loved those old habitat rooms, anyway? She had really believed she loved them-yes-with their dead, sad, glass-eyed animals cornered in imaginary homes.