[2017] What We Lose Read online

  The pain continued and the doctors continued to be confounded. The air at home was decidedly anxious. Our family dinners of curries and aromatic roasts ceased. My father fixed simple, utilitarian meals that filled my stomach and suited my mother’s health restrictions. I brought a tray to my mother’s bedroom every evening and ate at the kitchen table with my father. He fumbled with the dishes and silverware as the sound of the TV buzzed from upstairs.

  “Thank you,” my mother would say as she stared at the television. She would hug me or touch my cheek, and I would look deep into her eyes, searching for something that had already gone.

  At last a chain of referrals led to an oncologist. I was called to the office at school on the day of the appointment, and I was almost relieved to learn what it was, even though it was the worst possible outcome, because it ended this horrible period of not knowing.

  He is waiting for me at the airport, carries my small suitcase all the way to his blue hatchback. We kiss in the car, chastely, tentatively. His apartment is on the top floor of a three-story building in King. The landlady is an old Russian woman who smokes at the bottom of the back stairwell and cries every night. She has no family and no visitors; her life is a mystery that I fill in with tragedy.

  His apartment is a one-bedroom, spare, decorated with brown thrift-store furniture. It smells faintly of mothballs and cologne. In the living room are four towering bookcases. None of them match. The books overflow from the shelves, stacked in corners, piled on the coffee table. We sit in the kitchen and he makes me peppermint tea. When I finish the tea, he takes the cup from me and puts his lips to my forehead. I sigh. We embrace and sink into each other. We find our way to his small bedroom and his low platform bed. He undresses me and runs his fingertips all over my body. When we make love, it’s like we are two halves of a whole joining. There is no space between us, no awkwardness. We lie in bed for many hours afterward, smiling, tracing the light from the window on each other’s skin.

  That evening, he takes me shopping at the neighborhood market. It is a pioneering food co-op that also runs a food bank on weekends, serving different income types in the area. We stroll down the aisles. I push the cart from behind and he steers with his hand on the front. He pauses every few steps to hold up an item. You like this? You need this? Do you drink dairy milk? I prefer rice. I say yes to granola, rice milk, a young organic chicken, lemon, fresh rosemary, and baby potatoes.

  When he goes out for work on my third night, I take the chicken out of the fridge, wash it, and pat it dry. I load it into his only suitable baking pan. My hands shake as I grease the skin with olive oil and rub salt and pepper all over the body. My knife wriggles as I cut the lemon in half and squeeze citrus over the bird. I tear the leaves off the rosemary and dot them all over the skin, shoving the stems deep inside the cavity along with the spent lemon halves. The baby potatoes I run under the tap, trying to be gentle as I massage off the grit under warm water.

  My mother taught me how to roast a chicken to succulent moistness inside and crispiness outside. She taught me that men don’t always need, but they love, a woman who can cook and keep house. It wasn’t sexism, she said (such a disavowal, I noted, was usually a signal that it was); domesticity was harder to find in a partner now, because of feminism, and just like a job candidate who can code HTML, it was something that set you above the others.

  As I lift the chicken, covered in foil, into the oven, I worry that I have not remembered my mother’s instructions correctly. Is it an hour at 350 degrees, or 400? Or do I start at 350 and then move up to 400 when I remove the foil? What if the oven is irregular? What if, no matter how perfectly I cook the chicken, he doesn’t like it? Then I would be a bad feminist and a bad cook. I shove the bird into the oven and collapse onto the floor.

  A few hours later, Peter returns home. He sets the table and pours us wine. He eats each bite through a satisfied smile, and I realize that, even if the chicken had been charred, or half-raw, I would never have known the difference from his face. To my taste, it is seasoned well but a little on the dry side.

  We spend the next three days in bed except when we are carousing around the city, hand in hand, feeling like everything is brand-new and already ours.

  On the plane ride home, I look at my calendar, making plans for my next visit. When I get home, I make the announcement. I call Aminah and my father. It’s official, real this time: I am in love.

  A morning of Internet browsing leads me down a rabbit hole of research on serial killers’ wives. For every infamous man there are handfuls of women who become attached to him—who become infatuated, entangled, to small and more serious degrees. What strikes me—what is discomfiting, and what makes me return to these women long after this day—is the truly common nature of their relationships with these men. How close each of them was to death, or to the discovery of what her husband had done.

  And then there are the strangest cases, of women who seek out men already accused, sometimes convicted, of crimes.

  —

  Women who have married serial killers have given several different reasons. Some believe they can change a man as cruel and powerful as a serial killer. Others “see” the little boy who the killer once was and seek to nurture him. A few hope to share in the media spotlight or get a book or movie deal.

  Then there’s the notion of the “perfect boyfriend.” A woman knows where he is at all times and knows he’s thinking about her. While she can claim that someone loves her, she does not have to endure the day-to-day issues involved in most relationships. There’s no laundry to do, no cooking for him, and no accountability. She can keep the fantasy charged up for a long time.

  These wives often make significant sacrifices, sometimes sitting for hours every week to await the brief face-to-face visit in prison. They might give up jobs or families to be near their soul mate, and they will certainly be spending money on him—perhaps all they have.

  —

  How common are their reasons for entering these relationships. How many times have I hungered for loyalty, for the feeling of being needed. From time to time, I wish that I could be the cause for someone to genuinely change.

  I search eagerly for their photos and when I find them, I am struck by how normal and happy they look. How easily they could be someone I know. I search every inch of the pictures for hints of the horror that lurked inside their husbands, but there is nothing. There is never a hint, is there?

  Death and pleasure we experience asymptotically. We spend much time working upward on the slope, and most people only sometimes approach the lines of pure pleasure or death, close enough to touch. Maybe once or twice in a lifetime, for each.

  With Peter, at least some part of me is attempting to parse these experiences, to separate the liminal from the mundane, from my baseline. I need an anchor so that I’m not living so close to death anymore. I need to believe in life again.

  Sex is kicking death in the ass while singing.

  I don’t sleep for two nights. Instead I am wide awake and tossing. Each day I feel less like the person I was the day before, my body hurtling so fast in one direction that my mind cannot keep pace. I can scarcely remember who I was before my body became like this.

  I dream in bright, swirling colors. The dreams are so vivid that they linger with me long after I’ve woken up. I feel the same feelings that grip me at night while I’m at my desk, or on the subway. I will freeze, lost in them—scared, worried, or comforted in the same way—for hours.

  I dream that I am married to my high school boyfriend, Jerome. We’re living in one of the small government tract houses that are on the other, poorer side of town. Jerome is his old self: carefree, arrogant, handsome as all hell. He doesn’t have a job, but goes out in the morning and doesn’t come home until late at night. I question him and find out that he is sleeping with one of the popular girls from our high school, who is living in a mansion on the nicer side of town
. She is married to Leonardo DiCaprio (which explains the mansion), but is as unhappy as we are. For most of the dream, I am lonely, and when I find out about the affair, I am livid. I throw a vase at Jerome’s head and it breaks a hole in our living room wall. Jerome is terrified that I will kill him.

  A few days later, in another dream, my mother and father are still living in my childhood home, and I am on the opposite side of town with Peter. We are happy. In this one, I am living with Peter in the same house from my dream with Jerome. My mother shows up to visit, and I am so excited to tell her about my new life. She takes me into a small bedroom at the back of the house, and I expect she will tell me how much she likes Peter and how happy she is for me. Instead, every time I try to speak to her, her image fades like she is appearing on a broken TV screen. Eventually, she fades away completely, and I’m left with nothing but the feeling of losing her all over again.

  I dream that a hole opens up in the middle of the street and it swallows my father. He is just walking down the street one day, and then he is gone. I wake up crying, and there is no one for me to cry to. I spend the next few hours huddled in bed, and as soon as day breaks, I call my father.

  “Ouma,” he says, calling me my nickname from childhood, “everything’s all right. I’m not going anywhere.”

  It happens again, this tightening feeling and then the nausea, when I am sitting at my desk and then again when I am vacuuming the hallway in my apartment. I realize that the paunch in my belly that normally goes away after a big meal doesn’t this time. Instead it is turgid and my pelvis is sore, as if slowly being stretched apart, and I walk with my hips slightly parted, my tail angled toward the sky.

  I buy a pregnancy test and it says yes.

  PART TWO

  Aminah and Frank had been broken up for a month when she called to tell me that she was pregnant and needed an abortion. At the time, things were okay between them, and Frank had visited her in New York. They returned to her house from a party where Frank was talking to another girl. When they came home, Aminah fucked him with all her might, desperate for his attention, and afterward she collapsed in a ball next to him, crying, drunk, in the dark. She picked a fight with him and threw him out, and he rode the bus back to D.C. in the middle of the night.

  They hadn’t spoken in two weeks. I caught the train up to New York that weekend. We walked to the clinic, past picketers in front, and I helped her separate her belongings at the metal detector. We were led into a cold linoleum waiting room. I took notes for her during the consultation with the nurse practitioner. As we approached the doors to the operating area, she asked the nurse’s aide, “Can she come with me?” The aide refused, gently as she could, so I held Aminah’s hand until I couldn’t anymore. I waved to her through the swinging door.

  Afterward, she told me three other women were in the recovery room with her, two black and one white. The procedures had been completed in separate operating rooms, and at the end, they all ended up in one waiting room. The women who received anesthesia were worse than the others. They were confused, getting up and falling to the ground. Aminah was awake the whole time. The procedure didn’t hurt, she said, and the people were as nice and thorough as could be. But there was no getting around the discomfort. When it was over, they sat clutching their stomachs, and Aminah kept thinking about what color hair the baby would have had. Would it have looked more like Frank or like her? She didn’t cry, though another woman did. The other, dazed from the drugs, inquired repeatedly about a bus schedule. None of the other women had anyone waiting for them.

  Aminah said that she wasn’t sad. We never raised the morality of the action, because our politics took care of that. Neither of us believed that a fetus legally constituted a human life. But Aminah still cried as if she had lost something, and I had to tell her that she was wrong, that it was nothing to begin with.

  Yet part of me doubted that statement, because I was smart enough to believe that nothing on this earth could be completely knowable. That little tadpole could have feelings, and there could be a God, and we could have angered God with what we did that day.

  What I knew for sure was that if I had been in Aminah’s shoes, I would have chosen the same thing, and I would have mourned the same way she did. And I would have wished, against the futility of such thoughts and acceptance of my decision, that it hadn’t happened, in the same way that I knew she did.

  When I finally got her back into bed and fed her painkillers along with canned tomato soup, Aminah started crying, harder than I had ever seen her cry, even harder than the time she broke her ankle at camp field day in third grade and you could see the bone poking through her skin. “I love Frank,” she wailed over and over, “and he’s going to hate me for this.”

  I told her she didn’t know that he would, but she decided to keep it a secret anyway. She never told him, and three months later they were back together for good.

  My mother was completely exhausted in the first few weeks after treatment. She needed someone to bring her lunch during the day, to remind her to take her medicine, and to sit and watch television with her. I was home from college for the summer and played her caretaker. For most of the day, she sat alone in my parents’ bed, in the same position: hugging a body pillow, her head angled toward the television. She wore a stocking cap and her old cotton pajamas.

  Her treatment center was in the middle of one of Philadelphia’s most expensive neighborhoods. The building was a classic stone-fronted townhouse that overlooked a small park. It looked like a mansion, offering an opulence I imagined to be comforting to my mother. But that was one thing we never talked about: the apparent moneyed-ness of her treatment. It was something she knew her friends could never afford, and for that I think she felt guilty.

  She told me that, surprisingly to her, most of the people in her chemo center were black. I was surprised as well, but I never revealed as much. I thought of a friend’s mom whom I knew from elementary school, and the people in the ads and brochures for cancer foundations. They had a look: older, round, rose-cheeked, what little hair they had graying, and mostly white. No, my mother said, in her center they were mostly black men and women, quite a few of them young—in their thirties and forties—working- to middle-class. Many brought their children to treatment because the kids didn’t have anywhere else to go.

  She told me about one black woman in her support group who had no family, no friends willing to take her in or help her. It was just her and her daughter, the woman said, and she cried and cried.

  I never told my mother that, until then, I had thought of cancer as a disease of privilege. I hated how it had been elevated above and beyond all other diseases. I hated the ribbons, the bracelets, the ubiquitous awareness campaigns, the constant sponsorships.

  Another thing I wouldn’t tell her: Since starting college, I hadn’t admitted to anyone that my mother had cancer. I didn’t want anyone’s pity. My classmates and I theorized enthusiastically in class about the AIDS movement, and how disease had taken the place of dictators in postcolonial Africa. I could not admit to my friends that my family was benefiting so heavily from First World wealth. They thought that in Africa we lived in huts and played with elephants. I did nothing to disabuse them of that notion. Dirty and inconvenient, AIDS was a disease of the people, I thought. Cancer, to me, was the opposite. Its cause was endorsed and healthily sponsored.

  But I never admitted to my mother what I thought of her disease, that thing she lived with day and night, that was more present to her than us, than even God. Unlike family or faith, her disease was something she had never chosen. When I came close to telling her, I remembered that, and it rendered me silent.

  What I felt was extremely uncomfortable, and she would have resented me for it; as much as she suffered, many other people were suffering worse. Her disease only reinforced how the world saw us: not black or white, not American or African, not poor or rich. We were confined to the middle, and woul
d always be. As hard as she tried to separate herself from the binds of apartheid, we were still within its grip. It had become the indelible truth of our lives, and nothing—not sickness, not suffering, not death—could change that.

  While she was in bed drifting in and out of sleep, I sat alone in the kitchen. The kitchen in their apartment was modern and open, with an eat-in island in the center of the room, the seats facing the oven and fridge. All of the appliances were new stainless steel, the countertops a rare pink granite. Every day I sat there, in the company only of those appliances and the sounds that they made. A bathroom was just off the kitchen, so I didn’t need to leave the space at all during the day except to shower. For most of those four weeks, that was what I did.

  Every morning, I set my laptop on the island and did not leave except to bring my mother her meals. I rarely worked or wrote e-mails. I avoided anything that would connect me with the outside world, which felt too out of control. Instead, I retreated into the apartment and watched the world go by like a parade. The kitchen was my world. I ate gluttonously and gained ten pounds.

  I passively read my e-mails. Most were from college, asking me to choose my classes, to sign up for health insurance. I let the deadlines pass and later received red-lettered alerts from deans and other administrators. I began to enjoy taking those multiple-choice surveys on the Internet. What movie star’s hair do you have? What movie is your love life?